Attack of the screeds
Emily Kirkpatrick at Vanity Fair thinks JK Rowling has one hell of a nerve expressing her opinions right out in public.
No longer satisfied with simply repeatedly expressing her transphobic opinions on Twitter and in 3,600-word screeds on her personal website…
Aw, seriously, where does she get off writing things on her personal website? Who does that? And not just any old things but screeds. Ewwww doncha just hate screeds? Good people write essays or posts or entries, but evil people write screeeeeeeeeeeeeds. Doesn’t it sound witchy? Bitchy witchy writing her witchy bitchy screeeeeeeeeeeds. Let’s punish her.
Also, for the thousandth time, what she’s written isn’t transphobic. It’s not “I hate trans people” or “trans people are hateful,” it’s “we need to talk about women’s rights and how this new definition of ‘woman’ will affect them.”
To finish the sentence:
…J.K. Rowling now appears to be bringing her TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) logic to a bookshelf near you via her new fictional novel, Troubled Blood, out Tuesday.
Oops our writer hasn’t read the “fictional novel” but she’s making claims about it anyway.
According to an early review in The Telegraph…
Which misrepresented the Fictional Novel. How about not flinging shit at Rowling on the basis of one sloppy review?
Nah, that’s no fun.
“fictional novel” – cripes. Christopher Hitchens used to write for Vanity Fair. For all its celebrity gloss, I did think it was literate.
I also like the complaint that the stuff Rowling writes is just SO long. I imagine what goes on in these people’s brains must be something like this:
3600 WORDS? WHY MUST YOU MAKE ME READ SOMETHING WITH THAT MANY WORDS??? MY ATTENTION SPAN IS LIMITED TO A FEW BURSTS OF 280 CHARACTERS EACH!
I am seeing 4 paragraphs that end kind of abruptly
and then
am I in front of a paywall?
Hm, but the shortness connects to the amount-of-words-criticism
ok, I checked some other pieces, they are all around the visual height of 4 paragraphs or even less???
That’s better than my students who write reports on the non-fiction books they write for class and refer to them as “novels”. For some reason, they apparently think there is something wrong with “book”.
As for shortness, I get that all the time. What do you mean, your short story is more than 500 words? Won’t do, won’t do. Lots of contests now limit to 500 words (should be called flash fiction at that point, not short story). I grew up in a world where short story meant somewhere around 5000 words or slightly fewer; most of mine run between 3000 and 4500. I had a friend who talked about a wonderful story written in 7 words; she gave us the story (some prominent author, don’t remember who). It was neither wonderful nor a story, It was a sentence that conveyed an idea.
I blame Twitter. And television, which helped create the world that gave us Twitter.
So a search of the text of the novel reveals, translate, translation, transit, transcribe, transferred, transmitted, translucent (you get the idea) and – heavens there it is – one actual “transition” – oops – it’s in reference to the partitioning of India.
There are mentions of Maltese crosses, “cross of St. John”, “Charring Cross Road”, “cross of the Knights Hospitaller”, and the term “cross-dressed” – once – in the 10th chapter.
“Fictional novel” = screed pretending to be a novel?
The Barmaid joins the ranks of murderous TERFS:
https://www.jesusandmo.net/comic/odds/
Yasss she joined them long ago.