Few things make me cringe/laugh more than British pop-literati upholding Enid Blyton as some kind of patron saint.

Let me tell you, I was given EB books as a gift when I was about eight (and they were actually in my dream last night, latest in a series of nightmares!) and I pretty much immediately figured out that they were the most horrible books I had ever read. They're awfully written, for one. Bad dialogue. Poorly paced. Totally uninteresting plots. Her stories can pretty much be summarized by Golly Gee and Goody Goody Gumdrops. You compare the Famous Five and Secret Seven to other British children's literature - like Wonderland and Peter Pan and Wind in the Willows and any and all Kipling and, my God, even Narnia - and it's remarkable how bad they are, just as plain ol' books.

And then there's the whole "social issues" thing. The first thing I noticed was the sexism, the whole "girls stay behind and boys go off to adventure" attitude, done totally straight-faced. Conform to your gender roles, George! But don't be too flirty or you're gonna end up raped like Jo. Then there was the hilariously over the top anti-American British nationalism (if I read that one farmhouse book where the evil Americans are stomping out cigarettes with their feet, I literally become more patriotic - you have to see it to believe it, really). I did learn some things from the books: learned about macaroons and kitchen middens and stilts, for instance. Also learned that British people are noble, and gypsies and "carnies" can't be trusted. I'm okay with some racism and sexism in books written when such views were the norm, but only when there's some kind of redeeming factor. I grew up on British lit, after all. But EB is formulaic claptrap. There is just no reason to put her in any kind of literary canon.

So I rack my brain wondering why, oh why the British defend her so. Whenever anybody talks about removing Blyton from a library (something that hasn't actually happened, but upstanding British newspapers like to feed the rumor-and-fear mill!), it's interpreted as some kind of national insult, as if Blyton represents all that is good and fair about Mother Britain. On the surface this is ridiculous, because why on Earth make Enid Blyton, of all people, your national torchbearer. But that is what EB was all about when it comes down to it - British imperialism, distilled through a very gullible and low-capacity brain. Same kind of pathetic yearning for old non-existent glory that turns Wimbledon into an annual clusterfuck. It can be hard to give up on imperial fantasies, sure. God knows America has not even acknowledged that it ever had them, let alone still does. OTOH, we don't have children's books reveling in our stomping all over the Philippines either. OTOH, we have a long, long ways to go before we move children's books' portrayals of Native Americans beyond "cowboys and Indians."

Like this commenter says: "The world of her characters was just an idyllic landscape where fun things seemed to happen."

Yes - like how the world used to be our playground before those nasty natives decided they wanted to be "independent."

Does Britain have no postcolonial awareness? I'm just asking.

But you know, I guess if The Guardian's readers look back fondly on the days of Pax Britannica and its social mores, that's fine for them. Let the old folks have their Battleship and Bingo while the rest of the world moves on. At least they're not putting people from their former colonies in ghettos (or are they?). What's really sick and sad is that EB is still widely-read in former British colonies, where it was no doubt aggressively pushed - the reason kids in those countries grow up giving their own characters ye olde British names. Makes me thankful that the Dutch didn't install Dutch as Indonesia's national language. I think the Dutch in general need the least therapy as far as colonizer countries go, and the British and French need the most.

I'm not going to encourage my kids to read EB. If they come home with it from the library, I'd let them read it, but quite frankly, I'd want a talk. Just like I would if they brought home the original Rin Tin Tin. Should EB be banned? No - I'm not a supporter of book banning. I think Germany banning Nazi-related anything was a bad idea. I have less of a problem with the U.S. banning The Turner Diaries because it's so instructional, but I still don't think anything should be banned. I think people should be made aware of what all is out there. But I'm not going to weep because BBC didn't give her any exposure. That's not book-banning and it's hardly book-burning. She still sold millions of books to unsuspecting children worldwide. It's just ignoring her. Note that BBC did this because they didn't think EB's books had any literary value - and on this the BBC was absolutely right.

