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.
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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.
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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!
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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?
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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.
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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.
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*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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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Are we discussing writing (films, novels, etc.)? Or visual art like paintings and sculptures? Because I don't think the same rules really apply.
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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.
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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").
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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I must admit my experience with Cormac McCarthy is limited only to The Road and No Country for Old Men.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 ]
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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."
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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 ]
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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 ]
Posts: 12591 | Registered: Jan 2000
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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. Posts: 1831 | Registered: Jan 2003
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What if you don't consider happiness stupid, but you also portray non-banal evil and non-boring pain?
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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 ]
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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.
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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.
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Speaking for myself, there's very little I've read since I was 20 or so that's had any kind of real impact.
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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.
Posts: 6026 | Registered: Dec 2004
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Posts: 4600 | Registered: Mar 2000
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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.
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![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif)
). 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. ![[Wink]](wink.gif)
), 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."![[Smile]](smile.gif)
