I don't need no moral reasoning to know how to rock! 🤟🏻

Kyle J. Messick is a social psychologist with primary research interests in religion, unbelief, and metal studies.

Paging Pierre Bourdieu

Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier.
Social subjects, classified by their classifications,
distinguish themselves by the distinctions they
make, between the beautiful and the ugly, the
distinguished and the vulgar, in which their
position in the objective classifications is
expressed or betrayed.

2: Everyone needs a job.

Taste doesn't classify if you have covid.

I'd be surprised if there was any robust causal story.

There's apparently a long-running and -bruising conflict in online fanfiction, roughly around the question of the moral valence of transgressive stories and the extent to which they should be voluntarily restricted/contain warnings (the involved groups respectively painted by the other as prudes and edgelords).

Right, because it's canon that Snape died before Hermione turned 18.

Or Harry, if you want to really hang the whole plot on him having his mother's eyes.

8: But what if Hermione time travelled back to when Snape was a student, then is it wrong?

It is because it undermines his whole lifetime of unrequited love for Lily.

It's weird that there's two different stories that have as an important plot element on the main character having "Lily's eyes."

I get *so angry* about how in Harry Potter all the characters either marry their high school partner or spend the rest of their life pining over them. Thank goodness for Tonks and Lupin.

That said, I do think this clear pattern in the books make it clear that although JK Rowling's authorial statements outside the books about Dumbledore being gay are utterly meaningless for interpreting the texts, nonetheless *from the texts alone* it is clear that he is gay (or at least bisexual) because like all single HP characters he must be hung up on someone from high school and once you realize that it's reasonably clear who that person was.

In my fanfic, it's McGonagall.

Regardless, I'm sure the people writing fanfic are indeed much more likely to talk about this than metal fans because if metal fans did, it wouldn't work for them anymore.

Oh for me, either Five Finger Death Punch, Cypress Hill, or early Black Sabbath. Motorhead sometimes. Control Machete is pretty good, not metal but suits the same moods for me.

Does the author address the huge fan communities that can't understand the lyrics? Or the transition over time of the same music from transgressive to boring?

Lately, I've been completely unable to watch realistic violence on the TV. I think my brain is just too fried by everything for me to maintain the right frame of mind.

But I never did like horror movies or heavy metal music.

17: My wife is that way about video games. She's happy to slaughter aliens and zombies, and loves the cartoon guns-guns-guns violence of Borderlands, but doesn't want to shoot humans.

I also listen to boring music.

I enjoy Fortnite's cartoony violence. But there are also a lot of humans I want to shoot.

This topic makes me feel a little bit uncomfortable, and I'm not quite sure why. I guess because I worry that genuine moral/ethical concerns might be confused/conflated with "taste" as a class signifier (as per lw's 3, if I'm reading that comment right?)...

Too late. That's already a big thing and getting bigger.

My latest iphone update moved the browser refresh button and it is majorly messing with me.

It's a pain on mine too. I usually just close the tab and open it again.

You can change that back.

24 and 25: Figuring out how to change it back was the first think I googled.

I was googling stuff for years before cell phones had browsers.

hooray!! it's all switched back.

24 et seq.: omg, I'm so grateful for you guys. I don't know why it didn't occur to me to look up how to change it back.

Is this about the move of the search bar from the top to the bottom or something different? I'm certainly annoyed this week about relearning, but it seems like the bottom is obviously a better place in the long run so I'm happy to learn rather than revert.

13.2: Elphias Doge? I can buy that there may have been an adolescent romance, but I didn't get any hint that Dumbledore as an adult was pining after Doge.

I had to explain shipping wars about the TV show Supernatural to my daughter, because she knew people who were into it and she wanted to find out what the hell they were talking about. In a lot of ways, being a parent is pretty disappointing.

32: Grindelwald

34: nerd.

Anyway, I hadn't thought of it that way before, but find 13.2 convincing.

I completely agree with 13.1. I get that JKR was writing books from a child's perspective, and to a kid it might seem reasonable or even inevitable that you will love your high school sweetheart forever+ever. But then JR depicts actual adults living out that life, and it seems really strange and pathetic.

34. oh, right.

I read book 7 (because 35 is correct) after JKR's announcement that Dumbledore was gay, and it seemed pretty clear to me that 13.2 was her intent. I'm not sure what I would have thought if I had read it before the announcement.

I just hadn't put the high school piece into the puzzle before Upetgi said that.

22: We live in a society where people who have genuine moral/ethical concerns are often derided as elitist for expressing those concerns. Including even concerns about excessive inequality.

Probably there are multiple things going on, but the conflating of moral/ethical concerns with aesthetic tastes and class signifiers seems like it's driven by people who are somehow incapable of taking morality or ethics seriously.

