The current state of fantasy literature

[barsoomcore]

Ah-ha! A perfect example of my proposed two camps. Fun and goofy vs appealing to the "writing folks". Give me fun and goofy anytime!

What? That's no example of anything.

I'm prepared to say this a few more times but eventually I'm going to give up: snobs exist. I do not oppose the suggestion that some people are obnoxious snobs. I won't even go up against the idea that university literature departments are rife with such snobs.

But the fact that some people are snobs in no way supports the idea that there are only two kinds of readers -- those who read for enjoyment and those who read for intellectual stimulation. The ideas aren't even related.

If you want to say that people attacking that writer are literary snobs, well, I'll listen. You'll need to provide some evidence to convince me, however. Saying that there are only two types of readers, and the type that doesn't like this book are snobs isn't doing very much to do so. You might as well just define the word "snob" to mean "people who don't like The Fifth Sorceress."

 

[Desdichado]

One of the corollaries of that is that if we want to have a community where such debates can be held, then it's the responsibility of all us to try and create an environment where people feel like they can express their opinions and be attacked not for the opinions themselves, but only for the evidence or logic that supports them.

Absolutely. One of the reasons I spend way more time than I should cruising the boards here.

Well, let us say, the opinion itself possesses no right or wrong,or truth or falsehood. I don't think investigating one's opinions on art is useful because we end up with better opinions (we might, but that's not the real usefulness of it) -- it's useful to do so because we end with a better understanding of OURSELVES.

When you defend your opinions to others, you find out what your opinions really are. You find out what actually matters to you, as opposed to what you've been telling yourself matters to you.

Yeah, but in this case I got the same benefit just from hearing him mention several times that he really likes Salvatore, and I had to think about "why do you like him so much?" and "why do I not think he's that great?" I mean, sure, I like to talk about it too, but in that particular case, you have to know your audience. Not that I couldn't talk to him about it or anything, but it wouldn't have been the kind of discussion we're having here, for instance.

How about this: it can often be clear that you have very little to gain by entering into a debate with certain people. It would be of almost no value to me whatsoever to discuss with you the intricacies of Katori Shinto Ryu kenjutsu. You're unlikely to have opinions on such a subject that will provide me with new insights (unless this is another one of those creepy cases you and I are always having where we turn out to have the same idiosyncratic obsessions).

Not this time around. However, the aforementioned Salvatore fan could probably fill in for me there. Actually, I would argue that snobbery derives from INSECURITY, not the opposite. True confidence doesn't need to denigrate others or prove its own superiority.

While the motivation is the polar opposite, the behavior itself isn'y all that different at times.

 

[takyris]

Well, both, actually. I do like the classics, but what I was writing wasn't actually classical. I was in an SF writing group, and I was feeling pressure (self-created and based on what people said they found interesting, as opposed to "a fun light story") to write heavy stuff with a ton of philosophy and an unreliable narrator and no plot or action scenes.

What I discovered is that I love the classics, but also that most of the classics, at the time they were written, were intended to be incredibly freakin' popular and entertaining. I think that if Shakespeare were resurrected and told about, say, a space-opera retelling of Macbeth that was an enormous summer hit smash and combined the strength of his original ideas about fidelity and guilt with flashy effects and revamped writing for the modern audience, Ol' Billy would be annoyed for about thirty seconds, and then he'd smile and be glad that his stories are valued enough to be carried on and changed to meet the needs of a new audience.

(He'd still be ticked off about Strange Brew, though.)

So I don't think of myself as having turned my backs on the classics, because I love 'em. In fact, I think that the classics have been stolen by the stuffy people and neutered by centuries of academic debate designed to advance the pet project of a thousand professors fighting for tenure. When you learn to read Shakespeare's language, he's making sex jokes up the wazoo. He's raunchy. He's playing for the people in the cheap seats just as much as he is for the people in the booths. His monologues aren't supposed to be delivered in a thoughtful, controlled voice -- half of the time, they oughta be screamed or ranted. You look at Henry IV, part i, and it's a dry political drama with a lot of complex language, but really, it's the story of a screw-up son who doesn't want to inherit his dad's business -- he just wants to pal around with his hell-raising sidekick buddy. And then some bad guys come in, and everything hits the fan, and the son rolls out his shoulders and cracks his knuckles and says, "Well, s, I guess I do care about this stuff," and unloads a can of whoopass on the bad guys and redeems himself in his father's eyes.

