She wants to be learning something*/be exposed to new ideas/have her mind stretched by what she reads.
My mother is the same way. (She calls her mystery reading "idiot reading".) However, that isn't the same as saying that the only good books are difficult books that require work and that enjoyment is bad. So it's not that I dislike your answer because it's not linkable, but because it doesn't actually match my request.
So again, the name and some evidence of anyone, anywhere, you thinks that the best way to determine the quality of a book is how "difficult" it is and how much "work" it involves, who dislikes pleasure.
It's a trick question, of course, because the organism always seeks pleasure. Your mother takes pleasure in learning something new about people (or talking squid, or the French Revolution) and thus that is what she seeks out. She's not torturing herself for the sake of social status or to impress you or for occult reasons.
My friend Brian chews tobacco. Why? He likes it. Why don't I chew tobacco? I don't like it. it doesn't taste to me the way it tastes to him, or at least what he likes in his mouth is not what I like in my mouth. My failure to find pleasure in dip does not make me anti-pleasure and pro-eating gross things that aren't enjoyable like dip is.
Now, you can wave your MFA in my face and tell me to stfu because I'm just an amateur Reader Of Stuff and you have a Degree, but that's kind of what we're trying to get away from, isn't it? Or was I wasting my bandwidth in comment 12?
It's always very funny when someone manufactures some insult, attributes it to someone else, and then gets sore at being insulted by the person who didn't say or do anything.
Roberts is clearly talking about enjoyment. What does Roberts enjoy? He enjoys books that challenge, stimulate, offer something new, unnerve, and blow his mind. He refers to these books as good, excellent, and brilliant and enthusiastically encourages others to read them.
The defensiveness in this thread is hysterical, and in more ways than one. Because Roberts didn't stand and up and swear, "By the sacred Gernsback and the holy Campbell I do swear that I will only enjoy the books that Fandom Assembled does and only for Fandom-Approved reasons, and I will be sure to pre-emptively denounce The Intellectual and The Literary and the Schoolteacher and the Beret-Wearing Homosexual In the Back of the Cafe who is their Servant if on such an occasion that I like something else for reasons that are my own, so help me ghod in heaven" he's a schoolmarm telling people to take their medicine. And that medicine? The Batman movie, as opposed to the Hellboy movie. Uh, okay.
Nick: Could you dial back your tone a bit, please?
You first. Nothing I've written here is more hostile than, "his sneering use of the word 'pleasant' to diss Zoe's Tale indicates that he looks down on people who think enjoyability should be a criterion." Your entire increasingly silly misreading of Roberts's post simply tells me that you have exactly the baggage already discussed in comment #50. It's really not worth talking about enjoyment with someone who can look at the Roberts's enthusiastic use of the terms "stimulate" "mind-blowing" "the new" and "wake and shake" and come away with "enjoyability is not one of the criteria" Roberts uses to determine which books he believes to be good.
I don't know whether you really have reading comprehension difficulties (I suspect not, given your sentences), have a penchant for arguing yourself into a corner and trying to bluster your way out, or if you really just have so much comment #50 style baggage that you assume the worst of Roberts's comments and fill in the blanks with even more dire claims he's never made, but in the end it doesn't matter. Your remarks are limned with hostility toward Roberts (you already called him and asshole and then caught yourself -- funny that I never mistakenly typed a-s-s-h-o-l-e in the twenty years I've been online) and show a simple inability for whatever reason to understand Roberts's very simple claim:
The books on the Hugo shortlist are mediocre, which is bad because I think the Hugos are supposed to be about the best books. I like books that wow me and do something new. The Hugo books don't, except for one, but that one didn't really work for me either. I hope Hugo voters put books that wowed me on the shortlist next year because the Hugos have a high public profile. Here are some suggestions.
