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vulgarweed(What would Oscar Wilde do?)
So I see this assclown is up to his old tricks again. His thick-headed literal-minded "arguments" have been taking up way too much space in my head lately. I think it's not just because of the horrible things he's doing to two sets of books I love to prove his nonexistent points (yes, two - he grotesquely oversimplifies Tolkien as well), but rather, it goes deeper.
Much deeper. What this simplistic, prune-faced, disapprovingly clucking sort of "criticism," (which can come from either the left or the right) does is make gross, tawdry, and ignorant assumptions about the very function of literature. The moral opprobrium disguises a deep-seated belief that the reading public as a whole is a collection of weak-willed, gullible, overly impressionable monkey-see-monkey-do tabulas rasa who will of course not read the text as deeply and correctly as the critic hirself, and thus must be warned away if there is anything lurking there which may appeal to their poor benighted sad little weaker instincts, whether they be towards sexism or the desire to disobey teachers. Because of course the whole point of art is moral instruction, yes, and a work of literature is to be judged on the upstandingness of its role models. Moral ambiguity is dangerous for the proles, and so it must be left to the brave essayist to see the true and the right and the good, and to point out the snake in the garden that only his highly-trained and oh-so-insightful eyes can discern.
Due to an LOTR spoiler I'm gonna cut mid rant....Um...hello...The Lord of the Rings is a great book, not just a good fantasy book, because of that astounding moment when, at the very end of the journey, at Mt. Doom in the heart of Mordor, after long and terrible danger and toil, Frodo fails the fucking quest. He succumbs to the Ring's temptation, dumbass. It is only Gollum acting out of his worst greedy addictive impulse who saves the day by accident. It is horrible, it is mesmerizing, and it is utterly satisfying in a literary, psychological, and spiritual sense, though it pretty much blows any theories about the incorruptible ideal hero out of the water. Frodo was good at heroism. But the Ring was better at evil.
Abanes's misreading of Harry Potter is so thorough and profoundly wrongheaded, his complete and utter agenda-domination is the most striking thing about this essay. You'd really think he'd want to pick on books that fewer people had read, so fewer people would be scratching their heads in befuddlement right now at how he could have missed every single nuance so thoroughly, never mind wonder where his sense of humor was so irrevocably mislaid. It reads like parody, like something from the Landover Baptist site or The Onion, and yet it is not. Makes me want to take a bath.
No, actually, it makes me wanna write some funny HP smut. Yet another WIKTT challenge response, in fact:
The Boggart of Erised!
So I see this assclown is up to his old tricks again. His thick-headed literal-minded "arguments" have been taking up way too much space in my head lately. I think it's not just because of the horrible things he's doing to two sets of books I love to prove his nonexistent points (yes, two - he grotesquely oversimplifies Tolkien as well), but rather, it goes deeper.
Much deeper. What this simplistic, prune-faced, disapprovingly clucking sort of "criticism," (which can come from either the left or the right) does is make gross, tawdry, and ignorant assumptions about the very function of literature. The moral opprobrium disguises a deep-seated belief that the reading public as a whole is a collection of weak-willed, gullible, overly impressionable monkey-see-monkey-do tabulas rasa who will of course not read the text as deeply and correctly as the critic hirself, and thus must be warned away if there is anything lurking there which may appeal to their poor benighted sad little weaker instincts, whether they be towards sexism or the desire to disobey teachers. Because of course the whole point of art is moral instruction, yes, and a work of literature is to be judged on the upstandingness of its role models. Moral ambiguity is dangerous for the proles, and so it must be left to the brave essayist to see the true and the right and the good, and to point out the snake in the garden that only his highly-trained and oh-so-insightful eyes can discern.
Due to an LOTR spoiler I'm gonna cut mid rant....Um...hello...The Lord of the Rings is a great book, not just a good fantasy book, because of that astounding moment when, at the very end of the journey, at Mt. Doom in the heart of Mordor, after long and terrible danger and toil, Frodo fails the fucking quest. He succumbs to the Ring's temptation, dumbass. It is only Gollum acting out of his worst greedy addictive impulse who saves the day by accident. It is horrible, it is mesmerizing, and it is utterly satisfying in a literary, psychological, and spiritual sense, though it pretty much blows any theories about the incorruptible ideal hero out of the water. Frodo was good at heroism. But the Ring was better at evil.
Abanes's misreading of Harry Potter is so thorough and profoundly wrongheaded, his complete and utter agenda-domination is the most striking thing about this essay. You'd really think he'd want to pick on books that fewer people had read, so fewer people would be scratching their heads in befuddlement right now at how he could have missed every single nuance so thoroughly, never mind wonder where his sense of humor was so irrevocably mislaid. It reads like parody, like something from the Landover Baptist site or The Onion, and yet it is not. Makes me want to take a bath.
No, actually, it makes me wanna write some funny HP smut. Yet another WIKTT challenge response, in fact:
The Boggart of Erised!
