Serdar Yegulalp's Blog, page 158
November 17, 2014
Test To Destruction Dept.
Earlier in the week I noticed someone online using the term "troll it 'till it breaks", in reference to how to respond to some nitwit piece of legislation. Jump on it until the inherent absurdity of what it is becomes exposed by sheer force, and then maybe enough people will wake up that the item in question will be killed. The best way to test something, in other words, is to see where its breaking point lies.
November 16, 2014
They Blinded Me With Science Dept.
Random thought about the disdain for SF in literary circles, about what it stems from. Far as I can tell, most of it comes from a few different things, most of which go unacknowledged by literary types:
They're scientifically illiterate, or feel inferior when discussing such subjects (and yet never bother to take steps to correct that deficiency, because it gives them a convenient way to manifest indignity), so SF for them feels like having their noses rubbed in their ignorance.
A variant of th...
November 14, 2014
The Liar In The Mirror Dept.
At some point everyone sporting a brain has to break their shins on the realization that they are the easiest person in the world to fool. Beyond that lies yet another rough frontier to conquer: that the antidote to such self-delusion is not to tell yourself, "I'm no fool!" because that just sets you up for all new ways to be fooled.
November 12, 2014
The Pixel Factory Dept.
Is Pixar's Run of Greatness Over? - The Atlantic
[Apart from Inside Out and one other project], [e]very other upcoming Pixar feature that’s been announced is a sequel. Finding Dory in 2016, Toy Story 4 in 2017, and (as yet unscheduled) The Incredibles 2 and (brief shudder) Cars 3. For those keeping track at home, that’s a total of four announced sequels and two announced non-sequels. It’s tough to think of a more conspicuous advertisement that the creative wells at Pixar are running dry.
Dissen...
November 10, 2014
Faking The Funk Dept.
Fraud is such an ugly word, one made all the uglier by its thoughtless misuse.
In the span of less than a month I have see separate essays that have decried the words of Alejandro G. Inarritu and David Foster Wallace as fraudulent, with the artists in question labeled as frauds. This is not a new thing, either; on searching my memory I can recall any number of instances where a critic or even a fellow artist blasted off an F-bomb at some target or another. I suspect I've done it any number of...
November 9, 2014
A Classic Dilemma Dept.
A good, and appropriately narrowed discussion, of why thePercy Jackson books may be their own reward:
Young Adult Fiction Doesn't Need to Be a 'Gateway' to the Classics - The Atlantic
... one of the messages of Percy Jackson, and of a lot of kids' literature, is that children are not just waiting to pick their lives up when they're grown, but are heroes of their own stories now. That's a lesson that adults have trouble with, if the condescension and contempt in the discussion of children's read...
November 7, 2014
All Of My Heroes Have Been Dead Men Dept.
I'm at about the age, I think, when most of my childhood heroes begin to die off.
This isn't something you notice all at once. No one departure sets off the alarm bells. But one day, you look around, and the emptiness of the room, the dents in the couch where fine company once sat, resonates with you like a struck bell. Fixtures of my childhood imagination, like Moebius and H.R. Giger, are gone now. Men and women who gave my life direction and purpose in adolescence and early adulthood — Roger...
November 4, 2014
My Ears! My Ears! Dept.
Richard Ford’s Hero Returns in ‘Let Me Be Frank With You’ - NYTimes.com
Frank [the protagonist of Ford's novel] almost seems like a parody of a professorial liberal, who talks about buying Aaron Copland’s “whole oeuvre” online. Which brings us to another problem with Mr. Ford’s depiction of Frank in these pages, a problem Updike also had, at times, in depicting Rabbit: that is, a tendency to ascribe dialogue or thoughts to their middle-class, Everyman characters that are hard to imagine being...
November 3, 2014
Der Ding An Sicht Dept.
At some point, I'm not exactly sure when, I started telling something to people who told me they wanted to be a writer: "Is that something you want to spend at least an hour a day doing for the rest of your life, whether or not a single other living soul on God's green earth gives a damn? If so, get in line; there's a million others waiting." (That said, I couldn't present you with statistics about how many of them find another hobby after such a speech.)
If it sounds gauche of me to discourag...
November 1, 2014
Right Here, Right Now Dept.
I suspect some of what scares people away from Buddhism, even when they get past the b.s. pop Buddhism that's being thrown around, is because some of the claims it makes about what you're supposed to be doing seem alienating or counterintuitive. One of the ideas thatreally bakes people's cookies is the notion that there really isn't such a thing as the past or the future, so the only thing that counts is the present moment and action in the present moment.
