Quotulatiousness

September 17, 2015

Megan Geuss watched Star Trek – in order – so you don’t have to

Filed under: Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

By the time I started paying attention to the original Star Trek, it was already in syndication (and aside from the cartoon series, it was the only Star Trek) so I didn’t see the episodes in anything like their original order. Megan Geuss says I (and pretty much everyone else in my age cohort) missed a lot due to this:

Here at Ars Technica, we have Star Trek on the brain. A lot. It’s a thing most of us have strong opinions about, and without a physical office, sometimes the IRC watercooler chat devolves into half-hour-long discussions about the relative merits of such and such a character. That is, until a senior editor implores us to write up our thoughts instead of wasting time arguing idly over chat; we are writers, after all, and writing is what we ought to be doing during the work day.

I, too, have strong opinions about characters in Star Trek, but I came at the show from a much different perspective than most of my peers. My colleagues were astounded when I told them that I’d only seen one episode of Star Trek as a child (I don’t even remember the plot) and my first real exposure had been as an adult, when I watched the entirety of The Original Series and The Next Generation in order, over the course of three years or so.

My colleagues, and in fact almost everyone I meet who I end up talking to about Star Trek, can’t seem to understand why I’d do that. I realized a year ago that this disbelief comes from the fact that almost everyone who did watch Star Trek as a child watched it syndicated on TV, particularly The Original Series. While they may have seen all or close-to-all of the episodes in all the various series, they saw them randomly and sporadically over the course of an entire childhood, with other shows to fill the space in between.

Not I. Thanks to Netflix, I watched The Original Series over a two-year period, with other shows and movies in between, and I watched The Next Generation in a little under one year as my primary after-work TV. From a modern TV viewer’s perspective, the Original Series, with all of its 1960s storytelling quirks and anachronisms, was the hardest entry in Star Trek canon to get through. That’s what I’ll focus on here, because talking about both series from a novice’s point of view would make this article longer than the distance from Earth to the Delta Quadrant.

September 14, 2015

Trump and “middle class respectability”

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

At Ace of Spades H.Q. last week, Ace explained what might eventually be the kryptonite that allows someone to defeat “el Donaldo” in the Republican race:

There is a notion of Middle Class Respectability. This notion is important to most members of my (your?) class. It can be put aside by highly-committed partisans who are intensely in favor of Trump (and who therefore don’t sweat negative information about him), but not by most people.

I have said before, in a line that I quite like, that Donald Trump is gloriously unburdened by respectability. Respectability is both a blessing and a curse.

Respectability, obviously, grants you some respect; you behave properly, according to the code of the class, and therefore are considered a member in good standing of that class.

But it is also very limiting. Many people will point out that GOP/RINO “pussies” will buckle and apologize at the first dirty look from a member of the liberal establishment.

That is the downside of respectability — people are afraid to lose it, and will quickly apologize when The Mob threatens to withdraw respectability from them.

And in America 2015, public respectability is granted by — controlled by — the college-educated upper-middle-class Media Class which controls most everything related to morals and manners.

The fact that Trump is gloriously unburdened by respectability makes him willing/able to say things that no Respectability-Craving politician ever could, like that yes, we need a border wall, and yes, we are permitted to, and should, be outraged by foreign criminals murdering Americans who are permitted to be here by Democratic mayors and presidents.

But the downside of his contempt for respectability is that he will obliviously trample things that are very important to the people whose support he will ultimately need, if he wants to do more than blow hot air.

Whether or not Trump thinks that upper middle class suburban Republicans are silly or not, whether or not he thinks they’re “losers” or not for owning only two cars, he will need that one third of the party that is currently dead-set against him.

And while Trump seems to either have a problem with women (how long did he spend attacking Megyn Kelly, versus how long did he spend attacking Chris Wallace?) or is simply unburdened by the Middle Class Respectability code of gallantry towards women, It is making a very large and influential block of people absolutely disgusted by him, repelled by him not a political level (which could always later be finessed or papered over) but on a personal level (which can never be repaired).

And.

He.

Won’t.

Stop.

I would venture to say he can’t stop — I would venture to say that in Trump’s world of yes-men and eternal entitlement, calling a woman ugly is just sort of something he casually does, and, like a high school super-jock who’s always been protected from the consequences of his actions, he just has never had reason to internalize that dismissing a woman as Sexually Not Up to My High Standards as an opening gambit in conversation is socially disfavored.

