A Reader's Reprimand


caroljane

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Novelists whom I like, listen up. This is from me, but I speak for a fed-up multitude.

If you are doing anything except writing your next novel, stop doing whatever it is this minute, and get back to your desk and do not get up until you are finished to my satisfaction.

Don't go to anymore book festivals and literary conferences and do not give any more readings. I don't care what you look like and I can read faster than I can listen. I don't want to ask you questions. I want to consume your product in solitude at my own pace.

Don't let your publisher bully you into book tours. Stay home and write.

Enough with the publication parties and literary awards dinners. Have a sandwich at your desk.

Don't you realize you are not people, but just the means through which I get to revel in a great story, well-written? You are words on paper. Stop wasting time with author websites, I don't care if your cat had kittens or you need a double-double Tim Hortons to become inspired.

Vikram Seth, I appeal to your better nature. I am sure you have a mother. You wouldn't make her wait for SIXTEEN FREAKING YEARS for something she craved that you knew you could give her, would you? Well, would you? Your poetry is very nice and human rights are very important, but just drop them right now and finish A Suitable Girl. I am an old lady, I don't know if I can hold on until the Royal Wedding in April, who knows if I can make it to 2013? Pick up the pace!

Dead authors, don't think you're off the hook. It's all fine and well for you now up there in Plato's Writer's Retreat, but down here some of your books are going out of print. You must have made some connections up there by now --get those books, all of them, back into print and into the libraries where I don't have to pay for them. Norah Lofts, I'm talking to you! Ask Ayn to pull some strings.

I will address the publishers at another time, although....Sue Townsend and Peter Dickinson! I see you back there trying to sneak over to the Fabian Club..get back here at once! At once I say!...

Ranter's Note: The above, since it is my attitude, is the attitude of the Silent Majority of novel-readers. The Vocal Minority, i.e. other novelists and aspiring novelists, cause all the readings and websites and most of the evil in the world, and are ruining it for the rest of us.

Edited by daunce lynam
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Novelists whom I like, listen up. This is from me, but I speak for a fed-up multitude.

Dead authors, don't think you're off the hook. It's all fine and well for you now up there in Plato's Writer's Retreat, but down here some of your books are going out of print. You must have made some connections up there by now --get those books, all of them, back into print and into the libraries where I don't have to pay for them. Norah Lofts, I'm talking to you! Ask Ayn to pull some strings.

Hilarious, but oh so sadly true.

Tony

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Don't let your publisher bully you into book tours. Stay home and write.

I don’t get it, have you run out of new things to read? There’s nothing you’re itching to reread? Here’s someone you won’t find on the lecture circuit, try his stuff, it’ll keep you busy for a loooong time:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jR0588DtHJA

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Don't let your publisher bully you into book tours. Stay home and write.

I don’t get it, have you run out of new things to read? There’s nothing you’re itching to reread? Here’s someone you won’t find on the lecture circuit, try his stuff, it’ll keep you busy for a loooong time:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jR0588DtHJA

Ninth, it is no use, I am not smart enough to enjoy Thomas Pynchon. I said here somewhere that I quite enjoyed Joyce's Ulysses, but I lied. I don't like to work hard at reading or study, though I know there's a real intellectual buzz payoff when you do, such as with chemistry or algebra."Euclid alone hath looked at beauty bare" and all that. So I quite enjoyed working at reading Ulysses, and I really liked the "Yes" ending, and not only because it was the ending. But as a novel, as I like to enjoy novels, I didn't.

If there's anything I hate, it's a challenge.

Of course I have not run out of wannareads, they are piled up, but my beloved living authors are not replaceable though I always find new irreplaceables.

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Some OLers have expressed concern to me about how Ayn Rand is doing in literary heaven, considering the fact that she doesn't believe in it and that she has been assigned to the Plato's Writers Retreat sector.

I am pleased to report that her soul has remained undaunted. Once the fraught first meeting with Plato was over (it turns out he doesn't believe in her either, so they just ignored each other)and early adjustment to a new environment was made, she continued her unique pursuit of her own values.

She has had her setbacks, of course. Aristotle has been holed up in a fortified cloud since 1987, and has taken out a restraining order against her, but she continues to lob clear, precise, irrefutable communications over the gates. She was friends with Margaret Mitchell for a while, but they fell out over the intellectual property rights of epic rape scenes.

The intellectual grandeur of her ideas has attracted the brightest of the younger set, of course. You can probably imagine who they are. Envious second-harpers foully lie that her students are secretly plotting to "get Kant once and for all", simply because of casually curious questions as to his whereabouts. Smiling scornfully at these irrelevant creatures, the self-made soul continues, productively achieving, occasionally reaching down to give Leonard a piece of her mind that she no longer needs.

Heavenly days!

Edited by daunce lynam
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Ninth, it is no use, I am not smart enough to enjoy Thomas Pynchon.

His latest is actually a breezy read. Lots of fun too, and reportedly going to be adapted for film by the director of Magnolia. Vineland's fairly easy reading too. Gravity's Rainbow is up there with Ulysses, though. Mason & Dixon is probably his best.

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Ninth, it is no use, I am not smart enough to enjoy Thomas Pynchon.

His latest is actually a breezy read. Lots of fun too, and reportedly going to be adapted for film by the director of Magnolia. Vineland's fairly easy reading too. Gravity's Rainbow is up there with Ulysses, though. Mason & Dixon is probably his best.

