That's a ridiculous and easily disproven claim. I think you'll find after a moment's thought that there is no strong correlation between a book's "difficulty" and its quality; if there were, Foucault's Pendulum would have been even better if there were more lengthy, untranslated passages in it.
Good point. I'll clarify what I mean.
I think reading (and watching movies) can be pleasurable for several reasons, but I'll just talk about three. Fantasy, the shock of understanding, and provocation.
Stories can be pleasurable because they show us a better version our lives, or some dark aspect of ourselves that we prefer to avoid (but are titillated by seeing). This is fantasy; it happens in everything from Pride and Prejudice (e.g., Mr. Darcy) to Harry Potter (the chosen boy).
The thing about fantasy is, it's easy to generate. Kids are already tuned to fantasy. When a book generates pleasure through fantasy, its just latching on to something we do all the time anyways.
Now, the surprise of understanding: don't you love that feeling when you catch on to the style, patterns and themes of the story? That feeling of seeing how a character's trivial comment actually spirals out into a complete reappraisal of the whole story, or when you realize that the structure of the story itself completely undermines the "obvious" parts, or when you see how a writer is paying homage to past works?
That surprise of understanding needs to be learned, and it needs to be learned through reading. How many YA books use an unreliable narrator, for example? I doubt many at all, because its a technique people need to learn to recognize and understand. Kids and teens generally haven't had time to learn these things, and publishers know this.
Or, books can be pleasurable because they provoke new thoughts from us. One understands the technique the author is using, but sees some limitations in it, and thinks I can do better. So David Foster Wallace looks at William Faulkner, and tries to do better. Nobody is trying to do better than JK Rowling, unless "better" means more profit.
When I say harder is better, I mean that the great books demand that we pay attention. We can read them over and over again, each time re-appraising the story in light details or metaphorical connections we didn't see before. Or they provoke us into doing better.
Seeing those details and understanding how we could do better require work. It's hard. Fantasy requires us to do what we spend half of our days doing anyways.
So no, being hard does not make a book great. But it is very, very rare that an "easy" book is anything but mediocre.
Posted by dabbler (Member # 6443) on :
If there exist great books that are not hard, would that be sufficient to disprove your hypothesis or will they all be considered "rare exceptions?"
Posted by Scott R (Member # 567) on :
quote:When I say harder is better, I mean that the great books demand that we pay attention. We can read them over and over again, each time re-appraising the story in light details or metaphorical connections we didn't see before. Or they provoke us into doing better.
Seeing those details and understanding how we could do better require work. It's hard.
Your qualifications for "hard" don't match my understanding of the word.
I agree: great books keep our attention. (I wouldn't use the word "demand"; I might use the word 'draw' or even 'entice'.) Great books reveal new insights when we re-read them. Great books can inspire us to change our behavior.
That doesn't make them "hard".
quote:Fantasy requires us to do what we spend half of our days doing anyways.
quote:The thing about fantasy is, it's easy to generate. Kids are already tuned to fantasy. When a book generates pleasure through fantasy, its just latching on to something we do all the time anyways.
Before I comment-- how versed are you in the genre of fantasy? What do you mean when you say the word "fantasy?"
Posted by Scott R (Member # 567) on :
Also-- just read the other thread you linked.
There, you seemed to be equating 'hard' and 'complex'. Do you still stand by that opinion?
Can you define what you mean by 'complex'? How does a complex book necessarily accomplish the three things you said 'hard' books accomplish? Namely:
1) Draw and keep the attention of the reader; 2) Reveal new insights on re-read; 3) Inspire change in the behavior of the reader
For context, here's your post on the other thread that seems to explain your position, and poses the primary questions:
quote:How great could a book that is specifically written for an audience that has minimal experience with reading be?
Books written for kids assume their audience has read a handful of other books, because yeah, they're kids. Books written for teens assume a bit more.
The less demanding a book tries to be, the less chance it has to be beautiful. The better something is, the harder it is.
And yes, many of them are as complex as a lot of adult books - but that's because a lot of adult books are crap.
Posted by Synesthesia (Member # 4774) on :
I am not sure if I agree with what you are stating. Just because a book is full of complex concepts and large words doesn't mean it's good. It has to have more than just that. It has to have depth, and feeling. A book can be "simple" and have that. But what is meant by demanding and simple anyway? You can say that 1984 is more complex than the Giver, but the themes are similar. The Giver gets across its theme of a disturbing dystopia just as effectively.
Posted by Aros (Member # 4873) on :
I think that one of the points of (high) art is that it is subtle and complex, allowing the observer to draw their own conclusions. It doesn't pander or fall into heavy cliche (unless to prove a point).
High art is culture -- not merely escapism. That doesn't mean that there is no value in escapism. But escapism is not (generally) subtle. It isn't an impetus to self-realization. People don't ask what it means because the meaning is self-evident. What does Harry Potter mean?
Not all high art is enjoyable, but it is valuable. Have you ever trudged through David Copperfield? This massive tome isn't that enjoyable. I generally say that you often don't enjoy reading literature while you're reading it . . . the enjoyment comes from having read it. Posthumously. After the fact. When it changes you.
Some complex books are eminently readable -- though the audience doesn't readily understand. The Giver (a previous example) is a good example. Or Catcher in the Rye -- in this case, most high schoolers aren't really ready for the message.
Other complex books are difficult, in the way progressive rock is difficult for the casual listener. Lolita, for example. I'm not certain that they're more valuable. But as art, they are more able to explore and expound on an elaborate canvas that allows the reader to reflect and draw ephemeral conclusions. They are delicate and obtuse; they create ambiguity.
More difficult books can generally challenge the reader in ways that simpler books can't. It's this challenge in which we derive value, in which we can reflect.
I would suggest that there's no causal relationship between an artistic novel, a challenging novel, and an entertaining novel. A book can be all three. But "great" books are generally considered to be life changing -- therefore books written primarily for escapism are rarely selected as "great".
Some great books, in my opinion: Les Miserables The Beautiful and the Damned Stranger in a Strange Land Lolita The Picture of Dorian Grey The Count of Monte Cristo The Long Goodbye Fight Club The Sun Also Rises
Note: I would also suggest that the theme of The Giver is far different from that of 1984. It's not really a fair example. I'd more readily compare 1984 and Animal Farm.
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
quote:the enjoyment comes from having read it. Posthumously.
I hope not! Unless, perhaps, you are suggesting a book-reader's religion, where your position in Heaven is higher, the more Great Works you've read? Posted by rivka (Member # 4859) on :
I enjoyed Copperfield. Albeit a well-abridged version. It's long because Dickens was paid by the word, not because it serves any great literary or artistic purpose to be.
Posted by Samprimary (Member # 8561) on :
hard is better. Except when it is not, which is usually the case, because the accessibility of a book and its themes is often in most degrees related to its quality, instead of the other way around.
To put it differently: the difficulty of a book is not a virtue. It is a necessary byproduct of the method of conveying comprehensive themes, which a writer must manage and constrain, much in the way an engine must manage the heat and stress unavoidably generated by its operation. You don't judge the quality of an engine based on how much heat it outputs; you attempt to mitigate heats, frictions, and stresses as much as is possible while maintaining the desired output. When we're talking about books and someone says "a harder work is better," it's analogous to if we were talking about engines and someone was saying "a hotter running engine is better" because they've noticed that engines designed to output stronger horsepower have produced more heat. No. It may be circumstantially related to the function of an increasingly more ambitious product, but to take that correlation further is fallacy.
Posted by T:man (Member # 11614) on :
quote:Originally posted by Aros: Have you ever trudged through David Copperfield? This massive tome isn't that enjoyable.
Hey! I would never call my very enjoyable experience with David Copperfield 'trudging'!
quote:How great could a book that is specifically written for an audience that has minimal experience with reading be?
I think these are some of the best books. Accessibility is very very important, and almost always improves a book. (Although I can think of numerous examples of when a book goes out of its way to be accessible and suffers for it.)
Posted by Vadon (Member # 4561) on :
quote:Originally posted by Samprimary: hard is better. Except when it is not, which is usually the case, because the accessibility of a book and its themes is often in most degrees related to its quality, instead of the other way around.
To put it differently: the difficulty of a book is not a virtue. It is a necessary byproduct of the method of conveying comprehensive themes, which a writer must manage and constrain, much in the way an engine must manage the heat and stress unavoidably generated by its operation. You don't judge the quality of an engine based on how much heat it outputs; you attempt to mitigate heats, frictions, and stresses as much as is possible while maintaining the desired output. When we're talking about books and someone says "a harder work is better," it's analogous to if we were talking about engines and someone was saying "a hotter running engine is better." No. It may be circumstantially related to the function of an increasingly more ambitious product, but to take that correlation further is fallacy.
You pretty much hit the nail on the head.
I think books are better when they challenge me by having depth and complexity. But that doesn't mean I like it when the book is, in itself, challenging. If an author obfuscates themes to make it more of a challenge to understand, then I consider that bad writing. An author shouldn't deliberately make their work difficult to understand.
Sam got it right, though. In order to present comprehensive themes, the book will need to be more difficult. But the difficulty itself doesn't make it better.
It's the same thing with comedy, I think. I believe that Groucho Marx's joke, "Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana" is one of the better jokes out there. It's short, it's easy to understand, but it has depth. It makes a commentary on time, plays with "flies" being a homophone, and has a degree of absurdity in that banana is an inherently funny word. (At least to me.) It's also, I think, why Arrested Development is so loved as a comedy. It's not hard to understand or even "get" the humor. But there's so many layers to the comedy that it's rewarding on repeated viewings.
Posted by SteveRogers (Member # 7130) on :
quote:Originally posted by Aros: More difficult books can generally challenge the reader in ways that simpler books can't. It's this challenge in which we derive value, in which we can reflect.
I think it's making a huge mistake to distill what can challenge a reader to something in such subjective terms. Every reader has a different experience with a work. Some people may get more out of something like the aforementioned The Giver than from 1984 or Animal Farm if they lack the contextual knowledge to understand the points being made in either of the latter works. Upon further readings, a person may continue to get more knowledge out of any of these works despite it being easy to designate one as being simpler than the other based on things like content and style (most oft hailed by academic or academic minded individuals).
For every individual, the experience with a book is defined by their knowledge and personal experience when first reading the work.
It could be argued that it is our own personal growth indepedent of fiction which upon reflection later increases the meaning of a work. After taking a number of history classes and having a greater understanding of history, I got more out of Animal Farm upon an additional reading than I did the first time. But this was because of a change in my life, not because of a change to the text which somehow made it more simple or more challenging.
So, I would make the suggestion that great fiction is great because of the way we respond to it in the singular moment of time in our lives when we read it, for each person individually. This is why so many people define different texts as being great. Because every work is going to be different if we approach it in a time in our lives which is significantly different than a previous encounter with it.
Works, whether simple or "complex," which appeal to some level of the human experience will more often be called great because they'll strike a chord with many different readers in different parts of life. To some extent, this can explain the universal appeal of even abridged works by writers like Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, or Shakespeare. It's not always the way something is written which makes it great or the density of the themes, it's what is written and how that can impact a reader.
I think things like theme and the like often are praised afterwards after having finished a work and made some emotional connection, whether negative or positive, to it.
The thing which makes Faulkner great isn't the complexity of his style or writing; the thing which makes Faulkner great is the way in which he's able to speak truths and humors of what it means to be human.
All in my opinion of course. Posted by dabbler (Member # 6443) on :
An easy example might be short stories. I think there are some absolutely brilliant short stories out there (and we could probably all come up with some) that are "Great." But they are not all hard or complex.
Posted by SteveRogers (Member # 7130) on :
I personally prefer Kurt Vonnegut's short fiction over his novels (as a rule, they seem to be more focused). But I think it'd be an uphill battle to make the argument his short fiction is any less challenging or dense than his novels, but the style and length generally make them simpler reads. Posted by shadowland (Member # 12366) on :
quote:Originally posted by Samprimary: When we're talking about books and someone says "a harder work is better,"...
I think it's worth pointing out that the original statement was switched around from what you have in quotes here. "The better something is, the harder it is" is a different statement with a different meaning, <edit> based on what Foust seems to be trying to convey.
Posted by Tuukka (Member # 12124) on :
I think that much of the time it takes more skill to to write something seemingly simple and easy (yet complex and substantial), as opposed to something obviously complex and hard.
Simplicity is hard. It's even harder to make it seem easy.
An example: A lot of kids under 10 read Little Prince, and enjoy it a great deal. Parents read it to their 3-year old children. It's a really simple book, and easy to understand. Little Prince is also a piece of literary genius - It's very, very hard to write on that level.
Posted by Aros (Member # 4873) on :
Hmm...has me thinking.
Perhaps it could be akin to climbing a mountain? Both the view and the sense of accomplishment of climbing Everest make it worthwhile. Is it "better" than climbing Mauna Kea in Hawaii? Both are huge mountains. Both have spectacular views. One is more difficult and more famous, yes, but does it posses more value?
I like comparing and contrasting Fitzgerald and Hemingway. They were friends, contemporaries. Fitzgerald was very complex. Hemingway was very simple. Ultimately, however, both were profound -- it was merely a question of style. Fitzgerald could provide nuance with his more complicated prose, and some ideas could be better fleshed out, but I don't know that one style was artistically "better" than the other. (Please note, however that I am excepting The Great Gatsby -- I am convinced that Fitzgerald wrote Gatsby in an attempt to more closely emulate Hemingway's clipped style.)
Comparing to film, there have been several great movies in the last few years that have been more accessible to the mass audience -- from Hugo to The Artist to the Batman films to Miyazaki. Are they better or worse than The Science of Sleep, The Fall, or The Tree of Life? Ultimately, the top four most cited best modern films -- The Godfather, Shawshank Redemption, and Back to the Future -- are eminently accessible.
