Crap is a load of books

[imomus]

1. If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the

Comments

All hail Dickens

[endoftheseason]

and his fellow fusty Victorians, for they were in the vanguard of the Darwinian march towards moral excellence:

"The despicable acts of Count Dracula, the unending selflessness of Dorothea in Middlemarch and Mr Darcy's personal transformation in Pride and Prejudice helped to uphold social order and encouraged altruistic genes to spread through Victorian society, according to an analysis by evolutionary psychologists."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/jan/14/victorian-novels-evolution-altruism

seen through a different eye

[endoftheseason]

the shock of the slipstream.......boredom of the mainstream

Ex-crap-olation

[jdcasten]

Re: Subversive art… I think Extrapolation of past strategies has run its course; and to be abstractly unhelpful, we should be “thinking outside the box” rather than taking things to further extremes

[count_vronsky]

imagination of death

[count_vronsky]

underground over ground wombling if we had some work wed be free

[count_vronsky]

This is surprisingly excellent.

Feed those anon like an adder on your teat

[anonymous]

You should publish the comment history of Click Opera as a book.
Mine those anons for what their worth (hint: absolutely nothing) and get the regulars to sign off on a few choice bon mots and then publish it like a digital Socratic dialogue, except instead of having a semi-translucent but mythical echoing wall like Socrates being used by signed authors to test out ideas, you'd get Momus in all his naked narcissistic glory and an anonymous horde bouncing venom and praise off his digital husk.

I don't think we could have had a work of literature like that until 10-15 years ago, so stick that in your n'est pas un pipe and smoke it, those of you lamenting the passing of controversy and revolution.

Re: Feed those anon like an adder on your teat

[anonymous]

Fuck (in the spirit of Salinger) that should of course be "they're worth" not that bloody amateurish "their worth". English is not my first language, still feel free to drag me out behind the digital gym and wee on me.

Sturgeon's Law

[anonymous]

Seems to me that Theodore Sturgeon's remarks are relevant: "ninety percent of everything is crud", now usually known as Sturgeon's Law. The context below reminds one how to apply this: “it's the ten percent that isn't crud that is important".

Henry Wessells

Sturgeon's Law by James Gunn (published in The New York Review of Science Fiction #85, September 1995)

‘Of course what became known as Sturgeon's Law was then only a sentence in a talk that Ted [Theodore Sturgeon] gave to the entire convention; total membership was only 750, and there was no need for separate programming. The general thrust of Ted's remarks was that science fiction was the only genre that was evaluated by its worst examples rather than its best. "When people talk about the mystery novel," Ted said, as I remember, "they mention The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep. When they talk about the western, they say there's The Way West and Shane. But when they talk about science fiction, they call it 'that Buck Rogers stuff,' and they say 'ninety percent of science