Is Roberts hostile? Sure, it's a polemic. Is he being a bit imperious? Of course, but no more imperious than, say, you Xopher. Is it a fair reading to say that Roberts doesn't like enjoyable books or doesn't find books enjoyable or that he holds enjoyability distinct from quality? No. Not at all. Not in the slightest. That interpretation tells me much more about the interpreter than it does the text.
Now, I don't care much for Roberts's actual claims: of course popularity contests are going to be popularity contests. I don't care about the Hugos, though I did enjoy receiving my little rocketpin. I think some of the books he champions in his posts and certainly the movies he champions are just as mediocre as the books he decries. But he is absolutely not saying "enjoyment bad/difficulty the only good." This is transparently so because the books Roberts champions are no more difficult than the ones he labels mediocre.
So again, can anyone actually attach a name and a quote to anyone ever who has said "enjoyment bad/difficulty the only good"? And if not, will anyone out there actually stop claiming that there are legions of teachers and critics and snooty bloggers and Japanese instrumentalists and MFA students who do just that?
Xopher @ 211 & 212:
No, if you read it the way abi did, you also read it wrong, for the same reasons abi did.
See; we can play this game all day long. Roberts thinks TQW is a good book. He says it in that paragraph, and he says it elsewhere in that post. He thinks it's a better book than Zoe's Tale.
And he says that "good readers" are likely to see what he means.
That's it. When you say "Adam Roberts thinks it means a book that improves the reader" you are MANUFACTURING something that does not exist in what Roberts said.
abi @203:
Beg all you like, you're still inaccurate. You are torturing the text to make it say what you wish it to say. Roberts is NOT saying to read TQW to broaden your horizons, etc. He gives TQW as an example of a good book after explaining that it is a good idea to broaden one's horizons by reading widely and outside one one's comfort zone, not that the act of reading TQW will make you a better reader with a saner soul.
I refer again to Comment #50. The people you are arguing with are not here. Indeed, they are no anywhere so far as I can tell.
abi #192:
Swing and miss. Even the quote you provide declares The Quiet War to be "excellent" and a "better novel" while Scalzi's title is "pleasant but mediocre." Further, Roberts makes NO claim as to TQW's difficulty—and McAuley is not a difficult writer—nor does Roberts claim that TQW is good because it is difficult and denies the reader pleasure.
But your miss is more or less identical to the other misses I've seen yesterday and today. The mere claim that Book A is good and Book B isn't as good is insufficient. As far as why so many people see "Death to pleasure! Read the hard, obscure, incomprehensible stuff because it is hard!" in comment and claims that contain none of those imperatives, I can only suggest a reread of PNH's comment #50.
Nick, #181: That's not really a response to Sean's question. He's already acknowledged that his mother and her friends enjoyed both the academic reading and the mystery novels; the question was why they considered the latter something to be ashamed of reading.
I was the one who asked a question of Sean, or rather made a request. I requested that he provide an example of someone who privileged difficulty over pleasure, of someone who points to something that is hard or difficult and declares that because it is difficult and offers no pleasure that it is good.
The reason I asked for an example, and the reason I looked closely at his attempts is because Grossman has sparked a number of conversations across the blogosphere and a number of people have made declarations that there are writers/critics/readers etc. who are just jerks and willfully obscure and purposefully make/champion/consume things difficult because they think difficult=good AND pleasure=bad.
And myself and a number of other people have asked for the names of some of these writers/critics/readers are and...no surprises here...not one person has managed to come up with a name that makes sense. They've listed writers whose works they didn't like, they've listed critics who have pooh-poohed (some) science fiction, they've waved their arms and have said "most every critic" or people who read "hard" stuff, but nobody has shown that any of these people are opposed to pleasure.
They just find pleasure in other things. #185 has it exactly right.
Also, I don't believe we are talking past one another at all. You think Sawyer can write well. I don't think he can. I can certainly appreciate writers who make sure that words/writing doesn't "get in the way" (as you put it) of the story; I don't think Sawyer is a good example of that at all. (A writer who is: Robert Charles Wilson. Another: Greg Bear.)
