posted
Man, Slash, I know you're making an attempt to pass an olive branch of sorts, but even within that there was some harshness.
I'm not sure Dante was actively trying to be mean.
Before you say I'm just trying to suck up, I totally agree with all of your points and the premise. But Dante is my friend, and that first comment of yours caused me actual pain. Posts: 7600 | Registered: Jan 2001
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posted
Icarus, perhaps my response was a bit more vehement than even I had wished for. The fact is, I admire King quite a bit for his accomplishments both as a publishing writer and on literary merits.
Sure, he has dashed out some books that weren't that good, but he has touched genius more times than the vast majority of writers out there. And he did it in a genre that most literati sneer at. He's in the same boat as most science fiction and fantasy authors as well. There are some great, truly astounding works in the genre fields, but prejudices often keep the books from being described as literature.
A few of our own host's novels could certainly be counted among the best of the last century in my opinion, but you'd be hard-pressed to find much support for that statement among the academic circles that take on the burden of determining what is literature and what is not.
I just hate to hear anyone leveling the word "hack" at an author who is working and striving to reach an audience and make a living. It's also not just a slam on the author, but their entire audience as well.
Posts: 2848 | Registered: Feb 2003
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posted
Tom, I'm waiting for a response. You've put words in my mouth; kindly take them back out.
Sopwith:
quote:I just hate to hear anyone leveling the word "hack" at an author who is working and striving to reach an audience and make a living.
I'm not saying King's a hack, but by your reasoning, wouldn't that mean there aren't any hacks in the world at all?
Posts: 2443 | Registered: Apr 2002
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posted
I'd like to think there weren't any hacks out there.
But then again, I'd probably count as a hack. I've spent 12 years making a living by writing for newspapers and magazines. There have been some works I am proud of, but I have to admit, I didn't strive for art on each and every one. I mainly strove to pay the rent, or buy groceries or keep the car running.
Posts: 2848 | Registered: Feb 2003
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posted
King has a very wide body of work, so it's hard to determine exactly how good he is. Is a good writer consistent in the quality of his work? If so, then I would say King is not a good writer. IMO, there is a great deal of his work that has a pulpy quality. It's like his editors knew he was turning out this shallow, meaningless cotton candy but wouldn't refuse it because cotton candy keeps the reader coming back for more. These books are easy reads, get you involved enough that you want to get to the end (like any popular book does), but without that rich, deep, meaty feel of a "quality" (yes, this is a very subjective word) book with great themes and ideas - not just the "supernatural" gimmicks King puts into his work. A lot of his work could be compared to similar horror writers like John Saul or Dean Koontz or even other pulp writers like Dick Francis.
It isn't just the use of large words, either, that makes a book great or even an author. I don't think very many people would disagree that Hemingway is in the literary canon, yet he used very simple words that the common person could understand. He crafted his novels so those words contained a lot more than their surface meaning. (my American Lit teacher from high school so many years ago would call this the iceberg priniciple). In fact, he often sounded like a Dick and Jane book for grownups. "Nick caught the fish. It was cold and slimy." This isn't an actual quote from one of his books, but you get the jist.
You can tell that King can write good, quality books. He is inventive and some novels (like the Dark Tower series) have strong thematic qualities. But it doesn't seem like he puts the effort into crafting his novels. They just kinda pour out of him (as he admits when he writes about his writing). Some of this may just be that his editors don't know how to say no. Even the "nuts" (how he refers to books he's written and squirrels away in case he has writers' block) end up as best sellers. He's a publisher's wet dream.
This is not to say that his stuff isn't entertaining. I've read waaaaaaaaaay too many of his books. It's a reliable escape, kinda like TV in that sense. But it isn't a good meal. It's just cotton candy for the most part.
Some points/questions/opinions:
OSC is a lot closer to the canon because of the crafting of his novels. Ender's Game is well structured with very prominent themes. Definitely better than most if not all of SK's work.
Why do SK's movies always suck more when he has more control over the production? (e.g. The original The Shining was soooo much better than the remake by him, and The Shawshenk Redemption ruled)
I thought the Eyes of the Dragon was quite possibly the worst adult fantasy book I have ever read because of the sheer vapidity of it. I just had to say this because I saw that someone else praised it and I was horrified. Sorry if it offends!
posted
Perhaps that's because you missed the part where Eyes of the Dragon was written as a juvenile fantasy book. And it was one of the best juvenile fantasy books I've ever read. *grin*
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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posted
Well, that explains a lot! Still, Lloyd Alexander wrote better juvenile books. Even Judy Blume wrote better juvenile books. Maybe SK stopped writing juvenile books because he realized he sucked at it. And why wasn't Eyes of the Dragon over in the juvenile section like it was s'posed to be?