C'mon. Cast Will Smith (Henry) and Martin Lawrence (Falstaff) in this thing, with Samuel Jackson as the dad and Clancy Brown as the bad guy. Put the end fight on a moving subway, only still with swords -- instead of being English royalty, have them be the heirs to mystical magical power that has lain hidden in the world for millenia.

That movie would kick so much ass.

But in order to make it, somebody has to understand the old language first somebody who likes the classics enough to go in and see what they're really about but who isn't so rarified that he turns up his nose at modern entertainment. Kind of like a cultural translator.

Enter the Tacky.

Someday.

 

[Desdichado]

Now if only I could talk barsoomcore out of his ridiculous position that snobs don't exist...

 

[barsoomcore]

Now if only I could talk barsoomcore out of his ridiculous position that snobs don't exist...

Oh yeah!? Just you try it! My logic is unassailable! I'm right right right right right....

I'm not listening, not listening, not listening...

Ah, heck, it's all subjective, anyway.

 

[Wrath of the Swarm]

Am I the only person here who enjoys intellectual stimulation and is intellectually stimulated by enjoyable things?

Thought so. Drat.

 

[barsoomcore]

Am I the only person here who enjoys intellectual stimulation and is intellectually stimulated by enjoyable things?

*pokes Wrath of the Swarm with a sharp stick and runs away*

I got yer intellectual stimulation right here, buster!

 

[Wrath of the Swarm]

I wouldn't do that if I were you. People who make me angry tend to become riddled with horrible sentient parasites that monitor their every move.

Or just ripped to pieces and scattered to the twenty-six vertices of the universe...

 

[RiggsWolfe]

Indeed you have. You claimed that there were two types of people -- people who read for enjoyment and people who read for intellectual stimulation.

Given that I read for intellectual stimulation (among other things, but still) then any statement you make about those people in general must apply to me in specific.

And why must it apply to you in specific? At this point I probably need to go back and reread my original post, but basically what I was saying was there are people who do it because it is fun, and there are people who do it as something else. I believe I did say intellectual stimulation. I was thinking of that guy with the English degree I worked with, as well as a terrible creative writing professor I once had and one or two other encounters in the English department at 2 Universities and 1 junior college. I was thinking of, for lack of a better term, the academic reader. Those who feel a need to analyze everything they read, to find some hidden metaphor about society in it. I'm having trouble organizing my thoughts on, probably has something to do with the wine.

I'm not getting defensive. If I was getting defensive I'd be indulging in "Yeah!? Sez who?" kind of behaviour. What I'm doing is applying your generalizations to specific cases -- mainly in order to show that making generalizations like this is useless. If they don't apply in all cases then how do you determine in which cases they DO apply?

What we are seeing in this very debate is that your generalizations fail the moment they get applied to ANY individual -- you always have to start from scratch anyway so you've wasted your time developing and presenting these generalizations. They haven't helped you.

No, what you are showing is that the generalization apparently doesn't apply to you. I don't know yet if I agree. I don't know you well enough.

I happen to think King's fiction IS inferior to Borges'. I happen to think I can show why.

I am NOT implying that people who like King aren't discerning readers. YOU are making that implication, not me. A statement of taste is nothing more or less than that. If you want to take from that an attack on yourself, it is YOU who are doing it.

And WHY is it inferior? What specifically about it is inferior? As for you implying that those who like King aren't discerning readers, never said you did. I said that that implication can be drawn, depending on the tone of the person who is involved in the discussion. I think for instance, that the writer of that Website is one of these elitists I speak of, and I think he does imply that those who like the types of fiction he mentions are somehow inferior.