I also don't think that "the prose being the vehicle rather than the driver" is the definition of good writing (it's "a" definition), and driving in a prose vehicle isn't always the reading experience I want to have.
Good writing can involve prose being the vehicle, it can involve prose being the driver, it can involve prose being the obstacle that must be overcome, it can involve prose being the scenery that zips by almost too fast to recognize, it can involve prose being the flaming heap on the side of the road that we slowly drive past in order to linger upon. Bad writing can also involve all those things.
Good writing is a lot of things. The people who prefer (either always or sometimes) drivers, obstacles, scenery, and flaming heaps--and people who do not like (or do not always like) prose as vehicles--are not putting on airs or pretending to do so for tenure or social status or doing it because the nerd is the victim of the world and they are the great oppressor, or anything like that.
Lee: and some people can read, say, Ben Marcus or Nam Le, and have that same experience. They can do it with Eliot or Joyce too. They are not lying, they are not just saying so to look good back on the college qudrangle, they're not showing off -- or not showing off anymore than some con-going enthusiast who bellows about his or her favorites all the time -- or anything like that. They just like what they like. They don't see words as something that could "get in the way" because the words are the way in some books.
Further, many people can enjoy books where words don't get in the way and books where the words are the way and where the whole point is to holler "Ain't I something." There's no privileged position, no essence of what a novel or story is (or should be) be that precedes its existence.
Incidentally, I too have some background knowledge (I took a bunch of physical anthropology classes in college, and was the only non-major in the my school called "400-level" courses) and found Sawyer's first book in that series incredibly clunky, to the point where I laughed out loud several times at his attempts to squeeze in this or that bit of the science, and to the point where I didn't bother with the other books in the series. (There was also one of the more ridiculous descriptions of a rape scene and its immediate psychic aftermath I've ever read on pp. 62-65 -- I didn't laugh out loud, but I did roll my eyes and put the book down for a week.)
In her spare time, my mom and her friends loved to read mysteries. They called the mysteries, 'junk.' For example, 'This weekend I'm just going to read junky mysteries.' They also called these mysteries, 'trashy' and 'guilty pleasures'.
Why was it junk? Why did they feel guilty about reading mysteries? They valued the hard stuff, the epic poems with references that took footnotes to explain, but they seemed to enjoy the trashy junk too, but that was somehow not OK.
Again, this is NOT an example of your claim that some people valorize difficulty over pleasure.
One can enjoy formal dining at a top restaurant because it activates and challenges their palettes and also enjoy Kraft Dinner because it does not. One can enjoy epic poems because they are awesome and timeless and mysteries because they are not awesome and not timeless.
Your mother just had more than one axis when it came to pleasure.
The motto of Ezra Pound's "Little Review," which published the first chapters of Joyce's "Ulysses," was "Making no compromise with the public taste."
Nothing in that Grossman quote shows that there is a pleasure v. work dichotomy when it comes to the assignment of artistic merit. It shows only that the Little Review has a different publishing program than, say, The Saturday Evening Post. (So too does Tor, which publishes mostly SF/F and thus which caters to less than 10% of the fiction market. Why does Tor ignore the voice of the people! The people who don't want SF/F but only more popular genres!)
The mere publishing of "difficult" work is not a demonstration that the work was considered good because it was difficult, or that difficulty is valorized over pleasure.
So again Seam, please name some people "who value difficulty over pleasure" in a text and show me where they have made statements to that effect. Seems to me to be pretty clear that people who enjoy "difficult" texts find pleasure in the difficulty-- they just dare take pleasures in things you might not.
And the pleasure of difficulty is not unique to readers of (post)modernist fiction. Readers of SF/F, also enjoy difficulty, though the sites of difficulty within those works vary. "The Cold Equations" is a difficult text -- go find some third graders to read it to and then report back to me how pleasurable they found it -- but for an audience who enjoys being confronted with the idea of an amoral uncaring narrative universe, it is pleasurable. Same too with people who enjoy spending significant amounts of mental energy on reading eleven volumes of this or that fantasy series, or who enjoy being overwhelmed by descriptions of the vastness of space or the infinity of time, etc etc.
