Sunday, October 2, 2011

Prologue

Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say

What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,

Which in the very thought renews the fear.

13 comments:

  1. I'll make you a deal. No more cryptic crap out of me, if there's no more cryptic crap out of you.

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  2. Dast ist mine hamburger.

    I do love Dante's Inferno, though; of all the ways you could be slipping, this is possibly the one with the most literary merit.

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  3. I tend to disagree, Steele. The Divine Comedy is the bad fanfic of the classics world.
    So many better works of literature to pilfer...

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  4. No, the bad fanfic of the classics world is Milton's Paradise Lost, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

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  5. Eeesh, you have a point, but the entire point of Inferno was for Dante to have an excuse to write a poem about everyone he hated going to hell.
    I /dare/ you to call that anything but fanfic.

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  6. I could call that a lot of things. "Politics" being first and foremost. Milton's Paradise Lost was literally "Oh my, I do very much like this God character, I'm going to write more, showing how very evil this Satan chap is for daring to question His brilliance".

    Of course, everyone did find Lucifer a much more sympathetic character than the big guy after that anyway, so it can't be said that Milton was a GOOD fanfiction writer.

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  7. Yeah, and that's a lot to do with the attitudes of the time as well. That was pretty much the only acceptable literature.

    So they were both bad fanfiction. The point remains, there are so many better works of fiction to rip off.

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  8. Hey, even Aristophanes, Father of Comedy, spent half his time taking the piss of his contemporaries. Edgar Allen Poe's original contribution to the detective genre was taking the piss of the newly established police force. Fiction is self-serving, socially situated and sometimes scandalous, hardly makes it 'bad'.

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  9. Doyle would have stopped writing Holmes, but there was too much demand for it.

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