#WritersCoffeeClub Mar 3
Are there any books which should be banned, or is book banning always wrong?
No book written by a human should be banned. (Which doesn't mean a right to be published, sold, or stocked in libraries.) Responsible publishers should add historical context or commentary to evil but significant works.
Something like the AI-written foraging for mushrooms or diabetes cookbook should be purged off platforms though.
The most famous one is Mordecai Richler, who's my fifth or sixth cousin or something like that. LOL. All Montreal Jews are related. My mum writes for a local paper and writes creative nonfiction on occasion, and an aunt writes memoirs and newspaper articles.
@pattykimura I just did it like a weirdo. Decided in my teens that I was going to write poetry and formed a writers group and organized poetry slams at a local café.
Tory MP calls for "all wild animals" to be culled:
“Because if they don’t their health deteriorates. They don’t have any predators in today’s world. Foxes, deer, badgers. We don’t want to wipe them out, we just simply want them controlled.
HELP: looking for sources on fascist aesthetics. Why fascists (Nazi Germany, other fascist countries, and current fascist movements) like minimalism, Ancient Greek and Roman sculpture and architecture, and “elegant” beauty.
@mariyadelano I know a bit about the art they banned (because it ruled) and there are interesting similarities across totalitarian governments. Less about why modern day fascists are split between fetishizing (an inaccurate idea of) Classical art and just being tacky af.
@mariyadelano Germany, Italy, and Russia all had avant-garde movements that involved expressionism, abstraction, and breaking with the past. In Germany, Dada was anarchist/left-communist, in Italy it was anarchist before it went fascist, and in Russia it was left-communist and sometimes anarchist. It's interesting to me that the former was explicitly anti-government while the latter two were more aligned with an ascendant regime. 1/
@mariyadelano It's obvious why the Nazis hated Dada; it was all about the absurdity of war, it was anti-fascism (many Dadaists fled or took up arms against the Nazis), many of the folks involved were queer and/or Jewish. Expressionism and Dadaism were most of what made up the Degenerate Art Exhibition in 1937. 2/
@mariyadelano@philmoscovitch Hahah you may have hit on one of my special interests; apologies if I'm stating things you already knew. :) Anyway I love talking about this stuff.
Amazon in all its wisdom has taken down the Sad Bastard Cookbook. They won't tell us why. They won't tell us how to fix whatever tripped the algorithm. They won't seem to let us appeal. Reaching a human at Amazon is a Kafkaesque experience that we haven't yet managed to do.
Not only does this affect our ability to distribute it free to depressed, disabled, and broke folks, but the paperback is a big source of income for us. Anyone fought the 'Zon and won? Help!
@Firlefanz@zillanovikov Hi Hannah! Just send us the completed interview (along with relevant links, of course). We will lightly edit it (or I guess more heavily edit it if required, but usually people who write books are also good at writing interview responses).
#WritersCoffeeClub Oct 31: Does your work include any horror elements? What's the most frightening thing you've written? 🎃
I'm not a horror person but I tend to write things with horror elements. I get scared by a different set of things than normal people so horror sometimes happens unintentionally. Probably the scariest thing I've written are Blythe's scenes, which involve a lot of cosmic horror whilst trapped deep underwater.
#WritersCoffeeClub Oct 20 - If you read over a quarter of a book and decide you don't like it, do you bail or complete it?
This is one of my quirks—I never bail on a book, even if I hate it. There is always something that can be learned from it. Someone thought this was worth writing and someone thought it was worth publishing, and the gaps between my opinions and those of the industry are always worth exploring.
@cstross Oh, this is very true (though presumably the author at least thought it was worthwhile). I've done a few swaps with self-pub authors that caused psychic damage.