Posts by Cecelia
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What really gets up my nose is the idea that "literary culture" is some pristine club that has to be protected from the grubby proles. Well, here's a newsflash: When it comes to American literary values, I'd rather read (and re-read) John Crowley, Gene Wolfe, Chabon himself and a dozen others than Philip Roth's latest over-rated peek up his own prolapsed arse. Could it be within the realm of possibility that Elmore Leonard and Richard Stark said more worth listening to about the American Grain than the painfully detailed adulterous gyrations of John Updike's New England Brahman zombies?
Unfair - you have mentioned two of America's most depressing authors!
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Coro is very very funny at times but I'm well aware of its dastardly soap opera logic and the dreadful liberties they take with characters. No matter, I just love it. I don't care what other people think of it and have an immediate affinity with other Coro fans. It's a genre in which I accept the conventions and see through them but enjoy it all the same.
It was the same with Twilight (which I read before all the fuss because of a Time magazine article). It had putrid underlying messages and values but Meyer was so good at writing about a teenage girl's first sexual love (repressed) I thought and something kept me reading them avidly - a certain flow!
I accept the limitations of the above. And if we talk of quality - has a sci fi or fantasy novel ever won the accolades of more general fiction like the Booker prize or Pullitzer prize?
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I wandered away from Fiction into the Fantasy section for the first time ever and borrowed a Pratchett. So many of you enjoy him greatly and my three sons loved him. For various reasons I have a lot of time to read right now so I tried. I picked 'Hogfather' because I had heard of it, started it with some enjoyment and liked the character of Susan. Some of the humour was funny even to an old fuddy duddy like me and there was some pithy one liners. I've just given up, however - the Death character for rats was just a bit too much and there's too much dialogue. Conclusion: it's not my genre, it seems to contain (don't hit me, please!) a masculine sense of humour and I'm just too old to venture into the fantasy genre.
My thoughts on genre: books in Sci Fi and Fantasy sections are geared to certain reader expectations. I instinctively see them as of lesser artistic worth than literary fiction (a section in Dymocks in Newmarket!). I'm not a snob!! I loved the Twilight books and I'm fanatical about Coronation Street. -
If you enjoy musical references you might enjoy Kureishi and the wonderful Japanese writer Haruki Murakami. Allusions to past rock and pop music are kind of lost on me but when I read about them I think, why doesn't someone make an album of songs alluded to in many of these 'growing up in the 70s or 80s' novels? They probably have in Murakami's case.
However, the above books are not comical, just witty and observant.
And well, what's wrong with a bit of angst as long as there's some light at the end of the tunnel?
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I'll have to start on Terry Pratchett ... Meanwhile I have finished Fiona Farrell's 'Limestone' (damn good) and Hanif Kureishi's 'Something to Tell You' - also good.
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I got hooked in by some of the puns: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Hydrant for example but I tried hard for a few days to say "So what?" and "I'm not going to be sucked into that vortex."
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I'd also like to know exactly how Elin Nordegren "asked" to be publicly humiliated?
Good point but going back to the original post
The basic theme of it was that most of humanity are parasites who alternately feed off and tear down great individuals, and that society was an obsequious circle-jerk of needy interdependence.
Some of this relates to Tiger but I still think that he walked into this trap and that Ayn Rand's criticism of "most of humanity" is a bit rich.
I agree with you about Helen Clark but she is in no way a parallel to Tiger Woods.
I'm arguing for arguments sake in a way and not doing very well but not Ayn Rand! Nooooo!
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It was connected to his golfing because he was portrayed as a disciplined sportsman and a family man. By buying into his own celebrity status by accepting sponsorship deals he made it more than the golf.
Therefore you can't blame "society" for tearing him down. He played with fire.
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Didn't he tear himself down by living a double life and betraying his family???? The media is one thing - it's contemptible in its gossipy glee but I would have thought Tiger almost handed them his heart to be picked apart.
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Too right - agapanthus has terrible triffid like qualities.