Turns out that Klara already memorized the definitions of verbs, adjectives and nouns at school.

This is a good school. I have college students who have no idea what an adjective is.

Good as it is, we are skipping school again today because it’s still better to be out of if it.

The quote I posted above is great. But its author, David Kingsbury, spent his life ploddingly rewriting Dune. This is the strange thing about the clumsily called “genre literature.” It attaches to a single plot, and recreates it endlessly, sometimes for centuries.

Romance literature, for example, is hung up on the plot where the male character treats the female heroine horribly but then it’s revealed he was doing it out of love. This trend can be traced from Pride and Prejudice to Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca to Gone with the Wind to 50 Shades and on and on into infinity. I was once forced to read nothing but Harlequin romance books because there was nothing else, and pretty much every book was a variation on this plot. I guess women are desperate to believe that shitty men are actually in love with them. This is what a psychologist would call an archetype. It’s an idea or a story that humans are use over centuries to grapple with difficult things in life.

In sci-fi there seems to be a fixation on re-possessing the human body by either drinking its fluids or eating its flesh. There’s also a trope of women with secret knowledge of the “mommy knows best” type. These are clearly male archetypes, and I don’t understand them well.

Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Throw away the solution and you get the problem back. Sometimes the problem has mutated or disappeared. Often it is still there as strong as it ever was.

David Kingsbury