September 13, 2015

Markets in everything, Fan Expo edition

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

At The Walrus, Jonathan Kay explains how Ron Weasley (and the whole Fan Expo celebrity photo “experience”) made him both sad and $300 poorer:

Photo by Jonathan Kay. Click to see full-sized image at The Walrus.

Photo by Jonathan Kay. Click to see full-sized image at The Walrus.

Fans of the TV show Entourage will remember the second-season episode in which Johnny Drama (Kevin Dillon) heads to San Diego’s Comic-Con International, dressed in prop-wardrobe Viking costume. Drama, we learn, had appeared in a (fictional) show called Viking Quest, starring as the warrior Tarvold. On the fan-convention circuit, Drama explained, he could rake in big money by signing autographs, and set conventioneers’ hearts aflutter with Tarvold’s signature cry of “Victory!” On Entourage, this seemed funny. In real life, I recently learned, it’s sad.

On Sunday, I took two of my daughters to the 2015 instalment of Fan Expo Canada, billed as “the largest Comics, Sci-fi, Horror, Anime, and Gaming event in Canada.” More than 100,000 fans show up annually for the four-day exhibition, which now sprawls over both buildings of the massive Metro Toronto Convention Centre. Under one roof, I was able to meet a life-size My Little Pony, compete in a Catan tournament, playtest emerging console video games, commission custom panels from famous cartoonists, pose with life-size Futurama characters, buy a fully functional 3D-chess set, and generally revel in all the various subcultures that the rest of society stigmatizes as dorky and juvenile. My girls and I have been to Fan Expo Canada three years in a row, and we always have a good time.

But my daughters are getting older. This year, for the first time, they were after more than just a Harry Potter wand and a Gryffindor T-shirt: They wanted to meet the real-life Harry Potter movie stars appearing at Fan Expo. Expecting to encounter nothing more than a real-life version of Drama’s Viking Quest subplot, I acquiesced, and we wandered over to celebrity row.

I was shockingly naive about how this process works. Before Sunday’s celebrity adventure, I’d assumed that one could mingle about and snap pictures with fan-con celebs for free, taking out your wallet only when you wanted a signed photo.

In fact, the best way to describe Fan Expo’s celebrity protocol is as a sort of Chicago Mercantile Exchange for human beings. Instead of live cattle, lean hogs, skimmed milk powder, cash-settled butter, and softwood pulp, this big board (displayed above) lists prices for Billy Dee Williams, Gillian Anderson, Danny Trejo, Neve Campbell, Norman Reedus, Skeet Ulrich, Zach Galligan, and fifty other stars and quasi-stars. The precision of the numbers suggests a fine-tuned demand-driven adjustment process that any commodities trader would recognize. Williams (Lando Calrissian from Star Wars, but you knew that) was listed at $57. Anderson (X-Files): $91. Danny Trejo (Machete): $74. Neve Campbell (Scream): $97. Norman Reedus (The Walking Dead): $130. Skeet Ulrich (Jericho): $68. Zach Galligan (Gremlins): $63. Just my luck: Rupert Grint (Ron Weasley, Harry Potter’s red-haired sidekick) was listed at $142 — highest on the board. I wanted to bail out. But having made the mistake of getting dragged this far, turning back wasn’t going to be a good-dad move.

September 12, 2015

Nash The Slash – Psychotic Reaction

Filed under: Cancon, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Published on 20 Jun 2013

From His 1984 LP American Bandages

September 11, 2015

The first dramatic presentation of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four

Filed under: Books, Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Open Culture presents David Niven in the lead role of the first adaptation of Orwell’s final novel for radio:

Since George Orwell published his landmark political fable 1984, each generation has found ample reason to make reference to the grim near-future envisioned by the novel. Whether Orwell had some prophetic vision or was simply a very astute reader of the institutions of his day — all still with us in mutated form — hardly matters. His book set the tone for the next 60 plus years of dystopian fiction and film.

Orwell’s own political activities — his stint as a colonial policeman or his denunciation of several colleagues and friends to British intelligence — may render him suspect in some quarters. But his nightmarish fictional projections of totalitarian rule strike a nerve with nearly everyone on the political spectrum because, like the speculative future Aldous Huxley created, no one wants to live in such a world. Or at least no one will admit it if they do.

