Our calendar is still filled with Christmas-y visiting and today is a travel day for us, so a few things that have caught my eye …
When you give a parade and no one comes, maybe it’s time to rethink the concept.
Not a lot of love for de Blasio.
Egypt bans movies Exodus: Gods and Kings as Zionist film.
The Left-feminist faux-hysteria calls of wolf “rape culture” have collapsed this year. Unfortunately, if history is any indication, they’ll just double-down next year.
Student activists at California colleges are demanding children as young as kindergarten-age be taught consent education in order to curtail campus sexual assault.
Related: R.S. McCain notes a strange coincidence.
Max Blumenthal (Senior vomiter at AlterNet) feels love-making and rape are the same thing because they both involve intercourse. That is the only conclusion a reasonable person can conclude after his comparison of the late SEAL sniper Chris Kyle to murdering thug John Lee Malvo as “equals”.
CNN goes the extra mile in sneering at anyone who supports Israel.
Please add your own links in the comments.
here are some fun campus rape ads
gotta catch em all
And now for something completely different (non-political). It’s a bit long at 10 minutes, but if you can afford the time, it’s worth the trip. Don’t click on “Skip Ad.”
Claridryl™
When you are finished, go to the following website.
Claridryl™ Website
Anywhere your cursor takes the shape of a hand, you can click. Strange things start happening. Of particular interest: click on the house in the background. Keep clicking.
Happy Halloween!
If anyone’s in the mood to discuss literary concepts, there’s a Harry Potter discussion that Insty began before Christmas. Insty posted the original link further to the topic of women loving bad boys, but it rapidly turned to the nature of the literary character and reader response and the depth of the series.
I got into it mostly with blue_quasar, who was either determined to refute me at every turn regardless of what I said or I have a helluva blind spot regarding the nature of fiction, particularly the HP series.
Either way, feel free to discuss, elaborate, and refute. Or not.
Max Blumenthal’s logic reminds me of those blue-nosed prudes who equate all artistic nudity with pr0n.
Seems that the worst among us are distinguished by their insistence on conflating as many things as possible, thus to prevent anything resembling a thought process from entering the public discourse.
He’s got the Clinton-Obama punctuality model down pat. Maybe he expected the service to await his royal presence?
I figure when it comes to fiction the reader does have a right to his own interpretation, but not to say that his is the only interpretation.
When I write fiction I’m telling a story about characters in a setting. Where I want to minimize ambiguity I have the skills to do so, but ambiguity is a tool that, in fiction as much as rhetoric, has a value that can’t be eschewed.
What matters to me is that the reader finds the story worthy of his attention during the reading; if he thinks about it afterward, it’s gravy.
De Blasio is amazingly inept at politics. I’m surprised he was elected. I guess he had a lot of money.
When engaged in creative writing, I like to have some ambiguity. Also, I refrain from explaining what I meant. Maybe someone will have a better interpretation than I intended.
Bill Whittle on The Narrative: The origins of Political Correctness
I figure when it comes to fiction the reader does have a right to his own interpretation, but not to say that his is the only interpretation.
There is of course no way for you to compel a reader to have this or that interpretation of a text that you write.
However, if the sumbitch decides that your cute picture book, Curious George, is a performative of Edward Said’s Orientalism, and that you, the author, are guilty of furthering the oppression of Teh Other, I reckon you’ve got the right to punch said sumbitch in the kisser.
In the case of HP, up until Book 6, there was a hot debate among the shippers as to whom Hermione would end up with. Because JKR always planned to pair up Hermione and Ron (and Harry + Ginny), she littered the texts with clues as to this outcome beginning in the first book.
But the H/H shippers were relentless in their support of their preferred [relation]ship. JKR did not taunt the readers by having Hermione drift back and forth between Harry and Ron; therefore, none of the “evidence” for the H/H ship was ever convincing. It was predicated entirely on the shippers’ personal desires to see Harry and Hermione end up with each other, because the shippers felt that they were better for each other. Not based on textual evidence but on their own inexplicable matchmaking fantasies.
JKR was puzzled by the H/H shippers, saying that she had made H/R pretty obvious (and she had). Granted, she couldn’t stop the H/H shippers from seeing what they wanted to see, but she also couldn’t say that their interpretation was equally valid with H/R.
Because it wasn’t.
So what’s to be made of the H/H shippers who doggedly misread the text? The H/R shippers genuinely get to say that their reading was the only right one because it really was the only one that the text supported — not just because of how the story ended but because JKR did put H/R hints in the text but not H/H hints.
