The most recent 20 comments posted to Electrolite by Tim Walters:

"Fender bass" is an old-fashioned way of saying "electric bass guitar" regardless of brand, much as we still say "saxophone" or "Chapman stick" or "ondes Martenot"--but more confusing, which is no doubt why it died out. So you're both right.

As late as the Eighties, I remember reading an article for bass players explaining that no, the arranger didn't care what brand you played. So it must have lingered on in pit and studio terminology longer than in popular parlance.

I must admit that I read The Eyre Affair and didn't think much of the writing (though the concept is fun). Am I the only one?

Nope. It got me to read Jane Eyre, though, so it was worth it.

Jane Eyre, in preparation for reading The Eyre Affair.

Before that: The Algebraist. Quite good, but either I'm getting hip to Banks' tricks, or he coasts from time to time.

The lava tubes are great, though!

Xopher, I quite understand. For me it's Lou Reed solo albums. For a while there, every album he put out was touted as his return to Velvets-era form, and I would dutifully troop down to the store and buy it, and it would be half-decent at best. Eventually I gave up, and I doubt I'll ever listen to solo Lou again (with the possible exception of Metal Machine Music).

Yes, I should have included those, as well as The Dancers At The End Of Time.

Weren't most of the Eternal Champion books written in three days each to raise emergency money for New Worlds? In any case, I would read Stormbringer and The War Hound And The World's Pain and blow off the rest.

But his non-EC books are often very worthwhile, e.g., Gloriana, The Brothel In Rosenstrasse, Mother London, Byzantium Endures.

They must be seperate books, as one book cannot be better than itself.

Oh, but it can! The book I read the second time is often better than the book I read the first time, and both are undoubtedly worse than the book the author wrote, even though all are the same book.

I should have said "the same book, completely different, or both."

Using my patented system for computing genre as a pseudo-Riemannian manifold in n-dimensional style space, it turns out that Don Quixote by Cervantes and Don Quixote by Menard are either the same book, or completely different.

The point of it is that when writing genre fantasy novels it is not enough to set a bunch of standard genre fantasy characters in a standard genre fantasy setting. The clear meaning is that it is possible to write a genre fantasy novel which is something else, and indeed the only worthwhile genre fantasy novels are something else.

That doesn't seem very clear to me. If I said that hitting all the right notes wasn't enough to play Chopin successfully, would you take that to mean that I thought you should play wrong notes?

Clute disavows pejorative intent, and even goes so far as to say "the constraints of GF can bring out the best in some authors," citing Tad Williams as an example. I haven't read Williams; my examples of high-quality GF would be Tigana and the aforementioned The Knight (thanks, Mike).

If I ran the zoo, the term would be a little broader, and used merely to distinguish things that sit comfortably on the "Fantasy" shelf from the wider realm of fantastic literature (magic realism, postmodern fabulation, straight myth and fairy tales, etc.). But for better or worse, that doesn't seem to be the standard meaning.

I'm sorry, but this strikes me as the worst kind of scholastic bollocks.

Tell it to John Clute. I'm just the messenger. "Genre fantasy" may not be the most felicitous term, but it's out there and in common use (as the Making Light link posted demonstrates). If I had to guess, I'd say that he wanted a way to say "generic fantasy" without the pejorative connotations.

For heaven's sake, that Encyclopedia of Fantasy definition, taken as literally as you're saying we should, excludes Conan the sodding Barbarian from being "genre fantasy," because Robert E. Howard's Hyborian Age is certainly no "derivative of J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle Earth.

I'm pretty sure that Clute intends C.t.s.B. to be excluded, although not for that reason.

Exactly how does this aburdly precious distinction between "gray cats" and "cats that are gray" tell us what's actually going on? How does it make us smarter?

Would you agree that Jordan, Feist, Eddings et al. are part of a recognizable subgenre? If so, what would you call it? The only other term I've heard is "big fat fantasy," but I have a hunch you'd find that even more objectionable.

I have no stake in the term "genre fantasy," except that it's the term I know.

From the Encyclopedia of Fantasy's entry on Genre Fantasy:

"GF is almost always high fantasy, heroic fantasy or sword and sorcery, and its main distinguishing characteristic is that, on being confronted by an unread GF book, one recognizes it; one has been here before, and the territory into which the book takes one is familiar--it is Fantasyland....

The hallmark of GF is that it is set in a secondary world (in the broadest sense of the term). In less imaginative works this is just a granted--a Fantasyland derivative of J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-Earth."

And the Making Light thread On writing genre fantasy uses the term in a similar way.

Abigail's use of the term seems perfectly reasonable to me.

We've already heard from you that the fantasy genre is "Tolkienesque."

"Genre fantasy" != "the fantasy genre."

That said, I disagree with Abigail's main point about Harry Potter. I agree that it's a school story with fantasy icing, but I don't see how that implies that the fantasy element isn't driving sales; I would think that, if anything, it implies the opposite, unless there's some boom in non-fantastic school stories I'm not aware of.

