Gordon is a twat better live up to its namesake.

Which is not a rhetorical musing. Perhaps that really was the case. Rice and corn means we weren't starving, we just weren't nourished. Empty calories to fuel a hopeless rebellion, but rebellion it was. Three decades on, it's still alive and breathing fire. Those are still my most unliked books.

And this transformation has more to do with publishing and marketing tactics than readership, I believe. The genres have been twisted beyond recognition, and the mediums through which we create our art have been sorted by marketing first, algorithms second, and human perspective last.

But lately I've begun to view them (in their current form) as a way for readers to identify themselves. Less about the quality of the book and more about their tastes as a reader and how close this book achieved alignment. Through this lens, I think I fall on the 'authors should not engage' side.

I believe this is why the more odd and outlandish the art, the more deeply it tends to resonate. Buried instruction: the blueprint for navigating your own inner turmoil, described in ways socially acceptable language can't articulate.

But let a good book come through. It's a spiritual awakening.

Imo, this is a fundamentally disingenuous lens to view ourselves with and the reason art is powerful and everlasting.

Our ancestors created mediums to express that weirdness and pass it on. To pass comfort, reassurance, and guidance, in the face of strict societal adherence, to the next person.

There's an entire stratosphere of psychology based on the principle of 'falling outside of societal norms', which utterly disregards how norms change from society to society but people don't.

I guess if you're born on this dirt you're normal, but over on THAT dirt--well, that's quite insane.