Posts by Craig Ranapia
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O. M. F. G. Has Naomi Wolfe read her first book recently -- apparently not. Don't know what bingo card to pull out: Sex Crime Enabling or WMCA Privilege.
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“accidental death” is still on the cards.
I believe accidental death, without the air quotes, is still on the cards for us all. I'm comforted by the thought Death has a rather ghoulish sense of humour – though there is some dispute as to whether He rides a pale cat or some kind of dog.
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Hard News: Wikileaks: The Cable Guys, in reply to Megan Wegan,
Not to mention the rabid conservatives who have suddenly realised what ‘consent’ is. At least for the five minutes it takes to make Assange go away.
Quite -- looking at the usual suspects, I can never quite tell which one of their two faces they'll speak out of at any given time. And as I've said elsewhere, whatever reservations I have about Wikileaks (or Assange) it is totally unacceptable for Americans columnists or politicians to be calling for the murder of an Australian citizen who hasn't actually been convicted of any "treason" anywhere.
Didn't like it back in the day when a mad mullah was attempting to incite the murder of Salman Rushdie (a British citizen) for going about his legitimate and lawful business; don't like it how.
And, of course, they're exactly the same people who would be braying for blood if a liberal British or Australian columnist was calling for the murder of Sarah Palin. And too bloody right.
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Hard News: Wikileaks: The Cable Guys, in reply to Russell Brown,
The stuff about the Counterpunch articles is particularly notable.
Slut-shaming with a side of Teabag-iban character assassination. Nom noms - can I have some more Mr. Cockburn… There’s an interesting thesis to be written on American “progressive” males for whom feminism just didn’t happen. Perhaps I'm just a hopeless reactionary, but I don't find it at all implausible that you can be a golden left-wing poster boy whose treatment of women sucks 'roids.
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Busytown: She loves you, YA, YA, YA!, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
How did Pratchett put it? Children need to hear stories about monsters because it teaches them that monsters can be defeated.
Very similar to G.K. Chesterton’s brilliant defence of the fairy tale:
All this kind of talk is based on that complete forgetting of what a child is like which has been the firm foundation of so many educational schemes. If you keep bogies and goblins away from children they would make them up for themselves. One small child in the dark can invent more hells than Swedenborg. One small child can imagine monsters too big and black to get into any picture, and give them names too unearthly and cacophonous to have occurred in the cries of any lunatic. The child, to begin with, commonly likes horrors, and he continues to indulge in them even when he does not like them. There is just as much difficulty in saying exactly where pure pain begins in his case, as there is in ours when we walk of our own free will into the torture-chamber of a great tragedy. The fear does not come from fairy tales; the fear comes from the universe of the soul.
[…] Fairy tales, then, are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon. [Emphasis added - not in original]
BTW, Chesterton was an early and major influence on Gaiman – which surprised me but shouldn’t have, considering he laid into Sandman a perfectly bizarre but right tribute in the form of an anthropomorhic personification of an idyllic dream-place.
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Busytown: She loves you, YA, YA, YA!, in reply to recordari,
It would be good sometimes if popular YA, or children's fiction, for that matter, could transcend the perennial triumph of good over evil and explore some other facets of human existence, like identity, confidence, autonomy, freedom, compassion, empathy, grief, humanism, philosophy, entitlement... Is that too much to ask?
Sir, I'd like to introduce you to The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. One of those books that still breaks my heart -- and puts it back together sadder and a little wiser -- every damn time.
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Busytown: She loves you, YA, YA, YA!, in reply to recordari,
Haven't read Gaiman yet, and while increasingly feeling compelled to, at the same time all the indications are that it has some challenges, particularly for the precocious child dipping into YA.
It does - but I think they're healthy challenges, if that makes any sense whatsoever. Coraline and The Graveyard Book are, in parts, really frightening -- the threats are real, actions have consequences, and really really bad shit can fall on the heads of good people out of a clear blue sky. Because the universe can he a hard, cold and entirely arbitrary place.
One theory is that we shouldn't cotton wool children because what they read is a safe place to start emotionally reconciling yourself to some hard truths -- the world can be hard and cruel, you will feel as if nobody understands you or cares, grown-ups will let you down. But, and here's the big but, there is a way through the woods.
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And just to make Sally's life more difficult here's a glowing review of Charles De Lint's new book that "brings originality back to the coming-of-age story". ( LINK CONTAINS MILD SPOILERS )
I've been a crazed de Lint fanatic since I first stumbled on a copy of Someplace To Be Flying years ago, and went on a major de Lint jag, mainlining as many of his books as I could in the period of a couple weeks. I don't think I've ever read anything by him that didn't blow me away.
So I was excited to see a review copy of The Painted Boy, his new young-adult fantasy novel. When I realized it was about a fusion of Asian and Latin-American folklore, with a Chinese dragon living among Mexican people in the barrio, I was slightly more nervous, because such things can seriously wrong in the hands of a white author. I'm not even talking about the complex issues of cultural appropriation that arise in such circumstances — I'm just talking about the cheesiness that often comes up. As someone who majored in Asian Studies and lived in Asia for several years, I've had cause to roll my eyes more than once at Western authors trying to draw on Asian mythology, and the drek that can result.
Luckily, I needn't have been worried. De Lint certainly takes some liberties with both of the traditions he's playing with, but he never forgets to tell a great story, and never tries to exploit either Asian or Latin-American customs for a cheap effect, or to add more exoticism to his tale. In many ways, this is an American story, in which different gods and magical sources coexisting against a backdrop of our postmodern-ish society.
(As someone said up thread, I'm a huge fan of De Lint but his books are damn hard to find except in lovely but expensive editions -- though Tor is still the gold standard for genre publishing that owns inside and out, IMNAAHO. Off to the library website again -- bloody free reserves are worse than P...)
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Busytown: She loves you, YA, YA, YA!, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
It's not that, not for me
Aaaargh! I've got to get a lot better at the segue from the specific case to the general statement. Sorry, Lucy -- any man-splaination was wholly unintentional; book threads tend to bring out my inner didactic.
Sorry to be so slow in responding, it's taken me this long to check out the many reading recommendations given in answer to my modest query.
No apologies necessary. I find PAS such a rich source of brain food, I often need to sit back and digest too. :)
Mostly. I wish the young girl wasn't murdered.
Of course you do - so do I. But in Gaiman's defence, I don't think he presents it in a torture porny or sexist/misogynistic kind of way. There's a reason why Gaiman's passionate fan base (perhaps atypically for comic writers) has a large XX component -- he doesn't do "tits and spandex" wank fantasies or the disposable slut whose sole function is to get cut up in an alley, preferably just after having sex. Like Joss Whedon and Los Bros Hernandez, he likes the non-penis bearing half of the human race. Takes them seriously. Cares about writing complex, flawed but still magnificent women.
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Maybe that's a personal quirk, I don't know.
If it's a personal quirk, it's a rather common one. In part, I suspect it's because we do have a class system for the arts -- LITERATURE is respectable, movies and comic books are not. I'll have to dig up the exact quote, but I read an interview where David Cronenberg was withering about Margaret Atwood saying films should be censored but not fiction, as if images are somehow more potent than words. He said (and I agree) that it is a curious admission of impotence and irrelevance from a high profile novelist, critic and poet.
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