Anyway, one interesting thing about this particular study is that by limiting itself to subgroups of metal fans, it probably avoids the risk of getting results that are really just showing differences in social class (unless there are important class differences among metal fans that I don't know about, which is entirely possible).

I couldn't bear to read book seven after they kept getting longer and longer and so I've just had to trust that it all works out in rhe end.

Hermione marries Harry and they open a camping store for wizards.

23: That's what she said.

Probably 25.1 and 26 too, come to think about it.

13.1 -- I remember when "For Better or Worse" was still running (and I was regularly reading The Comics Curmudgeon) there was a plotline where the eldest daughter moved to rural Canada, maybe Nunavut, to be a teacher and met a hunky bush pilot or whatever, and the author seemed determined to punish this fictional character she had created for having the temerity to move away and be interested in a guy she hadn't known since she was 8. Anyway, it worked out badly and she moved back to be in the same town as her parents and end up for the rest of her life with whatever drip she went to the senior formal with. It's a real and weird impulse!

I mean, yes, but it also makes some sense from a narrative perspective since you keep the cast everyone knows interacting with each other. That doesn't really apply for Rowling.

(45 was me.)

It was nice to be reminded that Comics Curmudgeon still exists. It's been a while, but I used to read it every day.

45: I don't remember what the bush pilot was like, but I seem to recall that LizardBreath Elizabeth had treated Anthony pretty badly. He, in turn, had made a bad first marriage. So when they get back together it was an "older, wiser" kind of thing.

I have a TX friend whose second husband is someone she was super close to when much younger. It's his second marriage, too, and a considerable upgrade from first spouses for both of them. So it happens in real life, too! Or at least it happens in tales told by imaginary people on an eclectic web magazine, which is clearly the same thing.

On the other hand, none of the Harry Potter people had any business marrying their HS friends and sweethearts. The epilogue to book 7 should have been very different.

49.3:. Something about Voldemort's secret love-child to set up the next round of sequels, right?

49.3: I suppose she could have written a very similar epilogue and just have them all married to other people. That would have broken some kids' hearts, but maybe their hearts were already broken because they wanted Harry and Hermione to be a couple.

She could have moved it out four more years and had them get covid while worried about Brexit.

Or just, you know, not write an epilogue.

She had to find some way to tell the Harry/Hermione shippers to go fuck themselves.

Calvin ended up canonically married to Susie Derkins, but I didn't see a lot of complaints about it. I assume JKR wanted to keep the list of dramatis personae down to a manageable number, and why not? She was writing fiction. "The good ended well and the bad ended badly. That is what fiction means," as Miss Prism told us, courtesy of Oscar.

There's grown-up Calvin and Hobbes canon? From Watterson? I had no idea.

They fight crime.

NMM2 Michael Nesmith. Why can't some of the bad guys die?

Why shade Micky Dolenz?

Huh. Didn't realize that Dolenz is now the only surviving Monkee.

I almost wrote "Davy Jones" but decided to Google first.

If Dolenz outlives Ringo and Paul, he automatically becomes the head of the Beatles.

I'd back Ringo to make 100. He's been clean for a long time and he seems to enjoy what he does.
Im

56: Not from Watterson.

I have a vague recollection of Rowling saying she wrote the epilogue because she wanted kids to know you can go through lots of exciting trauma as a child and teen and still grow up and lead a normal boring life as an adult. Today, it occurred to me that she might have been inspired by the narrative epilogue to War and Peace.

I really would have thought that if anything now would make Halford come back and yell at everyone, it would be spending most of the metal thread talking about relationships in Harry Potter. Even I, a person whose knowledge of heavy metal ends abruptly around 1995 (it was a phase, I guess?), am kind of mortified.

The ending of War & Peace was not very metal either, it's true. But what IS the most metal Russian novel? Contrary to what you might think from the title, not Dead Souls. There's maybe a case for Crime and Punishment. I'm useless on recent stuff like Sorokin and I can't quite make a case for any of the Strugatsky novels.

In defense of the Harry-Hermione shippers, there was that one amazing scene in movie #49,682 or whatever where Harry and Hermione randomly start dancing to a Nick Cave song -- I remember because instead of zoning out while Elke watched, I sat bolt upright, desperately willing them to waltz out of the film and through a secret passageway into Wings of Desire. But it kept being Harry Potter.

67: I don't remember that scene, but it did strike me that the closest thing to a sex scene in the movies was Ron's cuck fantasy of Harry and Hermione getting it on.

66:. All of Dostoyevsky is pretty metal. I could imagine a metal rock opera of Demons.

