In the eyes of the enlightened, plot in fiction typically marks a work as “genre” and therefore neither “literary” nor intelligent.

DG Myers thinks not:

The most intelligent novels, I am almost tempted to claim, are those that are the most brilliantly plotted, in which every piece locks into place with an audible and satisfying click, and you are persuaded that no other ending is even possible. And that fewer and fewer novelists waste much thought on plot may explain the decline of intelligence in contemporary fiction.

I would argue that a plot “in which every piece locks into place with an audible and satisfying click” is as challenging as any other aspect of writing fiction.

Humans don’t have a very good understanding of what constitutes “rights”. From Wired:

Four in five adults believe access to the Internet is a fundamental right — with those feelings particularly strong in South Korea and China — and half believe it should never be regulated, according to a global survey.

Governments shouldn’t regulate the Internet, I agree, but to believe the Net’s a “fundamental [human] right”?

No wonder the world’s the way it is with this type of deluded thinking. What most humans believe are “rights” simply ain’t.

Seth Godin asks:

I wonder if real art comes when you build the thing that they don’t have a prize for yet.

Yes yes yes yes yes.

I couldn’t agree more:

. . . [W]henever writing gets too painful, when each word and idea seems to be dragged from the mind like the limb of an aborted camel, reading offers a writer a lovely escape into a fantasy world where stories are revealed with simple ease and order on the page. Writing is often hell, but reading is almost always a pleasure if you are discerning.

Besides writing, the most important thing a writer can do is read. I average four hours a day, but even that feels too short.

I’ll never be able to thank my parents enough for making me a reader.

French philosopher André Glucksmann in City Journal on “The Velvet Philosophical Revolution”:

As Western intellectuals watched Berlin in November 1989, they reconsidered their long belief that the world was fated to be Communist—but retained their belief in fate. Providence had at last spoken, chance was abolished, the terrible parenthesis of the twentieth century had closed. Forgotten, erased, transcended, surpassed were 1914–1989, the bloodiest and cruelest 75 years of the human adventure to date. Tocquevilleans rediscovered the ineluctable movement of universal democracy; Saint-Simonians passed on to ecologists the promise that the administration of things would replace the government of men; Hegelians like Fukuyama celebrated the End of History and of history’s wars; Social Democrats promised that understanding among peoples would grow. We were entering the peaceful, postmodern Promised Land, where great heroes, great dangers, great peoples, and great goals would all disappear, as Jean-François Lyotard, author of The Postmodern Condition, notoriously argued. The end of the Cold War plunged the “free world,” as it had been called, into a boundless euphoria. Western Europe immediately eliminated its military budgets, while Washington announced a “new world order.”

The other Europe, just emancipated from Moscow’s domination, did not share this optimism. The peoples extricating themselves from totalitarian despotism were at the same time rejoining history as freely choosing agents.

And they found before them two possible futures. One is symbolized today by Havel and Lech Walesa, Charter 77 and Poland’s Solidarity; the other by Slobodan Milošević and Vladimir Putin.

Glucksmann rightly argues that a little over two decades later the choice still remains Havel and Milošević.

As much as I would love to will a world free of totalitarianism, my will counts for very little.

The days are coming when a seemingly benign “new world order” will stamp its authority on every citizen in every corner of this sad little planet. (We should remember that “anti” doesn’t only mean “against” but  also “in place of.”)

(Link via Bookforum.)

There’s only way to get through this life and that’s to have as little human contact as possible.

You show me someone committing a good act and I’ll show you a million humans committing a million acts of evil . . . every second of every day.

The Times asks why we relish celeb break-ups, but the more important question to ask is why humans relish “celebrity” at all?

I assume that those who follow the lives of others (that is, those whom they don’t personally know, in particular “celebrities,” the vacuous idols and contemptible gods of modernity)—either through tabloids, glossy magazines, TV gossip shows, Twitter, etcetera—are trying to fill the holes in their own desperately empty lives.

I can think of fewer sadder existences.

Has any man wanted to be The Messiah more than Al Gore?

It would be an enormous relief if the recent attacks on the science of global warming actually indicated that we do not face an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it.

. . . [W]hat a burden would be lifted! We would no longer have to worry that our grandchildren would one day look back on us as a criminal generation that had selfishly and blithely ignored clear warnings that their fate was in our hands. We could instead celebrate the naysayers who had doggedly persisted in proving that every major National Academy of Sciences report on climate change had simply made a huge mistake.

I, for one, genuinely wish that the climate crisis were an illusion. . . .

From the standpoint of governance, what is at stake is our ability to use the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption. After all has been said and so little done, the truth about the climate crisis—inconvenient as ever—must still be faced.

Oh, Al, Al, Al . . . how my heart doth bleed for you! Oh how I wish that anthropogenic global warming were real so that you could fulfill your most desirous wish of saving humanity from itself . . . nay! of SAVING THE WORLD! It just doesn’t seem fair that someone as doggone sincere as you not get the chance to be the world’s Superman and Christ.

You’re right on one point, though, Al: we have overcome existential threats before. And we will overcome you and your self-righteous goodists in due time . . . just as our grandparents overcame the Nazis who believed that they, too, were saving the world. (Sorry for the comparison, Al, but you started it by quoting Winnie.)

Fear not, however, Al: Hitler was evil; you are simply a fool.

Booker prize-winner Hilary Mantel writes in The Observer on living in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia:

I had been thoroughly frightened by life in Jeddah, and my conversations with Muslim women, my neighbours in the city, had alerted me to the cavernous gap of understanding between the west and the Islamic world as one saw it in the Kingdom.

Feminism? A confidence trick, a trick that the men of the west had perpetrated on their womenfolk, to make them work both at home and outside. Freedom? A delusion. Democracy? An evil system, a defiance of the natural order. Obedience, deference to authority, reverence for tradition: these were the civic virtues paraded in the Kingdom. It was like travelling back in time. The Enlightenment? When was that?

. . . What were the rules? No one knew. What infringed them? A look or a smile could do it. Sometimes I would step out and know I’d got things wrong. Not even my Muslim women friends could explain how I could get it right. It’s legs, one said, that are the objection; you should be covered to your ankle. No, no, said another, it’s arms that are the problem; you should be covered to your wrists. I did both. I had no desire to show an unwonted inch of flesh. If you left your husband’s side in the supermarket, some sad man followed you and tried to touch you up in the frozen fish. You were western, and they knew you wouldn’t scream: just a silent bug-eyed flinch, a squirm out of their reach. You were probably a prostitute anyway. Most European women were. Male desperation, loneliness and need, the misunderstandings they bred: these hung in the refrigerated air, permeating public spaces like dry ice.

And upon leaving:

We sat at a pavement table in the traffic fumes and drank cold beer.

We in the West take our freedoms for granted . . . and it should be our desire that all on this planet be afforded the freedom to take freedom for granted.

Thanks to the Kevin Smith – Southwest Airlines imbroglio, I can sum up everything that is wrong with the world by invoking the name of one “civil rights organisation”: National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance.

Here’s a deal: I’ll “accept your fatness”—whatever that means—when you accept that being double-wide means you need to pay double for two seats.

What’s really sad is that I think modern airlines suck and I rarely believe that they’re in the right . . . But I’ll support them whenever they see fit to throw fatties off the plane to make the non-morbidly obese’s journey pleasanter.