Friday Ephemera (710)
Incoming. || The gathering of mussels. || “The marshmallow you never thought possible.” || New Scientist bemoans “our negative views about cannibalism,” blames racism, colonialism. || Related: human bodies are, it turns out, of “comparatively low nutritional value.” || Ask her about her nipples. || Not entirely sure what’s happening, or not happening, here. || A big dollop of Round The Horne. || Hot and cold. || Details. || Last three weeks, a thread. || The thrill of polyester. || Answers on a postcard, please. || How to pack a suitcase in a manly way. || Creepy Peepies, 1967. || Garden scenes. || I think it’s safe to say he does this better than you do. || Baby ferals. || More fetishistic role-play for the kids. || And finally, why that laser umbrella you’ve been waiting for isn’t a thing yet.
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Because lit’rary folks have very different ideas of what makes a good story. For me, the ideal fiction combines good storytelling (gripping plot, sympathetic characters, interesting ideas) with literary complexities (symbolism, lyrical prose, literary and historical and cultural allusions, etc) that make it pleasurable to not just read but to re-read many times. But the Brahmins of lit’rachaw seems to forget about storytelling and care exclusively about all those complexities.
Also, I suspect that Dhalgren was a first hint of something very wrong in Delany’s head and that this too appealed to many New York intellectuals.
Entirely reasonable. It would be foolish to waste one’s limited time, no matter what critics tell us we should be reading. The only reason I’ve read more than Dhalgren is that I encountered Nova and Einstein Intersection and a few others first. And thus I persevered for a little while and tried a few more novels before walking away. That is also how I happened to encounter Delany’s lit crit essays, which have some merit in spite of being poisoned by politics and postmodern crankery. To be scrupulously careful in my speech, not everything I said about his fiction in previous comments is derived from my actual reading: Some sf readers have written and spoken about the horrifically depraved character of some of his fiction (although “curiously” never in the pages of the professional and semiprofessional magazines like Locus and SF Chronicle and the New York Review of Science Fiction, which I find instructive.)
I miss Jerry.
That reminds me: Remember the principle of Chekhov’s Gun: Everything in a story must serve some necessary purpose, otherwise it should be removed as irrelevant and distracting. If I had been wiser and more cognizant of that principle, I would have recognized the significance of those hints when I first encountered them and would have been duly warned of the likelihood of worse to come and reminded of the desirability of not putting money in the pocket of someone with anti-civilizational views.
How about Thomas M. Disch? 😀 He’s someone else I could have done without reading.
It’s how they drive the Narrative. Even if you don’t buy into the fictions that they are pushing, they still have occupied your imagination with how they are telling you society thinks things should be. Again, it is not healthy for a society to consume fiction in the huge volumes as are produced and consumed today. Not just books but the tv, movies, etc.
The enormous volume of fiction is partly why we pay attention to these critics in the first place. And who are they, anyway? How many books do they really read in order to come to their conclusions what is good and what is bad? At least with film one can reasonably see a ‘critic’ analyzing several in a week, maybe a couple per day. How can book critics possibly keep up with 400 page novels unless they are relying quite heavily on what the publishers are pushing?
Someone should have him over for dinner.
Reviewers and critics with concealed agendas. As a young reader I eventually started to notice patterns whereby various reviewers always praised or panned books according to ideological criteria. Remember In Living Color’s Men On Film?
This. This is the main filter that starts with the publisher and is further refined by the critics.
That reminds me: In one of his essays, Delany (a Marxist, a postmodernist, a pathologically promiscuous gay man, and a member of NAMBLA according to a number of articles I’ve read) said that he preferred writing fiction to nonfiction because he could use fiction more effectively to portray the sorts of future societies that he desired. I would counter with “effectively but not honestly: it’s much easier to lie in fiction than in nonfiction.”
A science fiction writer told me that once, while sitting in a hotel lobby, she overheard some editors talking matter-of-factly about how they routinely rejected high quality manuscripts from conservative writers. Because conservatives should be silenced.
I see what you did there. Eating Raoul?
Emotional scenes.
Case in point: the MS Society has doubled down on its mistreatment of a 90 year old volunteer who did not understand all their pronoun bullshit.
Sample headlines here.
“If you deport violent foreign criminals, the postwar liberal order will collapse”
It is rather revealing of their current priorities.
women supporting pedophilia: wait till they find out that serial killers get a sexual thrill out of murder, and of course rape is a sexual orientation. Slippery slopes gonna slip I guess.
