i heart the IntarWeb

Because I discover places like the fanficrants community and it introduces me to people who claim to have "soul-bonded" with a favorite character from a comic book, and then get all indignant when their soul-bonded character shows up in people's slash. And apparently there's a reference in this post to "real Soulbonders"? So there are more people who have "bonded" with fictional characters?

Sometimes reality is better.

Ok, here is the one thought I had while reading this person's rant - of all the characters in the X-Men universe she chose to worship, she chose Cyclops? Scott is the lamest character in that universe, and he's kind of a dick, if I remember correctly. She couldn't have picked Wolverine? Storm? Professor X?

Part of a Paris Review interview with Orhan Pamuk - the most interesting part is where he says:

Like authors in so many poor countries, they wasted their talent on trying to serve their nation. I did not want to be like them, because even in my youth I had enjoyed Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Proust—I had never aspired to the social-realist model of Steinbeck and Gorky.

I thought his reaction could also apply to modern Chinese literature. Aside from the translation issue, I found it difficult to get into Chinese fiction from right before the Cultural Revolution, because it was mostly about how people's lives were miserable and how they would never get out of it. There's a sort of similar reaction against those tropes with the success of writers like Mian Mian, whose first novel Candy shocked with its frank depictions of sex and drug use. However, in the translation I read, there didn't seem to be much of a point to the novel, other than rebellion. But that was in the early 90s - I don't know what modern Chinese fiction is about today.