For at least the hundredth time, don't bother telling me I'm a terrible writer, I don't know how many times I have to say it I'M NOT A FRIGGIN' WRITER, I HAVE NEVER SAID I WAS ONE, I DON'T ASPIRE TO BECOME ONE. For me the written form of language is a tool, not an art. And it's a tool wielded by an amateur. I use a hammer and screw driver but that doesn't make me a carpenter, as my carpenter brothers and niece can tell you.
In thinking about how terrible a writer and load of crap Stieg Larsson was this morning,I thought of the terrible books that he obviously read and the crappy writers he stole from, other male writers who love writing about terrible sexual violence and murder done against, mostly, women, and long for the days when that kind of putrid junk was treated as porn instead of junk peddled by the book-peddling-movie-adapting industry to be sucked in by the inner degenerates among men and women. And I thought about how, their subject matter being so drearily similar, they all copy each other.
I wonder if the 20th century liberation of the fiction industry so that they could write and get published and peddle anything they wanted to by the end of the century has resulted in something analogous to "the end of physics" the idea that the enormous success of 20th century physics has brought them up to the end of what they can possibly discover using valid scientific methods and, so, the theoretical aspect of it has fallen into, first decadence and, perhaps, already into degeneracy. I wonder if the explosion in publishing and scribbling (perhaps the typewriter started that and the word processor accelerated it) may have led to all of the credible variations on plot, characters and devices being used up so that most future fiction will be nothing but a reiteration of earlier works or the kind of obscene, increasingly violent pornography that so much of lit'richer is now.
Maybe we need about ten years of no books being published or written or a century. I found reading novels was a matter of diminishing returns a long time ago. There is some good writing in some of them but it's rare for a full new novel to tell me anything I didn't read before, nothing new about human character I didn't know, except when it is about lives of people outside of the Northern European-North-American bubble that most English language lit discussion is about. I looked at a couple of "100 books you have to read" lists and found that with a few exceptions who could be predicted, all of them were English language writers with white skin, almost all of them male. The books originally in other languages all by white men, too. Maybe it's just white men who should shut up so other people can get heard.
By the way, the best send-up of Stieg Larsson I read was Nora Ephron's. It's good because it's short, I don't think I would have bothered to read a long one.
Oh, and as to me being jealous of him. He's dead, having smoked and eaten himself into a heart attack at the age of 50. I thought it was hilarious that he and his girlfriend, being too stylish to get married and him being too stupid to write a legal will had all of his posthumous wealth go to his father and brother (who he apparently didn't like) instead of the Communist party who would probably have spent it on producing crap to no effect at all. I hope his brother and father spent the money well, though I don't know anything more about it. I doubt his prose was any better in Swedish than it translates into English. The substance is degenerate shit that proves he was a degenerate. No moral person would have written what he did. Covering his snuff porn with a thin layer of pseudo-feminism doesn't change what it is, no matter what dippy idiot reviewers pretended.
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