Drunken Baker posted:

This is what delights and infuriates me about crap books/films/whatever. You get an idea like RPO and it is done so, so terribly. But it gives you a little spark of insight and inspiration because it COULD be the bedrock for some really fascinating fiction.

Oxxidation posted:

today i learned about rupi kaur and i wish i hadn't

quote:

“I will always go into a used bookstore,” she says, even when she’s working. “I’ll collect a lot of covers that inspire me — whether it’s the paper inside, whether it’s a font, so then later I can be like, okay, how’s mine going to look?”

quote:

On a cart at the Strand, Milk and Honey sits alongside Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay, Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit, and Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehesi Coates. Kaur read half of Between the World and Me. “I had to take notes,” she says — it was “more academic” than her typical reading. Recently she got Notorious RBG, and she’s been enjoying that.

quote:

“This guy is the best,” she says, noticing an edition of Kafka’s complete stories; she’s referring to Peter Mendelsund, the book’s designer. “The dream is to have him design my next book.” His work, she points out, translates well across media — to different sizes, to posters, to digital.

zoux posted:

Did you read this article from the Cut?




When people bitch about millenial bullshit, they're bitching about Rupi Kaur

quote:

Earlier in our conversation, Kaur’s constellation of gold rings caught my attention as she was speaking; I compliment them, and she thanks me. “This one I got when Milk and Honey reached number one on the New York Times list,” she says, indicating an emerald on her left middle finger. “I got this one in Oakland, and then this one I got when I finished writing the manuscript, and then this one was for selling over a million books. And then this one I got after I got all these and was like, oh, I’m just allowed to buy them now for no reason at all.”

Mr. Sunshine posted:

I got "In the balance" by Turtledove a couple of years back (for pretty much the same reason I got "Watch on the Rhine" - nazis fighting aliens). It's the first in a series of books. For those who don't know, the premise is that aliens have been planning an invasion of earth for like the last thousand years. The invasion fleet arrives expecting to face off against knights on horseback, but instead finds itself in the middle of WWII. So now the nazis, the commies, the chinese, the japanese, the yanks and the brits all have to team up to fight evil alien invaders!

And it's so loving badly written. Now, mind, it's not the frothing rant that "Watch on the Rhine" is. It's just...boring. Every character is a one-dimensional stereotype. Every non-american character exists only to contrast themselves and their nation against the US. Two german officers will be talking and constantly go "Let us drink beer and eat bratwurst, as is the way of us orderly germans, unlike those free-spirited americans who only drink coca-cola and eat hamburgers". I can't even remember who any of the characters were. There's the german noble officer, the chinese peasant girl, some russian farmer and they're all constantly inner-monologueing how they sure aren't like those americans.

The only good bit in the book is when the germans fire off a round from the Schwerer Gustav railway cannon against a alien landing site. The aliens send up advanced countermeasures designed to knock out guided missles...which does jack all against a solid 7-ton lump of metal coming barreling out of the sky.

Wheat Loaf posted:

I believe Turtledove's chief controversy was how he always turned Mormons into suicide bombers or something like that; he certainly did in Timeline-191, which is the only long series of his that I've read, but I don't know beyond that.

Most of Timeline-191 is pretty lazy in the sense that it's more or less a search and replace of the eastern front in World War II that replaces Nazi Germany with the Confederates and the Soviet Union with the USA. For example, the Confederate invasion of Ohio that starts the Second Great War is code-named "Operation Blackbeard", corresponding to Operation Barbarossa (which means "red beard" for anyone unfamiliar).

zoux posted:

Did you read this article from the Cut?




When people bitch about millenial bullshit, they're bitching about Rupi Kaur

zoux posted:

Did you read this article from the Cut?

When people bitch about millenial bullshit, they're bitching about Rupi Kaur

Brass Key posted:

^^^ Sweet Jesus that's full of some real gems.

The Vosgian Beast posted:

Because these are mostly teenagers and this is the equivalent of a high-level martial arts student beating up some children who just signed up for classes

zoux posted:

Did you read this article from the Cut?

Oxxidation posted:

Yeah, that whole essay is pointlessly cruel.

