Why the Three Musketeers have Girl Cooties (according to the Paul Cook school of thinking)

[la_marquise]

Ten Reasons Why the Three Musketeers have girl cooties
1. They are obsessed with their love relationships
2. They care about how they dress
3. They hug and kiss one another all the time
4. They have sleepovers
5. They like horses
6. They gossip
7. They go everywhere together (possibly even the bathroom, though Dumas does not specify. I bet Porthos hogs the mirror, though).
8. They love to go to parties
9. They swear to be BFFs
10. They are awesome, swordfighting heroes.
This sequence inspired by the thoughts expressed in This article
NB The musketeers are my all-time literary heroes and favourites.

Skirt of the day: blue wedgwood

Comments

[coth.livejournal.com]

Strewth!

[lamentables.livejournal.com]

*clicks link*

Wow, who is this simple-minded bigot?

*reads profile*

Really? He's teaching university students English?

*despairs*

[klwilliams.livejournal.com]

I'm not surprised he's an English professor. I've only encountered one university English professor (Brian Attebery, who taught with my mother) who had anything positive to say about science fiction.

[lagilman]

Paul has WRITTEN SF.

But even back then I could tell he had an allergy to character-driven stories.

[vaughan-stanger.livejournal.com]

Good grief--that linked article beggars belief.

[branna.livejournal.com]

Re: the linked article--good grief. The man is not only ignorant, he sounds like a two year old. "That broccoli touched my spaghetti! I can't possibly eat it now!"

However, he did inspire your list, which I love.

[anef.livejournal.com]

Did Dumas have a particular audience in mind? Who did he think he was writing for?

[txanne.livejournal.com]

Dumas' intended audience was "people who would pay him money for stories."

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

Everyone: his books were all written initially for serialisation in newspapers and were hugely popular with both men and women.

[blairmacg.livejournal.com]

I read, and rolled my eyes, at that linked article. Your post today made the time I spent reading that article worthwhile.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

Thank you!

[athenais.livejournal.com]

I know! Aren't they dreamy? *fangirls*

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

*dies laughing*

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

They are perfect :-)

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

I less-than-three this about eleventy time infinity.

In the immortal words of Bugs Bunny, Whatta maroon.

OK, I can't help myself

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

Bujold tips her hand in the eloquence of her language (normally a good thing) ...

Because allowing women to use language well sets a dangerous precendent, especially when they talk about girly things OMG.

I think I have a spray can of Fool-B-Gone around here somewhere.

Re: OK, I can't help myself

[athenais.livejournal.com]

Really? I need to borrow that sometime. John Ringo keeps giving interviews....

Re: OK, I can't help myself

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

Any time. I get it by the case from Amazon on the subscription model. Saves time and money!

[gillpolack.livejournal.com]

I love the Dumas and girl cooties list. It helped me realise that the modern version of the Musketeers are teenage hero-girls and that D'Artagnan is the guy trying to win his way into the circle.

That article made me realise why I read Cook's writing and couldn't deal. If he had been writing the article as a joke, I would understand, for it provoked a great deal of discussion, but he really doesn't see what he's doing or how he's doing it. It's odd to find an academic/writer with so little reflexivity. It's also odd to find the assumption that if something's well enough written after a certain style it can't be SF, also.

[athenais.livejournal.com]

Katniss Everdeen = Athos

[aberwyn.livejournal.com]

What amazed me about the article is how narrow his definitions are. Good books do not adhere to sets of little rules and regulations. The concept of "genre" began life as a marketing tool, and it should have stayed there, too.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Good books are written by people who are aware of a bunch of little rules and regulations ... and who are independent-minded enough to break them whenever they think it's a good idea. Slavish compliance with rules and regulations is only desirable in technical manuals and certain types of journalism.

The genre thing: I hope to see it die within my lifetime. But I'm not optimistic. As long as we have bookshops with finite (expensive) floorspace and limited numbers of shelves, there'll be pressure to provide clues for store staff to tell them where to shelve like-with-like. Granted, academics should know better than to pay attention to genre. But it's something all of us who've grown up with paper books are trained into from an early age.

[aliettedb.livejournal.com]

He. That article made me want to find brain bleach fast. Thanks for the laugh :)

[doubtingmichael.livejournal.com]

Oh good grief, that article is appalling. I think the standout line is probably "For me, personally, it takes much of the dramatic urgency out of a story if the hero is already married..." This suggests that Cook not only doesn't think it's SF if it's got romance in, but also doesn't think it's SF unless the hero shags a minimum of three dollybirds in the course of the plot.

He draws no distinction between what he personally likes and what the field is capable of.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

Yep: the James Bond model of plotting.