Hey does anyone have that painting of the Argonath but they’re dabbing? I don’t need it for anything but I do want to inflict it on all my followers again.
Remember when Ursula K. Le Guin called JK Rowling a nasty basic bitch back in like, 2004? We should have listened
“This last is the situation, as I see it, between my A Wizard of Earthsea and J.K.Rowling’s Harry Potter. I didn’t originate the idea of a school for wizards — if anybody did it was T.H.White, though he did it in single throwaway line and didn’t develop it. I was the first to do that. Years later, Rowling took the idea and developed it along other lines. She didn’t plagiarize. She didn’t copy anything. Her book, in fact, could hardly be more different from mine, in style, spirit, everything. The only thing that rankles me is her apparent reluctance to admit that she ever learned anything from other writers. When ignorant critics praised her wonderful originality in inventing the idea of a wizards’ school, and some of them even seemed to believe that she had invented fantasy, she let them do so. This, I think, was ungenerous, and in the long run unwise.“
Q: Nicholas Lezard has written ‘Rowling can type, but Le Guin can write.’ What do you make of this comment in the light of the phenomenal success of the Potter books? I’d like to hear your opinion of JK Rowling’s writing style
UKL: I have no great opinion of it. When so many adult critics were carrying on about the “incredible originality” of the first Harry Potter book, I read it to find out what the fuss was about, and remained somewhat puzzled; it seemed a lively kid’s fantasy crossed with a “school novel”, good fare for its age group, but stylistically ordinary, imaginatively derivative, and ethically rather mean-spirited.
does anyone else just absolutely crave the gray, gloomy autumn weather where the sky is overcast and the air feels like rain, where you can sit in your windowsill with a cup of hot tea and candles burning, and the deep gray of the sky contrasts with the fiery orange and bright yellows of the trees? where the air smells like wet leaves and it’s cool outside, you can put on your favorite sweater and go for a walk in the light misting rain?