Posted by Samprimary (Member # 8561) on :
quote:Originally posted by Tuukka: I think that much of the time it takes more skill to to write something seemingly simple and easy (yet complex and substantial), as opposed to something obviously complex and hard.
Simplicity is hard. It's even harder to make it seem easy.
Blaise Pascal: "Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte." — I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time. Posted by dabbler (Member # 6443) on :
I'd have agreed with you shadowland, if he didn't use the thread title "hard is better?"
Posted by rivka (Member # 4859) on :
quote:Originally posted by Vadon: I believe that Groucho Marx's joke, "Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana" is one of the better jokes out there. It's short, it's easy to understand, but it has depth. It makes a commentary on time, plays with "flies" being a homophone, and has a degree of absurdity in that banana is an inherently funny word. (At least to me.)
All true. It (or for simplicity, just half of it) is also an example of a sentence that can be parsed (and diagrammed) three different ways, which makes it both fun and great for teaching grammar/usage and parts of speech.
Posted by Foust (Member # 3043) on :
Maybe I explained myself badly, so I'll nutshell it.
Books can be pleasurable because they offer us a better version of our own lives. More powerful, sexier, more exciting, or even more miserable. These are easy stories to tell.
Books can also be pleasurable when we catch a glimpse of their architecture. It takes practice to learn to recognize this. Or, they can be great because they give us something to measure ourselves against. It takes practice to see what is up with Pynchon, not so much with Rowling. Cormac McCarthy measures himself against William Faulkner; no one is measuring themselves against Suzanne Collins (except in terms of profit).
I'm not talking about hard for the sake of hard. Part of Shakespeare's difficulty comes from the King James Bibleness of it all -- that has nothing to do with what I'm saying. Length untranslated passages are also irrelevant.
With all that in mind:
Dabbler, what book do you have in mind?
quote:I agree: great books keep our attention. (I wouldn't use the word "demand"; I might use the word 'draw' or even 'entice'.) Great books reveal new insights when we re-read them. Great books can inspire us to change our behavior.
No, I don't mean they "hold" our attention. Jurassic Park held my attention just fine. I mean they demand it - the careful attention paid to Infinite Jest is repaid in a way that careful attention to Patriot Games is not.
quote:Before I comment-- how versed are you in the genre of fantasy? What do you mean when you say the word "fantasy?"
Seeing as I included Pride and Prejudice as an example. . . I just mean a story that has a better or much worse version of us in it. Mr. Darcy is a fantasy for the ladies (or at least a lot of the women I know, ymmv).
quote:1) Draw and keep the attention of the reader; 2) Reveal new insights on re-read; 3) Inspire change in the behavior of the reader
No, I disagree with your interpretations of 1 and 3.
1) Close attention is repaid, in the way that close attention to a mathematical problem is repaid. Both end in pleasure. I mean careful, analytic reading - not "heck yeah, dude's stabbing the other dude! Turn the page!"
3) Changes or challenges the thinking of the reader. It makes you want to write something in response, whether a critical essay or a novel of your own.
I should have read the whole thread, because now I see Samprimary explains it better than I did.
I don't mean to be equating "running hot" with quality. I was reacting to the common belief that cool engines are just as capable of being awesome.
Dabbler has the right of it as well. The title should be "The better something is, the harder it is".
Posted by SteveRogers (Member # 7130) on :
By that definition isn't all fiction fantasy and therefore easier to write and read? Posted by Blayne Bradley (Member # 8565) on :
Extra Credits makes the point that while you have older books that are definately classics and must reads that may be hard to understand or particularly dense; ie Lovecraft. Newer books are "easier" only so much in the sense that the "craft" of writing has evolved.
Interestingly, there is already a list of Great Books and what qualifies. It was produced originally 60 years ago and a second edition created in 1990. Wiki is helpful here. Adler's criteria:
quote:the book has contemporary significance; that is, it has relevance to the problems and issues of our times; the book is inexhaustible; it can be read again and again with benefit; "This is an exacting criterion, an ideal that is fully attained by only a small number of the 511 works that we selected. It is approximated in varying degrees by the rest."[1] the book is relevant to a large number of the great ideas and great issues that have occupied the minds of thinking individuals for the last 25 centuries.[2]
His list obviously missed the last 60+ years of books (and was clearly western-centric) but the second edition additions can be seen here. Of course now missing anything from the last 20+ years.
I do not imply that I am able to discern Great to any scholarly depth, but I would vote for the Little Prince and the Giving Tree as powerful but initially simple books.
Posted by dabbler (Member # 6443) on :
Oh I agree with Blayne and forgot to make that point myself. Shakespeare was not "hard" for his contemporaries.
Also, Ubb code on a smartphone is totally a pain. But I did it!
Posted by Scott R (Member # 567) on :
quote:1) Close attention is repaid, in the way that close attention to a mathematical problem is repaid.
You could not have found a worse example for me.
quote:3) Changes or challenges the thinking of the reader. It makes you want to write something in response, whether a critical essay or a novel of your own.
I had this reaction to the King/Straub collaboration Black House. But that book was the opposite of great; indeed, it actively undermined the duo's previous effort with the same character (The Talisman).
I've no doubt that going back and re-reading Black House would yield new insights into other works by King, especially since at the time that he was writing Black House, he was trying to tie all his works together through the Gunslinger series.
Given the symbolism and literary devices King and Straub use, it could be argued that Black House demands the attention of the reader in the exact way that you've been suggesting great books do.
But it is far, far, FAR from being a great book. It is, in fact, the worst book I have ever read. A large part of its lack of quality is the literary pretentiousness that drips from the text.
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
As terrible as Black House is (and it is terrible), there's no way I'll accept the assertion that it's worse than Tommyknockers. Posted by Dan_Frank (Member # 8488) on :
I think Scott's pretty much been speaking for me. Thanks Scott!
I probably like many books Foust would consider great (and a whole lot more he wouldn't!)
But I'm all but certain I can't stand many books he would consider great.
And I suspect that in many cases the extent to which a book meets Foust's criteria for greatness is directly related to how tediously pretentious I find that book to be.
[ April 27, 2012, 09:55 PM: Message edited by: Dan_Frank ]
Posted by rivka (Member # 4859) on :
quote:Originally posted by Dan_Frank: I probably like many books Foust would consider great (and a whole lot more he wouldn't!)
But I'm all but certain I can't stand many books he would consider great.
And I suspect that in many cases the extent to which a book meets Foust's criteria for greatness is directly related to how tediously pretentious I find that book to be.
Agree completely.
Posted by Scott R (Member # 567) on :
quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: As terrible as Black House is (and it is terrible), there's no way I'll accept the assertion that it's worse than Tommyknockers.
I haven't read Tommyknockers.
quote: I would vote for the Little Prince and the Giving Tree as powerful but initially simple books.
I haven't read the Little Prince. I used to consider the Giving Tree a powerful book-- after reading it as an adult, I'm kind of mortified by the message.
Same with The Rainbow Fish.
Posted by dabbler (Member # 6443) on :
Scott, I find the giving tree to be compelling because of the mixture of selflessness and selfishness. The discomfort it causes is interesting.
I was lucky enough to read the little prince in the original French in high school.
Posted by SteveRogers (Member # 7130) on :
The Giving Tree in any recent reading comes across, to me, as having a much more succinct theme with some similarities to how I've heard the work of Ayn Rand described (note: I haven't read any Rand myself). And I find that somehow hilarious.
Posted by Synesthesia (Member # 4774) on :
No, this isn't really true. Harder doesn't really mean better. You listen to Mozart and he's fairly simple in a way, but so compelling and GOOD. Something could be a cacophony of sound and not be as good. i think what matters more is the feeling behind it. There's not a perfect formula to art. It either appeals to you, or it doesn't. It's deeply individual.
Posted by T:man (Member # 11614) on :
Haha. I'm glad you brought "great" books up dabbler. I'm currently enrolled in the Great Books College of Chicago and I haven't heard a single definition of a "great" book that anyone shared!
Nothing else to add to the conversation,
toodaloo.
Posted by Dan_Frank (Member # 8488) on :
quote:Originally posted by rivka:
quote:Originally posted by Dan_Frank: I probably like many books Foust would consider great (and a whole lot more he wouldn't!)
But I'm all but certain I can't stand many books he would consider great.
And I suspect that in many cases the extent to which a book meets Foust's criteria for greatness is directly related to how tediously pretentious I find that book to be.
Agree completely.
Yeah, I think it's a sentiment shared by many SF fans. I've definitely seen OSC saying similar stuff in his articles before.
There's a reason we gravitate where we do. And for me, a big part of it is that a lot of the pretentiousness that comes with traditional literary fiction just hasn't penetrated very deeply into SF.
Posted by Teshi (Member # 5024) on :
quote:So no, being hard does not make a book great. But it is very, very rare that an "easy" book is anything but mediocre.
I disagree with your second statement for reasons that were said above.
There are many reasons to write and many different ways to achieve literary greatness, and not all even the worthiest of them necessarily require complexity. In fact, I would argue that approachiability and apparently or real simplicity is more of a challenging goal for a writer in a piece of meaningful literature.
Posted by Foust (Member # 3043) on :
quote:In fact, I would argue that approachiability and apparently or real simplicity is more of a challenging goal for a writer in a piece of meaningful literature.
What's meaningful?
And what does pretentious mean?
Posted by SteveRogers (Member # 7130) on :
Anybody else?
Posted by Destineer (Member # 821) on :
quote:To put it differently: the difficulty of a book is not a virtue. It is a necessary byproduct of the method of conveying comprehensive themes, which a writer must manage and constrain, much in the way an engine must manage the heat and stress unavoidably generated by its operation. You don't judge the quality of an engine based on how much heat it outputs; you attempt to mitigate heats, frictions, and stresses as much as is possible while maintaining the desired output. When we're talking about books and someone says "a harder work is better," it's analogous to if we were talking about engines and someone was saying "a hotter running engine is better" because they've noticed that engines designed to output stronger horsepower have produced more heat. No. It may be circumstantially related to the function of an increasingly more ambitious product, but to take that correlation further is fallacy.
I also want to agree with Sam here (great post). This gets to why I disagree with the sentiment, often expressed by Card and Card fans, that "literary" work is about pretension. It's not. It's about ambition, of which pretension can be a bad side-effect.
The right response to this is not for all authors to focus purely on "story-telling," as Card would have it, and forget about being "literary." Because sometimes there comes a book that succeeds as story-telling just as well as the best OSC novel, and also succeeds at being "literary." (Hyperion is the best example I can think of.)
These are the truly, truly great books. The ones that aren't "hard," that you can get through in a day (and will want to), but that are also ambitious as "literature," and succeed on that count as well.
Posted by odouls268 (Member # 2145) on :
Tortoise and the Hare.
BOOM. Incredible story, life changing for some people. Yet very VERY easy to read.
Rare exception? Or a better rule?
Posted by Dan_Frank (Member # 8488) on :
quote:Originally posted by Destineer:
quote:To put it differently: the difficulty of a book is not a virtue. It is a necessary byproduct of the method of conveying comprehensive themes, which a writer must manage and constrain, much in the way an engine must manage the heat and stress unavoidably generated by its operation. You don't judge the quality of an engine based on how much heat it outputs; you attempt to mitigate heats, frictions, and stresses as much as is possible while maintaining the desired output. When we're talking about books and someone says "a harder work is better," it's analogous to if we were talking about engines and someone was saying "a hotter running engine is better" because they've noticed that engines designed to output stronger horsepower have produced more heat. No. It may be circumstantially related to the function of an increasingly more ambitious product, but to take that correlation further is fallacy.
I also want to agree with Sam here (great post). This gets to why I disagree with the sentiment, often expressed by Card and Card fans, that "literary" work is about pretension. It's not. It's about ambition, of which pretension can be a bad side-effect.
The right response to this is not for all authors to focus purely on "story-telling," as Card would have it, and forget about being "literary." Because sometimes there comes a book that succeeds as story-telling just as well as the best OSC novel, and also succeeds at being "literary." (Hyperion is the best example I can think of.)
These are the truly, truly great books. The ones that aren't "hard," that you can get through in a day (and will want to), but that are also ambitious as "literature," and succeed on that count as well.
Everyone's defining things their own way in this thread, which is understandable but can be confusing.
What characteristics would you call "literary," Destineer? I haven't read Hyperion, but I'm curious what elevated it in your eyes.
Foust, I'll give it a shot (though I'll admit that I think I'm stealing some of this from OSC)...
Pretentiousness is when the author is more interested in showing you how clever they are than in telling an interesting story.
That's still pretty vague, though. Best I can manage for now.
Posted by Destineer (Member # 821) on :
quote: What characteristics would you call "literary," Destineer? I haven't read Hyperion, but I'm curious what elevated it in your eyes.
Mainly allusions and parallels to other works, and to bits of history. Reading Hyperion the first time was as exciting and fun as reading Ender's Game. Going back and re-reading Hyperion after reading Keats's poetry, I discovered a whole different level of depth.
As wonderful as Ender's Game is in terms of story-telling, there's not another book I can hand you and say, "Read this, then go back and re-read Ender's Game. You'll discover something new about it." I'm not saying a great book has to have that aspect, but it adds something--which is why I like Hyperion better.
quote: Pretentiousness is when the author is more interested in showing you how clever they are than in telling an interesting story.
One worry I have about this is that it imputes motive to the author. What can you say about the work itself (rather than the author's intentions in producing it) to tell us whether it's pretentious?
I'm not sure how I'd answer that question myself, by the way. I agree that pretentiousness is a problem with many books, and it does often seem to come from an attitude in the author like the one you describe.
Posted by Foust (Member # 3043) on :
quote:Pretentiousness is when the author is more interested in showing you how clever they are than in telling an interesting story.
I say this is nothing other than anti-intellectualism. It's the same thing that makes one kid make fun of another for knowing the answers in class.
