Episode 10: Matilda

https://www.emmaburns.org/sacred-cheese-of-life-podcast/xi10otjy6gwtora43y8jiducelslwt

Forgot!

Look, I can forget where I was going and why I was going there between the office and the kitchen, so all this leaving the house and doing things has seriously interfered with my concentration. Or improved it? Hard to say.

Matilda is just fascinating, though. I almost can't get over how much this little chapter book does. Though I was also just thinking about Where the Wild Things Are and how that book is much, much bigger on the inside. It keeps on giving the longer you study it. 

Which incidentally was a truly boneheaded definition of literature I heard once: it keeps giving when you study it. Hi. That is true about EVERYTHING. 

Back to my ranty feelings about high and low art and genre bigotry.

Here, think about a play. Literature, right? (Don't get me started by arguing which ones are and which ones aren't.) If you film a play does it stop being literature? Obviously not. Take one of those one-camera BBC recordings of plays from the 70s. That's still the play. Formatting aside, a television show is a play that is filmed. Look, we have to be logical here. 

What they're saying is they don't respect some genres, to which of course we can say shut up, because there is actually no way to dig into that and find anything but BIGOTRY. There is good and bad writing within every genre, even by those people's definitions. 

I suppose my next topic has to be: what makes good writing? It's extremely individual. So the question has to be: what do you think is good writing? My opinion doesn't make something good or bad just because my job is to study all this. 

Read, watch, listen to whatever the hell you want. Be happy. Live long and prosper.