Years ago I joined my wife in a self-defense-for-women class taught by a black-belt/ex-Army-Ranger friend, who emphasized that flight is preferable to fight, and then taught us how to defend and respond in the conventional ways when it became necessary. That struck me as a good general rule, though it assumes a single encounter rather than, say, a playground or locker-room situation where the same people have to be dealt with daily.
Caroline @218 describes a classic response to the problem of garden-variety kid bullying, the same one my father advocated for me when I was a rather small small boy, and which did work for me in one situation I recall clearly. In 1957, when Terry Dirks (a year older and a head taller) would not stop punching me in the shoulder, I took my father's advice and socked him right in the nose. I can't recall if I bloodied it, but his response was to call me a little bastard and take two more swings at me. One hit a friend who was standing next to me and the other hit the wall. My friend was annoyed to have been collateral damage, but Terry hurt his hand and he never punched me again. This I take to be a standard example of how to handle a low-grade bully, but it is not failure-proof, particularly when the bully is a seriously pathological type or when there is a culture of bullying--if Terry had been part of a gang or a member of the football team, that probably would not have been the last of it. But this was, after all, more than fifty years ago, and I suspect the social environment has changed enough that my father's simple "fight back" protocol is no longer adequate. (I note with interest that fifty years later I still remember Terry Dirks' name--this was the sum of our relationship.)
I confess that I find some of this discussion confusing, since my experience of bullying is rooted in the face-to-face world of physical confrontation rather than on-line verbal argument. (There's a kind of bullying that can emerge in face-to-face verbal argument, but even that seems to me to hinge on the possiblity of rhetorical conflict becoming physical.) When I do a mental search for words and phrases associated with "bully" I come up with items such as "push around" or "in your face" or "shake a fist"--all part of the fine old repertory of grossly physical primate dominance behavior. I realize that there are verbal and rhetorical extensions and analogues of these, but I've always seen them as pretty attenuated, perhaps because even when I was a rather small person and fairly easily pushed and punched, I was more than a match, intellectually and rhetorically, for the entry-level thugs of the playground. It's difficult to bully someone who is willing and able to fight back, and in situations where they couldn't get at me physically, I couldn't be dominated. (Out on the playground, of course, I learned circumspection, tact, and the art of the retreat.)
Much of what is under discussion here strikes me as metaphorical rather than actual bullying--the kind of thing that the talking heads on TV engage in, such as Larry Kudlow's braying style of argument (shout over your opponent, use your control of the venue to dominate). I realize that some participants in an open discussion might feel put upon or put down by debater's tactics and general rhetorical loudmouthery, but unless there is threat rather than, say, mockery or cheap shots or the rest of the ad-hominem collection, it doesn't register as bullying to me. Just asshole-ism or maybe inadequate socialization.
As to how one deals with sphincteroid on-line behavior, that's a matter of the local culture. The fora I frequent have evolved explicit mechanisms (moderation here) or implicit protocols for coping with individuals who get out of hand. It does require a sense of community, which implies a stable core population. Most groups I've hung out with have included one or two volatile or opinionated or competitive or merely stubborn arguers, and while we usually put up with them, we do occasionally have to make them feel unwelcome and hope they leave. They often do.
Xopher,your hemming (without hawing, I presume) experience strongly resembles mine with most kinds of housework, particularly big cleanup/cleanout jobs (garage, basement). Opposite of fun in the doing, much satisfaction in the being-done.
Swatches of grad school and computer-science coursework had at least a little of that kind of necessary-drudgery feel. Certainly the exertions of Old English grammar were heavy going, but necessary if one was to get at Beowulf and the rest of the OE canon.
There was even a bit of it in courses on periods and writers I never warmed to. It turned out to be worth the effort to slog through Gower or mediocre Jacobean dramas or second-tier Victorian novelists, since they supply information on the whole range of work produced in a period.
I'm not sure that this kind of professional-training experience applies to one's purely voluntary reading (or listening or viewing)--I no longer read what does not please me ("please" covering a wide range of satisfactions, pleasures, and perceptions-of-usefulness), and I've long since served my time reading material whose difficulty ratings don't justify the returns (which include the intellectual-boot-camp mental conditioning/initiation hazing required to join the club).
Maybe I've gotten lazy--or maybe now that I know in detail what I like and why, there's no point in expending the energy just so I can tell others why I find [insert random current darling of serious lit here] not worth the trouble.
@402: Heroes are often ambiguous figures--Achilles, Odysseus, Heracles. They're the guys you want on your side because they're so powerful and dangerous. John Gardner used to say that heroes are monsters, and he built that notion into Grendel, which echoes much of his classroom commentary on Beowulf.
One might argue that the Dirty Harry-Jack Bauer protagonist is an expression of various anxieties in the audience, a feeling that the rules are no longer protecting us, and we need our monsters to fight their monsters.
