#also literally everyone else who was ever uc was able to effectively do their job and not be a complete asshole

[morganprentiss]

🔥hot take🔥

Erin >>> Aaron

[solo1y]

They All Have It: Infamy

@rhetoricandlogic

I am honouring you with a full answer here, because you made an effort to read my blogs and actually review my content, for which I am grateful. I mean, you were a little shaky on the dismount, but you made the effort, which is better than just telling me to “fuck off”. Because you’ve gone to the effort of actually reading some of the stuff I wrote, I’m going to assume that you’ll be open to understanding where you’ve gone wrong.

However, you made a number of unjustified attacks, and it’s a real pain in the ass having to explain myself to anyone, so you’ll have to make allowances if some of this comes across as defensive. 

I followed your link. I read your reviews. There are 14 of them over the duration of one year. I don’t know whether you wrote only 14 reviews or read only 14 books, but neither strikes me as you being extraordinarily prolific when it comes to reading, let alone passing judgment on “classics” (and I refuse to count Vonnegut amongst their number).

I don’t review every book I read. I think that would be silly. Also, once you understand the reason you “refuse to count Vonnegut” as a classic, you may understand my central point that there is a difference between elitism and having standards.

On another of your blogs (and you do have many, ugh!), I found your GoodReads link. 15 books. In words: fifteen - three of them Flann O’Brien, who definitely counts as genre-literature and not a classic. 

I write a lot. I’m not sure why that should be “ugh”. Surely someone interested in reading should be encouraging that sort of thing. 

I gave up on GoodReads. I was encouraged to sign up, but I didn’t see the point of it after a while. I thought for a while that I might be able to write some reviews that people might find helpful, but I wouldn’t use my GoodReads profile as a basis for any conclusions about anything.

Also, shame on you. Flann O’Brien counts as “genre-literature”? Which genre? Maybe you have to be Irish to understand the genius (James Joyce has this problem too, and I think regarding Joyce as classic literature is fairly uncontroversial), but I was never more proud than when I went into a UC bookstore and saw copies of The Third Policeman stacked to the ceiling because they were studying it in an English course.

Two reviews: the one for Crime and Punishment - you seem to be particularly proud of that one, because you’re copy/pasting that thing all over the internet,

I want people to read the things I write. I’m not sure why that should be positioned as a bad thing. Most writers feel like that.

albeit it’s nothing to write home about - and another one for Lolita which goes like this:

A book where you’re compelled by the narrative to identify with an unrepentant paedophile? A book where every single character is so psychologically damaged that you have to read the book a whole bunch of times to work out what the hell is going on? A book which makes literally hundreds of jokes (that presumably everyone else will miss) based on the fact that you know French and German? It’s like he had a list of things that would alienate readers and ticked them off one by one. It has to be the bravest act of literature in history.

Well, I’m no writer and I’m particularly bad at reviews but this is hedonistic egomania, not a review where you actually discuss, you know, the book - not your own perceived cleverness.

I don’t have much time for book reviews which do nothing by re-state the plot. I’m more interested in how the book will make you feel, what it means, and so on. I’ll admit it’s not what you might be accustomed to from a “book review”, but in this age of Wikipedia, I’m fine with that.

Also, I’m not sure how you got “hedonistic egomania” from that post, or discussing my “perceived cleverness”. I was explaining why Nabokov was clever. There’s nothing in there about me at all. Literally zero. I still think it’s the bravest act of literature in history, right up there with Zola’s J’Accuse. If you believe that it comes off as me sounding clever, then, thanks, I guess?

I also found this video of yours where you discuss your 2015 reads (even less than your GoodReads!)

and where you had the gall to hit on a commentor

I think it’s the effect of the flourescent lighting on my Microsoft Lifecam. I don’t know. I’ll work on it for future videos. Also, you’re hot. We should get married.

That woman tried to discuss books with you. Like so many others here on this thread. And you are either condescending or sexist? 

