Where were we having a big discussion about the fantasy genre recently?
Sylvia Plath's fig tree,Yeah, that's true - I sometimes get depressed about that. That you only get one shot at life and so you only experience a tiny fraction of what could be experienced. But of course that's the universal experience of individuals. I suppose you can make a concerted effort to broaden your range of experience, at least.
Sylvia Plath's fig tree,
“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
knowing more about one tiny speciality than about 5 other people in the world, and thereforeMind you, academia is basically a more respectable form of 'fandom', isn't it?
I pursued graduate work in philosophy after getting my Bachelor's and very quickly decided to do something else with my life because I just couldn't put up with the bullshit of academia... The job market is terrible, there's enormous pressure to publish, there's increasing specialization in the discipline as a whole and within sub-disciplines, such that you feel like you're writing or caring about increasingly, increasingly minor or finer distinctions to the point where you don't even know what the fuck the original point was.
Where were we having a big discussion about the fantasy genre recently? It's inherently backward looking and that seems to correlate to inherently reactionary.
NRx is computer programmers dreaming of feudalism and buxom serving wenches carrying jugs of mead and that is exactly the audience for fantasy