September 10, 2015

Rob Paravonian has a thing about Pachelbel

Filed under: History, Humour, Media — Tags: — Nicholas @ 02:00

Uploaded on 21 Nov 2006

A comedian rants about how much it sucks to play Pachelbel’s Canon in D on a cello. Recorded live at Penn State, this piece by comedian/musician Rob Paravonian has been a favorite on the Dr. Demento Show.

H/T to Never Yet Melted for the link.

QotD: “Bookless” liberalism

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The enduring strength of both conservatism and libertarianism as intellectual movements is that they acknowledge that they are, in fact, intellectual movements. We not only know what we believe, we know why we believe it. But while liberals know what they believe, they have a hard time explaining why they believe it. That’s because, as E. J. Dionne, Martin Peretz, and other liberals have written, they’ve turned their backs on their own intellectual history. Liberals, in Peretz’s memorable phrase, are “bookless,” so they follow an ideology without knowing why it upholds and cherishes its ideas. As a result, they don’t know when, or how, to subordinate their ideology to larger concerns (and when you cease to be aware that you have an ideology, it doesn’t make you a pragmatist; it makes you a dogmatist).

Driven by feelings more than fact, they seek rationalizations. Or as William Voegeli puts it in his book Never Enough, liberalism has lost its ability to articulate a “limiting principle” to the size, cost, and ambition of government. Indeed, as we saw during the oral arguments before the Supreme Court over Obamacare, this administration is incapable of articulating any principled limit to the apparently infinite powers of the Commerce Clause and the living Constitution.

There’s perhaps no better proof that liberals are terrified of admitting their own ideological aspirations than the effort to mint fresh clichés to preserve the integrity of old ones. That’s the apparent goal of the group No Labels, whose official motto is “Put the Labels Aside. Do What’s Best for America.” (Or at least that’s one of them; for a group that doesn’t like labels, they sure have a lot of mottoes.)

Jonah Goldberg, excerpt from The Tyranny of Clichés, published by National Review, 2012-04-22.

September 9, 2015

The rise of victimhood culture

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ronald Bailey thinks the rise of microaggression-awareness is a symptom of a decline in dignity culture and a sign of the coming of a new victimhood-based culture, and that it’s a really bad development:

Over at the Righteous Mind blog, New York University moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt is signposting a fascinating article, “Microaggression and Moral Cultures,” by two sociologists in the journal Comparative Sociology. The argument in the article is that U.S. society is in the midst of a large-scale moral change in which we are experiencing the emergence of a victimhood culture that is distinct from the honor cultures and dignity cultures of the past. If true, this bodes really bad for future social and political peace.

In honor cultures, people (men) maintained their honor by responding to insults, slights, violations of rights by self-help violence. Generally honor cultures exist where the rule of law is weak. In honor cultures, people protected themselves, their families, and property through having a reputation for swift violence. During the 19th century, most Western societies began the moral transition toward dignity cultures in which all citizens were legally endowed with equal rights. In such societies, persons, property, and rights are defended by recourse to third parties, usually courts, police, and so forth, that, if necessary, wield violence on their behalf. Dignity cultures practice tolerance and are much more peaceful than honor cultures.

Sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning are arguing that the U.S. is now transitioning to a victimhood culture that combines both the honor culture’s quickness to take offense with the dignity culture’s use of third parties to police and punish transgressions. The result is people are encouraged to think of themselves as weak, marginalized, and oppressed. This is nothing less than demoralizing and polarizing as everybody seeks to become a “victim.”

September 8, 2015

Pessimism and doom-mongering still sells books and movies

Filed under: Books, Environment, Health, Media, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Gregg Easterbrook reviews The End of Doom by Ronald Bailey:

Outside your window, living standards are rising, crime is declining, pollution is down, and longevity is increasing. But in pop culture, we’re all doomed. The Hunger Games films have been box-office titans, joined by World War Z, Interstellar, The Book of Eli, Divergent, The Road, and other big-budget Hollywood fare depicting various judgment days. Over in primetime, the world is ending on The Walking Dead, The Last Ship, The 100, and Under the Dome.

The same outlook obtains in nonfiction literature. Books that foresee doomsday — Collapse by Jared Diamond, The End of Nature by Bill McKibben, The Coming Plague by Laurie Garrett among them — win praise from commentators and sell briskly. Books contending that things basically are fine don’t do as well. One might think that optimism would be marketable to contemporary book buyers, who live very well by historical standards, but it doesn’t seem to work that way. Readers prefer material that depicts them dwelling in the final generation. Perhaps declining religious belief in Armageddon has been replaced by an expectation of some natural-world version of the event.

