Oh man. Now I'm missing Vikings from the Missoula MT fair. They're sort of like breaded, deep-fried, meatballs on a stick. With spicy mustard.
*sigh*
Serge @548 - you're not alone. I'm a ridiculous optimist when I'm reading. My personal algorithm for when to give up is more like 75 x age, because I'm usually still rooting for a book to get better when I hit the last page and am left thunderstruck that it didn't work out nearly as well as I'd hoped for anyone involved...me or the characters.
Weirdly, and perhaps betraying deep psychological weaknesses I shouldn't disclose, I've been known to reread immediately, hoping for a better outcome the second time around...
Pendrift @477
I spent several years working at a local indie bookstore where sneering at a customer's reading choice was grounds for immediate termination...even just among staff members, after the customer had left. More than once, a new employee didn't make it through their 30 day trial period -- almost inevitably for sneering at series romances.
I STILL miss that place.
pat greene @429, and abi @380 -
I was admittedly one of those fair-haired English students who, mostly, could do no wrong. That was discouraging in ways that don't seem dissimilar to the experiences you both seem to be describing.
I'd been a terribly isolated child, for whom reading anything and everything I could get my hands on was very nearly literally a life-saving exercise. So in more formal educational environments, then, I was casting around desperately for those survival-cues about what I was "supposed" to be reading and liking, and not being able to read the proper cues, so it was like being in a vast house of mirrors.
What happened, then, is that it all started to seem like an enormous circle-jerk, and no matter what outrageous thing I might say about this text or that, everyone would nod gravely and look transfixed. That reaction started to seriously give me the heebie-jeebies by the time I was halfway through grad school.
But, as a reader, I suspect it led me to a similar place as the students felt like they were always guessing as best they could -- a place where I finally stopped looking outside for some sort of nod of approval about what I was reading or writing about.
I sort of got to a point where it felt like I could make up whatever silly crap I felt like defending with the appropriate jargon -- and it was all a game of the Emperor's New Clothes. That was an unjust judgment on my part, in many ways...but also perhaps not entirely inaccurate.
Sean @422:I did suggest that some folks think difficulty iteslf is meritorious. I never suggested that those people didn't like reading difficult work. I posited that they liked it just because it's difficult. I even went out of my way to relate to that mindset, by admitting that I once had that approach to literature and that I approach some music in that way.
About that, I do think you're perhaps right. I can't remember now who brought up the example of sudoku -- it may well have been you, now that I'm thinking about it -- but I keep thinking of the various ways people approach and enjoy different sorts of puzzles: Logic, crosswords, word-finders, sudoku, or what-have-you.
Reading tastes seem to me to have something in common with the puzzle tastes of individuals. We like different things for different reasons at different stages of our lives and in different moods.
Teresa mentioned Gertrude Stein, upriver, who played word games that I still enjoy very much. Joyce's Finnegan's Wake on the other hand, I find seriously inaccessible unless I'm in exactly the right frame of mind. Neither of those writers meet the same needs. Nor do either or those writers answer the desire that sends me out for the latest King, Bear, Bujold, or Kingsolver novel.
It's that odd place where we seem to be making value judgments -- even inadvertently -- about those choices, either or own or other people's, that things quickly become oddly prickly and fraught, both inside and outside my own head.
Avram at #418,
I'd like to point out that I never said a thing about Nick Mamatas -- who actually said a couple of things I agree with wholeheartedly -- one way or the other.
So I'm perplexed as to why you're apparently feeling a need to take me to task for picking on your friend?
I was, frankly, concerned that I'd inadvertently been bruising towards Abi, who I consider to be a sane and kind voice of humanity, just in general. I would very much have regretted doing so.
And I'll certainly confess to my own degree of defensiveness in the preceding discussion, which, to my reading, seem rather full of inexplicable miscommunication between members of a community that typically aren't usually so prickly or so defensive. That, all by itself, seems deeply curious with regard to the subject matter.