Dostoyevskii's manuscripts especially. He had some architecture training, they're great. There's a book, english translation exists, by Barsht.
google finds these images
https://twitter.com/CLT_Exam/status/1410265985655902211/photo/1
https://twitter.com/CLT_Exam/status/1410265985655902211/photo/2

Here's an article, in Russian, but with some nice images:
https://unknown-dostoevsky.ru/files/redaktor_pdf/1540979428.pdf

I want to see a version of HP7.1 which plays up the psychosexual drama. It's like "No Exit" but with 3 people in a tent in the woods making each other miserable. Everyone imagines everyone else is having sex which each other and hates them for it.

I saw those on Twitter. I wondered if he gave those kind of pages to his wife and she turned them into printable copy.
Or did he dictate to her from those?

I would like the epilogue to HP a lot more if it posited a theory of history based on calculus.

72 to 70.

66: I'm guessing that Akunin is either prog, or each one is a different sub-genre of metal so that Fandorin as a whole is meta-metal.

Is Pelevin too 80s to be metal? Too wack?

The Tsar of Love and Techno is entirely too pretty to be metal, so it's a hair band. Also not Russian, which is entirely appropriate.

Red Plenty is also not Russian and yet fits perfectly. I'd say it was Yngwie Malmsteen if I liked him better because Red Plenty is all kinds of awesome.

The Master and Margarita features Satan prominently enough for it to have a legit claim as the most metal Russian novel. Moscow to the End of the Line is about getting drunk as fuck and nothing else as important as that; also pretty metal. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is extremely metal: all that shit to get through one day, and you've got three thousand six hundred and fifty-three of them. The extra three are for leap years. I haven't read any other Solzhenitsyn, they may be too compendious to be metal.

How metal is Isaac Babel? Red Cavalry would seem a candidate, but I haven't read it.

Life and Fate might be some monstrous four-CD set that people swear has the most amazing parts but only a dedicated fandom has made it all the way through. I'm sure there's an apposite metal band but I haven't made it through to them either. Dr Zhivago is all those metal bands that are boring but have plenty of fans anyway.

Platonov is metal played in cyclopean temples by beings from non-Euclidean dimensions beyond the ken of mortal men.

Agree with Master and Margarita.

Other candidates would include Buddha's Little Finger and Roadside Picnic (probably my "winner") although then again there is Notes from Underground.

Fuck yeah, I knew you'd show up for this. In order...

too 80s to be metal cannot be parsed. I've only read Omon Ra but it's at least a little bit metal.

I considered both Master and Margarita and Moscow to the End of the Line for sure, and the argument for the latter is conclusive... I'm just not sure about Bulgakov, even though I think the first place I saw that title was as the title of some H.R. Giger art possibly on a Danzig album? So yeah, kind of overdetermined, but all those chapters about Pilate? I can't make it work. I actually never read Ivan Denisovich. Babel... maybe. But, like, do Babel and Erofeev have anything in common? Is one genre capacious enough? (Update: lourdes says "Babel is punk.")

I really do think there's a strong case for Dostoevsky. My friend and I are reading the latest Sharov novel, apparently, so I will report back on that. I also think there's some aesthetic justification for setting a few of Tsvetaeva's poems to very noisy guitar accompaniment, which I should do solely because I'm running a real hedonic deficit atm.

Okay yeah, I accept Roadside Picnic. (Incidentally, if any of you have been teetering on the edge of actually reading it for years, do it! It's even better than I thought it would be! It's significantly better than Stalker, and I love Stalker.)

I'm going to put it on my list for after I finish "To the Lighthouse."

And I have my copy of that already.

Roadside picnic is wonderful but I don't think it's metal at all. Perhaps I am too influenced by the ending.

Moscow to the End of the Line, which I have under some other title, is wonderfully metal. It really ought to be done by a reading group alongside Under the Volcano

I put Virginia Woolf first because I'm a feminist.

I've failed three times to read Buddha's Little Finger, so I can't say much about that one. My favorite Pelevin stories are "A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia" and "The Prince of Gosplan." I've also read The Life of Insects and Yellow Arrow. If I had to transform him over into music it would be in the range of Pere Ubu and/or The Flaming Lips and/or Negativland. Out there and definitely something but not metal. Your verstage may vary, of course.

And I've never actually read any Dostoevsky. I had run out of things to read in Greece (this was 1993) and finally found a foreign-language bookstore in Heraklion. So I picked up The Magic Mountain in German and The Brothers Karamazov in English. I still haven't finished the Mann, and never moved on to the Dostoevsky.

I'll have to ask my friend Jane (Zhenya), who is pretty metal herself, what she thinks is a good answer to our question.

lurid, the infallible Wiki tells me "Surrealist artist H. R. Giger named a 1976 painting after the novel. The band Danzig featured this painting on the cover of their 1992 album Danzig III: How the Gods Kill." and adds, on the album entry, "For the album cover, Giger modified the original painting slightly, covering "the Master's" erect penis with a dagger bearing his interpretation of the Danzig skull symbol." Well spotted.