Into this adverse market steps The End of Doom by Ronald Bailey, an impressively researched, voluminously detailed book arguing that the world is in better shape than commonly assumed. Bailey deflates doomsday by showing that human population growth does not mean ecological breakdown; that food supply increases faster than population and probably always will; that, far from depleted, most resources are sufficient to last for centuries; that air pollution in the United States is way down; and that cancer is in decline.

Specialists will argue about some of the studies Bailey cites to support these contentions. So much environmental research exists today, for example, that one can find a study to prove practically anything. But in the main, Bailey’s selection of research is fastidious and convincing.

Bailey spends too much time, though, on discredited trendy bleakness from the 1960s and 1970s — such as Paul Ehrlich’s global-famine predictions and the 1972 Club of Rome report. One can practically hear dead horses saying, “Stop flogging me.” The End of Doom redeems itself with a clever chapter on how precautionary principles boil down to this rule: never do anything for the first time. “Anything new is guilty until proven innocent,” Bailey writes, but he goes on to chronicle how many new ideas denounced as dangerous turned out instead to make life less risky.

QotD: Political labels

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

More to the point, the notion that we should give up our labels is an ancient grift, a venerable con, a time-honored ruse used by ideologues to clear the field of opposition (as I chronicle at some length in my new book, the tactic was pioneered by none other than Napoleon Bonaparte, who invented the practice of using “ideologue” as an epithet). This Jedi mind trick has two parts. First, the liberal says: “In the spirit of civic cooperation and problem-solving, we must all abandon our ideological priorities!” Then comes the implicit Step 2: “So we must accept my ideological priorities as fact and wisdom.” It’s like saying “Nice doggie” until you can find a rock.

You never hear people say, “We’ve got to get beyond labels for the good of the country. So that’s why I am abandoning all of my principles and agreeing with you.”

In past decades, the serious Left was at least a bit more honest about this game. That’s why John Dewey begged the American Socialist party to abandon the label “socialist” but keep the policies. Earl Browder pushed the Communist party to brand itself as “20th-century Americanism.” And, as historian Ronald Radosh has chronicled, this has also been the tactic of Browder’s heirs, down to Obama’s erstwhile “green-jobs czar” Van Jones, who gave up honestly proselytizing Marxism in order to sell his wares with more attractive packaging. “I’m willing to forgo the cheap satisfaction of the radical pose for the deep satisfaction of radical ends,” he explained in a 2005 interview.

Today the grift is played by liberals who don’t even seem to understand what they’re up to. For instance, whenever Arianna Huffington is accused of spewing boilerplate leftism, she responds with a long, canned answer about how the left-right paradigm has outlived its usefulness. Here she is on CNN: “This whole framing as a right-versus-left debate — a liberal-versus-conservative debate — is completely flawed. It’s obsolete. It’s making it much harder for us to solve our problems as a country.” And here she is ranting in one of the books with her name on it: “Someone please alert the media: not every issue fits into your cherished right/left paradigm. Indeed, that way of looking at the world is becoming less and less relevant — and more and more obsolete.”

This argument might have been a teeny-weeny bit more compelling if it hadn’t appeared in a left-wing screed of a book titled Right Is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe (And What You Need to Know to End the Madness). For Huffington the anti-ideologue, only one ideological perspective is too ideological.

The most basic problem with “I don’t believe in labels” talk is that it is incandescently stupid. “Label” is another word for “word.” Everything we associate with civilization, decency, and progress depends on labels. If we cannot label something poisonous, people will die. Similarly, labeling policies, or politicians or commentators, with ideological or party identifiers helps make clear their underlying assumptions and values. If you cannot understand why having a rule against labels is such a terrible idea, I urge you to march into your kitchen and peel the wrappers off all of your cleaning supplies, prescription drugs, and canned goods. Natural selection will take care of the rest in due time. (Though in many cases, refusing to label politicians is like refusing to label men and women by gender; the difference is usually easy to see regardless.)

Jonah Goldberg, excerpt from The Tyranny of Clichés, published by National Review, 2012-04-22.