Abi, ah. I misread you. Thank you for clarifying.
These discussions very much have power, and I'm not sure why. I'm not sure why people talk about being embarrassed by the covers of this book or that. We're definitely not at the promised land, just yet.
abi @375
I've had that same response to this thread. And was just as reluctant to venture back in, honestly. Clearly, I should have heeded that feeling sooner.
I do apologize for any offense I've given
skzb @361
Yes. I'm sure. I've already pointed to a couple of such references in this thread, and so have other kind and well-read people participating here. it really is a case of the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Sidney's Defense of Poesie, linked above in my immediately previous post, is late 16th century, for example, and very much concerned with precisely what you've asked.
The idea that some writing improves the reader, while some spoils or taints the reader is pretty old.
Avram @358
Good. I'm delighted to hear it. That's effort well-spent, then, and can only improve the field as a whole.
Here's the thing. That push-pull dynamism serves the entire reader-writer community in ways that a more static and self-congratulatory dynamic wouldn't serve us. We *need* to have our comfort levels called into question, sometimes--and we *need* to have a knee-jerk reaction to that calling-into-question, I personally suspect.
I've been following this thread faithfully, but mulling much more than posting.
It occurs to me that I got a bit derailed with Sean's choice of metaphor in ways that were both useful and misleading, all at once.
In very real ways, we seem to be talking about individual squick and squee buttons -- but for whatever weird personal kink reasons, we've done an odd sorting thing into "literary" (that which I *ought* to like) vs "junk" or "genre" or other deprecating sorts of labels (stuff I really *like* and don't care to have to defend.)
Way back in PNH's post @ #50, wasn't it, he said something to the effect of wanting to tell his friends "those tall-booted, swagger-sticked, black-clad critics aren't here, now, and they cannot hurt you any more." (Okay...I'm taking radical license with his actual post, but too tired to go find and quote it for real.) What he said is true, though.
Moreover, some of those booted, black-clad critics are only waiting for an invitation to join the fun. Or even an indication that they won't be mocked and shunned.
There is a long, long, VERY long tradition of sorting written stuff into what we're supposed to like, vs. stuff that's fun and "trashy" and we're supposed to be embarrassed about reading.
Those lines are, I think, becoming a great deal more blurred in the last generation. LeGuin's thoughtful and wry essay about Atwood, cited above, suggests that's true, to me.
After all, Sidney was defending Poesie (Poets being those decadent souls who made stuff up...not necessarily just in rhyming verse) against those puritanical and self-righteous critics who would dismiss any and all writing they deemed to stink of fiction and poetry and whimsy as trashy, immoral lies.
But if (fie of such a but) you be born so near the dull-making Cataract of Nilus, that you cannot hear the Planet-like Music of Poetry; if you have so earth-creeping a mind that it cannot lift itself up to look to the sky of Poetry, or rather by a certain rustical disdain, will become such a mome, as to be a Momus of Poetry: then though I will not wish unto you the Asses ears of Midas, nor to be driven by a Poet's verses as Bubonax was, to hang himself, nor to be rhymed to death as is said to be done in Ireland, yet thus much Curse I must send you in the behalf of all Poets, that while you live, you live in love, and never get favor, for lacking skill of a Sonnet, and when you die, your memory die from the earth for want of an Epitaph.
Sir Philip Sideny The Defence of Poesie 1595
So while we're once again defending poesie, here, we don't have to do so nearly so fiercely or passionately, perhaps because we're among tribe. Perhaps because we don't have to purchase indulgences to atone for our fiction habits.
We have the luxury of rolling our eyes at someone who writes a long rant about who we *should* have put on the Hugo ballot...a rant in which he confessed he's not even a voting member. But he KNOWS what's Best For Us.
We have the luxury of responding with "*Snerk* Gosh, thanks, Daddy, but we like what we nominated and voted for just fine, thanks." The social penalties really are non-existent for the difference of opinion.