I like Independence Day, a lot. A lot of people think it's kitschy, and I think Roland Emmerich tried to listen to them. So he tried to "grit up" his disaster movies. The Day After Tomorrow was the new standard for disaster, and 2012 very much follows the standard. That is:

1. Scientists in Not-America discover Something Terrible that will destroy All Life On Earth.
2. A broken, white, middle-class family in America is set up as the movie's protagonists/heroes/every-men.
3. The government worries about how to tell the public and evacuate people.
4. Horrible Things start happening around the world. These are shown in 5-minute snippets ending in impersonal destruction.
5. Evacuation begins. Scientists in Not-America and secondary characters in America die, Tragically. Masses and masses and masses of anonymous people also die. Monuments, religious and political, fall.
6. Protagonist Family has to Band Together to Survive. Leaving anyone in your party behind is, always, not an option.
7. Some Books are preserved as cultural artifacts/cultural templates. This is Meaningful.
8. A Beloved Dog associated with the Protagonist Family Survives.*
9. Horrible Doom approaches. It must be outrun or otherwise avoided.
10. All Life On Earth besides the evacuated Survivors is pretty much dead.
11. Against All Odds, Protagonist Family Survives, Stronger Than Ever, and re-joins the other evacuated Survivors. Other evacuated Survivors rejoice at this news, because Protagonist Family is seriously the most important thing, ever.
12. A 2-minute explanation shows that things aren't actually That Bad, and there is some promised hot, dry land in Not-America that will be used to support the evacuated Survivors.

*: This is a trope from Independence Day, not Day After Tomorrow.

Same Shit, Different Day.

Me being the woman turning to misogyny.

Harriet Evans, who writes books like these, complains in the Guardian Book Blog that "an extraordinary amount of bile and patronising comment" is directed toward "commercial women's fiction" which is always labeled "'chick-lit': often a derogatory term used to mean books by young women drinking chardonnay and being silly about boys, without the thought that novels by women about women might accurately reflect their lives and thus have merit or, at the very least, relevance." And that books by men written "in the same vein" are not exposed to bile and patronising comment. [Her examples of this phenomenon, you have to see to believe.] Or, more succinctly: "It winds me up that books about young women are seen as frivolous and silly, while books about young men's lives that cover the same topics, are reviewed and debated, seen as valid and interesting contributions to the current social and media scene."

So what are these books about young women about? Oh, "the diversion it gives hardworking people who want a good read," mostly.

A lot of people did not like various aspects of this post, with quite a few of them focusing on how it's the publishing industry that sucks for making all books by women fitted in pink covers and swirly font. But here are a few of the supportive comments:

Perhaps we should use 'prick lit' for all those bangs and bombs books with the dark as opposed to pink covers?

And please, commenters, don't say sci-fi is patronised or forgotten - I've seen many a serious review of cyberpunk and many a reverential article about the likes of Philip K Dick - well deserved, mind you, but you don't see the same seriousness given to women's work. By the way, Jane Austen - now so revered - was considered lightweight and chicky-chick in her own time.

In reply to the people who object to the pretty covers, please understand that commercial publishing is a business. And in order to appeal to the most readers possible, women's fiction jackets need to actually LOOK LIKE women's fiction. And you're right - there are key markers for this: swirls, confetti, glittery hearts and flowers - to name but a few. But why is this such a bad thing? They might put off a Guardian reader or two, but the fact remains that there are likely several hundred thousand people a year who they delight - because, as any proper chick-lit /women's fiction fan will tell you, when you see those swirls and pretty illustrations, it usually means a novel which'll make you giggle, recognise yourself and people in your life, and maybe even give you that magical bit of escapism. And really -- even if the content is not personally your cup of tea -- what on earth could be wrong with letting other women enjoy that?

This comment is the winner though:

Most strikingly of all, when you take a good look at books from women who have gotten the nominations for big awards in the last few years, you'll notice that the ones by women are almost uniformly either a) in the voice or point of view of male characters or b) self-consciously "about" male themes: war, genocide, revolution. This is not bad, per se. But it does show how deeply ingrained our biases are.