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posted
*grin* I can only assume that King's assessment of what's appropriate for juveniles doesn't necessarily mesh with many other people's. Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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posted
Sopwith & JonnyNotSoBravo - your posts seem to summarize my feelings pretty well. I can agree with most everything you say there.
ae: it's not that there are no hacks, but that we are incapable of judging with absolute certainty who they are. To know for certain you would have to know both the heart of the author, to kow how seriously he or she took the art, and you would also have to know whether it succeeds in conveying what he author wanted to readers in the intended audience. It's impossible to have that knowledge, which is why we all seem to be agreeing that you can't judge with any level of objectivity. I believe that is Tom's point (as it is mine) which you keep throwing back at him without apparently realizing that it's his point.
posted
I strongly suspect King will be considered a popular hack by intellectuals until about 10 years after he dies, at which point they will begin complaining about how the new writers of the time don't live up to him.
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posted
And as far as that goes, I really enjoyed 'Salem's Lot. I've yet to read anything of King's that comes close.
Except for the Talisman. Which was a collaboration. Man, that was a good read.
I do understand the literary community's chagrin-- King is so wholly 'other' than what they're accustomed to. That said-- the liberal arts community has touted itself as edgy and envelope-pushing for years; it has proclaimed itself the over-guardian of things new and strange. Very ironic that they seem stuck in using one mold on this particular topic.
Could a fantasy/sci-fi author EVER be looked upon as beneficial to academia? I mean, before his death. . .
Posts: 14554 | Registered: Dec 1999
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posted
I don't think that I've ever started a thread that went to three pages. Or one that inspired some vigorous opinion.
I will attempt to rejoin the flow of the conversation later, but first...
Bloom has become a caricature of himself -- and much of that is because of his willingness to play the media game. If the NY Times are any other national publication needs a quote from a cultural reactionary, they dial his number. Just like if they need something from a cultural relativists and postmodernist, they call up Stanley Fish.
Two more points:
1. What I don't understand is, considering Bloom's fascination with the American spirit or geist (or whatever you want to call it), why he can't clue in to the fact that books like _The Stand_ and those of the DarkTower series seem to me to reflect the individualism combined with pragmatism with a touch of mysticism and the supernatural that permeates many of the indigenous American religions.
2. Bloom may have become a shrill reactionary, but I still have to give him props for his lit-crit work _The Anxiety of Influence_. It's really not useful as a literary theory that can be tested and extended to other texts, and really it's more like a piece of creative writing, but the book is full of energy and poetic prose and forces you to see certain works of literature and certain authors in a different light. It's a masterpiece.
Next:
quote:Last year the critic John Leonard wrote a lengthy appreciation of Mr. King in The New York Review of Books, calling him "a high-school English teacher who may have hit it big with `Carrie' in 1974 but had never stopped reading the serious stuff." Mr. Leonard found in Mr. King's works traces of Thomas Hardy, Daphne du Maurier, T. S. Eliot, J. R. R. Tolkien and even Shakespeare.
Don't you love how academics are so good at giving back-handed compliments? And this is about the most positive quote in the article. Notice how instead of saying "he's a great author' or "he's a master stylist" or even "while his plots sometimes contain too many cheap thrills, his characterization and evocative prose shine through in even the most pedestrian of his works" the most he can do is call him a teacher (a high school English teacher --which as we all know is where those who can't cut in the academic world go) who reads the classics. And if you look at the list above, it consists of authors whose literary stock was downgraded by the postmodernists and cultural studies academics.
quote:Some in the literary world just shrugged about the award. "The words `distinguished contribution' are a little bit puzzling, but he is a good writer as popular writers go," said Jason Epstein, the former editorial director of Random House, who won the foundation's first medal. "I am not sure this was the original intent of the prize, but who knows about original intent?"
I love this final quote because not only do you get the 'he's okay as *those* sorts go' but then he pulls this whole postmodernist thing where he effaces the whole idea. "Who knows about original intent?" This is a typical postmodern ploy -- instead of making a judgement, you change the rules of the whole enterprise. The effect is to downplay the significance of the medal. It's also a typical thing among sportswriters. Yeah, Barry Bonds is a great player, but Babe Ruth also pitched.
Disclaimer: I'm not actually an anti-post-modernist [in fact, I place a lot of emphasis on discourse, context, slippage in meaning, etc.] -- but I am anti-the-stupid-and-shoddy-application-of-postmodernism. Pod has mentioned in other threads how it has pretty much disappeared from the academy. That's quite true of many of the disciplines and probably even more so in the rarified airs of some research universities, but the phenomenon is still very much alive in its basest of forms out in the state schools, especially in literary departments, composition studies, colleges of education and some of the 'minor' disciplines that are struggling to 'do theory' in order to legitimize their fields. Thus my postmodern spoof.
quote:"Even Judy Blume wrote better juvenile books."
