circadianwolf

I will never understand this perception of Ned Stark. Based on the TV series, at least, he's a bureaucrat with a modicum of conscience ("let's perhaps not assassinate a teenage girl half a world away"). He openly doesn't care who would be a good king (such that that's possible at all), just that the proper rules about succession are followed--he didn't object to Joffrey until . -- I'm ambivalent about the fantasy elements. I like the sense that despite the world-weary cynicism there is more to the world than the pretenders recognize, but I wish less fewer of them were just tools for the powerful ( ). The Walkers are symbolically compelling in that sense, but I don't like that they're straightforwardly malevolent/in opposition to humans (though perhaps that's just how they're perceived currently and the series will end with human-zombie reconciliation). At least last week we had a brief moment of reality intruding from the medic who points out to Robb the fundamentals of war and class privilege.

Yeah, it's linked to on the publisher's site: http://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=284 That's the whole thing.

I've been working my way through _Revolutions in Reverse_, a collection of David Graeber essays. They're quite good--there's a lot of history I wasn't aware of regarding various social movements from the 1970s onward (in which Graeber was directly involved) as well as larger theoretical explorations that thankfully (and characteristically of Graeber) don't disappear up their own ass in academic terminology and frameworks. (I say this as someone who has read and appreciated Baudrillard, Deleuze and Guattari, etc.) The book is really poorly edited, though; there are quite a few typos and even a few incidences of whole sentences appearing twice. Very odd.

I'm honestly surprised there wasn't an "Are these characters... auto... auto-erotica?" reference during the errata/Evony discussion. (Unless there was one and I missed it.)

? Did we all forget about this ?

I think I see your problem.

Well, the YA audience read/reads Catcher in the Rye on their own. I don't know if they'd willingly read Great Expectations. I'd probably say it is anyway, but I also think categorization is kind of silly/pointless. Dickens is an interesting example though. You could probably make the argument that Great Expectations was something like the Harry Potter of its time--immensely popular serialized coming-of-age story adopted by adults despite not being necessarily about them/their concerns.

No, Catcher in the Rye is totally a coming-of-age YA novel by modern standards. The meaning of the "catcher in the rye", after all, is a person who would save children from becoming adults.

OT, but... I don't think cognitive therapy generally involves distracting yourself with pleasant fantasies. YMMV, though, I guess?

Also agree. I think the movie would work even if you were spoiled (it's definitely not built on suspense), but being surprised makes it even better. It's nice to have a movie in which the feels like it's being used to make a point rather than just being a thing.

Wow, that's not a reference you see everyday. (And the post was on-topic and informative, too!)

Neuromancer generally gets counted as literature by the people who get to decide those things. (though Gibson's writing being quite interesting formally, which probably is actually rarer among genre writers than "lit" writers, likely has a lot to do with that)

I think this is really important, too--not just constraints in general, but the sense that your work came from something, that you're reshaping an extant world rather than purely creating. I value Minecraft a lot because it's one of the few video games to implement any kind of sustainability/consistency model--it really bugs me in MMOs, for example, when things constantly appear out of and disappear into nothingness and the whole world is ephemeral. (Which also gets into the whole political discourse of it--MMOs as models of consumer capitalism where labor is fully alienated from genuine production and the economy is a Skinner's box centrally planned and managed--but that's dangerous territory.)

The first Dirk Gently novel is the best thing Douglas Adams ever wrote. I think an issue is that most literary fiction people read is much more cultivated than the genre fiction, which is generally consumed more haphazardly. There is a lot of trashy literary fiction that doesn't care about human concerns. There are less people who consume that stuff like geeky kids consume serial SF or fantasy, but those who do--mostly people within and around the publishing industry--have a disproportionate influence on what gets published, so it does exist in volume. Of course, that's becoming less true as publishers' discretion loses ground to "market realities".

I think the difference with Minecraft--outside of Creative mode, which I don't understand the point of at all--is that there's a sense you're not simply creating ex nihilo but constructing something from what's available. To a certain degree, we feel meaning in creation because of the work involved, the constraints we work within, and the context that gives the work; for some people, Minecraft's constraints make their creations feel more "real" than if they had simply created something in Maya without any larger context. Also, I think the shared, continuous world aspect of it is very important. Minecraft isn't, for me at least, one-off creations but evolving communities.