OK, sold. It was GR that I plodded through about 50 pages of before giving up. I'll try the shortest one.

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OK, sold. It was GR that I plodded through about 50 pages of before giving up. I'll try the shortest one.

If you like audiobooks, the reader for Inherent Vice is just fantastic. If you liked the film The Big Lebowski, it's sort of like that. His shortest is The Crying of Lot 49, I don't know if that's the right place to start or not, though I think it's his most read book. He's an acquired taste, I suppose. Gravity's Rainbow is certainly the wrong place to start, you need a reader's guide for that one.

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Daunce,

Your in for disappointment posting clever, amusing, literary posts here. This used to be an Objectivist site, but right now you're pretty much over the heads of most of the 'regulars', unfortunately.

They don't read, they skim.

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It was funny, and good posts are pretty much ignored rather than being commented on, while (most of) the regular readers here wait to get their snarks in.

They act as if they were unintelligent or intellectually slovenly. Not insulting, simply a fact.

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Cripes, Phil, you had to throw in a bummer and insult the reader. What the man wrote was funny - much better than RE - and you should have been happy with that.

Ted, I'm not a man - you even called me a housewife once! Hope you're still laughing anyway.

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Cripes, Phil, you had to throw in a bummer and insult the reader. What the man wrote was funny - much better than RE - and you should have been happy with that.

Ted, I'm not a man - you even called me a housewife once! Hope you're still laughing anyway.

Phil:

What is the point of your comments about Carol's writing? How does the carping enhance OL?

Adam

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No, wait! Daunce is a unisex name, like Gail.I can be a man and a woman both. God what a relief. I was trying to think what I would tell my kids, not to mention the regulars at the Hag & Sporran.

Sorry, Daunce is only unisex in the way that Stanley is. If you are shopping for a new one there's always Virago Termagant, the name of the moustachioed landlady from To Lorne Dieterling.

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No, wait! Daunce is a unisex name, like Gail.I can be a man and a woman both. God what a relief. I was trying to think what I would tell my kids, not to mention the regulars at the Hag & Sporran.

Sorry, Daunce is only unisex in the way that Stanley is. If you are shopping for a new one there's always Virago Termagant, the name of the moustachioed landlady from To Lorne Dieterling.

Oh, you flatterer. No, I will keep my managra, just as some of us keep our avatars which may weary repeat viewers. I don't mean yours, actually.

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No, wait! Daunce is a unisex name, like Gail.I can be a man and a woman both. God what a relief. I was trying to think what I would tell my kids, not to mention the regulars at the Hag & Sporran.

Sorry, Daunce is only unisex in the way that Stanley is. If you are shopping for a new one there's always Virago Termagant, the name of the moustachioed landlady from To Lorne Dieterling.

Oh, you flatterer. No, I will keep my managra, just as some of us keep our avatars which may weary repeat viewers. I don't mean yours, actually.

I didn't know you were a Doctor Who fan.

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No, wait! Daunce is a unisex name, like Gail.I can be a man and a woman both. God what a relief. I was trying to think what I would tell my kids, not to mention the regulars at the Hag & Sporran.

Sorry, Daunce is only unisex in the way that Stanley is. If you are shopping for a new one there's always Virago Termagant, the name of the moustachioed landlady from To Lorne Dieterling.

Oh, you flatterer. No, I will keep my managra, just as some of us keep our avatars which may weary repeat viewers. I don't mean yours, actually.

I didn't know you were a Doctor Who fan.

And mother of a total fanatic. His dad built him a Tardis out of an old wardrobe for his 11th birthday, and his wife gave him a Tardis bookstand/endtable for his 30th. He spent hours in the old one, guess he has to mind-morph into the newer one, it's kinda small.

The hilarious old Daleks were the best. Sometimes you could see the feet under them.

Edited by daunce lynam
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  • 1 month later...

Some OLers have expressed concern to me about how Ayn Rand is doing in literary heaven, considering the fact that she doesn't believe in it and that she has been assigned to the Plato's Writers Retreat sector.

I am pleased to report that her soul has remained undaunted. Once the fraught first meeting with Plato was over (it turns out he doesn't believe in her either, so they just ignored each other)and early adjustment to a new environment was made, she continued her unique pursuit of her own values.

She has had her setbacks, of course. Aristotle has been holed up in a fortified cloud since 1987, and has taken out a restraining order against her, but she continues to lob clear, precise, irrefutable communications over the gates. She was friends with Margaret Mitchell for a while, but they fell out over the intellectual property rights of epic rape scenes.

The intellectual grandeur of her ideas has attracted the brightest of the younger set, of course. You can probably imagine who they are. Envious second-harpers foully lie that her students are secretly plotting to "get Kant once and for all", simply because of casually curious questions as to his whereabouts. Smiling scornfully at these irrelevant creatures, the self-made soul continues, productively achieving, occasionally reaching down to give Leonard a piece of her mind that she no longer needs.

Heavenly days!

Mr J Bigger:

Re: Allegations on another OL Thread that we would not lower ourselves to read:

As the above will amply demonstrate that the evil distortions and misrepresentations that you probably made are priceless, we expect that you will avoid litigation and reach a reasonable settlement.

Forevermine& Lennys

Attorneys at Law

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