Synchronicity

[wombat_socho]

I set off a bit of a kerfluffle the other night at the PRSFS meeting by opining that most "classics" aren't worth the time wasted on reading them, and trotted out Trollope, Hemingway and Stendhal as examples. Apparently I'm not the only guy that feels that way. Correia also has an amusing post in which he fisks an e-mail from an annoyed leftist. Hooray for HATE MAIL! indeed.

Yesterday was a pretty slow day in the tax mines. I followed it with some opportunistic bargain-hunting at Harris Teeter, where I picked up a couple of 12-packs of Coke product for $1.88 apiece, then headed out to Mark Taylor's place for steak & conversation, both of which were good. I found myself playing courier for Mark, conveying a couple bottles of homebrew mead to P, who I met for a snack of wings after parting company with Mark. P and I made desultory conversation while paying minimal attention to the ass-whipping the Packers were issuing to the Falcons; we exchanged mead for Butterkaese, and then she went off to work while I headed up the road to the Sterling Walmart, where I filled in some holes in the previous week's grocery shopping. Unfortunately, I forgot to pick up a replacement bulb for the bedroom lamp and tea, so I had to go out for those today, but I did address the heavy cream and pork rind shortages. :)

Back to work on Marketing and Business Administration.

Comments

[harvey-rrit.livejournal.com]

Let us consider two "mainstream" "classics":
1 ) Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea;
2 ) Melville's Moby Dick.

1 ) A man spends the entire story obsessed with catching a big fish, and catches it, and dies.
2 ) A man spends the entire story obsessed with catching a big fish, and doesn't catch it, and dies.

So much more EDIFYING* than, say, a tale of a vengeance-bound sociopath in a society of teleports.


*EDIFYING (adj.): Understandable to union teachers.

[wombat-socho.livejournal.com]

I gave up on Hemingway after Death In The Afternoon, supposedly one of the great books on bullfighting, turned out to have more mierda than toros in it.