That’s my wife. 

Here are our wedding photos. It’s the first thing I mention in my About page, which I assume you looked at. It’s the first thing she mentions in her About page, which you probably didn’t look at. Across our social media, it’s a running joke. Here is another example of me hitting on my wife for the purposes of humour, from a science fiction convention where I was a guest speaker. The guy in the middle, who was running the panel, got the joke immediately (because he goes along with it rather than bust the gag). 

Now whether or not you find that “funny” is a separate issue; you cannot deny that it was a joke. 

You have no reading experience 

You have no evidence that I have no reading experience. It’s a ludicrous suggestion based on your pre-loaded bias that I’m “the bad guy” here for posting some opinions you didn’t like about some books. If you decided that you liked me (for whatever unlikely reason), you could just as easily scan my blog and come up with several reasons to believe that I read a lot. 

[You’ve come at me here with a whole bunch of stuff that is either demonstrably untrue, or untrue in ways I can’t demonstrate for obvious reasons. Now, if you like, I’d be happy to take a reset on this entire thing and be friends. Maybe you’re too invested in the adversarial idea that I’m “the bad guy” to consider that, but the offer is there. I have never refused anyone the hand of friendship, nor have I ever stood in judgement of anyone who developed a negative opinion about me based on false information. Some of my best friends started out hating me for what they now understand to be spurious reasons.] 

I don’t even know how I’m supposed to demonstrate that I’ve read lots of books, or what that might even mean. I guess you could send a message to my wife and ask her how many books I’ve read? Although she likes me (for whatever unlikely reason), so that might be pointless. I don’t know. Find someone who doesn’t like me and ask them if I read a lot? 

If you think of a way I could demonstrate how many books I read that would work for you, let me know. Otherwise, we’ll have to both agree that (at least for you) it’s an unknowable piece of information and somehow struggle on with our lives without jumping to conclusions about it.

and your writing (on yet another blog, sigh, this one called Fifty Bad Dates)  

Again, I have no idea why you find it so frustrating that some random nobody on the internet about might maintain lots of blogs, or enjoy writing. I’m not forcing anyone to read them. I certainly never forced you to scan them for things you personally found irritating and then message me about it. If anything, I should be “ugh”ing and “sigh”ing you! I never even heard of you until you tagged me in your post.

I’m a writer. What the hell else am I supposed to do?

My blogs are supposed to be fun or interesting, and the many followers many of them have indicate that at least some of the stuff I write is interesting or fun for at least some people. 

Now, granted, Fifty Worst Dates doesn’t have a lot of followers, but some of my blogs have thousands of followers. (I don’t really like talking about it, because I don’t like the idea that the quality of content can be judged by how popular it is.) The About page explains that this particular blog is supposed to be about how awful I am with women. It’s self-deprecating humour, but everything in that blog is based on real things that happened to me in my real life (although I moved a few things around for the purposes of exaggerating the humour or narrative flow).

you write about a (fictional?) woman called Natalya:

This is how I learned that a) just because someone is ethnically Russian does not mean that they cannot be fluent in Spanish and b) menudo is a type of Mexican soup.

I won’t even discuss this. I’ll just leave this here.

This is a joke. Again, I have no idea how I’m supposed to explain having a sense of humour to you. If you don’t get it, that’s fine. But don’t think I secretly hate Russians or Mexican cuisine (or whatever the hell you think we should take from your refusal to “discuss this”) just because you didn’t like or get the joke. It was a joke. 

“Yes, but the thing about jokes is-”

No! Stop! It’s a joke. That’s it. You don’t get to tell other people what they should find funny, and you certainly don’t get to tell comedians what a suitable subject for their comedy is. All you get to say is “I didn’t find this funny”, and then stay away from them.  

On all of your blogs, I found only ONE sentence that I will give a standing ovation to:

I need a job.

That particular slice of self-deprecating humour was a bit on the nose. Fair enough. 

Hire me.