Back when I was on Twitter I used to follow a bunch of writers and Yellowface was so entertaining in its portrayal of that domain. Idk if you have heard about the recent Cait Corran scandal but it had me thinking about that book again.
Anybody who wants to understand literature, you NEED to read John Truby’s 2 books ( which absolutely-obsolete Campbell’s “Hero With A Thousand Faces”, and oceans of other such books )
“The Anatomy of Genres”
“The Anatomy of Story”
IF you don’t understand the huge amount of stuff in them, THEN you don’t understand literature.
There are niggles: he thinks “village” means Wild West village, I think “village” means Tribal Village, as somewhere between 0.5 & 2 million years of history indicate, but such things are minor, compared with what he got right.
There is other stuff, ie things specific to languages/cultures that English cannot represent, e.g…
But those 14 Genres, those are the templates we form our mind on.
Please give yourself a huge gift, & read 'em.
Anybody wanting an equivalent for presentations, then Weissman’s “Presenting to Win” is the equivalently-spectacular one,
& anybody wanting an equivalent for editing, Coyne’s “The Story Grid” is the one.
www.TVTropes.org is also a required resource for understanding literature, though it is limitless & easy to lose days/years in…
It’s violence escalating over time over and over again, but it seemed to me like McCarthy didn’t want to “condemn” the glorification of it. The book is based on an actual posse of scalphunters, and to me the tone of it all seems to be on par with his other books where the main message you have to get out of it is “the world is a flaming giant turd filled to the brim with violence and hatred and it’s painful to tell you the kind ones aren’t coming out on top”. I hope I made it clear enough.
“The writer hated commas and semi colons and full stops and anything that would let a man take rest and contemplate both the novel and his station in life and often to the extent that every paragraph was actually just one endless sentence doing violence to that man’s ability to parse and consider all those elements and often something about bush craft and coffee and something about horses.”
TBF I can appreciate what he’s going for. The lack of quotes makes it less like you’re an omniscient being hearing dialogue, more like the narrator’s just repeating what someone said. I’m in the middle of Alan Wake 2 and I can’t help but read the book in Alan’s VA’s voice because the way “Alan” writes is superficially similar.
It also cranks up the impression that you’re stuck on a nonstop violence train that doesn’t really have any rhyme or reason to it. Just a series of events that occur.
No spoilers, but yeah Blood Meridian is a strange book. It felt like a sort of apocalyptic fever dream or something. I pretty quickly stopped trying to apply the logic of our world to it and just went wherever it was taking me lol. It’s a story from some other place I think.
A 2019 report on the racial diversity of the publishing industry showed 76 percent of the staff are White, primarily cisgender, heterosexual women. Only 6 percent of the publishing industry is Latinx, despite representing 19 percent of the U.S. population.
This author is ravenous about diversity. It’s unsettling. If there was… Just an article about what cool trans or Latin sci-fi I could read, I’d buy a book. Right now.
What these meta diversity journalists forget is that I buy books and read to relax. When I find out a world is written in a closed-minded (ie. White guy who’s never dealt with any bullshit in life) lens, it puts me out of my comfort zone.
The point of reading a book written by someone like me actually isn’t about politics. It’s actually about getting back to that comfort. The fantasies they can spin up are realistic to how I see the world. I can sit back, relax, and be immersed.
As is the norm, there's no mention at all of, or effort to even attempt to investigate, the demographics of the applicant pool/people who wish to pursue the field as a career.
You can't even have a cursory analysis of whether discrimination exists without it.
“x” is seldomly used in Spanish, and “Latinx” isn’t even really pronounceable in Spanish. It’s very clearly been created and pushed by people who don’t even speak Spanish, so it’s perceived as very disingenuous and forced. There are ways to achieve gender neutrality in Spanish in ways that are more fitting to the language, like using “e” ending instead of “a/o”, e.g. latino/latina/latine, amigo/amiga/amigue, etc.
Beautiful summary. One of my favourite classics.Theres so much depth and the conversation about faith between Ivan and Alexie has stayed with me for years
For me, yes. I notice that whenever I’m reading on my phone (night mode, blue light filter, lowest light setting), I will stay awake longer, my eyes strain, it takes me longer to fall asleep. When using my kobo (not backlit, but still lit - it has those leds all around the screen that light it up from above!!), it’s like I was reading a paper book, except I can read in a dark room without any strain to my eyes whatsoever, and I can take on any position without having to adjust the light source!!! An absolute game-changer in terms of comfort. In fact, I think my eye strain is even lower with the e-ink reader compared to regular paper indoors, because I have a better light source no matter where I sit in my room.
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