Brass Key posted:

Well now I feel bad, I just skimmed the essay for bad poetry.

In payment, have some more poems that are basically just tweets.

Inescapable Duck posted:

dril is the poet of our time.

Brass Key posted:

tbh "I will face god and walk backwards into hell" is a more evocative image than any rupi kaur poem and it's prefaced with "if the zoo bans me for hollering at the animals".

chitoryu12 posted:

She could make a poem that's literally

water is
moist
like me

--rupi kaur

And get a million loving likes.

Brass Key posted:

tbh "I will face god and walk backwards into hell" is a more evocative image than any rupi kaur poem and it's prefaced with "if the zoo bans me for hollering at the animals".

Brass Key posted:

Well now I feel bad, I just skimmed the essay for bad poetry.

In payment, have some more poems that are basically just tweets.

Sham bam bamina! posted:

The meaner those threads got, the worse, but there was also some real joy. Whether Mills College Anime Club was written by a 13-year-old or a 30-year-old, it brought everyone together.

quote:

Edit: also KIKEN

Wheat Loaf posted:

In retrospect I'm a bit embarrassed to have taken part in a lot of those threads, but I'll always have a soft spot for "~Anime is the tie that bind us~".


I remember guy who wrote that one was the same guy who wrote the most infamous Troper Tale of all, which lovingly boasted about how he was probably the youngest person ever to suffer from having a "berserk button" because "He broke 33 pencils in his life, and had a good friend break two of those pencils because they were too hard."

BravestOfTheLamps posted:

quote:

While more female South Asian voices are indeed needed in mainstream culture and media, there is something deeply uncomfortable about the self-appointed spokesperson of South Asian womanhood being a privileged young woman from the West who unproblematically claims the experience of the colonized subject as her own, and profits from her invocation of generational trauma. There is no shame in acknowledging the many differences between Kaur’s experience of the world in 2017 and that of a woman living directly under colonial rule in the early 20th century. For example: neither is any more "authentically" South Asian. But it is disingenuous to collect a variety of traumatic narratives and present them to the West as a kind of feminist ethnography under the mantle of confession, while only vaguely acknowledging those whose stories inspired the poetry.

Djeser posted:

I'm not invested in this beyond having looked at her poetry, but here's an article that talks about her use of 'collective trauma'.

quote:

This is not the only censure Kaur's work has been subject to. Satirical tweets, which have racked up hundreds of likes, imply that Kaur’s work is formulaic, shallow, and lacks true poetic talent. Her readers, however, do not mount a defense based on the quality of Kaur’s language; rather, they cite her openness about personal trauma in response to critiques of her work, suggesting that such honesty, particularly from a woman of color, exempts her from accusations of superficiality. That the debate has divided itself in such a way is a direct result of the poet’s own self-presentation: Whether on social media or in her poetry, Kaur has consistently marketed herself as an authentic writer who produces art free of artifice, and so any discussion of her work inevitably falls along these lines.

khy posted:

I like David Weber books but I am so sick of the phrase "bomb-pumped x-ray lasers"

Perestroika posted:

I tried to read Weber's Honour Harrington but ended up dropping it about three books in because his antagonists just suck so much. Not just "suck" in the way they're written, but in that they're simply bad at everything. Every time we get a glimpse into their world, we're told how their politics suck, their society sucks, or their military sucks. When we get a PoV character from their side, they usually think about how much their side sucks and how they hate it, but they still fight for them out of some atrophied sense of patriotism or simply inertia.

At that point, it doesn't really feel so much like our protagonists heroically struggling against overwhelming odds, but more like them beating up a retarded child. This was particularly apparent in the third book: The so far mostly cold war finally goes hot, and we get the first serious clashes in what has been hyped up as the both inevitable as well as utterly decisive showdown between the two major power blocs. And what happens? The antagonists instantly lose on every front in ridiculously decisive ways, and their government immediately collapses. That just kind of killed any sense of having stakes or a struggle.

Oxxidation posted:

Pretty much what I figured. She's not an author, she's a brand, and commands the same slavering knee-jerk loyalty.

Oxxidation posted:

Yeah, that whole essay is pointlessly cruel.