On the other side, there's Chandler's notion that the guy who walks the mean streets should not be mean himself--but that chivalric ideal is always being threatened in the Marlowe stories. And in Hammett's version of hard-boiled, the borders are even fuzzier and more permeable. Look at Red Harvest.
skzb@361: Arguments against literature are very old--Sidney's Defense of Poesy mentioned @352 is part of a debate that goes back at least to Plato. Arrayed against poetry (which stands for imaginative/expressive literature in general) are those who think it untruthful or not truthful enough or that it is morally corrupting or distracting or that it makes the shop-girls dream inappropriate dreams or just that it isn't the current/local Holy Writ.
-ble. Describable. I'm not wearing my computer bifocals.
Heresiarch @ 334: Genre and form (in the sense of sonnet, quatrain, etc.) are not quite the same thing--there are, for example, genres of sonnets. And poetic forms (generally describably using the languages of linguistics and rhetoric) can serve readers as well as writers. (To shift artistic realms, ever participate in a swing-tune jam? The 32-bar song form keeps it from collapsing into a noisefest.) And genre (a mixed-element term that includes rhetorical/linguistic form as well as matters of content and arrangement of content) offers a range of effects denied to the one-off work: satire, and parody, for starters, plus irony, inversion, and all manner of variations on a form or convention-set. You can't play with satisfaction or frustration or redirection of audience expectations without having expectations in the first place. No genre, no Shaw. Or Shakespeare, for that matter. Or early Woody Allen. Or Randy Newman.
I find the metaphors of sugar-coating and payload telling: they assume a content+form model of the work of art, and this model often indicates an aesthetic that privileges content--which in turn often implies that the value of a work resides in the content (see fruit and chaff, which is a medieval version of the puritan aesthetic).
Victoria @318: I maintain an inner ten-year-old, but he's the one who at that age started reading through his aunts' collections of popular novels of the 1940s and 50s: Thomas B. Costain, Frank Yerby, Ellery Queen, Samuel Shellabarger. . . . I never went back to kids' books, other than the Heinlein and Winston titles in the public library. And I did recently enjoy Little Brother, though I spent half the book wanting to smack the narrator.
I still have an office full of model WWI aircraft and toy robots and rayguns, though.
@248: I knew there was a reason I've been putting off growing up for so long. Maybe I'll skip it altogether. Mere oblivion and uninterrupted childhood, here I come.
I really, really don't like cantaloupe--as in, I find its smell and flavor nasty. My wife (at first) found it very strange, since she loves cantaloupe. But no amount of "give it a chance" or "most people love it" or "you don't know what you're missing" or even "it's good for you--full of vitamin whatever" can ever overcome my primal experience. Now, artistic taste is not rooted in the snake-brain (which is where I take my smell-based disgust of cantaloupe originates), but its base components can be buried pretty deep in the psyche. And I have had people push at me artistic cantaloupe--works and traditions that I just don't care for and (at my age and level of experience) know I never will. Free jazz. Experimental theatre. Soap operas. "Tintern Abbey." Slasher movies. Much mainstream, highbrow fiction. If I were an inexperienced 20-year-old, it might make sense to tell me that I should try Wordsworth or Sun Ra or Cormac McCarthy, since I would not yet have collapsed the wave functions of my personality and aesthetic universe. But most adult personalities (with the exception of the constitutionally neophilic) really do know what they like. And if it's cantaloupe, I say to hell with it. Or, if I'm with my wife, "Here, hon, take my portion."
Dave Bell @206: When I'm emperor, teachers not hopelessly in love with their subjects will be made into administrators. Wait, that already happens. OK, all teachers, etc. My wife is refusing to consider retirement because she can't give up re-reading and talking about Austen (who, by the way, completely deserves that pedestal), Homer, Ovid, and Shakespeare and the rest of her heroes. I'd say that it takes a special anti-talent to make Shakespeare unappealing--though maybe crappy teaching technique will suffice. And the wealth of recorded performances you note ought to compensate for even that.
Nick M @166: I'll accept the proposition that much SF requires familiarity with the tradition in order to get the whole experience, but wouldn't the kind of book described in section 2 be better described as "bad SF"? At least the infodumps, clumsy names and neologisms, and (presumably) badly managed matters of scale? Handling those elements in a way that makes them features rather than bugs is part of the craft of SF. Or, come to think of it, of serious historical fiction.
@135: Play the guitar. Write poetry. Join a gym. Get a wing-man.
Me, I think it's all pheromones. Everything else is a delusion and/or a hobby.
(And while writing poetry doesn't necessarily lead to getting laid, might it not work the other way round?)
The current sense of "genre" as "formulaic and convention-bound and thus predictable" is generally not applied to "literary" works that are clearly so constructed, which does not prevent SF or mystery readers from recognizing the reigning formulas and conventions of "literary" or "serious" fiction. Some of the mystification is rooted in the sense that literary fiction connects more strongly to reality--either via representational realism ("This is the way divorce/bereavement/abuse/addiction-and-recovery really feel"); or claims that complex and important and probably morally improving Issues are being addressed; or both. So: Art Is Really True and Art Is Good For You, which are the Defenses of Poesy back on which puritans always fall, since Art Feels Good is deeply suspect. Or, to take a slightly different tack, these folk distrust dulce but understand and can defend utile. I also suspect that the association of difficulty or opacity with Art is in part the result of believing that anything really improving and important shouldn't come too easy. After all, you gotta suffer if you gonna sing the blues.
