Wednesday, December 10, 2008

The new Frank Stockton ..

... or, Aesop Gone to Seed. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

... modern fabulists also typically reject the concluding morals that define the genre of fables, preferring to end their stories instead with ambiguity and guesswork. Not that these writers aren't highly moralistic, in their way; they tend, with rather too much ease and self-congratulation, to aim their barbs at all the usual targets—that whole Israeli-American-Catholic thing, to take an example not entirely at random—and someday I'm actually going to finish the essay I have half-written somewhere in my computer on "The High Moral Dudgeon of Pretending to Be an Amoralist."

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