Point; counterpoint.
So we just got back from a birthday dinner and a viewing of Shrek 2 which, better than the first, so, good humor and bonhomie all around, even if Bill’s snarking off about how it went over his head, and I’m doing the usual before-bed sweep of email and referral logs and that sort of thing, and it seems Bill Scher, who’s been slaking parched throats over at the Liberal Oasis for a good long while now, said something nice about me on the Majority Report, putting me in the rather heady (if lower-cased) company of uggabugga (diagrammatist extraordinaire) and skippy (the bush kangaroo). And so now I’m looking around at the last post a couple of days ago about a comics spat and at the litter of revolver bits lying about still to be put together and wondering about the whole poltical–non-political–apolitical blogging thing, and worrying whether the personal is political enough, but then I remember I meant to tease Jim Henley (with good humor, and bonhomie) for asserting that dance or the novel can be defined in some necessary and sufficient manner that poetry cannot, and of course attempting to define a political blog or a non-political blog or an apolitical blog is just as much a mug’s game as defining poetry, or the novel, or dance, or comics. It is what it is: Damon Knight’s definition works for everything, see. Not just science fiction.
So I’ll point you to an entry by Elkins, instead, since she’s much better at this sort of thing than I am, and it’s off to bed with me. (Though I do wonder: which definition of the novel did Jim have in mind? My own favorite, whose provenance escapes me: “A piece of writing, of a certain length, that has something wrong with it.”)
