Say Anything Blog

I prefer the Amazon bestseller list anyways.  It’s updated quite regularly (hourly?) and doesn’t deliniate between one genre and another.  HP’s been at the top of the list since a few hours after it became available for preorder.

I am not going to say that, say, Hansen, is a great rock band.  But they have their appeal to people that obviously lack a refined taste…  =) {subtle dig}

Reality is that I enjoy filet mignon.  But I usually eat hamburger or cheaper cuts of meat.  I don’t drink wine.  I rarely go to museums.  I eat hot dogs, drink beer, and go to baseball and football games.  Now my elitist friends think that makes me lowbrow.  I am not as cultured as they are. 

I have three kids, so my reading collection consists of a lot of Thomas the Tank Enging and Dr. Seuss.  They read philosophy and poetry and don’t have time for authors that aren’t academically credentialled enough.  Yet they don’t know who Milton Friedman is and have not read any Adam Smith or Locke or Jefferson or the Federalist Papers.  They don’t read Grisham or Chrichton or Clancy.  I don’t have time for books with obscure meanings.  I want books that are engaging and quick moving and most of the contemporary fiction authors deliver that.  As well as most contemporary filmmakers.  I don’t watch IFC because most of their stuff, though “artistic”, lacks a plot that I can follow while my wife is using the coffee grinder or running the dishwasher or my kids are complaining about their brother hitting them with a bat.  When I start listening to pop music and enjoying Adam Sandler films, it will be a problem, but until then I can live without “culture”. 

But guess what, outside of not fitting in at dinner parties with university professors, I fit in with my coworkers who follow sports, have a beer, and golf on the weekends.  My friends try to watch and follow soccer so that they can communicate with their smarter European friends.  Apparently they don’t realize that Europeans take fucking lead pipes to soccer matches so it ain’t as highbrow as they think.

Kurt Vonnegut is one of literature’s “greats”? In the minds of the postmodern, the “chattering classes” of pseudointellectuals that infest the Left and the education system today, perhaps. But not in the true definition of great.

It’s OK Rob, you can name me as the friend that lambasted you for actually reading King’s drivel…

After a 4-year liberal arts college education and an English degree (a.k.a. “a B.A. in BS”), I find I hate Faulkner, distrust Salinger (“Franny and Zooey” is beauty, but “Catcher” sucks dogballs), and love Stephen King.

The thing about King (if you can get past the anti-mass-market snobbery) is that he really is a master craftsman when it comes to description and story.  His tales, while almost entirely fantasy-driven, still work within the context of their own defined parameters. 

And if you only know of King as Cujo and Carrie and Running Man (which was a fun little book turned into an abominable film), then you don’t know King. (In fact, don’t go by about 90% of the films; they can’t get him right.)  “The Stand,” “The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon,” and the epic Dark Tower series are all evidence of his ability to capture the reader’s imagination in a way that few writers can.  He may not be the most technically proficient, but if I’m choosing a new book to read, I’ll ALWAYS pick King first.  Because, really, he’s the most friggin FUN.

(By the way, Rob, have you read “Lisey’s Story” yet?  Just finished it yesterday and enjoyed it quite a bit—even if there were no clear Dark Tower connections.)