First, assuming the "story" is the most important part of any novel is kind of shallow. If story were the most important thing, remakes of classic movies wouldn't seem so hollow.
Second, what's wrong with being clever? What's wrong with someone say "hey, let's see how far I can push this technique, what new craziness I can up come up..." Why can't you enjoy another's sheer ability?
Posted by Teshi (Member # 5024) on :
I don't have a problem with complexity but I have a problem with complexity being the only storytelling ranking system when it comes to quality.
Meaningfulness is the value of the writing as a cultural thing. Some stories are relatively obvious, like Dickens' A Tale of Two cities but it is culturally a heavy hitter because it employs what English majors call universal themes and a tragic setting. Likewise, Harry Potter is also a heavy hitter because it has mass appeal, even though it's relatively simple to understand-- much simpler than A Tale of Two Cities. Shakespeare's choice of plots are sometimes pretty thin, but his writing is great and elevates even the stupidest of stories to be culturally meaningful. The Man Who Planted Trees is a dead is a dead simple read and yet it is once again a very important work because it reads like a true story and it speaks to people in a simplistic and direct way-- similar to the way Shakespeare appeals if you strip away the language from Romeo and Juliet.
Each of these examples is meaningful and they are all very different. Complexity is one way to be a storyteller. To tell a story that is meaningful without frills or techniqes like unreliable narration or heavy use of cultural metaphorical reference is another way.
Both can be meaningful and significant, whether you understand every word first time or you never understand the story.
quote:Hugo
Oh god, if Hugo is good writing then I'm not in the right thread at all.
Posted by Vadon (Member # 4561) on :
quote:Originally posted by Foust:
quote:Pretentiousness is when the author is more interested in showing you how clever they are than in telling an interesting story.
I say this is nothing other than anti-intellectualism. It's the same thing that makes one kid make fun of another for knowing the answers in class.
First, assuming the "story" is the most important part of any novel is kind of shallow. If story were the most important thing, remakes of classic movies wouldn't seem so hollow.
Second, what's wrong with being clever? What's wrong with someone say "hey, let's see how far I can push this technique, what new craziness I can up come up..." Why can't you enjoy another's sheer ability?
Painting the comment as "anti-intellectualism" seems to be a bit of a stretch. I'm not someone who seeks opportunities to engage in literary criticism. I find debates on whether the social interpretation of a piece is more valuable than authorial intent boring. Likewise, discussions of subjective and objective value in a text makes me want to pull what little is left of my hair out.
There's nothing wrong with being clever. There's nothing wrong with your wit being the centerpiece of your writing. I think the issue Dan was highlighting was one of two possible things--when your cleverness insists on itself or when your attempt at being clever fails at the expense of other redeeming qualities (like a good story).
On the first possibility, if I feel like I'm being belittled as a reader, that I am somehow less of a person than the author, I don't want to keep reading. I have enough problems in my life, do I really want a library filled with books that hate me? It may be true (and most often is) that the author is smarter than me, but that doesn't mean I need to be insulted by the book. Defenders of these works tell me that I just don't appreciate the wit, or I don't "get it." They tell me that I would love it, if only I understood it. The problem is that much of the time, I do get it. Why should it be that the "wit" of a piece makes it exclusive? I'd prefer to be invited to share in the cleverness. Don't mock me. Tease me. Let me have fun with your writing. I should respect your cleverness because your cleverness demands I respect it--and by extension, you. It shouldn't be that you tell me to respect your cleverness.
The second possibility is when they fail at being clever in the first place. I don't know if it's the correct application of the term, since I do tend to avoid these debates. But I have heard it described as "purple prose." The Wikipedia entry on the subject has some good examples of it. But to explain the issue as I see it, imagine if a comedy series tries to do a "very special episode" and the episode is a flop. This is more than a problem of having simply made a bad episode. They made it at the expense of what is valued in the show--that it's a comedy. (Assuming that the introduction of drama took away from the comedy.)
Neither possibility is what I'd consider to be anti-intellectual.
Posted by rivka (Member # 4859) on :
quote:Originally posted by Vadon: Painting the comment as "anti-intellectualism" seems to be a bit of a stretch. I'm not someone who seeks opportunities to engage in literary criticism. I find debates on whether the social interpretation of a piece is more valuable than authorial intent boring. Likewise, discussions of subjective and objective value in a text makes me want to pull what little is left of my hair out.
There's nothing wrong with being clever. There's nothing wrong with your wit being the centerpiece of your writing. I think the issue Dan was highlighting was one of two possible things--when your cleverness insists on itself or when your attempt at being clever fails at the expense of other redeeming qualities (like a good story).
I agree with all of this.
Posted by Icarus (Member # 3162) on :
quote:Originally posted by Foust: How many YA books use an unreliable narrator, for example? I doubt many at all, because its a technique people need to learn to recognize and understand.
Unreliable narrators are extremely common in YA. I would say they are more common than not, and in fact I use one in my YA novel. Many times an unreliable narrator is one of the charms that a YA novel holds for an adult reader, who is able, thanks to greater experience, to recognize when the narration doesn't match what's actually happening.
For a particularly acute example of a narrator that is unreliable and chronically dishonest, read Liar by Justine Larbalestier.
-o-
I don't think it's accurate to say that Orson Scott Card doesn't distinguish between books that have literary merit and books (or other entertainments) that do not. Read enough of his reviews and it's clear he does value thought-provoking works of entertainment.
Rather, I believe OSC thinks that a deeper book can have greater merit, but that university literature departments are especially poor judges of when a book has such merit, likely to both assign merit to a book that lacks it and discount merit in a book that has it. Honestly, I don't totally disagree with him.
In my mind, Ender's Game is literary. It makes me think about real-world moral dilemmas, it doesn't provide pat answers to those dilemmas, and it rewarded repeated reading right up until the point where I practically knew it by heart. I would say Speaker for the Dead is even better.
quote:Originally posted by Foust: [A]ssuming the "story" is the most important part of any novel is kind of shallow.
I don't know that it's the most important part, but I think it's a necessary first requirement. As far as I'm concerned as a consumer of fiction, if a book or a movie fails as a story, it fails entirely. No amount of profundity or poetic exercise can redeem it. If it succeeds as a story but fails to be deeper than that, well it's a successful story, and that's a good thing in its own right.
Posted by Dan_Frank (Member # 8488) on :
quote:Originally posted by Icarus:
quote:Originally posted by Foust: [A]ssuming the "story" is the most important part of any novel is kind of shallow.
I don't know that it's the most important part, but I think it's a necessary first requirement. As far as I'm concerned as a consumer of fiction, if a book or a movie fails as a story, it fails entirely. No amount of profundity or poetic exercise can redeem it. If it succeeds as a story but fails to be deeper than that, well it's a successful story, and that's a good thing in its own right.
Bingo!
Well said.
Posted by Destineer (Member # 821) on :
I wouldn't say story is essential for me. I certainly don't go looking for a story when I read a poem. Sometimes I like to read fiction looking for the same things I find in good poetry (mainly evocative imagery and interesting associations). The very best novels tell a good story, but there are novels I've enjoyed that don't really tell much of a story.
The same goes twice over for movies. With a visual medium, again, story is one way to excel, but it's dispensable if the other parts are interesting enough. Mulholland Drive is a great example.
Posted by SteveRogers (Member # 7130) on :
quote:Originally posted by Destineer: The same goes twice over for movies. With a visual medium, again, story is one way to excel, but it's dispensable if the other parts are interesting enough. Mulholland Drive is a great example.
I think this can be true only to an extent. A lot of movies which are visually feasts are so lacking in story and substance they become practically indigestible. The most recent Zak Snyder film Sucker Punch is a good example. I went to see it with some friends for what we call a "bro-down," and the movie was certainly a buffet of spectacle. But the writing and story were so lacking it ultimately failed as a film. The same could be said for many Michael Bay films.
There needs to be a balance, and I think the same could be said for written fiction as well.
Posted by Destineer (Member # 821) on :
I'm definitely not talking about Michael Bay movies!
One thing about film for me, more than any other medium, is that after watching a lot of movies in my life, I've started to crave variety. Movies that ditch the usual tools of narrative and replace them with something else can be a pleasure just because they're usually something fresh and new.
I imagine some people feel that way about books, after reading a lot of them.
Posted by Destineer (Member # 821) on :
This is what I'm talking about. Something really different! Lynch is great for that.
Posted by SteveRogers (Member # 7130) on :
quote:Originally posted by Destineer: One thing about film for me, more than any other medium, is that after watching a lot of movies in my life, I've started to crave variety. Movies that ditch the usual tools of narrative and replace them with something else can be a pleasure just because they're usually something fresh and new.
Oh, most definitely. In my personal life, I think I've gone in the opposite direction. I started out really enjoying things written in less than traditional ways (Chuck Palahniuk, Douglas Adams, and Kurt Vonnegut are some good examples), so I've found myself gravitating towards works written in more traditional structures lately. So, I can see how this can go both ways.
Posted by Foust (Member # 3043) on :
quote:I don't know that it's the most important part, but I think it's a necessary first requirement. As far as I'm concerned as a consumer of fiction, if a book or a movie fails as a story, it fails entirely. No amount of profundity or poetic exercise can redeem it. If it succeeds as a story but fails to be deeper than that, well it's a successful story, and that's a good thing in its own right.
(emphasis added)
Yes, well, if it is a matter of getting what you paid for, then whatever is the most fun is obviously the best. Therefore Jurassic Park is the best novel I've ever read, and As I Lay Dying was the worst.
You might say calling yourself a "consumer" is an incidental turn of phrase, but I do think that a lot of readers think of themselves as customers who are paying for an experience.
Consumers pay for a particular product. But a lot of writers aren't trying to create a particular kind of product - they're trying to create something new and strange, an answer to a past tradition, the attempt to found a new tradition, or the attempt to just make something that would stand entirely on its own.
quote:Meaningfulness is the value of the writing as a cultural thing. Some stories are relatively obvious, like Dickens' A Tale of Two cities but it is culturally a heavy hitter because it employs what English majors call universal themes and a tragic setting. Likewise, Harry Potter is also a heavy hitter because it has mass appeal, even though it's relatively simple to understand-- much simpler than A Tale of Two Cities.
So "meaningful" is about the number of people that... find it meaningful? I'm not sure I follow your definition. Anyways, I can't see how your concept of meaningfulness could include someone like Samuel Beckett. Maybe he'd be perfectly happy to be labeled meaningless, but I do get the feeling that you are using meaningfulness in opposition to triviality.
quote:Likewise, discussions of subjective and objective value in a text makes me want to pull what little is left of my hair out.
Me too, surprisingly - but I think there is a value in pointing out the distinction between awesomeness (a giant robot using a giant sword to stab another giant robot right in his giant face like in Transformers) and greatness (the sheer pointless beauty of Infinite Jest).
It seems like a lot of people are just willing to stop with awesomeness, and think any bit of art that is utterly unconcerned with being awesome is therefore pretentious.
I do think that's what people mean when they say "pretentious": not awesome.
quote:On the first possibility, if I feel like I'm being belittled as a reader, that I am somehow less of a person than the author, I don't want to keep reading.
Ok, then quit reading. Or, you know, become a better reader. Do you really think Thomas Pynchon sat down at his typewriter and thought "Today, I will make Vadon feel stupid"? Dude, he wasn't thinking of you at all. He was thinking of ideas.
Posted by SteveRogers (Member # 7130) on :
You're suggesting someone should "become a better reader" essentially because they don't define great literature in the same way you do?
Posted by Foust (Member # 3043) on :
Just so no one says I'm saying they only like Michael Bay movies, I'll revamp my criticism of the term pretentious.
Kids start out by reading Dick and Jane. If a kid is only interested in reading Dick and Jane after a certain age, we think that's a little strange. They're supposed to graduate to Where the Wild Things Are. Eventually, if the kid enjoys reading, they'll move on to Harry Potter.
Each one involves a jump in skill and effort.
I think some adults hit a plateau, and then stay there the rest of their lives. Some people stop with Harry Potter, others stop with Jonathan Franzen. But they do stop; they never make a jump that is equivalent to the move from Dick and Jane to Harry Potter.
"Pretentious" is the term for books that would require a given reader to make that sort of jump.
Posted by Foust (Member # 3043) on :
quote:Originally posted by SteveRogers: You're suggesting someone should "become a better reader" essentially because they don't define great literature in the same way you do?
Vadon wasn't defining great literature, he was justifying his lack of interest in it.
Posted by SteveRogers (Member # 7130) on :
So, you're of the opinion that the word "pretentious" can never actually be applied to a book?
Edit:
The alleged justification for lack of interest seems like a definition for what doesn't qualify as "great" literature. Or that's how I read it at least.
[ April 30, 2012, 01:59 AM: Message edited by: SteveRogers ]
Posted by Foust (Member # 3043) on :
quote:So, you're of the opinion that the word "pretentious" can never actually be applied to a book?
Never said that.
Posted by SteveRogers (Member # 7130) on :
Oh, I wasn't saying you did. It was a question. You said you feel the word "pretentious" can be used to describe a work which would require a leap in difficulty which would potentially deter a reader. I was taking it to its logical extreme to see to where on that spectrum you referred.
Posted by rivka (Member # 4859) on :
quote:Originally posted by Foust: Vadon wasn't defining great literature, he was justifying his lack of interest in it.
I don't believe that is accurate.
Posted by Vadon (Member # 4561) on :
quote:Originally posted by Foust:
quote:Originally posted by SteveRogers: You're suggesting someone should "become a better reader" essentially because they don't define great literature in the same way you do?
Vadon wasn't defining great literature, he was justifying his lack of interest in it.
To be fair (to myself?), I was justifying my lack of interest in literary discussions. And I wasn't justifying it so much as asserting it--unless you count being bored or frustrated by them a form of justification.
