Sometimes one has to point and laugh

[pecunium]

Cliff Burns is a blogger.

Which makes him part of a really selective crowd. Cliff is, however, apparently shit hot at this blogging thing, unlike the rest of us. To make sure he's not relegated to the thin gruel which comes of other people reading a blog, and telling two friends, he is, an unrepentant blog pimp.

Which is a forlorn sort of thing. I know about Mr. Burns because he wandered into Making Light to tell us all about his witty, and trenchant blog, by linking to a post explaining (to a crowd of writers and fans, on a blog run by editors) that the genres we like are all drivel and crap; poorly written, as a rule, and failing to do things the way he thinks they should be done.

He then made an effort to defend this position.

To say he was gently handled is, mostly, true. But that doesn't mean he didn't get a bit of roasting (even with my brain cramping defense of the field including a conflation of Robert Jordan with Joel Rosenberg, the latter being a damned fine writer, Ties of Blood and Silver ought to be better known than it is).

And now he's trying, in his defense to something most people would never have known of, trying to mock people who make pleasant doggerel with Chtulu and Queztacoatl (at least one in the same verse).

He's going to get the hits he's seeking, but perhaps not the response.

Comments

[texaslawchick.livejournal.com]

Heh. I'm glad that you posted this link, because I, too, have fallen into some alpaca and have no idea what to do with it... :D

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

That's easy, you mail it to Maia, and she crochets with it.

TK

[vanmojo.livejournal.com]

You know, I went through the thread, checked out the guys blog, and quite frankly, I thought the writing was overblown, hubris-laden, hypocritical crap that committed the absolute worst sin anyone can do in the blogosphere...

The guy's boring!

Enough so to be used by insomninacs who don't respond to heavy medication...

mojo sends

[cofax7]

::points and laughs::

Really, what part of Sturgeon's Law does he not get? Or are we back to: "What I like is good; what you like is crap."? Because that's a school of criticism with a long history, at any rate, if not a lot of credibility.

But then he has pre-established his credibility--he says it right there!--and the rest of us gullible peons with no taste or perspective will just have to lump it.

Eh. What fun is a rant without egregious misspellings and some cat macros?

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

It's actually, IMO, worse than that.

He seems to be arguing that all story is about, "character" and F/SF fails to live up to that.

But story is about story, and sometimes non-"character" stuff is needed.

But hey, Mr. Burns has established that he's an insightful, incisive and downright iconoclastic writer, so he must have relevant insights.

Then again, he says he doesn't read for pleasure. I don't understand that. Why do something one doesn't enjoy; unless there's a payoff?

TK

[cofax7]

Not reading for pleasure would be the line that absolutely divides me from ever comprehending him at all.

[prodigal.livejournal.com]

As I pointed out to him on his blog, following complaints about how people should care more about the quality of their writing with complaints that they care too much about the quality of their science is somewhat ironic.

[elynne.livejournal.com]

I like how his hissyfit clouded the water for a minute and then was completely washed away in the flow of far more entertaining dialogue... I ended up reading quite a bit of that thread that had nothing to do with Mr. Lookit My Penis. ;)

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Yeah. Making Light gets a lot of that. Derailig an Open Thread is hard. The tendency to return to the mean is strong.

It's part of why I like the place.

TK

[glinda-w.livejournal.com]

ditto.

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

I'll note that he actually did write the bit about trying to rhyme Cthulhu and Quetzalcoatl.

Do you waste precious time trying to come up with something that rhymes with “Cthulhu” and “Quetzalcoatl”?

No, I don't waste my time, because I kmow what "and" means.

[elf]

Anyone who could find a single rhyme for those has the talent to supersede Ogden Nash in poetic history.

Of course, he probably thinks Nash was a drivel-producing hack.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Go read the thread. The "Gimme that old time religion" verses are so worth it.

TK

[elf]

I looked at it. (Wouldn't say I "read" it; don't have time for careful reading at work.) Gonna save out the thread when I get home; I love new OTR verses. Many of those are ones I don't have in my 13-page collection.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

That's because most of them were made up on the spot.

TK

[glinda-w.livejournal.com]

*sigh* Now I'm missing Mike Ford's writing again. I suspect he'd have come up with something...

[sinboy.livejournal.com]

I like the bit where in his blog where he proclaims loudly how he intends to start a fight, and then asks for civility over on Making Light.

Classic troll. He even tells us what he's doing. What a narcissist!

[elf]

I looked at his blog.

Tiny text cramped around pictures in the middle of a column filling a third of my screen, with dead gray space outside of that. Oh, with a header that's a quarter of a screen of dead space with a nice green block, with the words "Beautiful Desolation" at the bottom. (I like the pretty green color. But I despise dead space at the top of a webpage. This is not paper; we don't need the title to be three inches down from the beginning.)

Already, I know that whatever he writes, he's not writing for me... he's writing for his own biases. He doesn't give a damn what his readers think, beacause he's not willing to use a layout that's not hard on the eyes or that makes the text look relevant.

I read a couple of paragraphs, trying not to be too distracted by the apparently meaningless images that he's shoved on alternate sides. Am I supposed to be impressed that he's picked a layout that wraps text around pictures? That he can find a stock photo of James Kirk to go with his diatribe against trekkies?

I'm supposed to believe this guy knows what good writing is? Oh, and he goes out of his way to insult people who like books he doesn't. (Ah... Harlan Ellison is one of his inspirations, but he doesn't like Trek?)

ozarque's book sales are noticeably up since she started blogging--on LiveJournal, with the default layout, and no pictures. Somehow, I don't expect this guy to have the same results.

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

I couldn't make myself reward Mr. Sad Panda by looking at his blog... his commentary over on Making Light was perhaps insufficient to fully determine its literary merit (or lack thereof) but I just didn't feel like rewarding the blatent attention-seeking behaviour.

-- Steve's thinking this guy is less a starving artist and more an artist who should've been sent to his room without supper more often.