I love reading conservative Republicans
telling Shrub to get his slimy hands off our Constitution and quit trying to use
it to shoehorn himself back in office. As Rudder likes to point out, the
Constitution has only ever been amended to recognize individual freedoms, never to
take them away except for Prohibition and that didn't work. (Well, and to limit
Presidents to two terms in office. It can be argues whether that's denying
privileges to the incumbent or granting them to others. Either way, it's not one
of the document's shining highlights.)
SWooP: I am not a shoe whore.
If I were they'd pay me for it instead of the other way around. A shoe
john, maybe.
On the radio this morning, someone discussing the
Oscars mentioned that the Lord of the Rings movies are "about the big things":
friendship, courage, integrity. That rang true for me -- that's the common factor
in most of what I read. Most of the fiction on my bookshelves is either
children's/YA, F&SF, or mysteries. I have some "literature" too, of course, but it
tends more toward Austen and Trollope than to, say, Byatt or Proulx. A lot of
modern lit strikes me as flat out boring, or pompus, or at best dreary. I am not a
subtle person (yeah, big shock, I know) and one distinguishing factor of the
genres I read most is that they are not afraid to tackle good and evil head on.
No, I don't only read about great apocalyptic battles; there are also all of the
other great questions: why is love, what is civilization, why do manners matter,
what is the purpose of life, and so on nearly ad infinitum. They may use dragons
or murders or high school cliques to illustrate a point, but there almost always
is one.
I don't want to read about what happened on one day of some
random character's life unless it really mattered to him or her. (Funny, I've
never seen the resemblance between Joyce's Ulysses and Miss Read's
Thrush Green until now. Should probably attempt to read the former one of
these days.) I do want to read about how Elizabeth realized she'd been mistaken
about Darcy, or why you should always be polite to dragons, or how a man-of-the-
world soldier can find contentment in a monastery, or how women can fit into a
previously male-only army without pretending to be men.
Some of it
is writing style too, I guess; it's hard to care for a character who doesn't care
for anything himself. A good author can make me care about an issue that's
important to the character but that wasn't to me -- I agree with
href="http://www.eilatan.net/hobbies/reviews.html#janeoflanternhill">Natalie
that Pat Gardiner has a pathological attachment to Silver Bush, but I still reread
her anyway. I think at base I want to be able to see what the author is getting at
and why I should care.
Which may or may not be the case with the
meeting I need to run off to now.