Censorship: What is it, and who's got it?

[Grack21]

not the ones losing their shit.

not seeing anyone becoming manifestly angry, except for whoever it was that had the fuck you kalbear meltdown a few threads back.

Ooo! ooo! That was me! I'm famous now!

[Horselover Fat]

I need to get the autographed copy of "Fuck You Kalbear: The Grack21 Story".

[Grack21]

Fox has already optioned the movie rights.

[Edda van Heefmstra Ruston]

Arthmail, I think that you're getting too upset and emotional to continue. You're clearly seeing things that aren't there and just getting worked up. Maybe you should relax a bit.

(is that how to do the dismissal based on tone argument?)

I think that's more like basic concern trolling. (I'm making this decision for you for your own good; you can't be trusted to take care of yourself.) The 'pure' one is more like "I'm not going to listen to you while you're just so angry. If you'd just be calm people would take you more seriously. You're doing your cause so much harm by not just acquiescing to the wishes of others (usually those benefiting from the privilege you don't have and you're talking about) being nicer to your would-be allies."

Excellent attempt, though.

[Sci-2]

Fox has already optioned the movie rights.

I see Kalbear played by a young Ray Liotta. Grack, I'm thinking you're a fresh out the gate Matthew Broderick or a Grand Tarino Eastwood.

[Grack21]

Good lord no, I look like Gmili from Lord of the Rings. If we're going to be unrealistic though, I want SIR Patrick Stewart to play me.

[Datepalm]

Vaguely relevant post from Ursula K. Leguin, to class up the joint a bit:

I‘d have some trust and interest in literary prizes like that. For Soulfulness — for Sitting Up and Begging Nicely — for Passion Well Expressed – for Excellent Use of Semi-Colons — for Being the Only Novel About Elderly Female Entomologists in Love….

You think literature would suffer, if prizes were given so freely? You think sharing praise diminishes its worth? You think good books are written in order to win huge advances and one-a-year prizes? Maybe so. I think not. I think the desire to excel in competition, whether for prizes or for money, is likely to produce a mediocre and predictable novel on a trendy topic in a mode recognised as “safe” by the sales department of a large commercial publisher.

I think good novels are written by writers who want to write this novel, their novel, which is like no other. And which is therefore unpredictable, unsafe, and unlikely to win a prize. Given time and chance and a little publicity, of course, it may keep winning readers for years and years to come. But most corporation-owned publishers could care less for the years to come. Bottom line this month is all that matters.

o0o

Book Groups as the Opposite of Awards.

I don’t mean Oprah or commercial ventures, I mean the kind of reading group organised by private people among their friends and acquaintances, that have become common in the last twenty years or so. These groups often consist of modest people who don’t trust their own taste and therefore accept too meekly the publicised judgment of PR departments and award-givers. The book club that always picks the newest best seller or Big Prize winner for next month isn’t doing much for literature, although the cookies or the wine and cheese may be terrific.

But a lot of book-club members have been reading all their lives. Reading people tend to be a bit balky, independent, resistant to being told what they ought to read, inclined to go off and discover it for themselves. There are a lot of book groups doing quite serious independent reading and discussion. I wonder if they aren’t doing more to preserve and celebrate literature than all the national awards and lists of Bests.

And how about all the Internet sites and blogs that discuss books read? Some of them are awfully naïve — some of them are awesomely knowledgeable.

[Larry.]

The latter is why I maintain or participate in a few blogs. Voices crying in wildernesses, etc. Even a "best of" list can be interesting if it's not too closely resembling another's and gets others to be curious about it. The 2011 release I liked best (which I won't review until that post) polarizes readers.

[Sci-2]

Larry, why u no answer question about difference between reviewer and critic? :_*(

[sologdin]

reviewer is part of the marketing process, and, though reviewing can be serious, requires nothing more than an attention to detail and a familiarity with the relevant generic conventions of the items reviewed.

a critic is a different sort of professional, whose job is not even secondarily to state whether a text is good or bad--criticism that does incorporate express aesthetic judgment is functioning simultaneously as a review. the critic typically attempts to place a text within one discourse or another in order to draw out its significances and advocate for a certain set of significances over others.

to use the requires only that you hate writer as an example:

a ) she functions as a reviewer to the extent that she weighs in on the quaility (but not "qualities," a conflation of concepts erroneously made upthread by mr. shryke and others) of texts and writers, e.g., the naked description of abercrombie's writing as some sort of excrement;

b ) she functions as a critic to the extent that she assesses the text's rhetorical effects as practices in the discursive fields of gender, race, nationality, ethnicity, and sexuality. (there may be some class politics in there, too--but it wasn't central in what i read over there.). e.g., even the dismissal of abercrombie as "excrement" can be read as a non-aesthetic intervention if the term is read as a bakhtinian, bataiilean, kristevan, or deleuzean thesis. none of those readings requires an aesthetic judgment. even the simplistic naked metaphor of "excrement" requires no aesthetic judgment on the text itself, but merely an aesthetic judgment of the text's rhetorical effects in whichever political field we happen to analyze--it's excrement for race politics or gender politics or whatever. this allows the critic to damn the rhetorical effects but still have an aesthetic appreciation for the text itself.

overall, the pure critic is not making a recommendation on whether a market participant should purchase a product; the pure critic assumes that one has access to the text and is smart enough to keep up with analysis in which aesthetic judgment constitutes tertiary importance.

[Larry.]

Larry, why u no answer question about difference between reviewer and critic? :_*(

Pretty much what sologdin said above. Reviewers have a narrower focus when discussing a book; critics utilize more tools. On my blog, I'm typically a reviewer when writing essays on specific books but a critic when I write essays on other topics because I have to use different (and often more) tools to explore the issues. I sometimes combine the two, as when I wrote an essay on the McCarthy book I linked to earlier, but I sometimes have some of my critical pieces published elsewhere, such as when in 2009 I wrote a guest column for the Nebula site (then separate from SFWA proper) on issues dealing with interational SF. Critics will use some of the tools reviewers use (the shape of commentary can be similar), but the depth is greater, since the issue is more general than a specific book or books.