“A British bookshop chain held a vote to find the country’s favourite book. It was The Lord of the Rings. Another one not long afterwards, held this time to find the favourite author, came up with J.R.R. Tolkien. The critics carped, which was expected but nevertheless strange. After all, the bookshops were merely using the word favourite. That’s a very personal word. No one ever said it was a synonym for best. But a critic’s chorus hailed the results as a terrible indictment of the taste of the British public, who’d been given the precious gift of democracy and were wasting it on quite unsuitable choices. There were hints of a conspiracy amongst the furry-footed fans. But there was another message, too. It ran: ‘Look, we’ve been trying to tell you for years which books are good! And you just don’t listen! You’re not listening now! You’re just going out there and buying this damn book! And the worst part is that we can’t stop you! We can tell you it’s rubbish, it’s not relevant, it’s the worst kind of escapism, it was written by an author who never came to our parties and didn’t care what we thought, but unfortunately the law allows you to go on not listening! You are stupid, stupid, stupid!’ And once again, no one listened. Instead, a couple of years later, a national newspaper’s Millennium Masterworks poll produced five works of what could loosely be called ‘narrative fiction’ among the top fifty ‘masterworks’ of the last thousand years, and, yes, there was The Lord of the Rings again.”
I stumbled on an article last night where some douche was ranting about how mad he was that, in the wake of Terry’s death, people were mourning and calling him a great writer when they should have been reading something sublime like Bukowski.
In the first paragraph he said he’d never read anything by Pratchett and never intended to, which is pretty typical of that kind of angry elitism.
As someone who has been deeply impacted by Terry’s ideas about character and storytelling, that article made me so mad. Livid. Terry Pratchett levels of righteous fury.
Can I tell you how happy and unsurprised I am that Terry himself wrote such a lovely takedown of that snobbish, splainy mentality.
A thing being popular doesn’t automatically make it bad, and fantastic elements don’t make a work of literature into not-literature.
The thing about knitting is it’s much harder to fear the existential futility of all your actions while you’re doing it.
Like ok, sure, sometimes it’s hard to believe you’ve made any positive impact on the world. But it’s pretty easy to believe you’ve made a sock. Look at it. There it is. Put it on, now your foot’s warm.
the reason why people are so hard to read is because they are composed of the letters a, t, c, and g in random sequences and as im sure you know, that doesn’t spell anything
“I once asked my friends if they’d ever held things that gave them a spooky sense of history. Ancient pots with three-thousand-year-old thumbprints in the clay, said one. Antique keys, another. Clay pipes. Dancing shoes from WWII. Roman coins I found in a field. Old bus tickets in second-hand books. Everyone agreed that what these small things did was strangely intimate; they gave them the sense, as they picked them up and turned them in their fingers, of another person, an unknown person a long time ago, who had held that object in their hands. You don’t know anything about them, but you feel the other person’s there, one friend told me. It’s like all the years between you and them disappear. Like you become them, somehow.”
“i want a word for the almost-home. that point where the highway’s monotony becomes familiar
that subway stop whose name will always wake you from day’s-end dozing
that first glimpse of the skyline that you never loved until you left it behind. what do you call the exit sign you see even in your dreams?
is there a name for the airport terminal you come back to,
comfortably exhausted? i need a word for rounding your corner onto your street,
for seeing your city on the horizon,
for flying homewards down your highway. give me a word for the boundary
between the world you went to see
and the small one you call your own. i want a word for the moment you know you’re almost home.”
tbh a lot of my advice boils down to “hey you know that terrible horrible looming thing you’re doing your best to avoid and distract and escape as much as possible but no matter what you do it just keeps looming and looming and ruining your life”
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