Dear Christ Jesus is all I can say. The same commenter also says, "I would not want to be a young female writer these days." Yeah, sure - because of people like you, bud. This is called shooting yourself in the damn foot. Guess I'll go back to the kitchen now and have me a glass of chardonnay to go with my James McAvoy fantasy, because god knows that's what accurately reflects my life as a woman.

If you need me, I'll be giggling.

There's another post written by one of the writers that Harriet Evans holds up as someone who ought to be taught for A-Level - Joanna Trollope is her name - that compares Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary to today's chick lit (dear God help her), then unleashes this whammo of a get-back-in-your-place piece of reactionary social engineering: "get your relationships right and most of the rest of life assumes its proper proportion."

Damn, so that's all we needed to do to get rid of genocide? Oh, no, wait, I don't care about genocide. Forgot.

The Wall Street Journal interviews Cormac McCarthy.

WSJ: But is there something compelling about the collaborative process compared to the solitary job of writing?

CM: Yes, it would compel you to avoid it at all costs.

WSJ: Does this issue of length apply to books, too? Is a 1,000-page book somehow too much?

CM: For modern readers, yeah. People apparently only read mystery stories of any length. With mysteries, the longer the better and people will read any damn thing. But the indulgent, 800-page books that were written a hundred years ago are just not going to be written anymore and people need to get used to that. If you think you're going to write something like "The Brothers Karamazov" or "Moby-Dick," go ahead. Nobody will read it. I don't care how good it is, or how smart the readers are. Their intentions, their brains are different.

WSJ: People have said "Blood Meridian" is unfilmable because of the sheer darkness and violence of the story.

CM: That's all crap. The fact that's it's a bleak and bloody story has nothing to do with whether or not you can put it on the screen. That's not the issue. The issue is it would be very difficult to do and would require someone with a bountiful imagination and a lot of balls. But the payoff could be extraordinary.

WSJ: How does that ticking clock affect your work? Does it make you want to write more shorter pieces, or to cap things with a large, all-encompassing work?

CM: I'm not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.

WSJ: Is the God that you grew up with in church every Sunday the same God that the man in "The Road" questions and curses?

CM: It may be. I have a great sympathy for the spiritual view of life, and I think that it's meaningful. But am I a spiritual person? I would like to be. Not that I am thinking about some afterlife that I want to go to, but just in terms of being a better person. I have friends at the Institute. They're just really bright guys who do really difficult work solving difficult problems, who say, "It's really more important to be good than it is to be smart." And I agree it is more important to be good than it is to be smart. That is all I can offer you.

WSJ: Do you feel like you're trying to address the same big questions in all your work, but just in different ways?

CM: Creative work is often driven by pain. It may be that if you don't have something in the back of your head driving you nuts, you may not do anything. It's not a good arrangement.

The first big serious book that I ever read was The Hobbit in third grade.  Oh, how I loved The Hobbit.  Especially the part with the spiders.  That book taught me the phrase "Out of the Frying Pan, Into the Fire."  So somebody, somewhere down the line, got me Lord of the Rings.  I tried reading it sometime in middle school.  I remember writing sort of diary reports on it.  I sped through books at that age and I was trying to speed through LOTR.  I remember reading up to the part where they're on the horrible snow-mountain in Fellowship and writing in my diary, "Up next: The Two Towers!"  That's how fast I thought I was going to go.  Turns out I put it down and never picked it up again. 

Years later, the movies came out.  I knew nothing - NOTHING - about the plot.  I was just like, oh, that's that famous fantasy book.  Let's see the movie.  And I was totally, like, gobsmacked by these movies.  I wonder sometimes if Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings (and especially Viggo Mortensen, oh my GOD) did not single-handedly bring me back into the fold of fantasy.  So yes, I admit it - I'm one of those psychos who can quote from Lord of the Rings.  But gods, why?  Why do I like Lord of the Rings so much?  I sometimes feel like I shouldn't, especially because I criticize Narnia for being heavy-handed, and Harry Potter for being absolutist.  Especially because I watched that Legend of the Seeker miniseries and thought it was the lamest piece of lame I'd ever seen.  

So I figured, well, let's try reading that book again and see what my reaction to that is - see if I just have some kind of Tolkien blindspot.  So far, I've finished Book I (as in, the first part of The Fellowship of the Ring) - there's VI books total.  And these are my observations.  