September 5, 2015

QotD: The existential problem facing Reddit

Filed under: Business, Liberty, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Network effects are wonderful for a technology firm when it’s growing. Early movers can gain an advantage that is very hard to displace, because once everyone else is using Microsoft Word or a Playstation, there’s a cost to switching away. On the other hand, investors (and antitrust lawyers) often assume that network effects are more durable than they actually are. In fact, they can be quite fickle. Once your network starts shrinking, the collapse can be sudden, because every node that gets subtracted from your network makes it less valuable to the people who remain. Networks that start growing often start shrinking — and a modest decline can quickly prompt a stampede for the exits. Anyone remember MySpace?

And so the problem that Reddit has is this: Having attracted a bunch of people on the promise that they could say anything they wanted, the company risks alienating those people, shrinking the network and shrinking itself right out of existence. Reddit would probably be a better place if the fat-shaming hobbyists and racist trolls were surgically excised. But they won’t be; they’ll be forced out bluntly, along with others, and that will drive away many of the users Reddit would like to keep.

Deciding what is offensive is inherently a political act, because one man’s deep truth is often another person’s deep offense. To take one obvious example, do you treat conservative Christians who say terrible things about gay rights activists the same as gay rights activists who say terrible things about conservative Christians? Men’s rights activists the same as feminists?

We are all more attuned to the offenses against our own beliefs than we are to what may seem terribly offensive to others. And with the culture war raging hot, it is going to be very hard to make choices that don’t look as if you’re taking sides. Even if you try to be scrupulously fair, chances are that you will miss something, causing one side to understandably point out: “See, they crack down on us, but not on those equally offensive other people!”

Reddit is trying to avoid this by splitting the baby in half: designating much of the worst content as questionable, and then segregating it, but not banning it. It’s far from clear, however, that this compromise will work. I don’t think a lot of people are going to mourn when the racist subreddits are segregated. But those are among the most notorious cases precisely because most people can agree that racist epithets are not okay. The border cases are likely to be more numerous, and the decisions will convince some users that Reddit is not for them.

Megan McArdle, “Policing Reddit Could Kill Reddit”, Bloomberg View, 2015-07-17.

September 4, 2015

America’s grievance culture

Filed under: Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Kevin Yuill on the Virginia shootings and what it says about the wider culture in the west:

Had [Some Asshole]* carried out the killing of two ex-colleagues at Virginia TV station WDBJ 10 years ago, it might have been dismissed as just another case of a disgruntled former employee ‘going postal’ – a phrase referencing several incidents from the mid-1980s onwards involving United States Postal Service (USPS) workers shooting and killing fellow workers. But the fact that [Some Asshole]’s shooting of Alison Parker and Adam Ward was filmed, in a world dominated by YouTube and Facebook, ensured the story gained global coverage.

Predictably, we heard the calls for gun control before the victims’ bodies were cold. Opportunists like broadcaster Piers Morgan, President Barack Obama and presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton appear to welcome such tragedies so they can sanctimoniously read their pre-prepared statements. As a hysterical Morgan put it, the Virginia shooting ‘sum[med] up [America’s] appalling, senseless gun culture’. This kind of emotive finger-wagging is to be expected. Those on the other side of the political spectrum blamed mental illness. Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump said of the incident, ‘This isn’t a gun problem, this is a mental problem’.

[…]

The Virginia shooting draws attention to disturbing elements of American culture that undercut the simplistic ‘blame the guns’ media coverage. It points to the brittle culture of offence, whereby any behaviour considered disagreeable to some is understood as a personal slight. It touches on the bizarre narcissism of the selfie, in which only moments caught on camera are deemed real. And it indicts a powerful sense of entitlement, in which individuals demand automatic acceptance of who they are from others, and assume that any problems they create are always someone else’s fault.

An experienced newsman, [Some Asshole] also played upon the voyeuristic appetite for online sensation (something the Islamic State has successfully exploited). By filming his murders, he achieved a notoriety far in excess of his ‘going postal’ predecessors. Yet even that notoriety is someone else’s fault, with commentators also blaming Google and Facebook for allowing people to watch what was essentially a snuff movie. This is an evasion of responsibility on the part of all who searched out the video of the shooting.

Rather than blame guns, social media or mental illness for the Virginia shooting, perhaps we should look at the poisonous complaint-and-grievance culture that has flourished as a result of people’s refusal to take responsibility for their lives.

