Posts by Jolisa
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Hard News: The file-sharing bill, in reply to Russell Brown,
Shanks: It’s important to note that file-sharing is actually an illegal activity.
No, it isn’t, you moron.
But illegal file-sharing cat is illegal? (Just trying to get the hang of Shanksian syntax.)
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[posted by mistake]
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Up Front: Fairy-Tale Autopsies, in reply to Bart Janssen,
But I still firmly believe that most people, on first contact with a stranger, are nice.
I think so too. And it helps that you are your own best advertisement for this argument. You could only have been nicer had you actually been wearing a kitten on each shoulder :-)
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Here's a fascinating (indeed, disturbing!) New Yorker article by Laura Miller on readers bossing a writer around.
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Up Front: Fairy-Tale Autopsies, in reply to Jacqui Dunn,
Do you know if they're all separate individuals or are they the same people coming back repeatedly?
That's a good question; can you separate out the people refreshing a given page to see new replies (which would be a lot of us, a lot of the time, in the absence of auto-refresh), from the people who are loading it for the first time?
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Busytown: A new (old) sensation, in reply to Karen Healey,
And my Mum swears by Deborah Challinor’s historical novels
I was re-reading Diana Wynne Jones the other day - a short story called "The Plague of Peacocks," about a pair of do-gooders, the Platts, who move into a village and set about correcting its many "faults" -- and this bit leapt out at me (especially apropos of the comments upthread about parents-who-read-too-much):
Mr Platt was shocked to see that Mrs O'Flaherty had been reading a book while she cooked lunch. She had two favourite books which she read turn and turn about to keep her sane: this one was The Mill on the Floss; the other was The Count of Monte Cristo. She knew both so well that she could do most things while she was reading.
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Independent bookstore news is never a threadjack in my threads. And Ben, like you, I hope the writers are writing. That's why we pay them the big bucks and, erm, sometimes talk about them as if they're not right here. (Writing about authors who are No Longer With Us is so much less fraught, although even then, I suspect they are lurking. Libraries are full of them).
But I'm glad Cecelia, Bookiemonster, and Karen popped in to breathe life back into the thread and to speak up for the joys of genre.
your definition is somewhat limited, Jolisa, doubtless by word limit constraints as much as anything
Absolutely; and by the sort of books I'm generally given to review -- which are mostly from the genre Stephen Hunt recently dubbed "fiction fiction" -- which was where I started thinking about the whole thing. It was only late in the writing, the point at which I idly enquired about what people had recently re-read, that the genre question raised its head and socked me one. Too late to rewrite the entire piece in the light of it.
Still, I hope that (dodgy binaristic culinary metaphor ahoy) even while we loooove our literary comfort food, and who doesn't, that we are not also up for the occasional dalliance with molecular gastronomy. I like fiction that is challenging, and self-conscious, and so on (which is also not to say that "genre" fiction can't be that). I just kind of yearn for it to, um, settle down a bit plot-wise?
Anyway, who am I to say? Maybe what I'm sceptically describing as "new sensationalism" is in fact a brilliant hybrid, the next big thing hiding in plain sight, and once again we're at the cutting edge & punching above our weight as usual.
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I wouldn’t blame him for not turning up again. This thread is wak now.
Wak feels like it should be an acronym for something, in this context.
But yes, the original title of the thread is starting to feel a tad self-referential.
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Jane Gregg and Dave Frame
Two more arts grads -- American Studies, Philosophy -- doing flipping awesome stuff with it. (Has Danyl conceded the point yet? Viz.: that the "gestalt consensus" about the value of the humanities isn't just a freaky PAS thing, but a fairly standard every-major-modern-nation-on-the-planet thing?)
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a road to nuance
We're on a road to nuance...
</Friday earworm>