The subsequent comments can be amusing as well. Read the entire "letter" here:
http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/201...to-literature/
Excerpts:
Quote:
A Private Letter from Genre to Literature
I saw you tonight. You were walking with your cabal from the university to the little bar across the street where the professors and graduate students fraternize. You were in the dark, plain clothes that you think of as elegant. I have always thought they made you look pale. I was at the newsstand. I think that you saw me, but pretended not to. I want to say it didn't sting.
Please, please, darling let us stop this. This artificial separation between us is painful, it is undignified, and it fools no one. In company, we sneer at each other and make those cold, cutting remarks. And why? You laugh at me for telling the same stories again and again. I call you boring and joyless. Is it wrong, my dear, that I hope the cruel things I say of you cut as deeply as the ones you say of me?
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But allow me this, dear: what you do is crueler. You take the best of me, my most glorious moments - Ursula LeGuin and Dashiell Hammet, Mary Shelly and Philip Dick - and you claim them for your own. You say that they "transcend genre". There are no more heartless words than those. You disarm me. You know, I think, that if we were to compare our projects honestly -- my best to yours, my mediocrities to yours, our failures lumped together -- this division between us would vanish, and so you skim away my cream and mock me for being only milk.
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What do our friends make of our assignations, do you think? Those nights when you come to me and we find ourselves in each other's arms must seem comic to them, given how much we rail against each other in the day. And don't tell me that no one knows. Cormac McCarthy took the Pulitzer for a post-apocalyptic horror novel. Junot Díaz won his joking about Gorilla Grodd and describing violence in terms of hit points. Wuthering Heights is as much romance as ghost story. Roth's The Plot Against America was alternate history. Ishiguro wrote Remains of the Day and also Never Let Me Go. Faber wrote Under the Skin. Whitehead, Zone One. Don't let's start on Atwood. Everyone can see that you want me as much as I want you. And more than that. I have begun to suspect you need me, my dear.
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Come to me, my love. Come to me tonight. I will meet you at midnight in the garden outside my bedroom. I will wear those bright, lurid, exciting things that are my signature. You bring those pretentions that are your best and worst aspect, and - can I hope? - the willingness to shed them.
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