I was with you until this point, and then you lost me.
Yeah, I might have went too far with that 'cuz it's been too long since I read her books. They're kind of hazy in my memory but I know they had a dog, some girl named Ramona and someone named Beasely and this kid who caught a fish by wading out into the surf and picking it up. Still, EotD was so bad I'm sure they couldn't have been worse. How 'bout I replace the Judy Blume comment with "J.K. Rowling writes far better fantasy books for juveniles than SK does" which is true even if I think she borrows too heavily from popular mythology. And besides we had comments earlier comparing SK and Rowling before so it seems more relevant. Posts: 1423 | Registered: Sep 2003
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What I don't understand is, considering Bloom's fascination with the American spirit or geist (or whatever you want to call it), why he can't clue in to the fact that books like _The Stand_ and those of the DarkTower series seem to me to reflect the individualism combined with pragmatism with a touch of mysticism and the supernatural that permeates many of the indigenous American religions.
'Cause he hasn't read 'em. He's busy parsing Macbeth or rereading Henry James. Bloom's stuck in a rut, which is why in every book he publishes Shakespeare become more and more godlike. (I own two of them.) He's got a list in his head of who's worth reading and who's not, and King's not on it. Period. Plus, the American zeitgeist has already been established by the Gnostics and nineteenth century evangelicals. And Cormac McCarthy.
Posts: 794 | Registered: Aug 2000
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posted
I still don't get why academics are so obsessed with Cormac McCarthy. In this class where we had to read All the Pretty Horses, the professor talked it up like it was the crowning jewel of his syllabus, and when we finally got to it, it was a huge letdown, easily the most boring and forgettable thing I read all term. And I usually like literary fiction. ( )
Jonny: Ramona? You sure you're not thinking of Beverly Cleary?
quote:The real question here is where do these people get off stating that King is a lousy writer as if it's a fact? You could say that they are entitled to their opinion that King is, in fact, a hack, and they're simply expressing it. But their expressing of their subjective opinions as fact is just as ridiculous to those of us who think King is a modern day great as the disparagement in this thread of academic-style literature is to you.
The real question here is where does Tom get off stating that Rushdie is a lousy writer as if it's a fact? You could say that he is entitled to his opinion that Rushdie is, in fact, a hack, and he's simply expressing it. But his expressing of his subjective opinions as fact is just as ridiculous to those of us who think Rushdie is a modern day great as the disparagement in this thread of popular or genre-style literature is to you.
See, now, that's a silly comment. Just a few things to suggest:
1. "Genre" is something applies to every text so I often cringe when people hold up, say, fantasy or sci-fi as some kind of repressed entity because it is "genre" fiction. I think genre applies to Coetzee, Rushdie, Coover, Allende, Faulkner, Cunningham or pretty much any other author you care to name.
2. Whether a book is good or bad is subjective. For Pete's sake, people argue about the criteria for what constitutes a good or bad text all the time - and have done so since people told stories in Ithaca, no doubt - so its ridiculous to suggest that King or Rushdie are crap. Tom saying that Rushdie is "certainly" crap is just as ridiculous and childish as Bloom saying the same thing about King. Tom can say "I think Rushdie is crap" all he wants but he'll have a very, very hard time convincing me of the fact. Contrary to his opinion, I've found many of Rushdie's characters to be rich and vibrant and they have resonated with me long after I finish reading. I'm sure Tom feels the same way about King's work. Oh, wait, I must be WRONG about how I feel - it's patently obvious to me now that Rushdie is not, in fact, one of the best authors I have read (in, of course, my opinion) but is, in fact, pretension, shallow and a waste of time. Sorry. My bad.
3. My bookshelf features Rushdie, Coetzee, Pynchon and Eco. It also features Kafka, Joyce, Faulkner, Conrad and Naipaul. And Dante, Shakespeare, Homer and Beowulf. Oh, right next to those are Tolkien, Tad Williams, Neal Stephenson, Kim Stanley Robinson and Orson Scott Card. I happen to like them all. I think that Tolkien is great literature, even though his writing is occasionally poor. I loved Cryptonomicon and La Morte D'artur. My favourite books, off the top of my head, include Foe, In the Skin of the Lion, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, As I Lay Dying, Memory Sorry & Thorn, The Lord of the Rings and The Mars Trilogy. Eeek. Incompatibilty error... Or do I just happen to think that a wide variety of works can constitute greatness? I also happen to think the canon is bunk, that Bloom is a twit and that the idea of an exclusionary list of great works is just silly. I also happen to be wary of cultural studies and bothered by the fact that Friends can be studied for final examination in the last yeaf of high school in Australia.