- Too Many Damn Poems, Songs, Chants, Whatever.  At first I read them.  Now I'm just like, oh, italics and centralized text.  Skip! 
- Tolkien is good at making things scary.  I am way more scared of book-Ringwraiths than movie-Ringwraiths.  Book-Ringwraiths crawl.  I am no good with evil things that crawl (this is why I can't watch J-Horror).  And what the hell were those Barrow-wights and the sitting stones that appeared out of nowhere?  That's not pleasant.
- Sorry, but Tom Bombadil's a pretty bad character.  I've had purist friends complain vehemently that he wasn't in the movie version.  I say: Good.  It's possible Tolkien just used him poorly (he saves the hobbits twice, ten pages apart), but ughghghgh. 
- On the other hand, I really love the bickering, clannish hobbit families, and the people who live in Bree.  Bree people are so totally like Lincolnites. 
- Yeah, Tolkien could have used an editor.  Sometimes he just goes on and on describing furniture and slippers.  I get that there will soon be neither furniture nor slippers, but dude, it kind of distracts from the tone of stress and danger when you talk about how cozy and feasty The Prancing Pony is.
- But, he's very good at setting up his world.  It's like he has an answer for every "but why is it like that?" question.  Totally imaginable.  Totally believable.  
- Except for Weathertop.  If I had not seen Weathertop in the movie, no way I would have been able to imagine it by its description.  I don't know, Tolkien just dropped the ball on describing this one. 
- There's definitely a lot of race undertones here.  I can't say that I think they're disturbing, yet, because they just indicate mild xenophobia right now - except the whole Super Duper Numenoreans thing is probably going to start bothering me at some point.  Probably when the purity of somebody's blood gets mentioned.  Why must awesomeness always be attributed to genetics?  Lame.
- As far as character development goes, Frodo feels a bit like a non-entity.  Everybody else is decent.  I do wish dialogue was more engaging and characters were more bizarre (honestly, they strike me as less black and white and more as just the same shade of chalk), but I feel a little weird expecting dirty realism from Middle Earth.
- A sidenote: I have been having, and more importantly remembering, some really horrific dreams since I started reading LOTR.  Not sure what that implies.

Up next, Book II!  Ha ha ha.

I am literally grading master's assignments by school superintendents who are trying to get education degrees.  I have a B.A., and have never taken a single class in education.  All I know about education is from my experience as a K-16 student.  And administration?  No knowledge whatsoever.  This is ridiculous. 

More things I'm underqualified for: reviewing submissions to a journal called The Rural Educator, and writing articles to be submitted to journals like Research in Rural Education!  What.  The.  Hell.  How did I end up here?  Cosmic joke, yes?  I suggest you not start subscribing to these journals, because the likes of me are responsible for their content. 

Thus my comments never have anything to do with education.  They're like this:

There is no thesis. 
Not a strong conclusion. 
Spelling and grammar need help (this one doesn't get sent to the person who wrote it!).
This needs to be better organized.
Your graphs were good, if slightly crowded.
Think of specific factors that make Crete Public Schools unique.
Make it clear from the beginning that you'll be focusing on Maxey Elementary.
This needs a bigger font!
Include a table of contents.
You don't make your mission statement clear enough.
This would have been a very good profile if you had included achievement data.

This is from a reposted 2008 interview that The Wild Hunt did with Jeff Sharlet, a journalist whose main focus is the "intersections of religion and power" in the U.S. (and thus the world).  My emphasis in underlines.

Some members of modern Pagan faiths have long warned of a theocratic Christian cabal bent on taking over America, often with the usual suspects of conservative Christianity playing a part. These fears have often been debunked, but your book “The Family” seems to in part vindicate those voices, albeit not in the ways they imagined. Who are “The Family”, and are they really trying to take over the government?

