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capri0mniImagine the following lines to be swirly and curvy, rather than straight across:
I've recently realized I haven't read any fiction that was written in the last twenty years.
O_o
I think this is, in part, because I haven't done much reading on the toilet since I moved to this house 16 years ago -- I rush to the toilet having to go, without turning on the light, then I'm stuck on the toilet with no windows, and all the light switches on the farthest walls away from me... It's a drag (In the house where I grew up, in every bathroom, there was a big window over the toilet, so you could read, or do the crossword, by natural light).
Throughout my high school and college career, there were several dystopian/horror novels I was required to read as part of the curriculum:
Fahrenheit 451
The Lord of the Flies
1984
The Red and the Black (okay, technically, this is not a dystopian novel, but the whole message is society is F***ed up because people suck, and there's nothing you can do about it -- Oh, how desperately I wanted to NOT read it)
...I can't think of one Utopian novel ever discussed or assigned for class...
Why are dystopias considered more serious/realistic/worthy of study than utopias?
Why I believe dystopias are just as skewed and unrealistic as utopias:
Even in the darkest periods of human history, when life was short, and full of sickness, pain and death, people still put pretty designs on their dishes, and hair combs. If, even in the midst of the Bubonic Plague, people find value in creating art, then surely, no society could be entirely miserable.
So... yeah... Why? Why is warning against horror seen as more important and worthy of consideration than imagining what perfection might look like, if we could get there? We will never reach that spot (probably), but shouldn't we at least look in that direction, so we know where to start heading, so we can get a bit closer?
I'd also like to point out two things:
Roses come in all sorts of colors (except blue). And the slight pink tinge to these lenses I'm wearing is prescription (cuts down on eye strain from the computer monitor).
I've recently realized I haven't read any fiction that was written in the last twenty years.
O_o
I think this is, in part, because I haven't done much reading on the toilet since I moved to this house 16 years ago -- I rush to the toilet having to go, without turning on the light, then I'm stuck on the toilet with no windows, and all the light switches on the farthest walls away from me... It's a drag (In the house where I grew up, in every bathroom, there was a big window over the toilet, so you could read, or do the crossword, by natural light).
Throughout my high school and college career, there were several dystopian/horror novels I was required to read as part of the curriculum:
Fahrenheit 451
The Lord of the Flies
1984
The Red and the Black (okay, technically, this is not a dystopian novel, but the whole message is society is F***ed up because people suck, and there's nothing you can do about it -- Oh, how desperately I wanted to NOT read it)
...I can't think of one Utopian novel ever discussed or assigned for class...
Why are dystopias considered more serious/realistic/worthy of study than utopias?
Why I believe dystopias are just as skewed and unrealistic as utopias:
Even in the darkest periods of human history, when life was short, and full of sickness, pain and death, people still put pretty designs on their dishes, and hair combs. If, even in the midst of the Bubonic Plague, people find value in creating art, then surely, no society could be entirely miserable.
So... yeah... Why? Why is warning against horror seen as more important and worthy of consideration than imagining what perfection might look like, if we could get there? We will never reach that spot (probably), but shouldn't we at least look in that direction, so we know where to start heading, so we can get a bit closer?
I'd also like to point out two things:
Roses come in all sorts of colors (except blue). And the slight pink tinge to these lenses I'm wearing is prescription (cuts down on eye strain from the computer monitor).
no subject
Date: 2012-09-27 05:32 am (UTC)I noticed this when I was an undergraduate in college. Somewhere in the middle of my sophomore year, I heard Complaints about the System / Teachers / Cafeteria Food coming out of my mouth, even when I did NOT really believe what I was saying aloud,* simply because it was The Thing To Do. After that, I started to people-watch around the phenomenon. And I realized: that unless you put a storm-cloud around every silver lining, you'd be read as naive. So people get into the habit of announcing every flawed thing in everything they saw.
And you know what I decided?
Being uncool was the coolest thing of all.
*Cafeteria Food, for example. Sure, some of the regular dishes were insipid, pallid, fare. But the cooks had an excellent recipe for pork chops with rosemary, there was always fresh fruit in the salad bar, and the chocolate layer cake was sure to make a bad day better.