Selfnecroing

A necro, in the context of forums, is when you respond to a topic thread where there have been no posts for a very long time. Basically you're reviving a dead topic.

Adding a post to a blog which has been silent for over three years should qualify as a pretty nice necro as well.

I won't promise that I'll return with new posts here in a regular manner. In fact that's highly unlikely, but I felt a need to revisit the old place.

Since my last post I've gone over to the side of evil. With my BA in comparative literature I now qualify for the league of the bads. It's a well known fact that no-one with an academic exam in anything literature has even the slightest ability to produce the literature they study. Umberto Eco would be a good example, I guess.

That said, I've seen my daughter grow from toddlerhood to the points where she's tentatively taking the first steps at being a consumer of literature. I've also seen the birth and death of my son, and he spent too much time trying to learn to live to have a shot at anything literature at all. Well, I guess he was a tad young for such a taste to begin with. It is, after all, supposedly an aqquired taste.

I have also, rather obviously, read a bit. More theory than fiction I'm afraid, but given the state of some of the theory I've read I'm now very much in a position to share a secret with you -- the difference, all too often, between literary theory and the fiction it pertains, is that the fiction at least has a semblance of relation with reality.

The underlying reason is mainly that adacemics in the field of humanistics share a pathologic fear of anything which can be measured, extrapolated, described in a commonly agreed terminology, or simply be understood at all. If there's a perfectly sound way of telling something in a few terse sentences, rest assured that it can be told in obtuse academese lasting a full page or more.

Oh, I almost forgot. In the field of humanistics it is considered ethically correct, from a scientific point of view, to collect a single data-point and draw far reaching conclusions concerning an entire field of knowledge from it. Coming from the field of science myself I can tell you that while there certainly is a lot of academics about humanistics, there's absolutely nothing scientific about it at all. It fails, and explicitly so, to survive any of the standard requirements for science.

That said, I can't wait to continue my studies in the field. While too many active within it have lost touch with reality, the field as such lends itself to vast oceans of knowledge and thinking. Maybe not science, but definitely knowledgeable thinking.

Well, this is me signing out after a session of random ramblings. Enjoy your day. I will.

Go bashing

There's a hilarious thread on Absolute Write about the age-old problem with discerning between literary fiction and genre fiction. You have the usual verbal bashing where presumptuous and trash define the radicals of both camps, and of course there are the usual attempts to verbalise definitions.

Why not simply accept that literary fiction is a language-centric fiction genre, where the words are more important than the story? At least if you browse the shelves -- when story becomes as important as words then the books tend to get slotted in among general fiction anyway.

In print

It took a while, but now it's available for download. What is? Well, the non-fic project that ate so much time earlier this winter. In Swedish, but for those who want to give that language a try feel free to read a handbook in how to run a gaming championship in Sweden.

PC or not PC

I read an interesting article in Aftonbladet about political correctness in children's literature. As usual my source is in Swedish, so a minor explanation may be in order. Basically the article concerns older works, and how time has made them politically incorrect seen from a Swedish point of view. Mostly it is the ethnocentric angle that is touched upon, be they ethnic minorities in Sweden or simply people from anywhere else.

The author points out that the world will hardly go up in flames merely because your children read a story older than a few decades including terminology and views reflecting the time when it was written, but she also advices parents to use those very books to base a conversation about uncomfortable topics around.

Today I am ashamed of being Swedish

One of our commercial TV-channels has sold out to censorship for money. An article in DN tells the sorry story of how TV4 chose to accept delays in the broadcasting of the Nobel prize ceremony in order to enable censorship. The linked article is in English and lacks some of the content of the Swedish original.

Live well

Nothing about writing here, but a fun reunion we had. You're never too old unless you feel too old. So, courtesy of someone borrowing my camera for a short while, I raise one for you.

Another giant passes away

Arthur C Clarke has died at age 90. See New York Times for a longer article.