* Rather than give the killer any “glory” by using his name, I’m following the recommendations of the Some Asshole Initiative.

The problem of moral pornography

Filed under: Media, Middle East — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

In the Spectator, Brendan O’Neill explains why sharing a photo of a dead Syrian child is a symptom of moral pornography:

Have you seen the dead Syrian child yet? Look at his lifeless body. His head buried in the sand. His sad, resigned posture after he and his family made the treacherous journey from Syria to Turkey only to wash up dead on a Turkish beach. Isn’t this just the saddest photo you’ve ever seen? And gross too? Quick, share it! Show it to your friends — on Twitter, Facebook — so that they will feel sad and grossed-out too. Gather round, everyone: stare at the dead Syrian child.

We all know about the problem of sexual pornography on the internet. Now we need to talk about the problem of moral pornography. And nothing better illustrates it than the photo of Aylan, a three-year-old Syrian who drowned alongside his five-year-old brother Galip, his mother and others fleeing the hell of Syria.

The global spreading of this snapshot — which appears on the front page of the Independent today and inside the Guardian, and is even callously being turned into a meme by sections of the weeping Twitterati — is justified as a way of raising awareness about the migrant crisis. Please. It’s more like a snuff photo for progressives, dead-child porn, designed not to start a serious debate about migration in the 21st century but to elicit a self-satisfied feeling of sadness among Western observers.

[…]

Did the newspapers who put this kid on their front pages contact his remaining family members in Syria to seek their permission? Doesn’t look like it. When it comes to producing moral porn for the right-on, it seems the normal rules of journalism — and civilisation — can be suspended. And he’s only Syrian, right? It’s not like his poor, war-battered next of kin will be looking at the internet. Except the Guardian has now discovered that he has family in Canada, so they will very likely see the photo. Oh well, no matter: crack on, publish it, marvel at the purity of your emotional response to it, and be sure to tell everyone what your emotional response was. ‘I cried so hard’ thousands of tweeters are saying. The operative word here being ‘I’.

QotD: Joe Biden’s memoirs

Filed under: Books, Humour, Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I must admit, I have read neither Biden’s memoir nor Dole’s preamble to full erectile function. But I think that the vice president may have a great book in him — not Grant’s memoirs great, but pretty great. I dream of Joe Biden’s writing a postmodern surrealist political manifesto titled Literally Delaware: This Book Has No Subtitle, which I suspect would be colorful reading inasmuch as in his role as under-cretin to the World’s Most Powerful Man™ he has access to the 152-color “Ultimate” Crayola set, though presumably he is allowed to use the included sharpener only under adult supervision. The book would be available only at stores in Amtrak stations and should be read only on the train, a piece of locative literature.

Kevin D. Williamson, “A Plague of Memoirs: A courageously awesome American story of awesomely American courage”, National Review, 2014-10-06.

September 2, 2015

Guardian writer: Terry Pratchett was a “mediocrity”

Filed under: Books, Britain, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Jonathan Jones lets all of Terry Pratchett’s fans know that they’re idiots for liking such a mediocre writer of “potboilers”:

It does not matter to me if Terry Pratchett’s final novel is a worthy epitaph or not, or if he wanted it to be pulped by a steamroller. I have never read a single one of his books and I never plan to. Life’s too short.

No offence, but Pratchett is so low on my list of books to read before I die that I would have to live a million years before getting round to him. I did flick through a book by him in a shop, to see what the fuss is about, but the prose seemed very ordinary.

I don’t mean to pick on this particular author, except that the huge fuss attending and following his death this year is part of a very disturbing cultural phenomenon. In the age of social media and ebooks, our concept of literary greatness is being blurred beyond recognition. A middlebrow cult of the popular is holding literature to ransom. Thus, if you judge by the emotional outpourings over their deaths, the greatest writers of recent times were Pratchett and Ray Bradbury. There was far less of an internet splurge when Gabriel García Márquez died in 2014 and Günter Grass this spring. Yet they were true titans of the novel. Their books, like all great books, can change your life, your beliefs, your perceptions. Everyone reads trash sometimes, but why are we now pretending, as a culture, that it is the same thing as literature? The two are utterly different.

But, despite never having read a single one, he’s willing to share his amazingly brilliant insight with us ignorant, barely literate troglodytes. What a prince! We should all feel honoured and all that if he’s condescended enough to point out our collective failings, shouldn’t we?

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