Xopher, you obviously need the Innocent III action figure.

"Filii Hobenstaufenin, osculamini asinum meum."

I'll add Karl Popper's The Open Society And Its Enemies to Neil's recommendation.

Hit statistics can be misleading. I got three thousand hits from one forum last month, but they weren't downloading my music or even looking at my site. Rather, someone was using one of my images as an avatar.

Similarly, the songs on my site get noticeably more hits than complete plays or downloads. The only thing I would really want to count is the latter. I ended up writing a perl script that operates directly on the weblog, since I couldn't find a service that counted anything but hits. I hope that doesn't put me into the "obsessed" category--it was fun.

Tim: How do you connect your ... vigorous ... response to the OED definition previously posted?

The OED didn't mention "certainty." "Denies or disbelieves," it said. Disbelief, according to my less-prestigious but handy-at-work dictionary, can be limited to "withholding belief." It's nothing like certainty.

I think you and I are using different shades of the word "believe".

Maybe, but my objection was to your use of the word "certainty," which doesn't have a lot of shades.

how disturbed would you be if clear evidence turned up that O.J. didn't kill his wife?

Not very, but I wouldn't be particularly disturbed to find out that (most versions of) God existed either. Unless he stuck me in hell, of course. Fortunately, my disbelief in eternal damnation is a lot stronger than my disbelief in God.

Similarly, I have no emotional commitment to what you call yourself,

Oddly enough, I do, and I don't care for my creed being redefined into something I find unattractive. Having readThe Ascent of Man at a tender age, I associate certainty with arrogance and the abuse of power. Having read Popper much later, I understand even better why certainty is a dangerous chimera.

and if it makes you happier to call me an atheist you are free to do so

I don't want to do that at all. It wouldn't even occur to me.

Sorry if I'm too "... vigorous ...", but I usually post from work in haste. I haven't meant anything I've said as an attack.

I thought I'd made that clear; as I understood the term, atheism was the certainty that there were no gods, while agnosticism is an admitted uncertainty. Posts here suggest that this definition is not uncommon.

On the contrary, posts here have demonstrated that it's at least uncommon enough that several dictionaries flatly contradict it.

The difference between "belief" and "certainty" is pretty straightforward. There are many things I believe (O.J. killed his wife, invading Iraq was a bad idea, God doesn't exist), and very few of which I'm certain (1 + 1 = 2 under the normal axioms of arithmetic).

You don't have to be certain that the Iraq war was a bad idea to be a Iraq dove, and you don't need to be certain that God doesn't exist to be an atheist. Belief is sufficient in either case.

Ivor seems to think that certainty is required for belief. Not only can he not prove this (and therefore not believe it himself, by his own standards), but since certainty is very hard to come by, this requirement is tantamount to nihilism. Watch your toes around him.

I don't think you're as confused as he is, but I do think you're over-eager to claim moderate atheists for agnosticism.

I maintain that we are too ignorant now to know if there is a god or if there isn't. Because of that ignorance, we can't logically call ourselves atheists. This simply isn't a difficult or controversial point and I don't understand the intensity of the reaction to my position, unless my actions are interpreted as attacking a belief system.

If it's so simple and uncontroversial, why has it been decisively and politely refuted several times, and why has your only response to that refutation been to repeat your original thesis over and over as if it were a mantra, and to add gratuitous ad hominem remarks about how everyone who disagrees with you is just being over-emotional?

I have said that I am using the most common defintion, the most common usage, of the terms atheist and agnostic.

You can say it as often as you like. It's still not true.

Atheism is certainly a spiritual position (just as absolute zero is a place on the scale of temperature).

I don't like this analogy, because I think questions of spirituality aren't necessarily related to the existence of God (or gods). I believe in the sacred; all you have to do is take one look at Mount Shasta and you can see that it's a sacred mountain. I just think that spirituality is intrinsic to consciousness rather than extrinsic. I don't feel that that diminishes it in any way.

My ongoing Sunday question is: "If something came out of nothing; why did it happen?" I'm open to hearing responses to it from atheists. My own current response to it is "I don't know."

My atheist response is "I don't know, but saying 'God did it' leads us further from explanation rather than closer to it." At some point, something rather than nothing just is. I don't see any advantage in pushing that is-ness back a level.

Ivor,

By your own standards, agnosticism is equally illogical, since you can't prove that there isn't enough evidence to decide whether or not God exists. For that matter, you can't prove that Marduk, Santa Claus, or the Loch Ness monster don't exist, but I'm willing to bet that you don't believe in any of them.

If proof were required for belief, it would be impossible to believe almost anything. Fortunately, we don't require proof for belief; instead, we tentatively accept the best explanation available, knowing full well that new evidence may invalidate it at some point. Proof is required for certainty, but as has been pointed out about a thousand times already, atheists don't usually claim certainty.

In my opinion, a universe without God fits the evidence better than a universe with God. That's why I call myself an atheist. I'm open to being convinced otherwise, if persuasive evidence for God's existence can be mustered, but that doesn't make me an agnostic.

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