They’re not trying to take over government; they’ve been a part of government for almost seventy years. The Family is a network of conservative Christian elites in government, military, and business bound together by what The Family’s founder, Abraham Vereide, called simply “The Idea.” The Idea came to Vereide one night in April, 1935. God, he’d later say, revealed to him that Christianity’s emphasis on the poor, the suffering, the weak, the down and out, was all wrong. God wanted Vereide to minister not to the poor, but the powerful. He called them the “up and out” — corporate executives, politicians. The Idea was that if you could win the hearts of these “key men,” they, in turn, would dispense blessings to the masses. It was, in effect, trickle down religion, and it’s been the creed of religious conservative elites ever since, the justification for their war on organized labor and their support for foreign dictators, from Papa Doc Duvalier to Suharto to the thugs supported through the Silk Road Act, sponsored by Family politicians Senator Sam Brownback and Rep. Joe Pitts.

Which is all to say that the question we need to ask about fundamentalists is not, “What are they going to do?” but “What have they already done?” Fundamentalism is not a cabal or a conspiracy; it’s an ideology, and for nearly 70 years it has led America away from democracy and toward empire.

The theology of The Family seems quite different from the usual Christian conservatives and fire-breathing fundamentalists we often see covered in the news (though some of them are members or associates of The Family as well). Can you expand on what they believe, and what “Jesus Plus Nothing” means to them?

The Family’s vision of “Jesus plus nothing” leads them to seek a government conformed at every level, in every department, every office, to the will of their totalizing Jesus. There’s a sense in which this is a weirdly bureaucratic Christ. He doesn’t stand on street corners and shout about revelation; he whispers his message in the ears of his “New Chosen,” as some Family members call themselves. And the message is almost always the same: “privatize.” For seventy years, The Family has been dedicated to deregulating markets in order to free up the “invisible hand” of God.

I was intrigued by the notion of The Family performing “spiritual assassinations” on political leaders (making them “die in spirit” to Jesus), getting close enough to perform their “hit” through innocuous-seeming events like the National Prayer Breakfast (which they organize). Who are some high-profile “hits” we may have heard of?

Just to be clear – they’re not killing anybody. You’re referring to Chapter Eight, “Vietnamization,” in which I write about The Family’s admiration for the guerilla warfare tactics of the Vietcong. In 1966 – the same year Family leader Doug Coe announced that The Family was going “underground,” erasing its public profile – another Family leader, Clif Robinson, met with the U.S. ambassador to Laos, William Sullivan – strategist of the “secret” – and illegal – air war against that country. Robinson reported back to American Family leadership on what he learned. The lesson was that the Fellowship should understand itself as a guerrilla force on the spiritual battlefield.

They wanted their “victims” to “die to self” – that is, to commit themselves totally to Jesus plus nothing. One of their greatest “hits” was Chuck Colson, the Watergate felon. In his mega-selling memoir, “Born Again,” Colson writes of being recruited into The Family, which he describes as “a veritable underground of Christ’s men all through government,” through Doug Coe and the CEO of missile manufacturer Raytheon. Colson would later declare that through The Family’s religion, he was able to accomplish much of what he had once hoped to do politically. “Dying to self” paradoxically gave him a supreme sense of self-righteousness, a confidence – and a political network – through which he’s built up one of the most powerful Christian Right organizations in the world.

You talk about the differences and similarities between the “populist” and “elitist” branches of American fundamentalism (together forming a “popular front”). With The Family typifying an elitist manifestation, and evangelical mega-churches like Colorado’s New Life Church (formerly headed by disgraced pastor Ted Haggard) typifying the “populist” branch. I was struck by how New Life actively worked to drive out Pagan Witches and other undesirables from their city. Is driving out the “Witches” (the religious “other”) a shared goal between the populist and elitist branches? Or simply the consequence of fundamentalist Christianity coming into power?

Ultimately, the inner circle of The Family considers all non-monotheistic beliefs “demonic.” At their C Street House for congressmen, they used to have a prayer calendar listing spiritual war targets for the day – Tibetan Buddhism, Hinduism, Wicca, etc.

In an interview with Alternet you described The Family as “ultimately something worse” than fascism. Since “fascism” is usually considered the ultimate manifestation of political evil, on the right and left, what makes this group worse?