As for whether I tried to define what makes a book great, I think it's fair to say I was. At least, in so far as I was trying to clarify Dan's position such that he's not confused with being anti-intellectual. It's entirely possible I misrepresented Dan and I would defer to his clarification, should he provide one.
That said, I do believe it's possible for a work to be pretentious. I also believe it's possible for a work to be both pretentious and great. But I contend that pretentiousness (perhaps as defined by Dan) does not contribute to the quality of a piece--it hinders it. I would further say that the suggestion I become a "better reader" exemplifies the very attitude I criticized. I love a challenge. I am passionate about self-improvement and expanding my horizons. If I encounter a piece that's too difficult for me to comprehend, I try to learn what is necessary such that I can understand it. But I like being challenged by the text, not by the author or people who tell me I'll be a "bad reader" if I don't enjoy it.
Posted by Foust (Member # 3043) on :
quote:But I like being challenged by the text, not by the author or people who tell me I'll be a "bad reader" if I don't enjoy it.
Luckily, you're not reading a novel I've written.
I think if you really liked being challenged by books, you wouldn't have the reaction of "this author is making me feel stupid, I quit." It would be more along the lines of "this author is making me feel stupid, I should figure it out".
Posted by SteveRogers (Member # 7130) on :
I think a good writer can be capable of communicating new ideas without using content or style which by it's very nature belittles a reader by potentially alienating them.
Posted by Foust (Member # 3043) on :
quote:I think a good writer can be capable of communicating new ideas without using content or style which by it's very nature belittles a reader by potentially alienating them.
A question begging extravaganza up in here.
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
quote: I do think that's what people mean when they say "pretentious": not awesome.
No. I mean Jonathan Franzen.
Or, heck, let's look at something more genre-appropriate, like The Magicians. Because there's a book that confuses "literary" with "pretentious," to the extent that it drapes pretentious signalling -- not actual meaningful insights, mind, but all the semiotic alerts that tell the reader "Hey, here's an insight!" -- over every tired trope and then gets called "literary" by the establishment. It's a book that is a conscious response to allegory that for whatever reason seems to think that the allegories to which it's responding don't contain enough meaning to be relevant.
Pretentious books, for me, are the ones that desperately wave their hands at you, trying to get your attention. "Look at this plastic bag waving in the wind! It's a symbol! Look at the initials of this guy's name! Look at how clever I, the writer, am attempting to be while adopting this trope and theme already thoroughly explored in genre fiction!"
You can often recognize the worst sort of "literary" book by its cover. Does it have a quote from the New Yorker on it? Does the blurb suggest that someone is dying of cancer while his or her spouse is contemplating an affair with someone who has AIDS (although AIDS was pretty '90s, now that I think about it, and the diseases have moved on.) Is the author being heralded as the next Faulkner? Is it about a Southern lawyer, but not actually about a legal case? Does everyone in it have the midlife crises you'd expect a fifty-something, slightly embittered writer to have?
Another example: Confederacy of Dunces. It's a book that anyone who's gone for an English degree will have read, but which everyone pretends isn' f**king terrible. Because it's terrible. It's a terrible, terrible, terrible book that fails on every single level of bookishness, but which somehow the "establishment" decided was "important" because it danced rather obviously and tritely over themes they cared about.
Or, heck, let me worry at authors I like. I've already mentioned Eco. Consider Pinchon, now. Or Joyce. Or Danielewski. Or Calvino. I really enjoy all of their books. Sometimes they're rewarding on a purely "puzzley" level, where I feel some pride in "solving" the novel; other times, I find myself admiring the intricacy of the construction. Every now and then, their obliqueness produces a turn of phrase that a more direct approach would not have generated. But at the end of the day, can I really say that any of their novels are "worth it," are really more meaningful? And I'm speaking here as somebody who had a whole semester on Ulysses, mind.
[ April 30, 2012, 07:30 AM: Message edited by: TomDavidson ]
Posted by Foust (Member # 3043) on :
I would accept a lot of what Tom said as a legitimate use of the word pretentious - but it is clear that each of those things is a failure on the part of the author - recycling tropes while pretending not to, etc.
That being said, House of Leaves is both pretentious and awesome. Heidegger quoted in German? Faux Derrida speak? So awesome and so ridiculous.
Posted by mr_porteiro_head (Member # 4644) on :
quote:Second, what's wrong with being clever? What's wrong with someone say "hey, let's see how far I can push this technique, what new craziness I can up come up..." Why can't you enjoy another's sheer ability?
I enjoy a writer's sheer ability to the same extent I enjoy a musician's sheer ability, as a means, not an end. It can be a marvel to behold, but if I get no more out of it than a demonstration of virtuosity, I will quickly tire of it.
quote:I think some adults hit a plateau, and then stay there the rest of their lives. Some people stop with Harry Potter, others stop with Jonathan Franzen. But they do stop; they never make a jump that is equivalent to the move from Dick and Jane to Harry Potter.
"Pretentious" is the term for books that would require a given reader to make that sort of jump.
I don't think so. It's quite possible to "get" a book, for it to not require a jump, and to still find it pretentious.
Posted by SteveRogers (Member # 7130) on :
quote:Originally posted by Foust:
quote:I think a good writer can be capable of communicating new ideas without using content or style which by it's very nature belittles a reader by potentially alienating them.
A question begging extravaganza up in here.
Maybe I should clarify. I think I'll do so borrowing a quote from Tom.
quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: Pretentious books, for me, are the ones that desperately wave their hands at you, trying to get your attention. "Look at this plastic bag waving in the wind! It's a symbol! Look at the initials of this guy's name! Look at how clever I, the writer, am attempting to be while adopting this trope and theme already thoroughly explored in genre fiction!"
I was saying I feel a good writer can communicate new ideas without becoming a tool of their own style and content choices. If the content and style are, for lack of a better word, showboat-y, then it's likely the work will alienate a reader by the author's own choice to communicate them that way. How effectively can a writer communicate new ideas if no one reads their work or has a positive experience with a work?
[ April 30, 2012, 10:38 AM: Message edited by: SteveRogers ]
Posted by Samprimary (Member # 8561) on :
quote:Originally posted by Foust: Heidegger quoted in German?
Foust, you need to edit your post. No good and decent forum can abide mention of Heidegger.
Posted by Synesthesia (Member # 4774) on :
quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson:
quote: I do think that's what people mean when they say "pretentious": not awesome.
No. I mean Jonathan Franzen.
Or, heck, let's look at something more genre-appropriate, like The Magicians. Because there's a book that confuses "literary" with "pretentious," to the extent that it drapes pretentious signalling -- not actual meaningful insights, mind, but all the semiotic alerts that tell the reader "Hey, here's an insight!" -- over every tired trope and then gets called "literary" by the establishment. It's a book that is a conscious response to allegory that for whatever reason seems to think that the allegories to which it's responding don't contain enough meaning to be relevant.
Pretentious books, for me, are the ones that desperately wave their hands at you, trying to get your attention. "Look at this plastic bag waving in the wind! It's a symbol! Look at the initials of this guy's name! Look at how clever I, the writer, am attempting to be while adopting this trope and theme already thoroughly explored in genre fiction!"
You can often recognize the worst sort of "literary" book by its cover. Does it have a quote from the New Yorker on it? Does the blurb suggest that someone is dying of cancer while his or her spouse is contemplating an affair with someone who has AIDS (although AIDS was pretty '90s, now that I think about it, and the diseases have moved on.) Is the author being heralded as the next Faulkner? Is it about a Southern lawyer, but not actually about a legal case? Does everyone in it have the midlife crises you'd expect a fifty-something, slightly embittered writer to have?
Wally Lamb books maybe? I never want to read him again. She's Come Undone was good the first time I read it but I read it several more times and realized it was a TERRIBLE book full of stereotypes and misery. Same with I know this much is true, which I tried to read recently only to get irritated by it. I can't say I'm anti-intellectual, and sometimes I am deeply bugged by OSC ranting about the common man and elitists while at the same time being confused by it. I just want to read things that are good and don't bog me down in a swamp of misery.
Posted by Samprimary (Member # 8561) on :
quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: You can often recognize the worst sort of "literary" book by its cover. Does it have a quote from the New Yorker on it? Does the blurb suggest that someone is dying of cancer while his or her spouse is contemplating an affair with someone who has AIDS (although AIDS was pretty '90s, now that I think about it, and the diseases have moved on.) Is the author being heralded as the next Faulkner? Is it about a Southern lawyer, but not actually about a legal case? Does everyone in it have the midlife crises you'd expect a fifty-something, slightly embittered writer to have?
Sam, someday I'm going to need to buy you a beer. Posted by SteveRogers (Member # 7130) on :
quote:Originally posted by Samprimary:
quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: You can often recognize the worst sort of "literary" book by its cover. Does it have a quote from the New Yorker on it? Does the blurb suggest that someone is dying of cancer while his or her spouse is contemplating an affair with someone who has AIDS (although AIDS was pretty '90s, now that I think about it, and the diseases have moved on.) Is the author being heralded as the next Faulkner? Is it about a Southern lawyer, but not actually about a legal case? Does everyone in it have the midlife crises you'd expect a fifty-something, slightly embittered writer to have?
You know, I seem to remember hearing good things about that book from a friend of mine. Posted by rivka (Member # 4859) on :
quote:Originally posted by mr_porteiro_head: It's quite possible to "get" a book, for it to not require a jump, and to still find it pretentious.
Exactly.
Posted by SteveRogers (Member # 7130) on :
What's really pretentious is when a writer writes about a writer who writes pretentiously with the intention of being overly pretentious in an ironic statement regarding literary trends towards pretentiousness in books heralded by a literary elite. Then it's layer upon layer upon layer of pretention. With the intention of saying. . . something. But the message is so lost among the ironic pretention thus making the work itself pretentious despite the intentional attempt to be pretentious for the sake of pretention.
That's so meta.
[ April 30, 2012, 11:28 AM: Message edited by: SteveRogers ]
Posted by Samprimary (Member # 8561) on :
quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: Sam, someday I'm going to need to buy you a beer.
Aww, thanks. Then I can tell you the story about how I almost literally defenestrated A Confederacy Of Dunces, but thought better of it because someone might see it outside, pick it up and read it, and I would not be able to live with myself. Wait, I just told you that story. Okay, instead I will tell you about central novel protagonist and southern lawyer and part-time writer Lance Paragon Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
Lance Paragon? That's so retro! In a world filled with protagonists like Onwi Allmann and Will Bland, Lance Paragon stands out as a callback to a lost age of pure heroism. Unless it's meant ironically, of course.
Posted by SteveRogers (Member # 7130) on :
Another vague note on pretentious content, I often think of the film Synecdoche, New York written and directed by Charlie Kaufman. There's a lot of time in the film spent on imagery and metaphor and what have you. Ad nauseum however. Ultimately, the themes sort of beat the viewer over the head and greatly decrease the effectiveness of the actual narrative to the point the film becomes an ineffectual mess of half-baked images and unexplored story possibilities.
I suppose, on that note, I fall into the camp where I feel the writing (including things like theme and "cleverness") should work in service of the story and not vice versa.
I find my experience with Kaufman to tenderly toe this line between being clever and challenging to a point of almost trying too hard. I often can't decide whether to think of the man as a genius or as a hack wearing genius clothes.
Posted by mr_porteiro_head (Member # 4644) on :
quote:I suppose, on that note, I fall into the camp where I feel the writing (including things like theme and "cleverness") should work in service of the story and not vice versa.
That's a good way of putting it.
Posted by Icarus (Member # 3162) on :
quote:Originally posted by Destineer: I wouldn't say story is essential for me. . . . Sometimes I like to read fiction looking for the same things I find in good poetry (mainly evocative imagery and interesting associations). . . . The same goes twice over for movies. With a visual medium, again, story is one way to excel, but it's dispensable if the other parts are interesting enough. Mulholland Drive is a great example.
I find that fascinating. I can't identify with it at all, but I appreciate your perspective.
For myself, narrative is such a crucial part of, well, everything. It's the basis of my enjoyment of sports. Heck, I find theme park rides lacking if the story is generally incoherent (eg., Universal Studios).
-o-
quote:Originally posted by Foust: Yes, well, if it is a matter of getting what you paid for, then whatever is the most fun is obviously the best. Therefore Jurassic Park is the best novel I've ever read, and As I Lay Dying was the worst.
You might say calling yourself a "consumer" is an incidental turn of phrase, but I do think that a lot of readers think of themselves as customers who are paying for an experience.(emphasis added)
I did not call myself a customer; that was your word. I called myself a consumer, and, more importantly, I supplied the word with an object. Thus I was not using consumer as economic shorthand of "one who pays for things," but rather to mean "one who absorbs fiction." The turn of phrase was not used incidentally.
quote:But a lot of writers aren't trying to create a particular kind of product - they're trying to create something new and strange, an answer to a past tradition, the attempt to found a new tradition, or the attempt to just make something that would stand entirely on its own.
Fair enough, which was why I made a point of stating that my definition of artistic success or failure was personal:
quote:As far as I'm concerned as a consumer of fiction, . . . (emphasis added)
See? Not incidental at all. A work may have achieved what the artist wanted, but in my personal paradigm it may nevertheless be a failure. If the artist succeeded at something I deem secondary while failing at something I consider central to the experience, then I deem the work a failure.
quote:"Pretentious" is the term for books that would require a given reader to make that sort of jump.
I disagree. Tom has already answered this point pretty well in my opinion. When I call something pretentious, I don't mean I didn't understand it. It may or may not be true that I didn't understand it; the two concepts are orthogonal. What I mean by "pretentious" was that I found the creator's attempt to demonstrate his or her intelligence tedious.
