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Oh, God. On the off-chance that Kovacs is still bothering to check this thread, and because Duncan has just told me what terribly bad form it is to ‘grass him up’ by quoting K's words from Somewhere Else...
I had assumed, as it was on a public forum, that Kovacs wouldn’t have any problem standing by the quote I posted, that no confidence had been breached. If K, or anyone, would like the link and quote removed, just say. I posted it because I felt it was another, related but slightly more useful example of the kind of language K employs when describing what he thinks is barbelith’s tendency towards blandly uncritical appreciation.
Honestly, that’s all it was. If it's unhelpful, then I'll remove it. The chain of events went like this: Kovacs had just complained in this thread about yawn’s grievously insulting language; then, in the other thread, McGyver called him ‘a prick’ and asked what he meant by ‘gaycore.’ I thought that, after his post here, he probably wouldn’t be answering a question phrased in that way, so I cut-and-pasted his words as a way of explaining what he meant by it, ie it’s a directly related quote. No malice was intended, I was just trying to provide a quick answer to McGyver’s question, because I thought the whole ‘gaycore’ thing had the potential to derail the thread even further. I quoted him ‘for reference,’ with a link to provide context, and without comment. And then, in the same post, I came back to the Phillip Roth thing.
On which... Kovacs, I think the ‘point-scoring snarkiness’ that you now apparently see throughout the Klarion thread, is actually everyone engaging with your ‘Klarion vs Roth’ point to some degree. There’s hardly any agreement with your view that the comparison is a useful one, and there’s a lot of laughing at you, sure, but there really *isn’t* all the spite that you seem to imagine: you're being lightly pelted with soft fruit, not rocks (....Do I need to say this? - Nobody hates you). So, when you say that you’re ‘Not really convinced by most of the points above,’ consider that you’ve convinced precisely no-one that your initial point has really told us anything very useful or revealing, either about the works of Phillip Roth, or -on topic!- about the first issue of Klarion The bloody Witch Boy, and that most of the reactions to your posts have actually been somewhere between disappointment and bemusement. If a comment like ‘Klarion isn’t as good as the latest Phillip Roth’ had been said by Average Internet Fan, it might not have been picked up on, but you *have* set yourself up as a professional academic who works in the field of Cultural Studies, have you not? Jack Fear said it best, but you can stick me in the ‘disappointed’ camp, too. Dizfactor wrote a great post about the problems of comparing content across different media, and once upon a time, you might have agreed with him, but instead you’ve seemingly ignored Diz’s post completely, just because the rather pompous tone of your initial post has caused a bit of sniggering.
On your specific complaint, I simply don’t know what you’re now going after in this thread. I mean, what exactly are you asking for here? I think you’ve misunderstood yawn’s intent in a similar way to the way you've misunderstood a lot of the other responses: to my eyes, ‘shut it, please’ doesn’t really look particularly bad, I believe yawn just wanted you to stop making yourself look so bloody silly. If you stop being so defensive for a second, you might actually notice that the subtext to a lot of the responses is to do with expecting better from you. With wanting better from you.
But that aside, the right to respond with an ‘equal’ insult would just mean you saying ‘no, you shut it, please,’ and nothing else, wouldn’t it? So it kinda sounds like you’re now fishing for a licence to be more insulting in response - and that’s exactly what the whole ‘don’t post angry’ thing in the hallowed Guide To Barbelith Etiquette is all about, man. And then, your second post in this thread skips the question of how you might respond to yawn, and instead you’re suddenly asking permission to dish out insults to posters if you ‘feel they’ve warranted it.’ Which is, y’know, a slightly different question. And probably not one for which this case could make a good basis for an answer, considering how you've read this situation.
Aside from which, your ’I've always tried to pull punches even if provoked’ simply isn’t true. You pretty regularly get into fights on barbelith, and you have no hesitation in getting personal, only you usually cast these scuffles in terms of you vs barbelith-the-group-mind: yawn’s somehow being allowed to insult you because he’s ‘of’ barbelith and you apparently seem to think you’re not; when I have the temerity to disagree with you, it’s because I’m just representing the barbelith view, etc. Even without the kerfuffle caused by your Roth thing, you’d probably feel a lot happier in this community if you dropped this wiser-than-thou outsider schtick for a second or two: you’ve been posting here pretty regularly for an entire year now and if you’d actually been reading and communicating with other people throughout that time, you might have made a few more friends. If you continue to hold other posters at arm's length, then you may continue to misread those other posters: you'll carry on feeling you're being attacked and so getting into fights. And that advice comes from me alone, not from any official barbelith rulebook, and without any malice whatsoever, because if you’re going to stick around, then I’d rather you felt happy here. Wildly overreacting and then asking for official permission to insult the other posters howsoever you see fit is probably not a good way to go.
And, if you’re still intent on expanding on the problems you feel you’re having, then I’d also urge you to start a new thread for this purpose. |
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