"Eric Flint - Grantville Gazette - Vol 4" - читать интересную книгу автора (Flint Eric)

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Before a week had passed, I found myself watching the entire damn episode! Day after day! It was then
that I first discovered just how addictive soap operas could be. I'm surprised some enterprising politician
hasn't tried to include them in the ongoing and glorious War on Drugs. (Whose prospects, in my opinion,
were best described in Eric Frank Russell's Wasp by a disgruntled shopkeeper commenting on the
military success of the Sirian Empire: "For months we have been making triumphant retreats before a
demoralized enemy who is advancing in utter disorder.")
In defense of the Gazette, I will say that the characters in this soap opera are wrestling with a far broader
range of concerns than the usual fare of love pining from afar, emotional misunderstandings that
somehow last for years when a simple five-minute conversation could settle it, and, of course, the
inevitable jealousies and adulteries. Not that the magazine avoids those, either, of course. But the
characters also wrestle with political issues, religious issues, worry about their livelihoods and scheme to
make a fortune or at least a decent income.
In short, the Gazette is an ongoing chronicle of the way an alternate history would actually evolve, if
you looked anywhere beyond the narrow circle of Ye Anointed Heroes and Heroines. The distinction
between this and a soap operaтАФor The World's Great Literature, for that matterтАФis mainly in the eye of
the beholder.
Yes, sorry, it is. It is widely known, of course, that only women watch soap operas, just as only women
gossip. In my innocent youth, I believed these nostrums, until a quarter of a century working in
transportation and factories proved to me how ridiculous they were. You can find no better example in
the world of "gossip" than what machinists are doing standing around the tool crib or truck drivers are
doing at lunch tables in a truck stop. Of course, if you ask them, they will insist they are engaged in the
manly art of "shooting the breeze." Just as, if you ask the electricians and millwrights in the maintenance
shop who are watching daytime television while waiting for something to break down that requires their
expertise, they will insist they are not actually watching the soap operas showing on the set. No, no.
They are merely interested in ogling Whazzername's figure.
If this state of affairs irritates you, I can only shrug my shoulders. Don't blame me, blame Homer. To
this day, the Iliad stands as one of the world's all-time great soap operas. The much-hallowed "epic" as it
exists today is simply a cleaned-up pile of gossip. What it really was, in its inception, were the stories
with which bards entertained the courts of Mycenaean kinglets by chattering about which gods and
goddesses lusted for which mortals, their mutual jealousies, and what they did to advance their. . . ah. . .
"causes."
For that matter, blame the Old Testament. Sure, sure, a lot of it deals with Sublime Stuff like the creation
of the universe, etc., etc. But there are whole swaths of the books in the Bible that look suspiciously like
soap opera plots to me.
It's not even peculiar to western culture. If you want to read the Greatest Soap Opera of all time, you can
do no better than start the massive Hindu epic, the Mahabharata. I say "start," because you may or may
not finish the multi-volume work. (I did finish it, myself. But that was after I'd learned to enjoy a good
long-running soap opera.) I believe it is still, to this day, the longest epic ever written.
The word "epic," of course, is what scholars call a soap opera that was written a long time ago, which
gives it the patina of respectability. They will defend their use of terms by pointing to such episodes in
the Mahabharata as the philosophical discourse between Krishna and Arjuna which is separately known
as the famous Bhagavad Gita.

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