Now here's something I can easily boycott...

[shadowkat]

Well, I now finally know why everyone on Face Book wants me to boycott Hobby Lobby. Thank you shipperx who posted a lengthy recital of the Supreme Court ruling and Ruth Bader Ginesberg's dissent. Also, how great is Ruth? Best Supreme Court Justice on that panel.

Never heard of Hobby Lobby. So it's not all that hard to boycott. Love being told to boycott companies that I did not know existed. Now I can go on ignoring their existence.
Just wish I could boycott the five male justices on the Supreme Court. Who are once again giving Catholicism and religious rights a bad rap. As if it needed any help in that department. We really need to stop taking away or infringing on other rights in the name of religious rights. Last time I checked, someone's right to their religious beliefs did not take precedence over everything or give you the right to hurt people.
Gun ownership and manufacture and the right to own and fire guns at other living things is against my religious beliefs. Can we do away with guns please?

I loved the Daily Kos, which said...

Oh sorry, but paying for war violates my spiritual beliefs...you know, Thou Shall Not Kill" - so send me back $3 trillion.

Nailed it.

On the boycotting bit? I'm not sure it always works. It might. I don't believe in boycotting writers. Movie studios, yes. Publishing Companies? Depends. Corporations? Definitely but again, depends. They employ a lot of innocent people who are struggling to make ends meet. How would you feel if someone boycotted your company and you ended up getting laid-off as a result? It could happen.

But writers, artists, entertainers - smacks of censorship somehow and that makes me uneasy. Should we silence them because we don't like or despise something they did ages ago or recently, which we heard about through the media? To what degree do we even know it is true? Having done the criminal law bit - I can tell you that indictments and criminal convictions and confessions don't necessarily make it true. Lot's of gray area that very few people know about. You sort of have to have done criminal law to know whereof I speak.

Also art isn't always a reflection of the person's bad deeds. People are more than their actions, after all. We aren't defined solely by one or several deeds. Isolated or otherwise. A lot of people don't appear to understand this? Or so I've found? I guess I do because I worked in the Kansas Defender Project for a bit, and had to defend people who had robbed and murdered others. One guy that we were defending was this amazing artist, he was also a psychopath and in solitary confinement, think Hannibal Lector. We were defending his right to humane treatment, because everyone deserves to be treated humanely regardless of their crimes - anything else falls under vengeance. These people were complicated. One guy, the armed bank robber, was actually rather kind and had found ways to help others - including writing a pamphlet for drug abuse, and forming a drug rehabilitation support group while in prison. (Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary is a lot like the Prison in Orange is the New Black.)

And there are writers, philosophers, etc who historically did bad things, yet still added a great deal to our culture:

Socrates hated women and was a misogynist. Yet at the same time a brilliant philosopher.
Plato believed women had no souls.
Ghod only knows what Sophocles did.
TS Eliot was a sexist jerk (horrible to his wife) and anti-semitic. But an amazing poet.
Alfred Hitchcock...well, he was sexist and not nice to women, yet had a loving relationship with his wife and a brilliant director.
Flannery O'Connor - racist, but a great story teller

I admittedly haven't really read anything by Orson Scott Card, Walter Breen, Marion Zimmer Bradley (Sharra's Exile was about it, and I can't seem to make it through Mists of Avalon) or Anne Perry (not a fan of her writing - did try, after I saw Heavenly Creatures, partly out of curiousity. You can't tell it's the same woman.) But what they've done has little affect on my desire to read them. Actually, I've made a concerted effort to ignore these reports. I can't do anything about them. How does knowing this information help me or the world in any way? Does it stop others from doing this? Does it heal those who were hurt? Does it change how I view their novels? No, not really. Too late in the game to have much effect, I suspect. Also, being human, it's possible their books are helpful in other ways. I hear Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card is an anti-war book? And you really can't tell he's a homophobic bigot when reading it? Same deal with Mists of Avalon. Should a writer's actions done outside their writing life affect how we view their work and to what degree? How much do we need to know about the artist? How much should we? And do we really need to know anything at all?

Corporations - I get boycotting. That makes sense. Although not sure how useful it is. Artists and Writers not so much.

