(no subject)

When your days-off become more aggravating than the average work-day... Horse lost a shoe - no wait, that would have been too easy. Horse stepped on one shoe with the other hoof, ripping out most of the nails, but still leaving enough in for the thing to remain semi-attached to the hoof. I don't know how to deal with this kind of thing. Slight panic, until I found someone with a mobile phone, and he actually had the tools and got the shoe off...

::exasperated sigh::

Why me?

G. did a lecture and I thought I'd do the nice, friendly thing for once & go... I actually wanted to skip, but he was so nervous and. So. I went. Again, ::sigh::. Besides my general lack of interest in the subject and the fact that I was already familiar with at least two thirds of it, from proof-reading some of his articles, back when I still did that, it was bad. Badly delivered, confusing, &c.


.:@:.:@:.:@:.


It's rather interesting how my brain can reason itself out of an opinion. Or even a rant.

Not that I actually participate, but I occasionally do lurk around fandom-y things and what recently irritated me was the argument that supposedly puts an end to every discussion: It's only fiction, and god help you if you should be so unreasonable as to question this at all. Now obviously it's not the legal aspect that bothers me, and I'm certainly not starting to cry for censorship, but I do have a problem with the underlying assumption that someone's writing (or reading) is entirely disconnected from the rest of the personality, from 'real life'; that the written word does not and cannot have any bearing on real life, because it's just fiction, words, ideas.

'Nothing betrays a man like his book.' says Stephen Maturin in Desolation Island, and this is something I tend to agree with. Obviously the nature of the relationship between someone's writing and the other parts of their life will vary from person to person, but some kind of relationship surely does exist? Our reading preferences, our writing, our fantasies and kinks are part of ourselves, after all, and I would argue that a lot of subconscious elements do indeed go into writing.

Maybe I'm weird (and maybe I've got no life), but books are important to me. When I'm visiting someplace I always look at the bookcases, if I get the chance. Perhaps writing reveals even more, because even if you try to lie, to disguise yourself, to be entirely different from your 'real life' persona and 'real life' experiences, the lie and the disguise are still yours.

Books can be influential and inspirational, they can be trite, boring and shallow, or anything in between those two extremes, just like people.

I don't see any clear demarcation line between 'life' and 'fiction', and while codes of law in some cases have to draw one, even this is subject to change.


Then of course I start to really think about the whole thing, art, life, how one influences the other, and I give up, because there's no way I can solve or prove anything here, and maybe the 'It's only fiction' people are right after all, and I am weird. End of attempted rant. Sometimes I really hate my brain and its exasperating tendency to constantly argue itself into a state of dead-lock.