Just because it is obviously a sexual orientation does not make it harmless. Can these women not imagine their own child being assaulted?
And for many modern male educators, looking “sexy” or “cute,”
Leave the LGBTOMGWTFBBQ+ angle out of it for a moment – there would be something extremely disturbing about a super straight male teacher showing up to work everyday dressing (and smelling) like one of the Butabi brothers.
“If you deport violent foreign criminals, the postwar liberal order will collapse”
Canada bruited stripping “Canadians of convenience” of their citizenship if they committed crimes on Canadian soil a while back. I don’t think any government should have the ability to un-person someone that way; in the long run that’s going to be a much, much bigger problem.
What’s striking is how they claim to be selfless role models and to be performing some life-saving function, creating “safe spaces,” while simultaneously exulting in their own juvenile behaviour and relentless narcissism. Grown men with TikTok accounts, via which they share videos of themselves vamping and prancing. And showing off their collections of women’s shoes.
What exactly is that?
Step aside, Charles, there’s no arguing with a Lady in a Lake.
Last I saw the MS Society had backed off and apologized. Not that that fixes the problem. I don’t think anyone was fired.
From the:
this comment:
Someone needs to explain things to Joe. He appears to be able bodied. Though this is how most people think.
Found the update on the MS Society story:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13110311/MS-Society-apologizes-90-old-volunteer-fired-pronouns.html
Note the however:
Sh*t. My bad on that. What I had seen was they doubled-down, then apologized. But apparently the apology was just another double-down? I could swear I saw a story where she was given her job back but maybe that story itself was a (intentional?) misunderstanding/misinterpretation of the non-apology apology? My neck hurts.
Dragons and Jack the Ripper, probably.
On behalf of the US$A, I apologize for Karen McFilterface, and wholly support any efforts to deport her back to Seattle.
And I don’t know who this Kyle Shideler guy is but he gets it:
https://twitter.com/ShidelerK/status/1761045121884111093
Apparently being asked to take out the trash is oppressive.
I did see one item saying that a sincere apology would have included her getting her job back (and firing those who forced her out.)
In plain English, that must mean “we will let her return only if she embraces the pronoun madness.”
I wonder what we will eventually learn about his history: Crimes? Psychological issues? From a criminal culture neighborhood? Also, he’s a bit old to be an undergraduate.
Random association: “Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout Would Not Take the Garbage Out.”
They offer the service of repositioning them in a more masculine location,
Another video from another crazy in the same comment thread said keeping the nipples and moving them to another location was an extra $1,500.
That person also complained of phantom nipple pains. (S)he claims that the doctor pinched them just before removing them and that’s what’s caused the ongoing pains. The other video is long, but worth a watch for the analysis from a psychologist.
We are living in Heinlein’s Crazy Years.
What exactly is that?
Canada allows dual citizenship which many foreign nationals take advantage of. They get their “citizenship,” receive benefits like welfare and healthcare. Then they spend only as much time in the country as they have to to continue the benefits.
I like Gene Wolfe’s definition:
Thank you. That makes things much more clear. I have long felt that dual citizenship was something that should either be not allowed or allowed only in unusual circumstances. Certainly we have lots of recent immigrants to the West who do not see themselves as true citizens with allegiance to and love for their new homes.
I did read it. Twice. The second time, after some years had passed, to see if I’d missed something the first time around that would make it make sense. If I did, I missed it the second time too.
Tried reading some other works of his later & found them incomprehensible, tedious, tediously incomprehensible, or incomprehensibly tedious.
Gave it up for a loss.
Did you know that he spent time in a psychiatric hospital? (In the 60’s, I think.) Breakdown with hallucinations. Eventually checked himself out not because he was cured but because, well, I forget what he said the reason was. I am inclined to think he remained crazy but was able to superficially pass for sane.
When the entire family are criminals…
Hey! David’s got some new bar snacks!
Still waiting for the sequel to Torgersen’s A Star-Wheeled Sky.
The word ‘so’ comes to mind.
No apologies should be proffered. The nose ring is ample justification for not letting her in the country in the first place.
Sad news, but on the bright side . . .
The most idiotic evolutionary theory is that fish came out of water and moved about on dry land.
So . . . is a fish fry next door to chowing down on Grandpa?
Not entirely sure how I feel about this.
“We found a way to charge fools high prices for our mediocre food.”