Obviously, David, you do not read fanfic.

It is true that I have yet to make the proper critical appreciation of Dickens through the lens of SGA wingfic.

However, much art has been designed to fuck with those buttons either through a clever manipulation of them (like say...Hitchcock) or by total sensory overwhelm (like say...the Velvet Underground live in 1967).

"Transcendent" is suspect but I do think she's correct in diagnosing the weird vitality in Dickens language and his imagery which is larded on and on and on until I do think it works on you in an atypical fashion.

Buffistas are different from other people.

My last beach vacation involved watching Dexter on my video iPod, so I'm gonna low-tech it a bit this time.

IT HAZ WURDZ? I READZ IT.

OK, so sometimes I don't always like it, and sometimes it is baaaad, but for the most part, I do get some entertainment value from it, if not intellectual stimulus. Be it modern novels, romance, scifi, spythriller, mystery, bio, nonfic, analysis, whodunnit, history, althistory, whatever. Basically, I'm a reading whore. If it's well written (and ofttimes even not, but has some other hook) I'm going to read it.

eta: I do have a hardtime with fanfic. Not sure what the block is there. Isn't the writing.

Though I can't read Cormac McCarthy. I tried, I really did. But I couldn't. My mother can't figure this out. We usually overlap, and she thought we would here.

Isn't the writing.

Probably the self-indulgence. Not all fic is overtly self-indulgent, but a lot of it is, so much that the indulgence and the explicit emo-porn are what has come to define the genre for me.

Susan's co-irker is an idiot, but we knew that.

There are few genres I won't read at least something of. Though lately I've been re-reading teh books I've accumulated over the last mumblety-plus years. I'm trying to remember what I saw in James Michener (probably my favorite writer during my high school years). Maybe it's just that, even though I like epic sweep, The Covenant probably isn't the best example of it.

For me, truly great novels have plot, human insight and inspired language. Stuff not only happens, so do words and flashes of truth. However, I am happy to get any two of those done well in a book--books with all three, whether genre or straight fiction, are rare and to be treasured. Kavalier and Klay, IMO, has all three. So does Charlotte's Web, for that matter.

However, much art has been designed to fuck with those buttons either through a clever manipulation of them (like say...Hitchcock)

I have to say, I got a couple of Hitchcock films under my belt and came to the conclusion that coherence never got in the way of that dude's sense of the visceral. Sadly, my sense of the visceral goes "Wow! --Hey, waitaminnit."

The wow never overwhelms the waitaminnit. Pushing buttons, by itself, is not enough to make art good; the button-pushing has to work in concert with other factors.

For another, using words to push primal buttons is considered bad writing as often as it is considered good.

However, much art has been designed to fuck with those buttons either through a clever manipulation of them (like say...Hitchcock) or by total sensory overwhelm (like say...the Velvet Underground live in 1967).

But she didn't say it was always bad writing, just that it isn't, in and of itself, a sign of good writing. As I read it.

I'm reading Bee Season by Myla Goldberg and I go between really enjoying it and finding it pretentious as all hell. I liked the spelling bee parts - all the parts that focus on Eliza, really. I can't stand the parents. The parts that talk about words and letters are beautifully written. It's a decent read and I'm almost done but there have been points at which I considered not finishing it.

Did I tell you about when the national spelling bee was taking place in the hotel across from my office and they had protesters? they were protesting the tyranny of standardized spelling. @@@@