Ok, this is probably the craziest thing I've ever heard you say... I'm impressed.
I live to please =]
Also what makes you say Mark Twain's an asshole?
I feel like he built a lot of his reputation not as an author, but rather as a wit/great mind, by tearing down other people's work. It's one thing to say "I don't like the work you're making, so I'll make something of my own," and it's another thing to rip into amateur writing and make a publication of it. The comment about digging Jane Austen up so he could beat her to death comes to mind as well, though she was certainly not an amateur.
He published a book called "A Cure for the Blues," which is a roast of a particularly unfortunate novella some young man wrote. And yes, the novella has no literary value save as a benchmark for the bad writing of the time, but for someone with the strength and public stature of
Mark Twain to rip apart an amateur's work and make all sorts of snide comments about the writer's faculties seems. . . cruel.
It's like if John Irving or someone similar published My Immortal with an essay explaining why it's terrible. Or if I took to writing long critiques of wish-fulfillment stories clearly written by 7-year-olds. It's one thing to say "look, I've been reading a lot of really no-good things and here's a style guide of what I see as common errors, along with some representative examples," or to discuss something popular like Bieber or Twilight
while criticizing the technical/moral aspects of the work, rather than the fans--but it's another thing to pick one out of the flock of amateur, unpopular writing and make money on tearing it down. It doesn't add anything to the conversation, it's just. . . Grossmansucht. Macho posturing.
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Topic: Things that made you sad today thread. (Read 9418871 times)