Lee, I don't think I was saying anything all that obscure. "Weird" for example means "odd" and "extraordinary", not "clumsy." "Endless" doesn't necessarily mean "badly managed"—of course no book series or even mode of writing is actually endless, but it's easy enough to think of readers who didn't live to see the end of this or that series of books, or who fell away from a series because it became a slog or because life got in the way.
"SF/F requires enormous amounts of work on the part of the reader" is pretty straightforward. It does. It may not seem that way to people who have spent decades doing the work but the same is so of many of the people who enjoy (post)modernist fiction. They find their reading difficult but not too difficult. From the outside it may seem willfully obscure, but so too are stories about made-up kingdoms or the genetic differences between Neanderthals and modern humans etc etc.
I do think it applies to the dynamic of pleasure vs. work as a way that some folks seem to evaluate the merit of writing and the place of literature.
Could you name some of these people and point to their statements where they've said such things?
At least the infodumps, clumsy names and neologisms, and (presumably) badly managed matters of scale?
Who said anything about "clumsy" names or "badly managed" matters of scale? Not I! No fair moving the goalposts.
What I am saying is that what Audience A (SF readers) see as features Audience B (non-SF readers) may see as bugs, even if Audience A is absolutely sure that the neologisms and the physics of the spaceship engines and all that stuff is the bee's knees and done well and properly. Sort of like musicals: there are people who simply dislike all musicals because they cannot get behind characters breaking into song. It doesn't matter whether fans of musicals say that, say, The Music Man is the Best Musical Evar and that with all the bands and music teachers it's okay that everyone starts singing, those who dislike musicals will dislike even The Music Man.
And 15K hardcovers of literary fiction by a tier one university faculty member will sell to students in five years.
The Boat came out one year ago. Literary fiction does have an audience outside of classrooms. It really really is true, and that audience is as authentic and legitimate and often as large as any other audience out there.
Nick, we have had different experiences. Maybe you went to all the right places and met the right folks and I went to all the wrong places, wrong this and wrong that. That works for me.
Perhaps. Though I would recommend a couple of things to consider:
1. there are plenty of blowhards in MFA classes and creative writing workshops. School is sort of the place where one can get one's hare-brained theories out of one's system. But the same is so of Clarion and other workshops in the SF/F field -- there's plenty of blogging about this or that silly idea that some emerging skiffy writer has. (Often, they take the form of ill-considered "movements.") These silly ideas aren't necessarily representative of the silly ideas working writers have.
2. I'd contend that SF/F requires enormous amounts of work on the part of the reader. The ability to sit through lengthy infodumps on means of propulsion, the neologisms, the immense casts of characters and endless 800-page volumes that take place over the course of generations, the many references to earlier literature, outright didacticism on everything from statecraft to sexual politics, and the topic of science in general require significant synoptic facilities and patience from readers. Many many readers simply slam shut a book when the first page contains many crazy terms and weird names--for these readers complex or unusual sentences about the everyday is LESS work than trying to read SF/F. This may be one reason why many adult SF/F readers come to the hobby as children while relatively few people start reading SF/F as adults--one needs years of experience to read the contemporary material in the field.
I also don't think Franzen/Oprah is a good example of lit v genre, when one considers that OBC selections included work by Toni Morrison, Edwidge Dandicat, Andre Dubus III, and Barbara Kingslover. Franzen's arguments were both more nuanced and more self-serving (to maximize air time on a variety of media outlets) than all that.
