By the way, Will, I do have - as you put it - the bravery to insist that I am right and others are wrong when the "others" are such renowned and esteemed critics as Edmund Wilson and Harold Bloom, and the subject is a certain novel that they unhesitatingly condemn and that Patrick, Teresa, Neil, Sherwood, and I are all outspoken admirers of. I expect you and probably the others you list are admirers of it too. I think you know its name.
Should I be cowed by the mighty literary reputations of Wilson and Bloom? Would you be cowed by them? What if they posted on this blog?
And that dispute is a matter of literary taste. I haven't tried to defend my literary distaste for F&N at all: that is de gustibus. I found it boring, but I've liked other work by Emma and Steve. I adored The Sun, The Moon & the Stars, which just about everybody else I talked to hated. So it goes. This is not about literary taste, this is about factual plausibility, a much more objective subject, to whcih I attach more objective standards. When I read these holes, I thought of the holes Teresa found in American Psycho: not impossibilities, not actual inaccuracies, just implausibilities that insulted the reader's intelligence.
I'm willing to listen to defenses. On a couple subjects (18th-century capitalization, and the use of first names) I've heard good ones. On others, not. And to have some argue that these things are indeed historically plausible, while others say they implausibilities are because characters are lying, and yet others say the implausibilities are an indication of an alternate history, and Sylvia says there's some secret explanation which she hasn't revealed - these contradictory responses don't increase my faith in any of them.
Will, I am reacting to the standards for being upset that have been previously established here. If Teresa can take offense at the mere suggestion that she let her enthusiasms run away with her - something that we all do, so it's not condescending to point it out - I can do likewise at what Rachel has now clarified was the assumption that if I knew about the Chartists I'd have agreed with her, ergo I must not have known about the Chartists. People wanna talk about condescension, and how one can be obviously and blatantly condescending without intending it. I didn't bring the subject up, but it's there now. Well, there ya go.
And the question still remains: where did James get his highly-advanced philosophical ideas from? Not "from the Chartists"; why did he join them in the first place? It's not impossible, but it's highly unusual for a person of his class and background to have joined what was primarily a workingmen's movement. Since Chartist principles are taken for granted by many people of that background and class now, but were highly unusual then, the cautious reader will immediately wonder if we don't have here that extremely common flaw of historical novels, the modern person in the historical setting. If that's not what we have, some explanation as to how that unusual person got so unusual should be provided.
Instead, I'm getting tautologies: James held Chartist principles because he was a Chartist. (Never mind that the principles I was referring to are 20th-century secular humanist philosophy, not 19th-century Chartist politics at all.)
Rachel, again you are saying things that I either already responded to, or are off-point in some manner. But rather than wearying the gentry any more, I'm taking it to e-mail.
Oh, and I really enjoyed being treated as if I needed to be told who the Chartists were.
Mary Kay, Rachel, Jeremy - Thanks for the thoughtful replies, but everything each of you says (as well as Mitch's post of yesterday) was already addressed by things I've said in LJ, or in my previous posts. Or at any rate I thought it was. I can try, briefly, to repeat myself: Mary Kay, what sturgeonslawyer said: the objection isn't to what people did, it's to what they said. Jeremy, I very specifically did not say what you're paraphrasing me as condescendingly saying. Rachel, the question is, where and how did James come by these radical opinions?
Apart from that: since I'm obviously not making myself clear, let's just drop it.
Mitch - no, I have no problem with stories that play fast & loose with history. I read alternate histories and comic works. My concern here is with a work that looks like it's trying to be documentarily accurate, but appears to me to contain the kind of inaccuracies that look more like sloppiness than playfulness. Especially when (and this may not be necessarily the authors' fault) it is advertised as, and defended by its defenders as, historically accurate down to the last detail.
And as this is a documentary novel, i.e. the text consists of letters, diaries, etc., the question of accuracy IS about what people said they were doing rather than what they actually might have done. Though the question of simple plausibility, apart from mores, also comes up.
I also went on, when I said this the first time, to give an example of how my critical faculties were short-circuited when I was sufficiently goosed by a book.
You're absolutely right: I have no idea what's condescending about saying such things.
Patrick, there's an old saying, "Even Homer nods." It's not condescending to point out that this might have happened, or to compare Teresa with Homer. She is equally outstanding in her field.
If it didn't happen, I still await the evidence.
But Scott, you underestimate the depth of Republican hypocrisy. Remember, these are the guys who are now claiming that favorable military discharges are no proof of having done one's duty, and that we shouldn't use electronic voting because the opposition might steal the election.