But we're also in a brave new world where, ten years ago, I convinced a committee of Grad School professors that writing an English master's thesis about King's Pet Sematary was not only defensible, but entirely reasonable.
Again, my quibble with this discussion is that we're all talking about different things when we say "literary fiction."
The Boat? The KiteRunner? Satanic Verses? No one has actually made any attempt towards a definition - so it's a meaningless term. It means whatever the speaker at the moment intends to signify, regardless of how eccentric that assignment of meaning might otherwise be.
So back to the Lev Grossman essay, and PNH's observation that still has me laughing, "That damn Hemingway with his crazy free verse" -- we're still having trouble with definitions, then, and what we mean by literary vs genre, and what Grossman means by modernism. It's the can't-define-it "but I know it when I see it" problem.
So how do we sort writers who've been in the literary canon for decades, like LeGuin? Or genre writers who write tricksy and complex books (thinking of Lindholm/SKZ's co-written The Gypsy here, frex) and are still unabashedly creating a book that's commercial, as well as creating art as best they can be true to the term?
Ah! But there's this really cool thing, here!
We sexualize our description of the reading/writing experience (at least some of us do) because it is, at heart, an intimate transaction, regardless of all else.
To some degree, that leads to gendered language when we're trying to construct metaphors, describe experiences, and otherwise communicate the nature of a highly intimate experience.
In terms of classic Puritan arguments about the moral depravity lurking between the covers of novels, it might has well have been an indictment of the depravity lurking beneath the covers of a shared bed -- and the nature of all evils embodied by and unique to the feminine, either way.
But here we are, again, needing to define and describe the terminology and inherent meaning behind the metaphors themselves before we can go anywhere at all with the discussion itself.
And Lisa wonders why I think litcrit is so cool. *g*
Sean, I completely get that you don't think genre = girlish = bad/weak-minded/etc. I also get that you love and appreciate genre fiction. I made a leap, after, and forgot to leave an adequate trail for folks to follow.
My response was to your characterization of "literary" (whatever that means) vs. "genre" in terms of dom/sub language.
There's been ongoing critical discussion about the centuries-old dismissal of reading! novels! as Bad For Moral Character, and I found your metaphor absolutely fascinating in terms of that discussion. I also found it deeply interesting in terms of the use of gendered language around writing/reading.
That's what I was responding to -- so please accept my apologies if I sounded as if I was making value judgments regarding your personal theories around writing. That certainly wasn't my intention.
I think there's an either/or conflict happening, as well -- that is, either you're the reader's bitch, or the reader is just along for your private ride -- that's perhaps not entirely helpful.
But then, it occurs to me that we're operating without a solid definition of what Sean means when he says "lit fic" and that might, in addition, be helpful.
Joyce's Ulysses perhaps rides me hard and puts me away wet, to extend this metaphor, but that doesn't mean I think of him as a more "literary" writer than I think of Khaled Hosseini or even John Irving or even Stephen King.
PNH, Sean, I'm clearly expressing myself badly -- how do we talk about writing in terms of
A = You're my bitch
vs.
B = I'm your bitch
without talking about masculinizing or feminizing?
I seem to have made a leap in terms of this discussion, though, that's left me out on a limb. So I'll gently bow right back out with a tip of my metaphorical hat.
Sean @66 - I'm not accusing you of thinking one or the other is immoral, at all. As it happens, neither do I.
But the idea of one type of writing as being dominant, active, in-control, and performing upon versus another type of writing as being submissive, passive, and doing-as-told, is very much an argument about masculinization vs feminization of literature (this certainly isn't mine, btw, I refer you to the rather famous mid-90s essay by Beth Newman, "The Heart of Midlothian and the Masculinization of Fiction")in terms of a greater theory of fiction.
That's what I find problematic.
Sean @62 - it's not over the top, as such, but you're perhaps buying into some very old and weird thinking about the nature of reading and writing.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 29 |
Total: 29 comments. View all these comments on a single page.
The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by MacAllister:
Show all comments by MacAllister.