I enjoy witnessing mastery, but I do not enjoy witnessing somebody showing off. If a basketball player has to make some crazy double-clutch backhanded play to make a shot, I think that's awesome. If the player makes the same maneuvers and gyrations while unopposed on a fast break, I find it show-offy and annoying. The difference? Whether the mastery was used in the service of some greater purpose than just making me admire the performer. Which, in the case of fiction, brings me back to . . . story.
quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: Another example: Confederacy of Dunces. It's a book that anyone who's gone for an English degree will have read, but which everyone pretends isn' f**king terrible. Because it's terrible. It's a terrible, terrible, terrible book that fails on every single level of bookishness, but which somehow the "establishment" decided was "important" because it danced rather obviously and tritely over themes they cared about.
I . . . I think I love you.
Posted by Icarus (Member # 3162) on :
Incidentally, I think A Confederacy of Dunces, ironically enough, is so highly regarded precisely because of narrative. Not its own internal narrative, which is crap of of course, but the surrounding meta-narrative of the genius who, finding the world unwilling to appreciate his masterwork, commits suicide only for his mother to champion the work into publication, placing it before the eyes of a world that, all-too-late, appreciates the value of what is now lost.
The misunderstood, unappreciated hero. We'll miss him when he's gone. It's a phenomenal story. Hell, it was a hit for Don McLean.
Even when want it to be otherwise, most of us are narrative junkies.
Posted by SteveRogers (Member # 7130) on :
quote: I enjoy witnessing mastery, but I do not enjoy witnessing somebody showing off. If a basketball player has to make some crazy double-clutch backhanded play to make a shot, I think that's awesome. If the player makes the same maneuvers and gyrations while unopposed on a fast break, I find it show-offy and annoying. The difference? Whether the mastery was used in the service of some greater purpose than just making me admire the performer. Which, in the case of fiction, brings me back to . . . story.
This is my opinion on the matter as well.
Edit:
Just because a writer is capable of writing something which is stylistically challenging or unnecessarily difficult to navigate doesn't make it the best possible way to communicate that writer's themes or ideas.
Posted by kmbboots (Member # 8576) on :
quote:Originally posted by Foust: That being said, House of Leaves is both pretentious and awesome. Heidegger quoted in German? Faux Derrida speak? So awesome and so ridiculous.
To what purpose?
Posted by Samprimary (Member # 8561) on :
quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: Lance Paragon? That's so retro! In a world filled with protagonists like Onwi Allmann and Will Bland, Lance Paragon stands out as a callback to a lost age of pure heroism. Unless it's meant ironically, of course.
I .. i don't know. i don't know how to unironically make an ironic unironic ironic novel with an ironic callback to lost age of pure heroism who may instead be unironic retro, which might make it ironic?
Posted by mr_porteiro_head (Member # 4644) on :
Reading what Icarus has said about writing here makes me want to read his writing.
Posted by Dan_Frank (Member # 8488) on :
quote:Originally posted by Destineer: I'm definitely not talking about Michael Bay movies!
But why aren't you? (More below)
quote:Originally posted by Destineer: One thing about film for me, more than any other medium, is that after watching a lot of movies in my life, I've started to crave variety. Movies that ditch the usual tools of narrative and replace them with something else can be a pleasure just because they're usually something fresh and new.
I imagine some people feel that way about books, after reading a lot of them.
You (and maybe I'm conflating your point and Foust's, but I'm pretty sure what I have to say applies to both you and Foust) established that story/narrative/etc. doesn't have to be the sole or primary purpose of a work of fiction, right? If it's suitably fresh or new or challenging or something then it's good, even if the story is nonexistent or incoherent crap.
So, you can't dismiss Michael Bay movies on the same grounds that, say, I or probably Icarus/Tom/Steve/etc. might dismiss them... that is, the terrible story. Because story can be secondary!
If that's the case, though, then the best reason I can think of that you're so quick to dismiss Michael Bay movies and their ilk is that they are wildly popular (there are hundreds like them), so they're no longer "fresh and new."
If Michael Bay movies were unpopular to most people, and very rare, then I imagine you'd say "Oh man, the story is terrible but this is so fresh and new!" and Foust would say "Who cares about the story? Bay was doing something so much more than that. All the plebes who don't like his films just don't get it."
So, there but for the grace of the average movie-watcher go you?
Posted by Dan_Frank (Member # 8488) on :
quote:Originally posted by Icarus: I enjoy witnessing mastery, but I do not enjoy witnessing somebody showing off. If a basketball player has to make some crazy double-clutch backhanded play to make a shot, I think that's awesome. If the player makes the same maneuvers and gyrations while unopposed on a fast break, I find it show-offy and annoying. The difference? Whether the mastery was used in the service of some greater purpose than just making me admire the performer. Which, in the case of fiction, brings me back to . . . story.
I think it's worse than that, Icarus. Let me repost something from last page...
quote:Originally posted by Foust: First, assuming the "story" is the most important part of any novel is kind of shallow. If story were the most important thing, remakes of classic movies wouldn't seem so hollow.
Second, what's wrong with being clever? What's wrong with someone say "hey, let's see how far I can push this technique, what new craziness I can up come up..." Why can't you enjoy another's sheer ability?
Dismissing story and venerating "cleverness" like this seems to me more akin to someone who's got their touchdown victory dance down to an art form... but never bothers to actually play football.
You do them too much credit when you say it's "mastery used to make you admire the performer," because that assumes there's actual mastery.
How can you call it mastery when they eschew the most essential element of creating a work of fiction? Is a lifeguard who can't swim but looks great in a speedo a "master?" How about a blacksmith who can't even make a horseshoe but knows how to get a really nice fire going?
Posted by mr_porteiro_head (Member # 4644) on :
quote:How about a blacksmith who can't even make a horseshoe but knows how to get a really nice fire going?
Actually, managing the forge is an essential element of smithing, and one of the first things apprentices learn.
Posted by SteveRogers (Member # 7130) on :
quote: Originally posted by Foust: First, assuming the "story" is the most important part of any novel is kind of shallow. If story were the most important thing, remakes of classic movies wouldn't seem so hollow.
I think the reason remakes generally seem hollow IS because they're just a story which has already been told rehashed again. In fact, I don't really understand this original statement at all.
Edit:
Some remakes seem hollow because they're the same stories retold. Whereas some remakes succeed because they take the original story in a new direction. If anything, that supports the importance of story in this example.
Posted by Dan_Frank (Member # 8488) on :
Yeah, I know MPH. My partner does a lot of metalworking. I was more thinking a fire in general, not specifically managing a good forge fire (which doesn't have a lot in common with, say, a camp fire, at least as far as I've heard. Is that wrong?)
In any event, I also included that in an attempt to allow that some of the skills Foust is so fond of might actually serve a good writer well when creating a real work of fiction (one with a story)... but taken in isolation the skill has little to do with "good writing" (or "good smithing")
Posted by Samprimary (Member # 8561) on :
quote:Is a lifeguard who can't swim but looks great in a speedo a "master?"
Is a contemporary artist who can't draw or do anything more complicated than a squiggle on an otherwise empty canvas or a cube of orange plastic on an otherwise empty white table (entitled: "Mal traduit dans un navigateur pour mettre sur quelque chose pour le faire paraître plus branché: Cycle of the Knowing of sisyphean-worldSuicide") but looks great in an Armani outfit at his own neo-symbolic performance piece premiere a master?
wait a minute why am I not doing this for a living
Posted by Icarus (Member # 3162) on :
quote:Originally posted by mr_porteiro_head: Reading what Icarus has said about writing here makes me want to read his writing.
Go write to the publishers and tell them they don't have enough borderline YA/MG novels with boy protagonists! Posted by Aros (Member # 4873) on :
quote:Originally posted by Dan_Frank:
If that's the case, though, then the best reason I can think of that you're so quick to dismiss Michael Bay movies and their ilk is that they are wildly popular (there are hundreds like them), so they're no longer "fresh and new."
If Michael Bay movies were unpopular to most people, and very rare, then I imagine you'd say "Oh man, the story is terrible but this is so fresh and new!" and Foust would say "Who cares about the story? Bay was doing something so much more than that. All the plebes who don't like his films just don't get it."
So, there but for the grace of the average movie-watcher go you?
I see where you're going with this. I am somewhat in the same vein -- I consider myself the ultimate consumer. My time is limited, so I don't rewatch anything (television, film), replay anything, nor reread anything. It's a huge world, and I can't get to a lot of the interesting indie stuff.
That said, I love a lot of media / medium that can be considered "bad". Some films may not take alienate a portion of the audience (Scott Pilgrim), have a rediculous premise (Shoot 'em Up), are schlocky (Repo: The Genetic Opera), are rather slow (The Fall), or focus too heavily on action (Kill Bill). The unifying factor, however, is that -- taken holistically -- they still retain value.
Michael Bay and the Transformers are a good example. I don't think that these movies are bad because the story is terrible (and Kurtzman and Orci are great screenwriters). It's more than that, as the first and third movie didn't have the worst story (as clunky as certain lines / story elements were). It's the fact that they are made to be a product more than a movie, and are thus disingenuous. Moreover, they are SO blatantly disingenuous, they are difficult to watch. We could talk further about the fact that they don't respect source material, that the action is too clunky with shakycam, etc, but the truth is the only respect in which they succeed is that they have some humor and enormous action set pieces. And that isn't enough.
I think it's the same with any art. If you ask me my top 50 movies, I'm going to include some titles that (to you) are really flawed, real stinkers. If you ask my top 10, I'll have to omit some of the movies I loved (that have major flaws), but there may be a few with problems.
Flawed art, while not always on our top ten lists, is beloved despite its problems. Then again, how many people would put Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure on their top ten list? <awkwardly raises hand>
Posted by Samprimary (Member # 8561) on :
quote:Originally posted by Icarus:
quote:Originally posted by mr_porteiro_head: Reading what Icarus has said about writing here makes me want to read his writing.
Go write to the publishers and tell them they don't have enough borderline YA/MG novels with boy protagonists!
I think the problem is more that they do, but they could stand to be more, say, icarus-written. That way they might stand out more against the hordes of bald mary sues and their various psycho-metaphor dreamboat attachments.
Posted by Icarus (Member # 3162) on :
*laugh*
You're too kind! Posted by mr_porteiro_head (Member # 4644) on :
Is MG the category "below" YA?
Posted by Dan_Frank (Member # 8488) on :
Yeah, "Middle-Grade" I believe.
Posted by Dan_Frank (Member # 8488) on :
quote:Originally posted by Samprimary:
quote:Is a lifeguard who can't swim but looks great in a speedo a "master?"
Is a contemporary artist who can't draw or do anything more complicated than a squiggle on an otherwise empty canvas or a cube of orange plastic on an otherwise empty white table (entitled: "Mal traduit dans un navigateur pour mettre sur quelque chose pour le faire paraître plus branché: Cycle of the Knowing of sisyphean-worldSuicide") but looks great in an Armani outfit at his own neo-symbolic performance piece premiere a master?
wait a minute why am I not doing this for a living
You are everything that is wrong with modern art. Or, you want to be, which is almost as bad.
You know I realized in reference to my comments above, that one might say: "X author could write good story too, they just chose not to! They were more interested in showing their cleverness by writing Y and Z."
Which is the equivalent of saying "No no, that lifeguard could swim out there and save that person, but they chose not to because they just applied a new coat of oil and they want to let us admire the glare off their abs!"
Posted by Icarus (Member # 3162) on :
quote:Originally posted by mr_porteiro_head: Is MG the category "below" YA?
Yeah. I had the poor sense to come up with a YA story that needed a young protagonist, so I fall into kind of a no-man's land with the book currently out being shopped. (We're a long way from dead in the water with it, though.) Books like mine do get published: Gary Schmidt's Okay for Now is a pretty good comp book, I'd say. But it's a harder sell than if I'd found a way to make the story less wrenching or the protagonist two years older.
Posted by Destineer (Member # 821) on :
quote: I find that fascinating. I can't identify with it at all, but I appreciate your perspective.
For myself, narrative is such a crucial part of, well, everything. It's the basis of my enjoyment of sports. Heck, I find theme park rides lacking if the story is generally incoherent (eg., Universal Studios).
I take it this means you don't like much poetry?
quote:Originally posted by Dan_Frank:
quote:Originally posted by Destineer: One thing about film for me, more than any other medium, is that after watching a lot of movies in my life, I've started to crave variety. Movies that ditch the usual tools of narrative and replace them with something else can be a pleasure just because they're usually something fresh and new.
I imagine some people feel that way about books, after reading a lot of them.
You (and maybe I'm conflating your point and Foust's, but I'm pretty sure what I have to say applies to both you and Foust) established that story/narrative/etc. doesn't have to be the sole or primary purpose of a work of fiction, right? If it's suitably fresh or new or challenging or something then it's good, even if the story is nonexistent or incoherent crap.
So, you can't dismiss Michael Bay movies on the same grounds that, say, I or probably Icarus/Tom/Steve/etc. might dismiss them... that is, the terrible story. Because story can be secondary!
If that's the case, though, then the best reason I can think of that you're so quick to dismiss Michael Bay movies and their ilk is that they are wildly popular (there are hundreds like them), so they're no longer "fresh and new."
If Michael Bay movies were unpopular to most people, and very rare, then I imagine you'd say "Oh man, the story is terrible but this is so fresh and new!" and Foust would say "Who cares about the story? Bay was doing something so much more than that. All the plebes who don't like his films just don't get it."
So, there but for the grace of the average movie-watcher go you?
The thing is, it's not hard to list a million ways Michael Bay movies are shit, besides just the story. The directing is very bad, the writing is cliche at every level, and people in Michael Bay movies just don't act like human beings.
For example, compare "Armageddon" to a great (absolutely awesome) movie about very similar subject matter: Danny Boyle's "Sunshine." Both are about a space mission to save the world. The difference is that in "Armageddon," when something goes wrong, Steve Buscemi makes a stupid joke. In "Sunshine," when something goes wrong with the mission, the guy responsible for the mistake becomes suicidal. That is the stuff of great cinema. Michael Bay is the stuff of terrible cinema.