Keyes is saying that it's OK for him "to go into a state he doesn't even live in and pretend to represent people there," because he's not using it as part of a nefarious plot to run for president.
Remember, this is a guy who already has run for president twice, without letting the fact that he held no office at all stop him; nor does the fact that Hillary has not run for president seem to have made much of an impression.
Indeed, I have seen it argued that Hillary's failure to run for president in either 2000 or 2004 is evidence for her nefarious plot to run in 2008, as if a plan to run in 2008 (if there is one) is nefarious.
I've also seen Republicans say it's OK because Keyes was drafted by the party. Never mind that Hillary was similarly drafted by major figures who wanted her to run, and then won a primary which proved she was wanted. Never mind also that no caveats about drafts were part of Keyes' original statement. And never mind that the Clintons were moving to Westchester anyway, regardless of whether Hillary ran or not. I've seen no claims that Keyes was planning to move to Calumet City, or wherever it is he's establishing residence, anyway.
Sylvia, as the defenders of F&N seem split, even within individual persons, as to whether the apparently erroneous details are actually factually accurate or are a clue that it's an alternate universe, then if it is indeed the latter, it isn't a very effective way of conveying it.
I am also skeptical of the wisdom of creating an alternate universe that looks exactly like the non-alternate universe of a lousy author. One needs a very deft satirical talent indeed to pull something like that off without telegraphing it.
The best explanation I can think of is that the documents turn out to be fake - as indeed they are, having been written by Brust & Bull. If that's the case, for my part all the errors are excused.
But in the meantime, as you'll know if you read my LJ post, I am quite aware of the implications of not having read the entire book, and I was waiting for someone to give a good explanation. I'm still waiting.
In response to your last comment, I guess I need to repeat what I said earlier:
When I told Teresa that perhaps the book had goosed her pimples so much that her critical faculties went on hold, it was a mere speculation (that's what "perhaps" means). Further, I paid her critical faculties an effusive compliment in the same paragraph.
Avram: And I replied to those in a follow-up post. Did I give you the impression that the entire fantasy world had already weighed in?
Rachel: I'm not going to bring the full arguments over here because it couldn't be done meaningfully without going on at great length, and I doubt strongly that either Patrick, or readers who aren't interested, would want to page through it.
The problems with F&N that I cited are not those kinds of details. See my LJ for specifics. If you believe that any of them are either true or convincing, I'd be very interested to see evidence.
So far, most of its defenders have been saying that it isn't supposed to be historically accurate. Quite a feat for a book which, except in this one discussion, has been and continues (see above) to be praised for its historical accuracy.
Mary Kay: Fine, I don't care if people value a historical novel for reasons other than its historical veracity. That was the whole point I was making by bringing up the Westlake example: that I'm not insisting that getting it right is the only critical value. But that's not the response that's come, here or elsewhere, to my statement that F&N lacks an accurate feel for its historical period. It's been either to assume I disliked the book in total (I do, but that's because I found it boring - but that, as Patrick says, is simply de gustibus), or to defend its historical accuracy, which is futile.
Mary Kay, this isn't about tastes and opinions, this is about historical facts. Of course it's annoying to be told that one's historical facts are wrong. But that doesn't make them any less wrong. If you want to get into specifics, take it to LJ.
When I told Teresa that perhaps the book had goosed her pimples so much that her critical faculties went on hold, it was a mere speculation (that's what "perhaps" means). Further, I paid her critical faculties an effusive compliment in the same paragraph.
And it does happen to everybody. Dancing Aztecs, my favorite Donald Westlake novel, has a huge gaping factual hole right in the middle of its fundamental premise, and I don't care!
But if someone pointed it out to me (and no one did: I noticed it myself the second or third time I read the book), I'd say "Yep, that's a problem" and explain why I liked the book despite that. There are other things I wouldn't do. One of them might be getting upset at the person who pointed it out.
I think Abigail is right to this extent: that the "thing" that certain readers are trying to get out of SF, or fantasy, differs so profoundly from the "thing" that other readers are seeking that N mutually exclusive sets of books within a genre are formed. (That's ignoring other books which are not mutually excluded.) And some kind of terminology is helpful.
Speaking as someone who assimilated Tolkien into my hindbrain at an early age, I can say categorically that essentially nothing that is published with "in the tradition of Tolkien" on the cover has in it what I get out of Tolkien. That something, which I think to be the fantasy equivalent of SF's Sense of Wonder, is very hard to find, and not just because I'm older and more jaded.