I'm not saying (again) that snobs don't exist. But you are saying that ANY statement of the type that fiction A is inferior to fiction B carries with it an implication of insult to people who hold opposing viewpoints -- and that's not true.

It is possible to discuss ideas without any reference to the people who hold those ideas. Indeed, that ability is at the very center of rational debate.

Yes and no. It is possible to say I like A better than B with no insult. I like Star Wars better than Star Trek. No insult.

However, if I say, for instance, Star Trek is an inferior form of entertainment, I can gurantee you some people will be offended, and part of that offense, will be that they will feel I am implying they don't know good entertainment when they see it.

Okay, let's examine that. You didn't say that you don't enjoy intellectual stimulation.

That's not quite the same as saying that you ENJOY intellectual stimulation. But let's assume that it's true, that you enjoy intellectual stimulation. If my assumption is incorrect, then I'm wasting my time, but that's okay.

A double negative might be a positive. On the other hand it could be seen as noncomittal...

So you enjoy intellectual stimulation. Which means, at the very least, that intellectual stimulation falls into the category of "things that can cause enjoyment". So when somebody reads for intellectual stimulation, they are reading so as to experience one of the things that can cause enjoyment. Similar to reading for humour, or action or romance, or whatever. I think this is identical to saying that they are reading for enjoyment.

Ergo, people reading for intellectual stimulation ARE reading for enjoyment. Ergo, your distinction between the two categories is false. This isn't my opinion, it's a result of logical analysis. If there's a flaw in my reasoning, please point it out.

Throwing the word Ergo in there does not make it logical analysis. You are trying to make this sound like:

My argument is

If A then Not B
(If you are reading for enjoyment you are not reading for intellectual stimulation.)

However, what I really said was

There are generally two types of people:
A and B.
A is the one who reads for fun
B is the one we've come to term the snob.

I believe the website writer falls into the B column. I don't believe it's impossible to be both and never said I do. I said in general this is what you have.

That's because it's true. It's not HARD to respond to -- it's IMPOSSIBLE to refute.

*sigh* you only quoted part of my reply and part of what I was replying to. I was meaning the comment about everybody being a moderate. That's what the whole rest of my paragraph was about. Please don't resort to editing replies to try to make things look different than they are. I think you're intelligent enough to know what my entire written paragraph there was replying to. It was blatantly obvious.

Generalizations inhibit communication. Is that untrue? Prove it. I don't believe you can, because I believe it's true.

Can you prove it IS true? How does you believe it's true make it true?

Then why try to divide them into these camps in the first place? It accomplishes nothing. You still have to deal with each individual on their own terms, so why waste time trying to pretend there's these easy categories you can stick them into?

For one thing, I wasn't truly trying to talk about individuals, I was trying to talk about readers in general, as a sort of mass group. Your statement, again, to use politics as a metaphor, is like saying that because a moderate exists it is useless to talk about people's politics in terms of Liberal and Conservative.To put it another way, you're trying to argue Quantum Mechanics (the small picture) while I'm arguing Relativity (the big picture)

Yes, it does. Or at least, it means the line doesn't show us anything very useful -- so why should we waste time worrying about it? Logical distinctions ought to make understanding easier. Generalizations about people do not do this. They make it harder. They lead us to false conclusions. They make it easier for us to be lazy.

Indeed? Then what kinds of logical distinctions would you make?

If you have any interest in getting to like Hemingway (not saying you should, but IF) first off, read his short stories -- he's one of the best short story writers ever (I would not say he was one of the best novelists). Secondly (or firstly) read Death in the Afternoon a non-fiction book he wrote about bull-fighting. It really is a wordy old man telling you stories -- but what stories. It's really awesome -- after you finish reading it, I guarantee you will want bullfighters in your campaign.

Hemingway had his chance with me. Twice. I forced myself to finish both novels. As for the book about bullfighting I rarely read non-fiction unless it is Science or Occult. Though, arguably, depending on your viewpoint, the last might be fiction.