Now, this is partly a story-based critique. That's fine! Not every movie has to tell a good story, or a complete one, for it to be worth my time. But the ones that try to tell a story, as their main thing, had better succeed at telling a good one. And the ones that don't try to tell a story had better have something else interesting about them (like the images in "Mulholland Drive," which I will never forget as long as I live).
Also, you seem to think I'm using "fresh" to mean the opposite of "popular." Not so. "Fresh" just means I personally haven't seen the same thing a million times before. The Simpsons was once fresh for me, now it's not. Not everything fresh is good, and not everything good has to be fresh, but it helps (especially in movies).
The short version: story is one way to excel. There are other ways. A work of art had better excel in one way or another. Bay's movies do not excel in any way.
Posted by Dan_Frank (Member # 8488) on :
Those all looked like story critiques of Bay, except his directing I guess? But yeah, acting and reacting like human beings, cliche dialogue... that's all 100% in the wheelhouse of story, isn't it?
But if we say:
Bay isn't trying to tell a good story, he doesn't care about something as shallow as "story." You just don't understand his genius. He's exposing the terrible, beautiful radiance of man's last seconds before death, symbolized by The Explosion, which is the predominant theme in his films.
He's showing how we move numbly from one stage of our lives to another, little more than wooden cutouts gliding across irrelevant setpieces, until that one, glorious moment where nothing else matters but The Explosion....
Then why does story matter? It's so pedestrian to care about things like that. His films are about so much more than that!
Posted by Icarus (Member # 3162) on :
quote:Originally posted by Destineer: I take it this means you don't like much poetry?
Good question.
I don't consider narrative to be a central or crucial aspect of poetry (which is why I've mostly emphasized that I'm talking about my criteria for successful fiction, except in the piece you quoted, where I strayed into theme park rides ). I'm a lot more relaxed about things that require less of an investment in time for me. So for a bit of flash friction, a nice bit of frisson is sufficient even if the story is lacking or nonexistent. I can enjoy short stories that do things that would enrage me in novels. I've appreciated poetry or music that has just created an image or conveyed an idea or belief.
I'm more likely to appreciate such poetry the shorter it is, though.
I don't discount poetry (just like I don't discount prose fiction) merely for being dense and difficult to decode. However, I think the decoding of poetry has become fetishized in academic circles to the point where it is easy for a student to conclude that this is all we do with poetry and that this is the only meter by which poetry is judged. And consequently, I think the crafting of impenetrable poetry has become fetishized by those who would be considered worthy by academics. Doesn't mean denseness is bad, but again I'd like to see a compelling idea, or powerful imagery, or an emotional pull, as well as perhaps intricate symbolism.
(I have to acknowledge here that I *don't* spend a lot of my free time reading poetry, and so I won't be able to hold my own in a discussion of specific works for very long once you get beyond what I learned in undergraduate and graduate school as a literature major. But that doesn't mean I don't appreciate poetry at all or that I have no use for it. On the other hand, I think singer-songwriters are the true modern descendants of the poets of centuries ago.)
Tell me, do you like Taylor Mali, or do you consider him, I dunno, populist garbage?
Posted by Samprimary (Member # 8561) on :
It is me, by the way, who does not like poetry, and find it to be a medium struggling with issues of its own relevance. At any rate, it doesn't speak to me in most cases.
Posted by Dan_Frank (Member # 8488) on :
quote:Originally posted by Icarus: I'm a lot more relaxed about things that require less of an investment in time for me. So for a bit of flash friction, a nice bit of frisson is sufficient even if the story is lacking or nonexistent. I can enjoy short stories that do things that would enrage me in novels. I've appreciated poetry or music that has just created an image or conveyed an idea or belief.
Yeah, I think I agree with this.
But I also agree with you about singer/songwriters, and I very rarely find poetry that truly appeals to me.
Edit: Yeah, Sam's ninja comment has a ring of truth.
Posted by Icarus (Member # 3162) on :
*nod* I am pretty passionate about the singer/songwriters I admire, and I do focus on the lyrics, and approach them as--in my mind at least--poetry.
Posted by Aros (Member # 4873) on :
Poetry was what perennial layabouts did before Facebook.
Posted by Destineer (Member # 821) on :
quote:Those all looked like story critiques of Bay, except his directing I guess? But yeah, acting and reacting like human beings, cliche dialogue... that's all 100% in the wheelhouse of story, isn't it?
Not 100%, I would say. Even the most non-narrative films (like the "Rabbits" short I linked to on the second page) contain dialogue. The reactions of the characters I would file under the heading of "character development," which is usually considered separate from plot (although related).
But Dan, is your point really that there's no identifiable way Michael Bay movies go wrong, except in terms of story? The story is the only way these movies fall short?
That point of view gives Bay far too much credit as a technical filmmaker and a crafter of visual art, in my opinion.
A movie with a story as bad as "Transformers," but which succeeded visually, and in its use of music, the way "Sunshine" or the JJ Abrams "Star Trek" succeeded, would have been a somewhat worthwhile work of art.
Posted by Destineer (Member # 821) on :
quote:Tell me, do you like Taylor Mali, or do you consider him, I dunno, populist garbage?
Not familiar, to be honest.
I agree that poetry is in some ways a dying form, but I do think it has some virtues, and there are novels that don't succeed as stories, but which still co-opt some of the virtues of poetry. It's hard to make a whole book work just on the basis of being poetic, but I would say it still happens, when the author's voice is strong enough. Naked Lunch might be the best example of this that I've read.
Posted by Icarus (Member # 3162) on :
You should check out Crank by Ellen Hopkins. It's a verse novel--but it also has a hell of a searing story.
And it's YA.
Posted by Dan_Frank (Member # 8488) on :
quote:Originally posted by Destineer: But Dan, is your point really that there's no identifiable way Michael Bay movies go wrong, except in terms of story? The story is the only way these movies fall short?
*Kicks dirt sheepishly.*
Aw, shucks. Noooo, I suppose not!
But seriously: as absurd and ridiculous as my earlier "defense" of Bay was, I have a similar reaction when I see people try to justify their appreciation for "art" like, well, that short film you linked earlier. Or, hell, Joyce. You can dress up your analysis of it in all the pretense you want, but in the end it still really does just look like a bunch of incoherent nonsense to me.
quote:Originally posted by Destineer: That point of view gives Bay far too much credit as a technical filmmaker and a crafter of visual art, in my opinion.
A movie with a story as bad as "Transformers," but which succeeded visually, and in its use of music, the way "Sunshine" or the JJ Abrams "Star Trek" succeeded, would have been a somewhat worthwhile work of art.
I'm not sure I agree, or at least not significantly. I haven't seen Sunshine (though I'd like to, because Boyle knows how to tell a good story ), but I certainly can't imagine ever sitting through Abrams' Star Trek if you drained out the story and replaced it with some flavor of "clever," obfuscated, piece of "art."
PS: Please forgive my liberal use of scare quotes.
Posted by Destineer (Member # 821) on :
quote:Originally posted by Dan_Frank: But seriously: as absurd and ridiculous as my earlier "defense" of Bay was, I have a similar reaction when I see people try to justify their appreciation for "art" like, well, that short film you linked earlier. Or, hell, Joyce. You can dress up your analysis of it in all the pretense you want, but in the end it still really does just look like a bunch of incoherent nonsense to me.
I'm not going to defend Joyce; I largely dislike his work and agree that it's pretentious (although I like the childhood scenes from Portrait of the Artist all right). Let's look at the example of the "Rabbits" movie, though. "Incoherent nonsense" is a good label for what's going on in the film, I absolutely agree. I don't think that's incompatible with its being a good little movie, though.
Clearly it's supposed to have a dream-like feel, and dreams often consist of incoherent nonsense. This gets to the thing I like about the movie: it evokes in me the feeling of having a weird, sort of scary dream. Which is a feeling I enjoy. If you don't enjoy that feeling, I can understand why you don't like it. But now that I've explained my reaction to it, I imagine you can understand why I like it.
So the issue is, is either of us exhibiting a more highly-developed sense of taste than the other? That's a hard thing to argue, of course. The way to break the tie, though, is not to simply assert that story is absolutely necessary for a work of art to be good. Everyone agrees there can be good art without story (paintings and sculptures, if nothing else).
Posted by SteveRogers (Member # 7130) on :
Are we discussing writing (films, novels, etc.)? Or visual art like paintings and sculptures? Because I don't think the same rules really apply.
Posted by Destineer (Member # 821) on :
And as Icarus pointed out, most people agree that short works of fiction don't need to be story-focused in order to succeed. Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" is one example--the story is really nothing except for a description of a setting.
Posted by Destineer (Member # 821) on :
The lines blur in the case of film, because it's also a visual art form.
In any case, I would say that many poems and novels are more similar to paintings than stories in their purpose. A work like Naked Lunch or "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" isn't there to tell a story. It's there to put images in your head. The same goes for many poems (like "Ozymandias").
Posted by Dan_Frank (Member # 8488) on :
You've got some good points, Destineer. As always!
I think that I've been conflating some of my arguments, a possibility I acknowledged above. I don't necessarily think that any piece of art that lacks a story is inherently pretentious.
I do think that when it comes to novels and feature length films, I have very little patience for art that lacks any sort of cohesive story. And, in general, whether it's a painting/sculpture (which absolutely can have a story, by the way, and some of the best of it usually does in my opinion), or a short story, or a short film, I do tend to gravitate towards art that has a coherent story.
That said, in those latter mediums (the ones that can be consumed quickly) I have more tolerance for a piece of art that just wants to describe a setting or give me a vivid image. In short fiction I have more tolerance for gimmicks, too. Which I think is related.
Re: the Rabbits film, yeah, I don't really remember my dreams, almost ever. So that really does nothing for me, but you could argue I'm not the target audience I suppose.
Ultimately, though, this is all a side conversation to Foust's assertion, isn't it? Even if a piece of art can be good without a story (and I think I can comfortably concede that you're right, it can, with the aforementioned caveats/parameters)... it doesn't need to be hard, does it? Even if your goal is to be dreamlike, or to create vivid imagery, wouldn't doing either of those things in the clearest and most accessible way be a good thing?
Posted by Destineer (Member # 821) on :
Yeah, I also find lack of story easier to overlook at shorter lengths. Perhaps that's because story is normally the reason one needs a longer work like a novel or feature film. If you're trying to do something other than tell a story, it's often not so hard to accomplish that in a shorter work.
quote:Ultimately, though, this is all a side conversation to Foust's assertion, isn't it? Even if a piece of art can be good without a story (and I think I can comfortably concede that you're right, it can, with the aforementioned caveats/parameters)... it doesn't need to be hard, does it? Even if your goal is to be dreamlike, or to create vivid imagery, wouldn't doing either of those things in the clearest and most accessible way be a good thing?
I completely agree. More accessible is always better, if you can acheive the same aesthetic success with it. I take it this is what Sam was getting at earlier.
I also think that you're right that this is a side discussion, but it's an important one, because I think the view that story alone is what matters is a very natural overreaction when disagreeing with a view like Foust's. It's especially interesting here at Hatrack because OSC seems prone to the same reaction.
Posted by Dogbreath (Member # 11879) on :
I think it's easy to conflate the ability of challenging literature to illuminate and bring out greatness with the greatness itself. My rhetorical skills are a little weak at the moment, so I'll make a (very imperfect) analogy to explain what I mean.
I'm an avid hiker, and live in one of the most beautiful places in the world. I find that the strenuous nature of the hikes help awaken my senses to appreciate beautiful scenery in a way that, say, just getting out of bed and looking at it never would. Anyone who's ever been at the peak of a mountain, legs sore, arms and back aching, goosebumps from sweat rapidly cooled by the cold wind, gazing out into infinity knows there's something to the experience that merely looking at pictures or even looking out from an airplane or helicopter can't replicate.
But the beauty is already there. The hike may help bring it out, make you more appreciative of it, but the hike isn't point. If it was, you could have the same experience (with much less risk) going to the gym or going rock climbing at an indoor arena. (and these are both activities people find immensely enjoyable, but only in a cathartic or entertaining way) In the same way, I actually really enjoy challenging literature, at least when it's done in a clever way instead of being tedious. I enjoy poetry. I like the way it stretches and exercises my imagination, and, in the same way I enjoy going to the gym or running, I can enjoy slogging my way through a difficult book or poem for no reason other than I appreciate the ingenuity and complexity.
It's not what makes a book great or beautiful, though. It's merely a tool that allows one to appreciate a refined beauty that might not be as noticeable, or visible at all, in a simpler location.
Posted by Foust (Member # 3043) on :
quote:Foust, you need to edit your post. No good and decent forum can abide mention of Heidegger.
Ehhh he was, on occasion, a great writer.
On occasion.
quote:I don't think so. It's quite possible to "get" a book, for it to not require a jump, and to still find it pretentious.
This is true. But in my experience, the claim of a book being pretentious and requiring a jump correlate quite well.
There's a reason Harry Potter is so popular among adults.
quote:How effectively can a writer communicate new ideas if no one reads their work or has a positive experience with a work?
Is it possible that a book would maintain a tiny readership just because it would require a huge jump in reading ability from most people?
I think the problem with your position, Steve, is that you don't seem to differentiate between those jump books and books that are just bad. Your requirement is "lots of people find it meaningful," which could easily be the same as "lots of people find it easy."
quote:I suppose, on that note, I fall into the camp where I feel the writing (including things like theme and "cleverness") should work in service of the story and not vice versa.
