(no subject)

[shadowkat]

1. Every once and a while I'll see a post stating "how dare the US take the word America and only apply it to themselves or call themselves Americans!" This never fails to amuse me for various reasons. First off, unlike most Europeans and residents of the UK and even Asia, there really isn't anything else to call residents of the United States as a group besides Americans. Statesians? Doesn't quite work. USAians? Yeah good luck with that. Some Brits like to call US residents "colonists" - which is just plain silly, that term applies to basically half the world's occupants. We need to narrow things down a bit. In the US, we often go by regional names...such as Kansans, New Yorkers, Georgians, Texans, and I have no idea with North and South Carolina use - guessing Carolinians, if memory serves. The Soviet Union went by...well the Soviets. (although the US called them Russians much to the annoyance of the non-Russians in the group).

Mystery Writer Walter Mosely puts it best in an interview in the NY Times Book Review:

We call ourselves social creatures when indeed we are pack animals.

This is so true. Except, I think I'm more of a lone animal type, me and packs don't last that long, sooner or later I'll break away from the pack.

Speaking of Mosely...the rest of the quote is even better:

The change of century is a challenging moment for the world. We have to face our deepest fears and prejudices in order to save the human race and the planet we inhabit. We have to encourage strange bedfellows and forgive many trespasses. Science and religion, capitalism and socialism, caste and character are all on the auction block. The waters are rising while we are dreaming of dancing with the stars. We call ourselves social creatures when indeed we are pack animals. We, many of us, say that we are middle class when in reality we are salt-of-the-earth working class drones existing at the whim of systems that distribute our life's blood as so much spare change. These subjects can be addressed in fiction or plays, even in poetry, but now and again the plain talk of non-fiction is preferred.

2. There were two other quotes of Mosley's that caught my attention:

* In response to the question which novels had the most impact on you as a writer -


I am one of those rare writers (at least I believe this to be true) who do not equate reading and writing in any kind of direct way. I know for a fact that the father of the Western tradition of the novel, Homer, was illiterate. Many storytellers and poets of the West were not schooled in letters. The founder of one of the world's great religions, Siddhartha Guatama Buddha, created a religion in an environment in an environment where no one wrote.


I agree with this. I can't say what I read really influences what I write one way or another.
What I watch on TV or in the movies actually has more of an effect - weirdly enough. You wouldn't think so but it does. May be because my memory is more visual and pictorial? No clue.

* What were your favorite books as a child...

I know as a working writer I should answer this question in such a way as to make me seem intelligent; maybe Twain or Dickens, even Hesse or Conrad. I should say that I read intelligent books far beyond my years. This I believe would give intelligent readers the confidence to go out and lay down hard cash for my newest, and the one after that.

But the truth is that the most beloved and the most formative books of my childhood were comic books, specifically Marvel Comics. Fantastic Four, and Spider Man, The Mighty Thor, and The Invincible Iron Man; later came Daredevil and many others. These combinations of art and writing presented to me the complexities of character and the pure joy of imagining adventure. They taught me about writing dialect and how a monster can also be a hero. They lauded science and fostered the understanding that the world was more complex than any one mind, or indeed the history of all human minds, could comprehend.

It's odd, but I often want to deny the things I loved - and show that I loved intelligent books beyond my years. As if this mere fact would make my blog or writing more accessible or more interesting to readers. Dare I tell you that I loved the X-men? Or my favorite books growing up were Ann McCaffrey's Dragon Riders of Pern, The Hobbit, Judy Blumes novels,
amongst others? Or that I adored reading Rosemary Rodgers, Fern Michaels, Georgette Heyer, and yes Stephen King? Hardly literary. And not nearly as ahem, intelligent as say Mark Twain or the classics.

I did read some of them. I did adore "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and "Beloved" continues to haunt me along with the Great Gatsby and Old Man and the Sea, not to mention Huck Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird, and various others. But my favorite books much like Walter Mosely were not classics.

I think sometimes...we allow the world a bit too much leeway and control over us. Telling us who to be, what to think, what to believe, how to live...and what to love. The world be damned...I am who I am. I love what and who I love. As long as no one is being hurt, what is the harm in that?