TNH @114: When I was still in the trenches, I often thought that the snobbery and self-absorption (along with narrow reading habits) of some lit teachers made it even tougher for the rest of us. (I can't recall a time when literature wasn't a hard sell to the general student population.)
I was composing a post about John Gardner and profluence and what-makes-writing-appealing that might have been useful, but EditPad Lite locked up and ate it and now maybe I'll content myself with being a kind of data point.
First, I must, as they say, situate myself. I'm a white male literature Ph.D. of A Certain Age who used to teach. I'm a compulsive reader who also reads professionally (for Locus), so my actual reading habits are not representative of any significant demographic. In any case, here are some of the writers I read for pleasure when I'm not reviewing: M.C. Beaton, Bernard Cornwell, Lindsey Davis, C.S. Forester, Dick Francis, George MacDonald Fraser, Carl Hiasssen, Reginald Hill, Stewart Kaminsky, Patrick O'Brian, Robert B. Parker, Martin Cruz Smith. All these have something that pleases a reader who trained particularly hard on Old and Middle English and Renaissance drama and poetry and who taught considerable chunks of the modern (and modernist) canon, along with popular literature and SF. And some of them I would happily teach in, say, a freshman lit-for-writing course, should I ever have the chance again.
My recreational reading no longer includes the kinds of books that get reviews in the serious literary press--possible candidates, presumably, for inclusion in some future canon of school texts. I find them uninteresting and often tediously badly written (for example, Cormac McCarthy, for my money a chronic over-writer). If someone were to produce a novel of middle-aged angst or pathological family dynamics as sharply written as Gorky Park or Master and Commander or Flash for Freedom, maybe I'd reconsider.
In grad school and in the classroom, I really enjoyed dealing with Eliot and Pound and Joyce and many of the more challenging modernists-as-conventionally-conceived, along with the merely-moderns such as Shaw and Faulkner and Katherine Anne Porter and Flannery O'Connor. Many of my students did not enjoy this material as much as I did, partly because it can be hard to read, partly because some of it can be pretty bleak. But they found Shakespeare tough going, too, and even something as direct as Frost's "The Span of Life."
I'm not sure there's a point in here, except that I tend to connect questions about "quality" to further questions about for whom and what and when.
TNH: Would competitive hermetics be a natural result of competitive hermeneutics, or the other way around?
Actually, Jim, I'd think a version of the Jon Stewart approach would work better to expose whatever shoutdown posses might exist: video the loudmouths and edit together a montage of repeat offenders for YouTube. This would also avoid the possibility of free-speech arguments (from those who actually oppose it)--does anyone really want to be seen as responding to rudeness, even malignant and organized rudeness, with arrests and handcuffs?
@28: Francis/Frances. The schwa-ing of that last vowel (and willful ignorance of spelling) meant that I put up with not a little razzing about my middle name on the school bus. Of course, in the early '50s gender tags were taken more seriously by pre-adolescents.
Lots of worthwhile stuff here, to which I might add, "Don't get too pleased with yourself for being able to take advantage of your particular situation or for having a particular comfort level; and don't beat yourself up when the choices available (thanks to market conditions, work requirements, family situation, or whatever) are suboptimal." Matters of (literal, for food) taste are not inevitably and inelastically tied to morality. (Must we all garden and sew? Must I patronize mediocre local theatre? Can't I please watch "CSI" if it amuses me? On a TV and not a Mac, which is not to my taste?) We all have to live in environments built by other people, some of whom have a lot of clout or just big numbers, and our choices are circumscribed thereby. (Couldn't resist that stuffy construction.)
Back on 12/18, my wife got an e-mail warning from Mad Hatter's Review that their site might have been hacked and everyone should stay away. (Don't know why they didn't just close the site--maybe there's something about running an infected website I don't understand.) Unfortunately, she didn't open the message until after she had visited the site, and sure enough, the Norton AV on her office computer (which sits on a university network with, one would think, pretty good security) notified her that it had picked up some unspecified virus. The university tech couldn't get rid of it, so he had to reformat her drive. Fortunately, I keep redundant backups of her data files anyway, so it was an inconvenience rather than a disaster.
Nader's comment doesn't strike me as being racist in any simple or traditional way, though it was strange as hell
I first heard "Uncle Tom" decades ago as a term of disdain among blacks for other blacks, and it always seemed to carry more emotion than, say, "Oreo cookie"--it indicated a kind of collaborator or apologist. The only time I would hear whites use it would be when reporting on the opinions of blacks about each other--it wasn't a judgment that an outsider got to make. I can imagine (barely) an angry, suspicious, radical black posing the underlying question that Nader did, and maybe even invoking the Tom insult, but it's amazingly arrogant and tactless of Nader to frame it that way. It's very far into "we get to say it but you don't" territory. (Though I have not heard the term used in earnest by anyone for a very long time.)
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