4. I'm an English major and have studied literature through many theoretical and non-theoretical frameworks. None of them have been perfect.
Posts: 2945 | Registered: Apr 2000
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posted
At the risk of sounding petty, it pisses me off no end when people put words in my mouth and then leave it at that, refusing to respond to or even acknowledge my replies. Particularly so when the person doing this is respected and supposedly reasonable.
There's a lot of interesting stuff that's been posted since I last did, but I'm too annoyed to respond to it. I think I'll just add a name to my shit list and bow out.
posted
AE, I think you did a perfectly reasonable job of explaining that you think I misinterpreted you. What do you believe I would have contributed to that process by posting?
Frankly, I think you're too emotionally invested in a thread -- and a topic -- which is, at best, completely irrelevant to everyone here; that everyone has spent pages ADVOCATING its complete irrelevance, in fact, makes it pretty obvious that we're all on the same page, and so I'm bemused by the thought that your "credibility" could be damaged by something so forgettable.
In other words: don't sweat it. If you feel that I've misconstrued or misunderstood your arguments, say your piece -- as you have -- and shrug it off, man. I seriously doubt the New Yorker has scouts watching this thread, looking to pick out rookie critics.
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"Rushdie, Coetzee, Pynchon and Eco. It also features Kafka, Joyce, Faulkner, Conrad and Naipaul. And Dante, Shakespeare, Homer and Beowulf. Oh, right next to those are Tolkien, Tad Williams, Neal Stephenson, Kim Stanley Robinson and Orson Scott Card."
What's amusing about this is that my bookshelf has pretty much the exact same list, minus Coetzee, but I don't put 'em anywhere near each other. I keep a buffer zone between my postmodernists and my classics, for some subconscious reason. I don't keep such a zone between my classics and my genre fiction. I wonder why.
posted
Because subconsciously, you're an elitist snob-- you lump all the old ideas with all the bad ideas, and leave the postmodernism to stand alone and aloof.
EG, why can't you see that you're making my point? We have been saying that it's subjective! That's Tom's point in asking for objective criteria by which King can be judged inferior. All Tom is doing when he comments on Rushdie being garbage (or all I was doing when I commented on my feelings at the end of grad school, for that matter) is putting the shoe on the other foot:
This thread began as an expression of outrage over the casual dismissal of King's body of work by some academics . . .
. . . some people posted agreeing with the opinions of these academics . . .
. . . those of us who like King point out how easy it is to dismiss the favorites of many academics in quite the same way . . .
. . . those of you who like these authors are outraged--just like we were by the slamming of King!
posted
Yeah, I get it. You're all just evil robots sent from the future to disparage my favorite authors.
Really, though, I don't see why it's so childish for Bloom to say a particular author sucks. You can say he's stodgy or elitist or just plain wrong, but to say he shouldn't be saying it seems a little silly. He's a critic, after all. That's his job.
posted
Yes, but earlier you seemed to imply that your big objection was with not what people said about King but how they said it:
quote:The real question here is where do these people get off stating that King is a lousy writer as if it's a fact? You could say that they are entitled to their opinion that King is, in fact, a hack, and they're simply expressing it. But their expressing of their subjective opinions as fact is just as ridiculous to those of us who think King is a modern day great as the disparagement in this thread of academic-style literature is to you.
I don't have a problem with people bashing literary fiction (though I am annoyed by some of the snide remarks in this thread about the motives of those who read it). I have my own issues with the academy, and I will readily admit that there's a lot of boring, pretentious crap out there that only gets read because it's stylistically or ideologically en vogue with the literary crowd. So I do sympathize with what you're saying here to some extent, since we all know that whenever anyone with academic clout says anything, thousands of college students will record it in their spiral notebooks as fact. That's the trouble with what Rene Girard calls "the cult of expertise." But on the other hand, I don't think everyone should have to preface everything they say with disclaimers about how this is only their opinion. It's a subjective value judgment; of course it's an opinion. It almost seems a little arrogant to me when people go on as though they assume anyone would think otherwise.
posted
Of course, the primary objection there is that Bloom doesn't usually concede that his opinions are, in fact, merely opinions. But YMMV. *grin*
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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posted
I think Bloom is being an idiot because he is spouting off on an author he doesn't really know in the most public print-based forum in the U.S. [the NY Times]. That's not being a public intellectual or a defender of the canon -- that's being a media whore. I'm not saying that academics should only comment on authors or topics that they've published papers or written books on, but a little discretion is always wise.