The fact that it’s far more effective. Fascism, properly understood, was a relatively short-lived European ideology. There have been other examples of it since, but by far the most powerful ideology since 1945 has been not fascism, but empire. One church historian says of The Family that they’re not right-wing and certainly not left-wing, but “empire-wing.” Fascism may be a purer evil, but empire is a more pervasive one, and ultimately more dangerous because it’s able to call on the loyalties of well-intentioned people who’d never go near fascism. But if you’re a Vietnamese kid napalmed in 1968, or an Iraqi kid with your hands blown off in 2008, empire is every bit as bad as fascism. Or, for that matter, if you’re a Bangladeshi or a Chinese sweat shop worker or an Afghani forced to grow and process heroin to survive, the economic ramifications of empire are as bad as the explicit political repression of fascism. And for decades, what traditional fascism has cropped up around the world – in Central America, in some African nations, for instance – has been made possible only through the support of empire.

One point you make in the book is that secular America keeps trying to announce the death of fundamentalism, of conservative Christian power, but that these frequent declarations are rarely real. That the “defeats” are merely part of a natural ebb and flow of fundamentalism in America. Instead of shrinking, conservative “muscular” Christianity grows ever stronger and is very much a part of the American fabric. Is the much-touted recent “evangelical crack-up” just another natural ebb? Will we see audacious power-grabs by fundamentalist forces in the near future?

We see audacious power-grabs right now! For instance, Rwanda has recently become the first official “Purpose-Driven Nation,” remade in the image of evangelical pastor Rick Warren’s bestselling “Purpose Driven Life” with the support of U.S. dollars and faith-based initiatives. There’s no “evangelical crack-up,” no matter how much the New York Times may wish it so. Rather, there’s an evangelical transformation – and an expansion. Evangelicals are addressing issues liberals thought they owned, such as poverty and AIDS. That doesn’t make evangelical conservatives less conservative; it makes their agenda more far-reaching, for better or worse.

Some of the old lions of the Christian Right are dead or are dying. The new generation is softer-toned in style. But conservative evangelicalism has been a huge part of American life for 200 years. It’s not going away just because Jerry Falwell went to heaven. Or wherever.

So how do those opposed to what The Family is trying to do fight back? What is this groups Achilles heel? Is there anything anyone can do to minimize their influence on America and the world?

Of course! The first step is what we’re doing right here: talking about these issues, educating ourselves. The Family prospers when the public doesn’t pay attention.

Let’s tell Obama that we respect his desire to include people of faith – all faiths and no faith – in the public square, but we want him to recognize that not everybody is operating in good faith. Let’s pay attention to our local representatives. We need to hold the media accountable, too. We need them to ask smarter – and tougher – questions about religion. When we encounter monotheist politicians – that is, those who consider only monotheism legitimate – we need to give them loud refreshers in the history of the Founders, who were quite clear that they meant the First Amendment to extend to everyone, regardless of their beliefs.

I’m not a Pagan, but I’d also love to see some Pagan candidates for office. We’ll all benefit from that. Even if Pagans don’t win major offices – and they won’t, at least for awhile – their very presence in the public square helps everybody think about what pluralism means, what democracy means. Democracy isn’t something we HAVE, it’s something we make. The Family doesn’t like it. They call it “the din of the vox populi.” The din of the voice of the people. So we know what we need to do: Let’s make some noise.

*: Around ninth grade I was writing a book whose villains were the "Mink Libels," Christian fundamentalists who subtly but surely took over America.  I'm sure this was because I was becoming more politically conscious at the time... plus the Bush administration was in office.  Considering I - and probably most of the country - knew pretty much nothing about actual Christian political-fundamentalism (and based it off superficial observations about Ashcroft, among others), it's always creeped me out when I see "Mink Libels" in the real world.  The name is nonsense, just something that sounded good at the time.  I'm still obsessed with Christian fundamentalism, as this post makes evident...

The GRE has slain me, my brain is now mush.  But I'm happy with the results - I seem to have gotten exactly what I should have for my "goal programs," so... so far, so good.

*sleeps*

(via SF Signal)

man, that was boring.

...

time for Sons of Anarchy!