I don't consider myself a violent person
By: Gina Dalfonzo|Published: July 19, 2012 9:24 AM
. . . but
this makes me want to throw things. Is there a more hellish combination ever conceived by the mind of man than "Fifty Shades of Grey" and classic literature?
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Fanfiction just means, "Using another author's setting."
"I don't know my equally mentally deficient, amazon, clad in a tactically ridiculous chainmail bikini, but remaining alluring after also slaughtering hundreds of barbarians."
"I know, my glorious mentally deficient shirtless warrior. Why not connect the name of our tale to one famous in real literature."
I don't consider you a violent person either, dearest Gina, but I must say I'm quite astonished that this makes you want to throw things. Not having majored in English myself, I would think that instead of getting violent, you'd applaud their courage.
Yes, their *courage*.
You see, to my mind it takes considerable guts to admit, publicly, that you're going to write and publish porn. I don't read it, but I can only imagine that it's the most formulaic and predictable of all fiction: people are about to have sex, people have sex, people had sex. Yawn. And, it uses words to appeal to the basest, most animalistic instincts of the reader, rousing them to accomplish nothing good for the world. In Orwell's _Nineteen Eighty-Four_, the Party actually employed a whole division of writers to create porn for the proles (but forbade Party members to read it, since members of the Party were supposed to be superior creatures with accordingly superior behavior). The purpose was to give an outlet to prole passions, lest such stupid beings ever somehow use those passions to start a revolution. Porn keeps a society in stasis instead of in progress. So to tell others that *this* is what you write is to tell them that as a writer, you're a complete hack writing for an audience of complete drudges.
I'd imagine when _Bring Her Down_ was published, most of your friends and relatives got a copy. And I'd expect they were justifiably proud, as I certainly was, and told others about how delighted they are to have a connection to that book's author, as I did. Until recently, porn was the kind of "literature" that people felt guilty and embarrassed to read, much less to publicly recommend to anyone else. So a porn writer is not only a hack, but a hack who should be ashamed of themselves.
Plus, there's the issue of what motivates someone to sit at their keyboard hour after hour, and the issue of the motives of their publisher as well. Clearly this is all about earning a lot of money from what could be a very temporary fad. So these are shameful, *greedy, unprincipled* hacks.
Finally, they can't even think up their own plots for this dreck, so they have to borrow stories that have been successful for a century or so. Fiction writers depend on having fantastic imaginations. Therefore these porn writers are shameful, greedy, unprincipled, *complete no-talent* hacks. And their publishers are enablers at best, and pimps at worst.
So I would expect you, Gina, to not get angry but to applaud their courage in announcing their extensive list of deficiencies to the world, and to applaud them with the sarcasm of a Lileks or Mark Steyn. With your skills as a writer, your passion for classic literature, and your concern for the impact of writing on society at large, I'm quite certain you could thrash them in a way that would be both entertaining and enlightening.
But as I say, I wasn't an English major, so I'm not tempted to write anything like that.
I'm more tempted to wonder if someone could automate the whole production process: a program could pull classic texts from the online archives of Project Gutenberg ( www.gutenberg.org ), scan each work for phrases like "alone in the house together", and insert one of a set of predefined naughty passages. The whole thing could probably be written and up and running in a day as a set of simple Perl scripts. With no need to pay any writers whatsoever, the profits of the publishers would be maximized. They could exploit their ever more morally impoverished readership with tremendous efficiency. Big Brother would be so pleased.
One is reminded of Richard Bentley's comment to Alexander Pope about his interpretation of Homer's Iliad: "It is a pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer." (Not that I'd call eroticizing Jane Austen pretty; a large part of the power of her stories is precisely her restraint, and the restraint of her characters.)
Aye Captain, warped speed. And I mean warped.
"Unto the pure all things are pure: but unto them that are defiled and unbelieving is nothing pure; but even their mind and conscience is defiled."
In short, going forward, everything some in our culture will now touch they will first look at with a jaundiced eye. The bar has been lowered yet once again.
Oh and while we're at it, let's draw pictures of couples copulating in the windows of Van Gogh's The Starry Night.
Even if it wasn't erotic sex scenes being added to these works . . . it is an ugly thing when people somehow think they have the right to change another's art.
This ranks with things calculated to drive pilgrims over deep blue Atlantics. Time for a New World. Lord?