Of course, this is also bad reporting on the part of the Times. How come no one bothered to figure out that there was a Michael Collings out there and contact him for a comment on King's strengths and weaknesses and place in American society and culture? In other words, try to kind of understand the phenomenon. I suppose the literary world is aghast angle is more interesting, but it wasn't for me because it's so damn predictable.
Posts: 3423 | Registered: Aug 2001
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posted
Deirdre, the key is in the last sentence in that quote.
Of course you can express an opinion. If you do it on an online forum, you may be disagreed with with varying levels of politeness; ideally, it will be in proportion to the politeness you show in expressing your opinion. If you are a high profile "authority" on literature, you are even fairer game, by virtue of your position as an expert. The quotes in question here are pretty rude, and so many of us are responding with a commensurate amount of scorn.
Several people now keep posting that bit and responding to the beginning without realizing that the answer is in the end.
Posts: 13680 | Registered: Mar 2002
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posted
But EG, in the literary world as presently constituted i.e. the awards and fellowships given out, the books reviews in the "top-tier" publications, the course offerings at the "best" colleges, the emphases of creative writing programs, this:
quote:"Genre" is something applies to every text so I often cringe when people hold up, say, fantasy or sci-fi as some kind of repressed entity because it is "genre" fiction.
isn't true. Genre *is* used as a disparaging term applied to the marketing categories of sf, romance, thrillers and mysteries. There's poetry, fiction, non-fiction and journalism -- and then all the genre crap. The divisions are somewhat permeable, but mostly not.
One (admittedly anecdotal) example:
Dave Eggers invites Michael Chabon to do a "genre" issue of McSweeneys. It gets a ton of press in the national and large regional papers. Meanwhile, I don't think that I've ever read a word about any of the science fiction, fantasy or horror magazines in the same papers. Indeed, to pull out the most likely story that might get some coverage from the sf world, if the Hugos and Nebulas get mentioned at all it's just a small story with a list of winners -- not the half to full column (and in some case feature-lenght) that McSweeneys received.
Posts: 3423 | Registered: Aug 2001
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quote: Several people now keep posting that bit and responding to the beginning without realizing that the answer is in the end.
I think I do understand your point, but I still object to it for the same reason ae did. I see it as hypocrisy, not fair play.
Posts: 1046 | Registered: Sep 2002
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posted
Never mind. We've been through this all before, several times now. I just happen to be surrounded by sci-fi/fantasy fans IRL, and I’m tired of people implying that I’m boring, stuffy, and pretentious because I like literary fiction. So I vent my frustrations here.
Posts: 1046 | Registered: Sep 2002
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posted
J. Peder Zane has some advice for Stephen King.
caveat:
quote:Let me state upfront, I do not agree with those who dismiss your work. I think you take your writing seriously. I believe you strive for excellence. Those who contend that you write schlock have probably never read you. It is because you care about good writing that I hope you will take my plea seriously.
kicker:
quote:It is clear that you are being used. The National Book Foundation hopes to kindle new interest in its programs and in reading in general by honoring you. I cannot predict what good might come from the effort, but the dangers of the precedent are clear. What is at stake -- not completely, but in part -- is literature's standing as one of the last poles in our culture where prestige is based on performance, not popularity.
Dang. The Book award as the Emmy's. That is really sad.
----
I'm sympathetic to Dante - I went through a three-four year period that may not be completely over of refusing to read anything less than fifty years old. That way, I got to read Steinbeck and avoided most of the crap.
It's like oldies stations. Are most of the songs on Oldies stations good? Yes, actually.
Is that because they wrote better music back then? Possibly, but I doubt it.
Why then? Because the crap has dissapeared and we are left with the refined gold.
Hype, the machine, and laziness prodded by Oprah can and does make a book popular now, but it won't a hundred years from now. Books that are still loved - not taught, but loved - a hundred years afte their author's death usually have something worthwhile about them.
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posted
Dang it, is there any profession or field anywhere that isn't tainted by politics and bickering and posturing? Anywhere??
Posts: 26077 | Registered: Mar 2000
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posted
Nope. I had heard that morticians were a non-political, mutually supportive lot, but that industry has changed in the past decade.
--------
To follow up on MattB's remark about Bloom and Cormac McCarthy and Kat on Bloom and Rowling, I give you this op-ed piece.
I've heard a lot about Delilo's _Underworld_. Out of curiousity, I'm going to give it a try and see how it matches up with _The Stand_ and the Dark Tower series.
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