Absent from Felicity redux
Sep. 6th, 2011 06:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennySo, Orson Scott Card has apparently rewritten Hamlet* to be a didactic rant against homosexuality. (Or, more accurately, "homosexuality.")
There are all kinds of things I could say here, but they would all be based on the review rather than the actual book, and that's bad practice. So instead I would like to point out "Absent from Felicity" for those of you who would like a (quite short) alternate take on possible homosexuality in Hamlet.
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*And thank you, William Alexander, for a very trenchant review.
There are all kinds of things I could say here, but they would all be based on the review rather than the actual book, and that's bad practice. So instead I would like to point out "Absent from Felicity" for those of you who would like a (quite short) alternate take on possible homosexuality in Hamlet.
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*And thank you, William Alexander, for a very trenchant review.
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Date: 2011-09-07 12:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-07 12:03 am (UTC)I mean, money, obv. But seriously, I feel like they are or should be losing a fair amount of social capital as a result of this...
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Date: 2011-09-07 12:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-07 12:50 am (UTC)Did he NOT hear Lady Gaga's song?
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Date: 2011-09-07 01:02 am (UTC)The male ones, at least. I guess he just thinks lesbians are a sexy show for him to watch?
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Date: 2011-09-07 01:18 am (UTC)If I own any of Card's books, I won't resell when I get them off my shelves shortly--straight to the landfill.
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Date: 2011-09-07 01:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-07 01:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-07 02:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-07 02:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-07 03:20 am (UTC)Everything I have found out about OSC and his work since has further tarnished that originally-pleasant memory. It's a small thing to be irked about, considering, but it's a small thing added to all the other crap he's done that's irksome and worse than irksome.
I wish the damn fool would quit digging.
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Date: 2011-09-07 03:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-07 04:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-07 05:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-07 05:08 am (UTC)Honestly, the only logical explanation I can think of is that he's trolling.
(On some level I know he's not, but think how epic it would be if after a few more years of this shit the Mormon church was like, "Dude, you've gone too far, even for us," and he was like, "Social experiment, 4 teh Lulz!!!")
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Date: 2011-09-07 05:18 am (UTC)Although having grown up Mormon, I grew up worshipping his writing and every time I think I'm disillusioned to the point of numbness, something comes along to strip of one more illusion.
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Date: 2011-09-07 05:24 am (UTC)Orson Scott Card's writings are a menace to humanity. That is all.
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Date: 2011-09-07 05:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-07 06:22 am (UTC)Re: Subterranean Press: They say it has the smallest print run of any OSC novella they've brought out. Wonder if they're anticipating low demand?
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Date: 2011-09-07 07:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-07 09:16 am (UTC)How you could get that from Hamlet is something I utterly fail to understand.
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Date: 2011-09-07 02:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-07 02:29 pm (UTC)It also makes me sad that Card's current excesses are making people throw out all his books. Many flawed, wrong, crazy people whose lives do not bear close examination have written wonderful, beautiful, entertaining, and moving books. Milton's treatment of his wife and daughters was a sin and a shame. Colette's treatment of her lesbian daughter was indefensible. I'm not goin to banish Paradise Lost from my shelves or even Cheri. Granted, Card is neither Milton (though I suspect he'd like to be) or Colette (now that's a thought for a rainy morning!). He's clearly a deeply troubled and conflicted human being who has written at least two classics of the genre. Don't look at him. Look at them. And wonder at the complexity and tragedy of the human condition.
Scott Lynch's Henry V: The Non-Gay Version
Date: 2011-09-07 02:30 pm (UTC)Sorry about multiple edits.
Date: 2011-09-07 05:10 pm (UTC)I’m perfectly capable of (and can enjoy) reading many things which have authors whose politics I don’t like. (Jerry Pournelle, say), or who are Bad People (too numerous to name). It’s just that Card makes the problem into one of the foci of his work. (I’d say “a minor focus,” except then you have things like Songmaster.)
But the whole “I will now throw away this person’s books” thing disturbs me, too.
On the other hand, I have sympathy for people deciding there's a point past which they can't cope.
Re: Scott Lynch's Henry V: The Non-Gay Version
Date: 2011-09-07 07:01 pm (UTC)Re: Sorry about multiple edits.
Date: 2011-09-07 07:09 pm (UTC)I say this as a hard-core ex-Mormon previously-a-fan of OSC: His books always had his politics in them BUT I don't think they've always been the same politics, nor have they impacted his writing to the same degree. (I could chart my trajectory from the Right of OSC's politics to a point far left, but I can't tell you how much he's moved because my start and end points produce an illusion of vast movement.)
His current stuff is unreadable. It's boring polemic. It makes virtues of repellant beliefs. His old stuff is rough but the characters were at least complex and driven by multiple issues, instead of being a flat allegory.
(I explained OSC's Hamlet to my husband, who used to be a theatre major, and got about two sentences in before husband said, "But that's not Hamlet!")
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Date: 2011-09-07 08:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-07 09:56 pm (UTC)What?
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Date: 2011-09-08 12:50 am (UTC)Re: Sorry about multiple edits.
Date: 2011-09-08 02:14 am (UTC)That said, he lost me completely at the second Alvin book. I haven't read anything more recent.
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Date: 2011-09-08 02:45 am (UTC)(Which, yeah. /What/?)
Re: Sorry about multiple edits.
Date: 2011-09-08 06:53 am (UTC)I was about the perfect age for the 2nd Alvin book -- I was 15 or 16. I haven't gone back to re-read it because I can only imagine the problems I'd find with it now. He officially lost me with the first Homecoming book, which came out my first or second year of college -- definitely after I came out to myself, at any rate. One of the characters is a self-hating gay man, and I looked at the book, and thought to myself, "/Why/ am I reading this?" And I stopped. Haven't read one since, other than _Ender's Shadow_, in the library.
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Date: 2011-09-09 12:19 am (UTC)Certainly won't go back to him now; yogurt brains like him are why some kids feel it's cool to torment a gay student into suicide.
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Date: 2011-09-12 06:27 pm (UTC)Based on the prose samples in the review, I'm not sure I want to actually plow through it to find out who's right....