There's a good rejoinder to Franzen in Harper's, though sadly the entire article hasn't been pirated:
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2005/10/0080775
Perhaps I just hang out with the wrong crowds of literary and genre writers, and got my MFA at the wrong place and have run workshops at the wrong writing centers and have been published by the wrong editors and have edited the wrong magazines and have read too widely the wrong writers and their literary biographies but I too am deeply suspicious of Sean's formulations.
I'm also deeply suspicious of the claim that "literary fiction" means books that can only sell a couple thousand copies to the MFA crowd and whatnot. Grossman points to Nam Le's book selling 16,000 copies in the past year and a half of so, in two formats. What he doesn't mention is that ~14,500 were in hardcover, which ain't bad (and which doesn't include sales to libraries, which Worldcat tells me Le has done well with, with 1207 library systems having at least one copy of his book).
I know plenty of genre writers that would looooove to sell 14,500 hardcovers of a single title in a year and a half (plus a couple thousand to libraries, and through independent bookstores etc etc etc.) According to Bookscan, which I am abusing here in the final minutes of my working day, a number of the more prominent genre writers--Hugo and Nebula nominees and winners--haven't managed that trick with their 2008 hardcover releases. (Though of course genre fiction often gets the mmpb release as well.)
@112: I made no claim that she was disagreeing with me.
I was pointing out that typewriting as an issue came up here due to the question of class in #37. Once you're offering up the example of writers who have dozens of typewriters and can afford housecalls, you're not talking a class issue anymore, at all.
Also note: there are working writers who use typewriters because that is what they are comfortable with. The late Walter Wager owned a bevy of typewriters so that he would always have at least one working machine. His typewriter repair person made housecalls.
Certainly. But once you're in the "My typewriter guy makes housecalls to service by two dozen typewriters" bracket, you're pretty much not poor. You can pay someone to key your stories into a word processing program, much the same way a generation or three ago one might pay someone to key in their handwritten stories on a typewriter.
Which is the whole reason one can't generalize from "this works best for me" to "this is what works best for everyone and so ought to be required" in the first place.
Nobody's doing that. I (and JM) used ourselves as examples, but nobody is starting from "works for me" and ending at "works for everyone."
What we are saying is that:
a. inexpensive word processors are more accessible than inexpensive typewriters and are more likely to function.
b. Free Internet access in public libraries is cheaper than non-free stamps, envelopes, typewriter ribbon, photocopies, carbon papers, and/or printer toner.
c. Free Internet access in public libraries is more easily accessible than typewriter ribbon or carbon papers.
d. A single CD on which to store work to be transported to the library is cheaper than photocopying, carboning, or printing the work.
And the reason people are saying these things is because they are all so. The result of these four things is that e-subs do not only not harm more poor people than paper subs help, but e-subs actually make the submission process more accessible in more cases than paper subs.
The reason people are saying that well if it's 110 degrees outside and you have money for WD-40 but not for the bus even though they are the same price and if you're next to a magic store that sells paper for 1/5th the price of what paper sells for and maybe someone somewhere has a typewriter that still works and comes along a cache of ribbon that happens to fit and and and and...well, I don't know why people are saying these things.
There may well be 1 in 100 people helped out by paper subs. The paper sub-groups are, in the meantime, holding back 20 out of that same group of 100.
I can even think of a reason to accept a paper sub not otherwise mentioned. Religion. Th. Metzger, for example, has religious beliefs that essentially keep him off the 'net, though he is still published online (see?) thanks to the cooperation of his friend and publisher. But if you're not a genius like Metzger, I guess you won't end up in Flurb. On balance, it's still a positive trade-off. It's not worthwhile to accept paper subs for the one or two outliers for the most part, given the costs of dealing with paper subs one might wish to buy when otherwise the field has gone electronic.
There are certainly writers who'd benefit from being able to send their submissions verbally as they are great oral storytellers (and there are probably more of those given the tradition of oral storytelling than there are poor people in the exact situations necessary to make typewriters cheaper than the 'net) and yet where is the demand for open calls to perform in front of an editor's desk?
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