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May 04, 2005

more links than a sausage factory

from a thought provoking essay by Matt Cheney, well worth reading:

Life is short and there are an awful lot of books out there, so I don't blame anyone for severely narrowing their definition of reading or of literature. If you think the only books really worth spending time with are the most classic of classics, then you will certainly be a fine reader and have plenty to think about, but your perception of the possibilities of literature and life will be flawed. In high school, I read a biography of Eugene O'Neill, and while I don't remember too much from it, I have never forgotten one moment where the biographer said that O'Neill's father James maintained that a person could learn everything necessary to know from Shakespeare, and that O'Neill went out of his way to reject this idea, while holding on to a veneration for Shakespeare. He acknowledged the greatness of Shakespeare, but unlike his father, didn't think it was the only kind of greatness possible.

Rydra Wong finally posts her Great Exogamy Arc Theory of Farscape and with statements like this--

His heroism is manifested not through Kirk-ish machismo, but through adaptive skills, survivor's skills, immigrant's skills - tenacity, flexibility, communication, bricolage, growing ability to pull together pieces of disparate cultures, technologies and sciences and make them his own. And in fact we see him as heroic because he struggles, flounders, makes mistakes, makes bad choices, and has to deal with that - the opposite of the Kirk-ish hero who always does the right thing, is the role model.

--reminds me I need to watch the whole thing again from the beginning, and take notes, because at some time I do want to write an essay on the deeper implications of the translator microbes, transspecies communication and post traumatic stress (so you'll have to watch Farscape to follow all this; why not, I ask.)

Radiant Robyn Bender brought an essay by Doris Egan called A Taste for Ingres to my attention, which reminded me how really good it is to be at a certain point in my life. And more than that, that there are lots of women out there making the same discoveries, day by day, about the advantages of not being twenty:

Where did this willingness to take delight come from? When I was in college, I would sometimes stay up all night finishing a paper or studying for a test, then go up to the roof to watch the sunrise. From this distance, a continent and a lifetime later, I can see that the paper and the test have faded, but the sunrise remains. For me, the sunrise was and is a lesson I need to learn, perhaps the way my friend needs to learn Buddhism. My own heart lies with Yuan Mei, a Chinese poet who wrote adventure stories and took lovers and created the standard text on a certain poetic form -- and who once ran out of a Buddhist temple because he saw a poem on the wall that he loved, and he had to go and find the author then and there. (He did find him, and they became friends for life. What more can one ask?)

And finally, also from ever vigilant Robyn, a website that takes the ridiculous romance cover to its logical end. Maybe this is what's needed to wake the publishers up to the folly of their ways.

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