What I do get out of Fantasy Product, and even from higher-class works like Guy Kay's, is the same thing I get out of non-fantasy historicals. This causes me to think of these books not as fantasy at all, but as historical novels with magic in them. And if I Ran The World, they'd be removed from the fantasy shelves and put with historicals, so that I could find what I was looking for in fantasy. Patrick can sue me for this, but it's the way I feel.
Teresa, sorry, but something's got to explain this, and it sure ain't that the book is historically accurate. The explanations I've gotten so far amount to, "It's alternate history," which as an explanation for accidental historical infelicities is cheating. We haven't even talked about Lisa Goldstein. You think your scales itch ...
Abigail's original point was a rather subtle one about the differences between reality and stereotyped perception. Too bad her argument was lost in definitional noise, but it seems to be coming back out.
My own thought on it is that she's half-right: Harry Potter's fantasy trappings are not much more than that, and it wouldn't take that much change to remove them. But that doesn't make it extraneous that the books are fantasy: I believe that's a large part of their appeal, however superficial the fantasy elements may be.
I find the same thing in Extruded Fantasy Product (or "Tolclones" as we often call them in the Mythopoeic Society). That their fantasy elements are not integrated into the story was observed by Ursula K. Le Guin in 1973; still, it's clear that their readers love those elements.
Neil Gaiman has answered one of Abigail's points: the website discussed is full of marketing data not because the publishers think the book is about its marketing, but because the site is aimed at booksellers, who need to know this stuff: there's another site aimed at readers which is actually about the book.
Teresa, perhaps you were so delighted with Freedom & Necessity that you were not able to apply your critical faculties to it. This happens, even to the best of us, and you are the best of us. I've taken my detailed creebs to LJ, and anyone who wants to read them can follow the link.
Abigail: Ah yes, The Anubis Gates. Yes, Powers did grasp the period well. But that book was over 20 years ago now (I haven't read any subsequent historically-set books by Powers), and I'm still reeling from the sheer incompetence of the highly-praised work of intervening years by other authors, such as what I mentioned above. IIRC, Freedom & Necessity was dedicated to TNH as "the ideal reader of this book." I'll say. The TNH who eviscerated American Psycho would have sliced & diced Freedom & Necessity.
Xopher: Ah, I see. Rather the way I keep in mind that the dromedary has only one hump by remembering that Ogden Nash was wrong: it is the other way around.
I for one intend to read Clarke's book as soon as I can find time to read an 800-page novel. I was tremendously impressed with her stories in Starlight. At long, long last, a post-Tolkien historically-based fantasy writer who actually has a feel for the historical periods she's writing about. A corrective for the mind addled from reading Lisa Goldstein and Freedom & Necessity.
Xopher: if, as your post seems to imply, you are a veteran of high-school German, then why do you have trouble with Tolkien's name, which is German in origin? I'd have thought graduates of high-school German would know that what's pronounced keen would be spelled "kien" rather than "kein" - or don't you pronounce it that way? I've never heard anyone SAY tol-kine unless they were sarcastically reproducing the misspelling, but maybe I've missed something. After all, Fritz Leiber, which should be pronounced lye-ber, got so wearied of people saying lee-ber that he gave up correcting them.
Patrick: when visiting that alternate continuum, don't forget Frederick Pohl. And L. Sprague de Camp alphabetized by surname under S, which I swear I have seen on bookstore shelves more than once.
Somewhere (possibly on Political Animal) I read the comment of Leahy's press secretary, who said that he guesses this means that Cheney's previous calls for civility in politics are "inoperative."
I wonder how many younger folk today will catch the drift of that last word.
Dowd calls Cheney "Major League Potty Mouth." Shouldn't that be "Big Time" instead?
It's interesting to see reports about marriage-is-for-procreation types who actually apply this to opposite-sex couples who are elderly, infertile, etc. This is insane, but at least it's consistent.
The line I've more usually seen is the mealy-mouthed "in principle any opposite-sex couple is fertile." And in principle, ostriches and penguins can fly.
An anti-gay marriage poster at Amptoons used the metaphor of two glasses of water. A given 12-oz. glass may be empty, but in principle it can hold more water than a 6-oz. glass. Amp gave the perfect answer: "This doesn't mean we should then prohibit drinking out of 6-oz. glasses."
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| 2004 | 22 |
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