1/ I'm thinking about those NYT ads where "this [ obese ] [ black ] woman is imagining Harry Potter without his creator" and in addition to the tiresomeness of the demographic pandering, just the "imagine X without Y" is sticking in my craw
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3/ so: JKR is bad, and Harry Potter is good granted now what? my answer is ... you live with it. Arists are real people. They're complicated. They can make great art and have terrible politics. They can make OK art and have naive stupid politics.
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4/ Heinlein wrote great fiction with can-do competent people of both genders and all races and all ages ...and yet he was maybe a wife-swapping weirdo and didn't understand the value of Chesteron's Fence, and his sexual and other politics would, if adopted, ruin America.
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5/ The proper reaction to this is not to imagine The Moon is a Harsh Mistress or Door Into Summer "without Heinlein". It's to appreciate the work, understand the man on his own terms, and realize you have some reservations about his views.
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6/ Most of the authors I like are not just left of me (not too hard) but very left of center. I don't try to imagine Newton's Wake without Ken MacLeod, or Perdido Street Station without China Mieville, or Mother of Storms w/o John Barnes. I just understand that people disagree
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7/ I very much dislike the totalizing idea that you can't accept people, or art, if there are flaws or disagreements. It's evidence of the religious [ prog ] mania that we find ourselves in, that this point even needs to be made / discussed.
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End of conversation
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