Comments

[flake-sake.livejournal.com]

I read Marion Zimmer Bradley, but not extensively. I read "The mists of Avalon" when I was 9 years old up to page 900 or so. I hated it. It was the first book I did not finish (my determination to read every book to its end was what got me so far).

I was clearly far too young for the book but at the time I was really pissed at her. I had really been looking forward to King Arthur from the women's side and it turned out that everything cool was missing and it was just about sex. It was kind of hammering home what all the kids stuff already perpetuated, that if it was for girls it was stupid.

I have a more differented view on this today, but I still think it is a superboring book that has no literrary value to me.

I have also read propaganda. And I think you need to, to be able to crittically analyze the propaganda you are confronted with every day. Those are books I read to learn about their tricks and I do keep my distance to those books.

I could also do that with MZB, but when I read for entertainment, I don't want to be so guarded. I just wan't to let the author take me to their world and run with it.

I agree that you should not jump on someone you heard a rumor about, but like Barb wrote the MZB/Breen thing really is past that stage.

Mind you, I am not calling for a ban, I think no one is. I don't think banning books is a good idea, ever, but I decide what I read, for entertainment or for learning. And I feel I can learn far more from other books and her actions sicken me too much to let her entertain me.

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

Well, you made it further than I did with Mists of Avalon and I tried to read it at the age of 19, 25, and 47.

Still can't make it past the first 50 pages. It's not the sex. Actually, sex never bothered me in books - I prefer it to violence, I'm funny that way. Although I don't really remember what I preferred at 9 - that was well ...a long long long time ago. Over 30 years.

At any rate, there's no sex in those first 50 pages that I can remember, or if it's there - it is rather non-memorable. No, her writing style just doesn't work for me - it's very preachy. And I didn't like anyone in the first 50 pages. I honestly don't think this novel was written for entertainment nor was it perceived as entertainment when it was first published in 1983. It was perceived as a feminist text, a retelling of the Arthurian Legends from a feminist perspective. People made a big deal about it in Women's Studies programs. I was pressured to read it in the 1980s by various people, because I was writing a thesis on Welsh Mythology, specifically the Mabiniogi and the Mother Goddess. Actually the emphasis was the Mother Goddess. And of course "Mists of Avalon" fit perfectly with my thesis and studies from their perspective. But I preferred the Arthurian tales in the Mabiniogi, which were more feminist, and I also preferred Mary Stewart's take on the legends. That was in the 1980s.

Now about 25 years later, a friend has asked me to try read it again. When I told her that I lost mine (turns out I didn't, it was hiding beneath my bed), she loaned me hers. Which sat on my night stand for the past 12 months - pretty much undisturbed. Once again I made it to page 50 and no further.

I'm having the same problems with Mists of Avalon that I am with Lord of Light. A friend loaned me a book that they loved to pieces and it's proceeded to sit on my night stand forever without me really reading it - I stare at it, it stares back. At least I made it to page 150 of Lord of Light. That's something, I suppose.

Both books are high in mythology and allegory, both reinvent a mythological story in a new way - both I should eat up like candy. But honestly? I find them incredibly dull, not all that innovative, sort of silly, far too much ritual and description of environment. Neither writer can write dialogue to save their lives. And my mind just wanders. I remain bewildered that my friends, who loaned me these books , adore them to pieces. And somewhat at a loss as to what to do about it. Do I continue to try and read the book? Or just push it to one side? Mists is easier - I've returned it, but I'm not sure I should throw out my version - because what if she asks about it? Shouldn't I give it another chance? Maybe I just haven't tried hard enough? Maybe I'm not in the right mood? And now of course there's all this crap about MZB's actions on the internet...most of which I'm not entirely sure of - and seems to be reported by fans and media outlets. (I'm too much of a lawyer to take what non-lawyers, journalists, and laymen say about this at face value. I know how easy it is to manipulate facts and testimony. And how easy "victims" can bend the truth years and years after something happened to suit their own purpose. Truth is in some cases we may never know what happened. )

So, you see - I'm coming at the MZB thing from a completely different perspective than you are.