I Was Reading Blogs on Writing

Thoughts occasioned by this fact.

• At some point on John C. Wright's blog, he said that in Buddhism, "everything is nothing". Now, representing Buddhism—which is based on the most extreme form of monism—as nihilism, is, quite simply and literally, to mistake "on" for "off" and "one" for "zero", but I think I know how he came by the error. Or two reasons.
  
  First is, Theravada's a lot less explicit about the fact non-duality means "nothing exists but God" than Mahayana is—it's the main focus of the Lotus Sutra and to a lesser extent Heart Sutra, but those are Mahayana. And Wright, like every other half-bright Anglo-Jingo of Christian background (that he actually is a Christian and knows it does not excuse him from the opprobrium his provinciality warrants), thinks (given other things he's said) that Theravada is the most authentic Buddhism. Never mind that Mahayana is not only bigger (62% of all Buddhists, or 217 million people, are in traditions that accept the Mahayana scriptures), they're more intellectually respectable. Basically, Anglos assume that accepting an artificially reduced number of scriptures—also believing in limited atonement—makes something the most authentic expression of its faith (yes I know Wright's not a Calvinist, but he certainly appears to be duped by Protestant scholarship).
  
  Second is that Wright may have been misled by thesauruses—Devil's catechisms!—into thinking that "emptiness", in the famous line from the Lotus Sutra, means "nothing". When, actually, "form is emptiness, emptiness is form" means, quite simply, that all formal parts (remember that Hindu and Greek thought share an origin) are contingent and therefore lack ultimate reality. Which, by the way, is something you'll find in Thomas Aquinas, minus the monism. Even the Wikipedia article on the Lotus Sutra gets that part right (lacking ultimate reality, I mean, not Aquinas), so there's really no excuse for making that mistake. (What the Wikipedia article doesn't get, aside from the similarity of Mahayana thought to Christianity, is that Mahayana's major achievement is more clearly deriving non-duality from non-soul, advaita from anatman, than Theravada does.)
• Watching Wright's debates with Fabio Barbieri is always amusing, in an ironic kind of way. Wright's a Republican, Barbieri a Christian Democrat in the European sense (I do not think he would object to that characterization); both are concerned to stake out their quaint ideological fetishes as the true heirs of Classical Liberalism...because both appear to believe that Classical Liberalism is a good thing. Both are equally self-righteous toward monarchy and feudalism and all the other political systems that weren't born of the unprecedented butchery of the Thirty Years and Seven Years Wars.
  
  And I can't resist the urge to remark that it wasn't the Spanish Empire that stole Navajo children from their homes and force-reeducated them in a European culture (there is a reason the most widely-spoken Native languages are all in Latin America); it wasn't the Bourbons, all their Renaissance absolutist sins on their heads, who tried to stamp out the Basque language. That was you people. Restrict your self-righteous posturing to the totalitarians, gentlemen, all of whom were simply taking your precedent and doing it like they meant it.
• Not actually from a blog but related to writing, my sister (younger) was reading a book one of her students recommended, a "paranormal romance" thingy with changelings. Switched by Amanda Hocking, if you must know. I have a few comments. Firstly, does all paranormal romance have to take something from White Wolf and make it fifty thousand times lamer? Because there are other ways to have fairies interacting with the modern world than changelings, and yet that's the one everyone seems to do—and by an amazing coincidence the one White Wolf did. Please stop it, I'm about to fail a Willpower check to resist frenzying. Second, aside from the fact what you have there are actually elves, you simply can't call trolls "Trylles". That is so laughably "majyckal" a spelling as to approach self-parody (it's also etymologically unjustifiable, but only I and one artist from Birmingham, England care about that—and no, not Ozzy). Also, given the sound-change patterns that produced Icelandic from Old Norse, "trylle" probably would've been "trulle" in the Viking era, and "trull" is a dialect variant of "trollop".
  
  Third, "paranormal romance" should be paranormal, and have romance. Trolls that are really elves with the wrong name spelled incorrectly should not just behave like suburban gated-community people. Love-interests that are supernatural creatures should occasionally behave differently from any other teen chick-lit love-interest. I realize I write urban fantasy, but the principle is the same: my werewolves cock their heads like dogs when they're confused, and making one angry is an act not unlike calling Sinestro's mom a bad name. We do not read comics to see a Kansas farmboy break really important news stories, we read them to see the Last Son of Krypton stop bullets with his corneas (one really cool idea in the otherwise negligible Superman Returns). And seriously, romance. Don't just mark out a designated love-interest, show us why. People sure seem to look down on harem manga, but all harem stories I can think of give a reason why the girls fall for the dude. Why does anybody in paranormal romance fall for their love-interest?
• And seriously, paranormal romance, ask yourselves why it makes less sense for your heroines to fall for your heroes, than it does for adorable little pixie-like tsundere android girls to fall for this guy:
  
  (In case you can't tell, those are panties he's holding.)
  Because Tomoki really is a more plausible male love-interest than the typical paranormal-romance one. When that little twerp has more to recommend him to the ladies than your hero, you have failed as a writer and probably as a human being.
• Speaking of dialect, I just know people are going to complain about the fact my Jamaican vampires sometimes talk patois rather than English. But newsflash, you can't say that patois and creole are perfectly legitimate linguistic forms and then object to people who would speak them in real life being portrayed as speaking them. (I feel like I should have their Haitian leader speak Haitian creole, but A) Haitian creole is nowhere near as easy as Jamaican, it bases parts of its grammar on the torture chamber that is Niger-Congo, and B) who's he gonna talk it to?)
  
  Which reminds me, if Firefly were at all serious about a combined Chinese-American hegemony, nobody would talk inexplicably 19th century English with occasional switching to bad Mandarin. Know how they would talk? "Namba wan fain dili, turi pisi gan fa tauzan kashi, mai kan kachi dem yu tumoro." ("Great deal, three guns for a thousand, I can deliver them tomorrow.") Of course, they would have to occasionally deal with some Asians to make the use of a pidgin language plausible.
  
  Incidentally, the way linguists generally spell the borrowed words in creoles and pidgins is, I think, the final word on why we don't want phonetic spelling.
• The problem with most love-triangles (I was actually watching RediXBato, but there's writing in a light novel, as well as in a show) is they're virtually impossible to write as isosceles—one of the two options is almost always indisputably superior. Therefore, the indecision that makes the love-triangle possible is the result of Plot Induced Stupidity ("if the guy realizes which of the girls is manifestly better, there goes the story"). And Plot Induced Stupidity is bad.
• That thing I said about how we don't read comics to see Clark Kent report the news made me realize, most paranormal romance, which mostly ignores its paranormal conceits for standard chick-lit plots and characters, is, basically, superhero shows from the 70s. You know, the one where Spidey doesn't fight supervillains, he fights muggers (also where the guy crawls on a floor and they turn the camera sideways, for wall-crawling). Or where the Hulk (whose name is, for some reason, David Banner, rather than Bruce) is pursued by one crazy cop (journalist?), rather than Hulkbusters.
  
  And that, of course, reminds me in its turn, that apparently the movie "Catwoman" was a proud return to tradition—a tradition, admittedly, that was the reason we all thought comic book movies sucked until the first X-Men and Spider-Man.