 

[RiggsWolfe]

Well, both, actually. I do like the classics, but what I was writing wasn't actually classical. I was in an SF writing group, and I was feeling pressure (self-created and based on what people said they found interesting, as opposed to "a fun light story") to write heavy stuff with a ton of philosophy and an unreliable narrator and no plot or action scenes.

First off, a science fiction writing group? Sounds interesting. Was it a school thing or more informal.

Second, about the "heavy stuff" , sounds like a Philip K Dick novel to me.

What I discovered is that I love the classics, but also that most of the classics, at the time they were written, were intended to be incredibly freakin' popular and entertaining. I think that if Shakespeare were resurrected and told about, say, a space-opera retelling of Macbeth that was an enormous summer hit smash and combined the strength of his original ideas about fidelity and guilt with flashy effects and revamped writing for the modern audience, Ol' Billy would be annoyed for about thirty seconds, and then he'd smile and be glad that his stories are valued enough to be carried on and changed to meet the needs of a new audience.

A space opera retelling of MacBeth? You making this one up or is it some movie I didn't see past the obvious on? MacBeth is an interesting play. I kept hoping for him to redeem himself. Oh well. I miss when Kenneth Brannagh was going through his Shakespeare days.

(He'd still be ticked off about Strange Brew, though.)

I love Strange Brew. A bit warped, but I love it. I have to admit, it has been years, over a decade since I've seen it.

So I don't think of myself as having turned my backs on the classics, because I love 'em. In fact, I think that the classics have been stolen by the stuffy people and neutered by centuries of academic debate designed to advance the pet project of a thousand professors fighting for tenure.

These Stuffy people were who I was speaking of in my original theory about the two camps of readers. I wish I'd never put the phrase "Intellectual stimulation" in there. Oh well. I know what you mean. I remember getting so irritated with various English professors. They'd want me to analyze some story or play and I was the guy who'd raise his hand and go "isn't it enough to just enjoy it?" Not that I couldn't , or in some cases, didn't analyze it. It's that I didn't want to lose sight of just enjoying the book/play/whatever. Though I will admit to once writing a huge essay on the mythos behind Star Wars. I even went so far as to analyze color schemes!

When you learn to read Shakespeare's language, he's making sex jokes up the wazoo. He's raunchy. He's playing for the people in the cheap seats just as much as he is for the people in the booths. His monologues aren't supposed to be delivered in a thoughtful, controlled voice -- half of the time, they oughta be screamed or ranted. You look at Henry IV, part i, and it's a dry political drama with a lot of complex language, but really, it's the story of a screw-up son who doesn't want to inherit his dad's business -- he just wants to pal around with his hell-raising sidekick buddy. And then some bad guys come in, and everything hits the fan, and the son rolls out his shoulders and cracks his knuckles and says, "Well, s, I guess I do care about this stuff," and unloads a can of whoopass on the bad guys and redeems himself in his father's eyes.

That was my big problem with Shakespeare when I was younger. I always saw it done in real boring productions with people just sort of speaking the dialogue. Then, several things happened, a good teacher, a movie with Danny Devito where he teaches some army soldiers how to read Shakespeare, and Kenneth Brannagh.

C'mon. Cast Will Smith (Henry) and Martin Lawrence (Falstaff) in this thing, with Samuel Jackson as the dad and Clancy Brown as the bad guy. Put the end fight on a moving subway, only still with swords -- instead of being English royalty, have them be the heirs to mystical magical power that has lain hidden in the world for millenia.

Does Will Smith have to cut off Clancy Brown's head to win?

That movie would kick so much ass.

But in order to make it, somebody has to understand the old language first somebody who likes the classics enough to go in and see what they're really about but who isn't so rarified that he turns up his nose at modern entertainment. Kind of like a cultural translator.

You sound like me when I talk about fantasy/sci-fi/comic book movies. Heh. Someone has to understand it, and appreciate it before they can make a good movie out of it.

Enter the Tacky.

Heh, sounds like a movie tagline.