That was hilarious. The "village explainer" was my favorite.
The hosts are right in that if this showed up today online, with its ability to go viral in a matter of hour, if not minutes-- ohhh my. I wondered to, as they did, exactly who was the audience for these comments, and how did it make the rounds?
It has always been my own policy, whether it's books, movies, conventional arts, what-have-you, to try to give the benefit of the doubt to the artist. There are things I've read or seen that I think are magnificent, others very, very bad, and everything in between, but sometimes opinions change with time, in either direction. I just see little point in being nasty unless the artist has deliberately tried to do the same without any benefit of ironic or satirical intent.
My favorite is "an idiot child screaming in a hospital."
My all-time favorite put-down is a story by Sinclair Lewis about himself. He was watching an older lady reading one of his books during an ocean-liner journey across the Atlantic. He watched with great interest as the woman clearly was getting close to a controversial passage in the novel. As he watched, the woman got up, walked to the railing, and flung the book far out to sea.
It's not odd everyone doesn't know all the authors mentioned. But, it's odd for a young woman who makes her living reviewing books (even if on YouTube) to not have some kind of decent background in lit. These folks who aren't sure about Robert Lewis Stevenson, and don't know several of the others are products of the fruits of my very own retirement tax dollars. Arizona has horrible schools. (I can't blame today's teachers for not dwelling on Ezra Pound, who defected to Mussolini's Italy.)
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The hosts are right in that if this showed up today online, with its ability to go viral in a matter of hour, if not minutes-- ohhh my. I wondered to, as they did, exactly who was the audience for these comments, and how did it make the rounds?
It has always been my own policy, whether it's books, movies, conventional arts, what-have-you, to try to give the benefit of the doubt to the artist. There are things I've read or seen that I think are magnificent, others very, very bad, and everything in between, but sometimes opinions change with time, in either direction. I just see little point in being nasty unless the artist has deliberately tried to do the same without any benefit of ironic or satirical intent.
From:
no subject
My all-time favorite put-down is a story by Sinclair Lewis about himself. He was watching an older lady reading one of his books during an ocean-liner journey across the Atlantic. He watched with great interest as the woman clearly was getting close to a controversial passage in the novel. As he watched, the woman got up, walked to the railing, and flung the book far out to sea.
It's not odd everyone doesn't know all the authors mentioned. But, it's odd for a young woman who makes her living reviewing books (even if on YouTube) to not have some kind of decent background in lit. These folks who aren't sure about Robert Lewis Stevenson, and don't know several of the others are products of the fruits of my very own retirement tax dollars. Arizona has horrible schools. (I can't blame today's teachers for not dwelling on Ezra Pound, who defected to Mussolini's Italy.)