I read The Brothers Karamazov in college. Spoiler alert: the asshole brother did it, but the dad was the biggest asshole.

I didn't finish the one where the asshole kills the old lady asshole. Presumably, he gets punishment. Unless he got crime and the old lady got punishment.

85: all are punishéd!

Not that some random internet person in 2021 is going to be the tipping point, Doug, but I think Karamazov is worth your time even if you've heard every spoiler. I had a period of skepticism about Dostoevsky but I'm glad I got past it. And I really did enjoy the Grand Inquisitor, although it makes me think of an interview with Laura Bush from many years ago where someone asked her for her favorite book and she said "Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor [sic]: it makes me feel secure in my faith" or something like that. The commentator really struggled to piece together a more polite response than "wtf, did we read the same book?"

That's like when the Reduced Shakespeare people did Titus Andronicus as a cooking show.

I'd say Babel is maybe Rockabilly, definitely more interested in humor than most punks. X ?

I like the Brothers K a lot, more than most other Dostoevsky. I just finished rereading Dead Souls, still loved it. Last echoes of the eighteenth century convention of an affable narrator recounting the novel, but with completely deranged freestyle digressions. I couldn't manage it in the original, senetences are insanely complex and he does so much with tone. I think Maguire is not a great translation, I may try some others. This senetnce with the extended insect metaphor:

Thereafter driving through broad streets sparsely lighted with lanterns, he arrived at the Governor's residence to find it illuminated as for a ball. Barouches with gleaming lamps, a couple of gendarmes posted before the doors, a babel of postillions' cries--nothing of a kind likely to be impressive was wanting; and, on reaching the salon, the visitor actually found himself obliged to close his eyes for a moment, so strong was the mingled sheen of lamps, candles, and feminine apparel. Everything seemed suffused with light, and everywhere, flitting and flashing, were to be seen black coats--even as on a hot summer's day flies revolve around a sugar loaf while the old housekeeper is cutting it into cubes before the open window, and the children of the house crowd around her to watch the movements of her rugged hands as those members ply the smoking pestle; and airy squadrons of flies, borne on the breeze, enter boldly, as though free of the house, and, taking advantage of the fact that the glare of the sunshine is troubling the old lady's sight, disperse themselves over broken and unbroken fragments alike, even though the lethargy induced by the opulence of summer and the rich shower of dainties to be encountered at every step has induced them to enter less for the purpose of eating than for that of showing themselves in public, of parading up and down the sugar loaf, of rubbing both their hindquarters and their fore against one another, of cleaning their bodies under the wings, of extending their forelegs over their heads and grooming themselves, and of flying out of the window again to return with other predatory squadrons. Indeed, so dazed was Chichikov that scarcely did he realise that the Governor was taking him by the arm and presenting him to his (the Governor's) lady. Yet the newly-arrived guest kept his head sufficiently to contrive to murmur some such compliment as might fittingly come from a middle-aged individual of a rank neither excessively high nor excessively low. Next, when couples had been formed for dancing and the remainder of the company found itself pressed back against the walls, Chichikov folded his arms, and carefully scrutinised the dancers. Some of the ladies were dressed well and in the fashion, while the remainder were clad in such garments as God usually bestows upon a provincial town. Also here, as elsewhere, the men belonged to two separate and distinct categories; one of which comprised slender individuals who, flitting around the ladies, were scarcely to be distinguished from denizens of the metropolis, so carefully, so artistically, groomed were their whiskers, so presentable their oval, clean-shaven faces, so easy the manner of their dancing attendance upon their womenfolk, so glib their French conversation as they quizzed their female companions. As for the other category, it comprised individuals who, stout, or of the same build as Chichikov (that is to say, neither very portly nor very lean), backed and sidled away from the ladies, and kept peering hither and thither to see whether the Governor's footmen had set out green tables for whist.

86, 88: Thanks, lurid and lw! And thanks for keeping the conversation going, it's nice to be more than just the threadkiller who comes in six hours after everyone else.

I probably still have that copy of Karamazov, which would be a good prelude to The Brothers K by David James Duncan (whose The River Why I adored, though it is extremely nonmetal), which I have also possessed for year and years.

It's likeliest that my next big Russian book will be Vasily Grossman's Stalingrad, because I did make it all the way through Life and Fate, parts of which are metal af^3. (Srsly, there's a gas-chamber scene that is as horrible as you would imagine and as humane as you wouldn't imagine, and is utterly heartbreaking. And then about 100 pages later some other characters idly wonder where so-and-so is, when readers know they perished at Birkenau. That's the Soviet side of the war for you: people died.)

That's a terrific excerpt with the insect metaphor!

88: You finished Dead Souls? You're doing better than Gogol!