:tup: Gods that thing is fantastic. So very, very out of time. Also, since someone mentioned it above-- Debt: The First 5,000 Years is one of the most important books I've ever read. It's actually short for its subject matter (which is, essentially, the entirety of human history through the lens of debt) but packed with absolutely revelatory insights (with the data to back it up).

I know what genre fiction means. It's an ill-defined term that is used largely not as a description of style or form (it's far, far too broad for that) but to de-legitimize/ghettoize huge swaths of fiction as being not worthy of "serious" or "adult" consideration. There is a ton of literary fiction where the author sticks very closely to conventions, avoids being too creative, etc. (You're familiar with the idea of "Oscar-bait" films? Literature has the same thing.) RA Salvatore is a hack, but it's because he writes derivative, mindless, comforting fiction, not because he writes "genre fiction". This argument has been fought many, many times. Samuel Johnson was fighting (for the canon) in the 1700s.

IIRC, Mieville hates Tolkien as revisionist monarchist fantasy and is presumably suggesting that escapist genre fiction is about maintaining the status quo (the inherent conservatism of fantasy as looking back to an idealized past) versus revolutionary genre fiction that advocates social change in the tradition of utopian fiction (which is often considering the beginning of the fantasy/science fiction/genre tradition) offering a vision of a better, or at least different, world. Which I would agree with, incidentally.

I agree with all of this, except: why/on what basis are you conflating genre fiction (or youth fiction or whatever) with fiction primarily for entertainment? There's a ton of "literary" fiction out there that is terrible. I read much of it in college, in addition to a lot of very good literary fiction, and a fair amount of very good genre fiction. (And why doesn't "literary" qualify as a genre unto itself?) You seem to be suggesting, to me, that there are formal properties of "genre" fiction that are at odds with it being literature as more than entertainment, which I don't think is true. There is immense pressure on fiction (and films and games) to be entertainment and nothing more, but that seems to me quite clearly a result of who controls the funding for publishing fiction(/films/games) and the cultural crisis of late capitalism rather than a formal property of a particular kind of fiction. (And there is very, very important work being done in the margins--the universal dismissal of Twilight, for example, is very telling, because Twilight--despite being a terribly written mess of a novel and pretty openly the wet dream of a religious fanatic--has some important things to say about our society and the role of patriarchy that are otherwise largely unacknowledged by mainstream culture.) I think the most genre-iffic novel I've ever read was Against the Day. (Though honestly I don't read that much genre fiction.)

I'm curious about the origin of this alternate spelling. Was it a one-off coining? Was it deliberate, or an accident of ignorance? Is there a community of self-identifying weezards in the area?

Well, the original article is a straightforwardly and proudly ignorant exercise in cultural elitism, considering one of his central points of argument is "I don't need to read this to know I'm better than it". Beyond that, I still don't see how this amounts to more than read good books (or rather books that people you respect have read and say are thought-provoking/interesting/worth spending time on), avoid bad books (or rather, etc.)

I believe you said you wouldn't consider Dan Brown adult fiction, so my fault for making that leap. I assume you aren't differentiating "stories that actually demand an adult's level of reading comprehension and that are best experienced by people with an adult's breadth and depth of life experience" as a category mutually exclusive with genre fiction or thrillers or whatever, just saying Dan Brown specifically would fall into the latter but not the former.

Huckleberry Finn. Or, Chris said on twitter that he would lump Dan Brown in with the youth fiction. Which to me seems like giving up the argument altogether. That's not saying, adults should read adult fiction. That's saying, people should read good fiction. Which I think few would argue with. Cory Doctorow did an interview around the release of either Little Brother or For the Win in which he said that writing YA fiction that treated the audience like they were intelligent, creative people and not mentally deficient animals was a revolutionary act in itself. He's probably correct (especially in the current cultural climate), but his point, of course, was not that we should avoid YA fiction, but that we should expect more from it. (There's also a whole argument about Twilight & The Hunger Games which is entirely separate and deals with the de-legitimizing of female-centric fiction due to it taking as givens certain facts that contradict foundational assumptions of the heteronormative consensus that are found even in "feminist" works like Buffy, which is so often used to counterpoint Twilight. Leigh Alexander's essay on Twilight at Thought Catalog points to some of those issues.)

I assumed it was that way in the novel; I'm just impressed they managed to keep it in. I also took the scene at the end of the film where as implying exactly what you say happens in the novel. (I also know some readers felt that it didn't come across that it was fake in the film, but my 11-year-old sister (!) understood what was going on.)