And I think this criteria means Faulkner, Gaddis, and even some Cormac McCarthy must all be bad. Heck, even GGR Martin does this from time to time.
quote:I did not call myself a customer; that was your word. I called myself a consumer, and, more importantly, I supplied the word with an object. Thus I was not using consumer as economic shorthand of "one who pays for things," but rather to mean "one who absorbs fiction." The turn of phrase was not used incidentally.
I know you meant this, but I see nothing in your position to distinguish you from a customer.
quote:I enjoy witnessing mastery, but I do not enjoy witnessing somebody showing off. If a basketball player has to make some crazy double-clutch backhanded play to make a shot, I think that's awesome. . . .Whether the mastery was used in the service of some greater purpose than just making me admire the performer.
But you seem to think that "greater purpose" is plot. What other examples of a greater purpose can you think of?
quote:
quote:That being said, House of Leaves is both pretentious and awesome. Heidegger quoted in German? Faux Derrida speak? So awesome and so ridiculous.
To what purpose?
Can you clarify?
Posted by Kwea (Member # 2199) on :
quote:Originally posted by Destineer: And as Icarus pointed out, most people agree that short works of fiction don't need to be story-focused in order to succeed. Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" is one example--the story is really nothing except for a description of a setting.
One of the best short stories ever, IMO, and one of the only ones that has stayed with me to the point that I remember it years after reading it.
Posted by SteveRogers (Member # 7130) on :
quote:Originally posted by Foust:
quote:How effectively can a writer communicate new ideas if no one reads their work or has a positive experience with a work?
Is it possible that a book would maintain a tiny readership just because it would require a huge jump in reading ability from most people?
I think the problem with your position, Steve, is that you don't seem to differentiate between those jump books and books that are just bad. Your requirement is "lots of people find it meaningful," which could easily be the same as "lots of people find it easy."
I'm really not sure I agree with your definition of these "jump" books because it's come across as way to essentially say repeatedly people who find a book pretentious simply weren't intelligent enough to get it. And I really don't think that should play much of a role.
That basically constitutes literary discrimination by saying, "If you aren't smart enough to get this book I think is great, then you don't read 'great' literature."
Edit:
I think using the term "jump" book is a way to excuse pretentious books which are just poorly written by putting the blame on the reader instead of on the writer. Or to excuse books which seem to have been written as an opportunity for the writer to attempt to show off how smart they feel they are instead of telling a story.
quote:Originally posted by Foust:
quote:I suppose, on that note, I fall into the camp where I feel the writing (including things like theme and "cleverness") should work in service of the story and not vice versa.
And I think this criteria means Faulkner, Gaddis, and even some Cormac McCarthy must all be bad. Heck, even GGR Martin does this from time to time.
If you think the stylistic choices made by Faulkner and McCarthy take precedence over their story, then that's an entirely different issue. In a number of my posts, I've specifically said Faulkner works because his unique style still serves a story which relates to a reader.
Edit:
I also feel I should clarify I feel theme is also a key factor in great literature, but I think a good writer can weave it into a story without being heavy handed, belittling a reader, or being clever just for the sake of being clever. A great work can be one with a powerful theme subtly woven into a compelling story written in graceful prose which poses little unnecessary threat to a reader. For me, a good example of this is Animal Farm by George Orwell. It's a compelling and interesting story told in a simple, almost fairy tale-esque style which can relate to a reader, but there also various themes at work throughout the book which are so subtle they can allude a reader who lacks a background in history. But even still, a reader who doesn't catch the references to historical events can STILL get thematic growth from what essentially constitutes a morality tale.
[ May 01, 2012, 10:38 AM: Message edited by: SteveRogers ]
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
Cormac McCarthy is bad.
Posted by SteveRogers (Member # 7130) on :
I must admit my experience with Cormac McCarthy is limited only to The Road and No Country for Old Men.
Posted by The Rabbit (Member # 671) on :
quote:This is true. But in my experience, the claim of a book being pretentious and requiring a jump correlate quite well.
There's a reason Harry Potter is so popular among adults.
I'm not sure what you think that reason might be. Perhaps you should elaborate because a lot of the adults I know who are big Harry Potter fans are University Professors or have Ph.Ds.
Posted by mr_porteiro_head (Member # 4644) on :
quote:
quote:I don't think so. It's quite possible to "get" a book, for it to not require a jump, and to still find it pretentious.
This is true. But in my experience, the claim of a book being pretentious and requiring a jump correlate quite well.
If this is true, then your definition of pretentiousness is, at best, inadequate.
Posted by kmbboots (Member # 8576) on :
quote:Originally posted by Foust:
quote:
quote:That being said, House of Leaves is both pretentious and awesome. Heidegger quoted in German? Faux Derrida speak? So awesome and so ridiculous.
To what purpose?
Can you clarify?
Sure. What was the author's purpose in quoting Heidegger? Did it further the plot? Convey information about the character? Evoke a sense of the scene? Communicate an idea or emotion?
Posted by Foust (Member # 3043) on :
quote:Cormac McCarthy is bad.
Blood Meridian is my favorite book, so there might be a bunch of things we don't see eye to eye on.
quote:I'm really not sure I agree with your definition of these "jump" books because it's come across as way to essentially say repeatedly people who find a book pretentious simply weren't intelligent enough to get it. And I really don't think that should play much of a role.
Or, we could conclude that the claim of pretentiousness often says more about the reader than the book itself.
We could just drop it is a critical term altogether. Why is it so important to be able to call a book pretentious? Because it gives us an excuse as to why we aren't interested in it. Why not just say it isn't your cup of tea?
If you really want to say "different strokes for different folks," then just say it. I don't get any enjoyment out of James Joyce or Samuel Beckett in the slightest, I think reading them is like watching grass grow - but that doesn't make me dumb and it doesn't make them pretentious.
It's important to point out that while I've spoken of good readers and bad readers, I've never once spoken of intelligence (except in a rhetorical statement to Vadon). It's all of you who keep doing that. What I'm saying has nothing to do with being smart or dumb.
Reading is a skill, and some people are better at it than others. Two people of entirely equal intelligence can have unequal reading skills, just like they can have entirely unequal mathematical skills.
Quality requires skill to appreciate. We don't think a 10 year old is dumb when they can't appreciate Shakespeare, especially from the written page. Reading Shakespeare requires a certain level of skill, and the things in Shakespeare that create that requirement are a large part of what makes him great.
Anyone who wants to insist that everything in writing must serve the plot is free to rewrite Hamlet. See if your version is remembered in ten years. (You could always add in some creepy sexual politics like a certain someone in order to generate buzz)
quote:That basically constitutes literary discrimination by saying, "If you aren't smart enough to get this book I think is great, then you don't read 'great' literature."
Literary discrimination, I love it. But again, you're the one talking about being smart.
Posted by Foust (Member # 3043) on :
quote:Originally posted by kmbboots:
quote:Originally posted by Foust:
quote:
quote:That being said, House of Leaves is both pretentious and awesome. Heidegger quoted in German? Faux Derrida speak? So awesome and so ridiculous.
To what purpose?
Can you clarify?
Sure. What was the author's purpose in quoting Heidegger? Did it further the plot? Convey information about the character? Evoke a sense of the scene? Communicate an idea or emotion?
The last two. It was a passage about the uncanny, or better yet the un-homelike. It was pretentious because I don't think the author had ever actually read Being and Time. Or at least he dragged a passage from it out of all context and dropped it in just to enhance the faux-academic writing. Plus, it quoted him in the original German (I think, I don't have a copy with me). I mean, come on. And the Derrida faux speak was played for laughs.
Posted by Samprimary (Member # 8561) on :
quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: Cormac McCarthy is bad.
The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.
The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.
tl;dr - no, you Posted by The Rabbit (Member # 671) on :
So I've been thinking for several days about what makes a good or great book. Here's what I've come to.
A good book has to stimulate the reader. That can mean a lot of different things. A good book might stimulate emotion, curiosity, imagination, understanding, laughter, anger, fear, arousal or compassion, but if it doesn't stimulate something -- it's not a good book. To be a great book, I think it has to stimulate the reader in ways that have a lasting effect on the way the reader understands people, the world and their relationship to it.
Naturally, people are going to vary a great deal in what they find stimulating and in what kinds of stimulation they prefer. I think the underlying question is whether this is simply a matter of individual preference or if some types of stimulation are fundamentally greater than others. There is an unstated assumption among the literati, which is I think reflected in Foust's commentary, that to be great, a story must stimulate a certain flavor of deep abstract intellectual thoughts. I have yet to find any justification for that assumption that doesn't boil down to elitism.
I think that if some forms of stimulation are of intrinsically greater worth than others, it is because they have a more lasting and profound effect on the way we think and act. By that standard, much of the highly acclaimed literature I've read doesn't rank any better than your average murder mystery.
[ May 01, 2012, 02:56 PM: Message edited by: The Rabbit ]
Posted by SteveRogers (Member # 7130) on :
quote:Originally posted by The Rabbit: There is an unstated assumption among the literati, which is I think reflected in Foust's commentary, that to be great, a story must stimulate a certain flavor of deep abstract intellectual thoughts. I have yet to find any justification for that assumption that doesn't boil down to elitism.
I think that's been more or less the point I've been trying to make regarding the state of what is "pretentious."
Posted by Raymond Arnold (Member # 11712) on :
quote:To be a great book, I think it has to stimulate the reader in ways that have a lasting effect on the way the reader understands people, the world and their relationship to it.
Something I've been wondering about lately: how many books can realistically alter someone's worldview meaningfully? (Or, how often can you experience a book totally blowing your mind)
It seems like there are books that tend to impact people if they read them at certain ages, when their identities are in flux. I'm not sure if they have to be read at those ages, or if those ages just correlate with people discovering particular works.
My current hypothesis is that you can only have your worldview dramatically shifted so many times before it solidifies, and you probably can't radically shift it that often (so even as an impressionable college student, you're unlikely to, say, get blown away by Ayn Rand and the immediately get blown away by some opposing story).
How many books have you read that blew you away at the time? Would they blow you away if you read them now?
Books I recall really impacting me:
1) "The Giver" 2) "Ender's Game" 3) "Xenocide" (moreso than Ender's Game for me) 4) "Worthing Saga" (hey, got to experience the "The Giver Mind Blown Experience" twice!)
5) "Eisenhorn", by Dan Abnett and "Traitor" by Matthew Stover books. (Two bizarrely good "made to crank out cash for a franchise" stories. Neither told me the moral of the story, and I felt obligated to figure it out myself, which was an interesting experience.)
6) Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (sort of the "anti-Worthing-Saga". Also gave me the "born again X" experience. This worldview I had always sort of had suddenly got validated and magnified, complete with followup obnoxious evangelizing)
I don't expect to read many more books that change me radically, but I feel like I'm missing "The Moby Dick experience," wherein I'm able to appreciate a really complex work not just for its surface layer(s), but for the way it interacts with complex life experiences that I just haven't had yet.
I'm 25. For people who are... say, 35+, what have you read AFTER your early twenties that really impacted you, and did it do so in ways that were similar or distinct from 20s- experiences? Can you describe it?
[ May 01, 2012, 03:37 PM: Message edited by: Raymond Arnold ]
Posted by The Rabbit (Member # 671) on :
I would add one more thing. I think that to be truly great, a story has to be true. I don't mean that it can't be fiction or that all the details must be factually correct and realistic. I mean that the story must reflect the essential or genuine nature of life in some meaningful way.
Too many authors excel in telling "half truths" too well. V.S. Naipaul, for example, does an incredible job of telling half the truth about Trinidad but his tales are so misanthropic and bitter that they end up being mere caricatures. In the story "The ones who walk away from Omelas", Le Guin writes
quote:The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.
Intellectuals are quick to recognize the shallow dishonesty of happy stories but fail to recognize that stories that show only suffering and evil are equally dishonest and shallow.
[ May 01, 2012, 04:36 PM: Message edited by: The Rabbit ]
Posted by mr_porteiro_head (Member # 4644) on :
You don't have to be intellectual to fall into that trap.
At least, I don't consider myself intellectual.
[ May 01, 2012, 03:53 PM: Message edited by: mr_porteiro_head ]
Posted by Vadon (Member # 4561) on :
quote:Originally posted by Foust: Or, we could conclude that the claim of pretentiousness often says more about the reader than the book itself.
We could just drop it is a critical term altogether. Why is it so important to be able to call a book pretentious? Because it gives us an excuse as to why we aren't interested in it. Why not just say it isn't your cup of tea?
If you really want to say "different strokes for different folks," then just say it. I don't get any enjoyment out of James Joyce or Samuel Beckett in the slightest, I think reading them is like watching grass grow - but that doesn't make me dumb and it doesn't make them pretentious.
It's important to point out that while I've spoken of good readers and bad readers, I've never once spoken of intelligence (except in a rhetorical statement to Vadon). It's all of you who keep doing that. What I'm saying has nothing to do with being smart or dumb.
Reading is a skill, and some people are better at it than others. Two people of entirely equal intelligence can have unequal reading skills, just like they can have entirely unequal mathematical skills.
Quality requires skill to appreciate. We don't think a 10 year old is dumb when they can't appreciate Shakespeare, especially from the written page. Reading Shakespeare requires a certain level of skill, and the things in Shakespeare that create that requirement are a large part of what makes him great.
Anyone who wants to insist that everything in writing must serve the plot is free to rewrite Hamlet. See if your version is remembered in ten years. (You could always add in some creepy sexual politics like a certain someone in order to generate buzz)
I think we might actually be pretty close to a consensus here. You've asked why having the term "pretentious" is so important when we could simply say that a certain work isn't our cup of tea. But that leaves the question of "why isn't it your cup of tea?" You've said it's an excuse for saying we're not interested in a piece, but if we simply say we're not interested in it (It not being my cup of tea) people will want to know the excuse or reason why we're not interested.
For example, I'm a nerd who doesn't particularly like Star Wars. Saying the series isn't my cup of tea doesn't usually appease my nerd cohorts. They demand a justification with charts and graphs and everything.