There is such a thing as an invalid reading. A reader who is unwilling to “go with” the ride you’re providing, unwilling to take all of the textual cues into account, and who is determined to imbue your narrative with stuff that just ain’t there is as poor reader who produces a poor reading.
There may be multiple valid ways to read a text but there aren’t an infinite number of them. We’d be better off if teachers stopped telling kids that all of their subjective interpretations are equally valid.
Because now those students can’t even read a simple blog post or Tweet without twisting what you said into unnatural configurations, and there ain’t no way to explain to them why they’re wrong.
Most fiction writers will attest to the fact that there are often valid interpretive insights regarding a work that they were not aware of when they wrote it. The imagination has roots in the unconscious.
Heh. Or make him the subject of an actual performative on oppressing the sumbitch as a species.
I agree about the Hermione/Ron thing. It was obvious — as in, the tool of ambiguity was spared when it came to that, and applied to better effect elsewhere.
But in storytelling there are areas where an author might want the reader to go astray, temporarily or otherwise, for his personal enjoyment of the reading. If I later eliminate the ambiguity, it’s for my own storytelling purposes.
If I fail to use ambiguity (or its absence) effectively, that’s on me — but if the reader insists on seeing something I explicity denied in my story, that’s on them.
In either case though, they paid good money for the right to makes asses of themselves on discussion forums.
From Ho-ho-ho to who–who-who’s flying this thing?
Oh goody — we may see the trillion-dollar coin after all.
heh, the puzzlement reaches beyond the flyer and into the fiction of the simulator pretending to be a physical aircraft in process of flight — or displaced back into politics, the fiction of a Constitution or regime of governance in action. There ain’t no there, there. But there’s our “culture” for us, the epitome of a fiction on every lip.
With an owl at the wheel: *** I recalled an accident the aftermath of which I witnessed in East Africa. A badly maintained army truck carrying sacks of grain on top of which sat eighteen passengers tried to ascend a steep hill, but could not make it and began to roll backwards. The people fell off and then the sacks after them. All eighteen were suffocated or crushed to death, and by the time I arrived a mother and her six children, aged between three and eight, were laid out like organ pipes by the side of the road.
There was no inquest, of course. And, oddly enough, concern about accidents is inversely proportional to the likelihood of their happening. The local people explained the accident by the curse put upon the truck by spirits, rather than by the lack of maintenance of its brakes. Their fatalism was both admirable and infuriating. ***
We.are.truly.doomed.
> “I think you miss one very important point. He has had Al Sharpton to the White House 80, 85 times. Often when he’s talking about police issues he has Al Sharpton sitting next to him. Have a poster boy for hating the police, it’s Al Sharpton. You make Al Sharpton a close adviser, you’re going to turn the police in America against you. You’re going to tell the police in America we don’t understand you. I saw this man help cause riots in New York; I’ve heard his anti-police invective first-hand. To have a man who hasn’t paid $4 million in taxes, have a man who’s spent his career helping to create riots and phony stories about police, to have that man sitting next to you speaks volumes. You know, actions speak louder than words. You put Al Sharpton next to you, you just told everyone you’re against the police.”<
rudy g.
McG, waiting for the next installment. Anything on the horizon?
megaphone news
Narrative Formation Case Study: NYT’s Role in the Ferguson Fiasco
In the case of the sumbitch, you tell him that. actaully Edward Said’s Orientalismwas a performative of Curious George, i.e. a story for that particular breed of child known as the academic.
As for HP and shippers. Best just to back out of the (chat) room slowly. . . .
Unless you’re their to denounce Peter Jackson for promoting bestialism or something like that. I’m down with that struggle.
Running out of money isn’t the problem. Running out of WEALTH is the problem. When the value of debts exceeds the value of income AND assets nobody wants to do business with you until you correct that somehow. Subdividing your specie to a fine mist doesn’t change the value of your assets and incomes and paying your debts with paper means no one will lend to you again. Ever.
Still working on it, Red. Distractions galore, unfortunately.
Good to hear, McG. I’m going into semi-retirement in TWO DAYS and will be upping my reading for enjoyment as compared to reading for income. May have to start writing for enjoyment, too. Moar blog time!
Non-fiction or journalism?
Commentary, likely. You know, opinions are like a**-holes – eveyone has one.
Wouldn’t mind sitting down to write The Great American Novel, but would be satisfied with A Mediocre Self-Aggrandizing Piece of Crap No One Knows About Or Reads.
Did you have any specific writing training before doing your novels?
Nothing formal that ever stuck. I learned by reading, basically.
As for opinions, I’ve decided they have less in common with the body part than with what issues thenceforth.
Everybody has an endless supply.