CSotD: Write on, Monty
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Monty has been sitting in a coffeehouse all week, writing great literature on his laptop. In most strips, I use "all week" to mean a story arc that has gone on all week, but in this case, I'm pretty sure he's been going back every day, because he's very serious about writing. On a laptop in a coffeehouse. With a little soul patch and a black turtleneck.
The whole arc has been good, but today is a homerun for me and it would be a homerun for you, too, if your day job involved editing book reviews written by middleschool kids. These kids are wonderful writers who do more than book reviews, including interviews with people like Ken Burns and Jeff Kinney, articles on pet care and reports on museum exhibits. One young woman interviewed an artistic director from "Tangled" who talked about the physics of hair and we've got a young fellow whose family just moved to Burma/Myanmar and who sends periodic reports and photographs from there.
And then we get book reviews about vampires. And werewolves. And demons and curses. And things that go bump in the night, or at least at twilight. We hoped to stem the tide momentarily by sending a reporter to do a group interview of five authors who all write teen novels about teenagers caught up in occult phenomena, but there are a great many more than five people churning these things out, and the kids keep volunteering reviews of yet another novel about a girl who discovers she is a witch and has to find the mystical key and also deal with the really handsome, mysterious undead guy she's just met.
You don't want to turn them away because (A) it's not our job to tell the kids what to be interested in, (B) we don't want to discourage the kids from reading and then writing reviews, and (C) some of the books are actually rather good. Some. Well, "Hunger Games," a trilogy which doesn't actually have magic in it but which is dark and dystopic and violent and well-written and will keep you engaged even if you are not 13 years old.
On the other hand, the publication is aimed at kids in grades 4 through 8, and a lot of these novels are not appropriate for the younger half of that spectrum, so we're starting to put the brakes on a little.
(The film version of "Hunger Games" is expected to be PG-13, and we had one of the seventh-graders review the third book in the trilogy under the headline, "Is 'Mockingjay' too violent?" Her conclusion was "There are quite a lot of deaths, in sort of gruesome ways, but the author is careful not to go into detail. I can say that the book is a little bit sad, and I do not think that it was a very sunny ending to such a great story." But she started her review by saying, "It is a very intense, well-written story." Fair enough.)
Most of the books written along these lines, however, could be described as intense but not as "well-written" and are more bodice-rippers than true science fiction, which brings us back to Monty and the coffeehouse.
I'm all in favor of guilty pleasures, but let's retain the sense of guilt. The head of my department in college, a man who could read Greek and Latin and who wrote and lectured on the history and philosophy of science, was a Baker Street Irregular. He enjoyed Doyle and he didn't apologize for it, but he didn't mind if we all snickered at his hobby, because he didn't mistake it for Homer or even Virgil.
There's nothing wrong with a little cultural slumming, as long as you know you're slumming, and as long as you set a few limits about the depths to which you will sink. As Saint Augustine wrote, "I cannot stop the Kardashians from being on the cover of every tabloid at the checkout lane or from having their own reality show, but it's my own goddam fault if I know which one is which."
And, by the way, I'm officially sick of zombies.
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