If I describe a book as pretentious and cite it as my reason for not liking it, that doesn't obligate you to also believe the work is pretentious. It is simply my subjective reason for the book not being my cup of tea. You can think I'm wrong, and I have no problem with that because I do believe that "different strokes for different folks" applies. If the reason you think I'm wrong is because you think I'm a bad reader or that I didn't get it, then there are many cases where I would object to your reason. If you simply say that you don't find the work pretentious and therefore think I'm wrong in my reasons for not liking a book, I have no beef.
Also, I'd argue that Disney's The Lion King has survived past ten years as a rewrite of Hamlet's basic plot. Posted by Samprimary (Member # 8561) on :
What if you don't consider happiness stupid, but you also portray non-banal evil and non-boring pain?
Posted by The Rabbit (Member # 671) on :
quote:Originally posted by Samprimary: What if you don't consider happiness stupid, but you also portray non-banal evil and non-boring pain?
Examples?
Honestly, I enjoyed stories of horrors far more when I was younger and more naive. The more I have experienced and witnessed real life evil and suffering, the less entertaining I find it.
[ May 01, 2012, 04:35 PM: Message edited by: The Rabbit ]
Posted by The Rabbit (Member # 671) on :
quote:I'm 25. For people who are... say, 35+, what have you read AFTER your early twenties that really impacted you, and did it do so in ways that were similar or distinct from 20s- experiences? Can you describe it?
Why do people who are 25 assume that their life is over? Maybe it is for some people, if so what a horrid waste. You only stop having mind blowing experiences at 25 if you stop using your mind. Perhaps as you age change become more of an evolutionary process than a revolutionary process but true revolutionary changes are rare at any age.
Since you asked, here are some examples of books that have had a profound impact on me since I was 25.
In my late 20's, I was profoundly impacted by Gandhi's autobiography and a related collection of books on non-violence. The book "Paddle to the Amazon" inspired me to buy a canoe, a sport which I have now enjoyed for over two decades.
In my thirties I started reading a lot more science fiction, fantasy and magical realism. For me, OSC's books don't qualify as "great literature" but they do have great moments. One of the most memorable for me is the scene in Speaker for the dead where Ender meets human. That's had some significant influence on the way approach science. It's made me more wary of rejecting data that doesn't fit my model. In general, I think reading fantasy, science fiction and magical realism have had a profound impact on my understanding of the importance of imagination to being human. It's made me contemplate the question of why fantasy is the most enduring form of human story telling. I no longer dismiss it as "light reading".
In my thirties I was also strongly influenced by books by Wallace Stegner. They've have given me valuable insight into my adult friendships.
Some of the authors that have had a significant impact on me in 40s include Thich Nhat Hahn and Mary Midgley. Most recently, I read the Glass Bead Game which has had an impact on the way I think about and approach intellectualism and literature. Sunday evening I watched the BBC version of "MacBeth". Even though I've read and seen MacBeth numerous times, that performance caused me to connect some things I've never connected before.
Personal development only ends in your twenties if you choose to let it.
Posted by Raymond Arnold (Member # 11712) on :
It wasn't so much that I expected to stop developing, as I expected subsequent developments to feel less intense, or high intensity ones to happen less frequently. I did mean the question earnestly, not "clearly I will never experience this again, prove me wrong if you dare."
Orson Scott card books had a major impact on me as a teenager, but when I go and read similar books now, they're merely "good" (sort of the way you describe them).
My Dad's spent the past several years being continously blown away by Moby Dick, which I finally last year and thought was "merely good", but which I could imagine having more meaning for me if I had more experience to integrate it into. So I know there was definitely *something* more to come, but it seemed to be a different kind of experience than what I've had so far.
I felt like there were qualitative differences in the ways I heard people of different ages describe reading experiences.
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
Speaking for myself, there's very little I've read since I was 20 or so that's had any kind of real impact.
Posted by SteveRogers (Member # 7130) on :
There may be a biological explanation for that to an extent. I think some of that may have to do with the slowed progress of the brain's biological progression shortly after young adulthood. When our brains are still expanding to fully develop the capacity for problem solving or decision making, I think one's worldview (which can be shaded by decision making) could be reasonably said to be malleable.
Once that stops, one could infer it'd be more difficult to make drastic changes in that department.
Grey matter and white matter and blah blah blah. It's finals week, so I don't want to go into anymore psychological detail than necessary outside of my actual finals.
Edit:
After posting, I also thought that could potentially play into the idea I often hear expressed that you really only listen to the music you enjoyed as a late teenager for the rest of your life.
Posted by Raymond Arnold (Member # 11712) on :
quote:After posting, I also thought that could potentially play into the idea I often hear expressed that you really only listen to the music you enjoyed as a late teenager for the rest of your life.
quote:It wasn't so much that I expected to stop developing, as I expected subsequent developments to feel less intense, or high intensity ones to happen less frequently.
Everything is really intense as a teenager. Teenagers lack perspective so everything seems of critical life changing importance. But as you get older, your perspective on what was actually of life altering importance changes. This is not to say that nothing that happens in your teen years is formative and life altering -- it's just that we rarely recognize what is truly of life altering importance at the time.
Perhaps I am not really the best person to speak to this question since I never had an experience as a teenager with a work of fiction that "blew my mind". The stuff that blew my mind as a kid was all science, philosophy and religion.
Posted by SteveRogers (Member # 7130) on :
quote:Originally posted by Raymond Arnold:
quote:After posting, I also thought that could potentially play into the idea I often hear expressed that you really only listen to the music you enjoyed as a late teenager for the rest of your life.
There could be a biological basis for this cartoon. In all seriousness.
Edit:
quote:Originally posted by The Rabbit: Perhaps I am not really the best person to speak to this question since I never had an experience as a teenager with a work of fiction that "blew my mind". The stuff that blew my mind as a kid was all science, philosophy and religion.
My experience was similar to this to a limited extent. For me, though there were works of fiction which greatly impacted me, the book which had the most effect on me was a work of non-fiction as opposed to a work of fiction. I can genuinely look at my life and say, "This was me before The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and this was me afterwards." Reading texts from other religions than my own had a similar effect. I think I learned more from reading The Book of Mormon than I did many textbooks, and I'm not Mormon.
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
Hm. This has actually prompted me to consider which book I think had the single most transformative effect on me. And as much as it pains me to admit it, I'd say it has to be Taran Wanderer and its sequel, The High King. The transformation of Taran into exactly the person I always wanted to be was oddly moving for an eight-year-old, and stuck with me forever.
Posted by SteveRogers (Member # 7130) on :
I never finished reading that series. I read the first two in elementary school, but the library got rid of the copies of the rest of the series by the time I would've gotten around to them. And I just never sought them out again.
Posted by Destineer (Member # 821) on :
quote:Originally posted by Raymond Arnold: I'm 25. For people who are... say, 35+, what have you read AFTER your early twenties that really impacted you, and did it do so in ways that were similar or distinct from 20s- experiences? Can you describe it?
After my early 20s I definitely started reading slower. But there were still books that had a huge impact on me. The Book of The New Sun might be the most important one. It was a "harder" book, maybe the first really hard one that felt like it was completely worth the work. I think that's one good thing about more complicated works, for me, is that at this stage of my life they can make a big impression on me where more YA-ish books feel like popcorn.
Another example, which was less of a hard book, was Girl in Landscape, which I just read recently. There was a really aching drama at the heart of it, which felt truer to life than a lot of other dramatic novels because it was so nuanced and there were no easy answers about who was to blame for some of the bad things that happened in the story.
Posted by Destineer (Member # 821) on :
I guess I'm not really 35+. I'm 30+, though.
Posted by Tuukka (Member # 12124) on :
quote:Originally posted by Raymond Arnold: It wasn't so much that I expected to stop developing, as I expected subsequent developments to feel less intense, or high intensity ones to happen less frequently. I did mean the question earnestly, not "clearly I will never experience this again, prove me wrong if you dare."
I'm 35.
The problem is that the more books you have read, the more *great* books you have read. So you have experienced more greatness, and on some level you compare every new book to that standard of greatness.
Also, once you find a great author, you easily read all of his novels, at least the ones that have been received well. And great authors that speak to you on a more personal level don't come around that often.
Unfortunately, I think I'm starting to get tired of scifi, which is my favorite genre. I've explored nearly all interesting authors out there, over the last 25 years. But there are still some I haven't tried out - I just ordered 4 novels from Jack McDevitt at Amazon. I've never read him, but he might appeal to my tastes. But I'm starting to fear that I've already read all the great authors who appeal to me.
When you are young, everything is *new*, and therefore more exciting and impressive. When people get older, they usually don't actively seek for new things, so they don't experience anything exciting. The solution to this is to always seek out new things - You just have to get out of your comfort zone.
Posted by Aros (Member # 4873) on :
I don't know, I the Fountainhead still affected me greatly in my late twenties. Ben Franklin's Autobiography was rather powerful in my mid thirties.
Posted by mr_porteiro_head (Member # 4644) on :
quote:Ben Franklin's Autobiography was rather powerful in my mid thirties.
Ditto.
In my 30s, interestingly, Bujold's Vorkosigan saga has had quite an impact about how I think about certain things.
Posted by Jake (Member # 206) on :
Such as? :: curious ::
Posted by SteveRogers (Member # 7130) on :
I think much of the argument in this thread presupposes a work of fiction must meet some criteria for being "great" to have an impact on a person, and that's certainly not true.
Posted by Samprimary (Member # 8561) on :
quote:Originally posted by SteveRogers: I think much of the argument in this thread presupposes a work of fiction must meet some criteria for being "great" to have an impact on a person, and that's certainly not true.
Twilight changed my life!
Posted by SteveRogers (Member # 7130) on :
And conversely I would certainly not use that as a basis to lay accusations of "greatness" against a book which I think most of us can agree is much closer to criminal.
Posted by rivka (Member # 4859) on :
quote:Originally posted by Samprimary: Twilight changed my life!
Now you're not ashamed to sparkle publicly?
Posted by The Rabbit (Member # 671) on :
quote:Originally posted by Aros: I don't know, I the Fountainhead still affected me greatly in my late twenties. Ben Franklin's Autobiography was rather powerful in my mid thirties.
[ May 03, 2012, 02:51 PM: Message edited by: The Rabbit ]
Posted by mr_porteiro_head (Member # 4644) on :
quote:Originally posted by SteveRogers: And conversely I would certainly not use that as a basis to lay accusations of "greatness" against a book which I think most of us can agree is much closer to criminal.
As much as I dislike the Twilight books, I feel pretty comfortable in saying that Twilight is closer to being a great book than to being criminal.
It is, at the very least, a book. And it has non-zero merit.
But the writing and publishing of it broke no laws that do or should exist. It is not criminal in the slightest.
Posted by SteveRogers (Member # 7130) on :
The Rabbit: Your link is not functional.
Edit:
Oh, mph. You so silly. Posted by mr_porteiro_head (Member # 4644) on :
quote:Originally posted by rivka:
quote:Originally posted by Samprimary: Twilight changed my life!
Now you're not ashamed to sparkle publicly?
There's only one Twilight that sparkles, and she's a unicorn!
Posted by SteveRogers (Member # 7130) on :
Shall we corral you back into the Bronies thread?
Posted by Dan_Frank (Member # 8488) on :
quote:Originally posted by mr_porteiro_head:
quote:Originally posted by rivka:
quote:Originally posted by Samprimary: Twilight changed my life!
Now you're not ashamed to sparkle publicly?
There's only one Twilight that sparkles, and she's a unicorn!
That was awesome.
Posted by mr_porteiro_head (Member # 4644) on :
quote:Originally posted by SteveRogers: Shall we corral you back into the Bronies thread?
I already said my piece in there.
(Or should that be "peace"?)
Posted by SteveRogers (Member # 7130) on :
I honestly just wanted to make a pun there. Posted by Foust (Member # 3043) on :
*cough*
I've only read the first Twilight book.
You know what?
It deserves more credit than it gets for being a legit vampire story. I find it unbelievable that people criticize the kinkiness of it: Edward's a 100 year old man hitting on a teenager, etc. It's a vampire story, vampire stories are supposed to sexually inappropriate.
Posted by SteveRogers (Member # 7130) on :
My issue with those books definitely has nothing to do with any alleged "kinkiness."
Posted by Dan_Frank (Member # 8488) on :
Foust: It's more that Twilight is sort of billed as a wholesome Mormon-safe vampire story with no premarital sex and a loving relationship.
And then it still has stuff like a 100 year old man breaking into a teenager's room to watch her sleep, and then getting into a horrifically codependent relationship with her.
Posted by Foust (Member # 3043) on :
quote:Foust: It's more that Twilight is sort of billed as a wholesome Mormon-safe vampire story with no premarital sex and a loving relationship.
And then it still has stuff like a 100 year old man breaking into a teenager's room to watch her sleep, and then getting into a horrifically codependent relationship with her.
That disconnect between the marketing of the book and the actual book itself exists, and it is hilarious.
But yeah, the book does present itself as a wholesome love story. The fact that it is actually a skin-crawlingly creepy story makes the book more interesting, not less.
Posted by Samprimary (Member # 8561) on :
But such a good role model for girls!
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
Foust, you're reading more ironic depth into it than the author intended. Posted by Foust (Member # 3043) on :
I doubt she intended for anything like "depth."
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
So one measure of a book's greatness can be the ironic meaning a given reader brings to it? Posted by Foust (Member # 3043) on :
Only if you're speaking ironically!
Posted by Samprimary (Member # 8561) on :
quote:Originally posted by Foust: I doubt she intended for anything like "depth."
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), but I certainly can't imagine ever sitting through Abrams' Star Trek if you drained out the story and replaced it with some flavor of "clever," obfuscated, piece of "art."