People on that thread haven't really taken the point as seriously as they might have. Yeah, I read Anne McCaffrey, but even at twelve, I knew I was indulging a somewhat childish taste, as you say FL.
More interesting are those books to which one commits one's youthful self-identity, for a time: "This is the adult world I will enter! This is how it works!" And the painful self-humiliation part is the realization of not only how young one was, but also how totally rolled one was by a flawed and even stupid worldview.
By those criteria, I wouldn't say that either Alexander or Anthony really count. Rand counts, but I hope that there are a few other authors out there with similar influence, otherwise we're all really in trouble.
You mean like works that portray a really stupid version of the grown-up world as being the real grown-up world? Maybe that's why a few people at CT have mentioned, say, Tom Clancy. If I were much younger, my nomination would be "Instapundit."
Yeah, Clancy would count. I also read Jett's Ian Fleming, and I'll even throw in the ridiculous Robert Ludlum, although these latter two are more clearly Gary Stu fantasies.
I don't know whether to be embarrassed by the fact that I liked The Witch of Blackbird Pond or by the fact that I lost my copy and had to reimburse the school.
Also, I may have idolized Thoreau without actually reading him. I no longer idolize him but still haven't read him.
I noticed at some point that the theme of all young adult novels seemed to be, "people, they disappoint you." Which was actually fairly useful, as morals go.
This all may be too youngish to count, but here goes: FL, I think it does get worse than rocking out to Asia. I rocked out to the Bay City Rollers. I dressed as a Roller for my last Halloween. Also, my first concert was Andy Gibb, where I rushed the stage for a close up photo with my instamatic camera.
I think everything that I'm embarrassed about having liked in the past, I'm embarrassed because I have assimilated an outside-world sense that I should be, rather than because I have independently decided that it is lame.
Take Richard Bach, for instance. I just loved JLS when I was in high school, must have read it 20 times, I thought it was great. (I got to Illusions a little too late I think, to find it great -- though if memory serves I did struggle to do so.) And I recognize now that it is not acceptable within a crowd of literate folks, to say something good about JLS; so in that sense I am embarrassed about having liked it. And my tastes have changed, I don't think I would pick it up now, though I might recommend it to my daughter when she is 13 or something. But I don't feel the kind of repulsion toward it that I would need to, in order to feel ashamed or embarrassed-for-my-own-sake at the memory of enjoying it.
The Black Stallion. Re-reading it as an adult, I was appalled at how astonishingly thin the racial allegories in that series of novels are. Shudder.
Also, Shogun, which I read several times at around the age of 9 / 10.
A movie I'm embarrassed to have liked--all the more so because I finally made Mr. B. see it a few years ago, swearing up and down it was great--is Harold and Maude. Jesus, what pap the movie is.
Racial allegories in The Black Stallion? I thought it was just horses. I'll have to read it again someday so I can be embarrassed about it.
I loved Robert Heinlein's early books about space cadets and Mars colonies and so on. Embarrassment enough for anyone! Although I never liked Stranger in a Strange Land, I'm happy to say. I also loved the Hardy Boys.
What's wrong with Elric? A bit doomy and portentous, but that won't kill you. Or Lloyd Alexander and his Prydain books -- those were quite good, nothing embarrassing about them. No worse than Tolkien.
A book that I took seriously and shouldn't have (this was age 15): Mailer's Miami and the Siege of Chicago. I reread it a few years back and it's sludge.
I also read Advertisements for Myself many times as a kid, but I don't think it did me any harm. Various misimpressions regarding intercourse derived from "The Time of Her Time" were soon cleared up by the real thing.
But a commenter clarifies an important point here: "More interesting are those books to which one commits one's youthful self-identity, for a time: 'This is the adult world I will enter! This is how it works!' "
For me that was no book, that was Woody Allen's Annie Hall. I did think adult life would be like that, and now I resent the film for its misleading egocentricity and triteness. The one benefit is I get to feel superior to the many people who don't see what a pretentious would-be talent Woody Allen is.
kyle doesn't have a soul, or seems to have misplaced it at the time he stopped admiring Annie Hall.
I was really into Hemingway. I probably thought his sentences encapsulated the good life. Which meant you had to be both stoic and ironical at all times, and drink a lot without getting very drunk. I failed to notice that he shot himself in the head.
I couldn't get a rise out of anyone at CT for my suggestion of Robert Cormier. Do I have to go all "Flowers for Algernon" on you?
Embarrassing art-rock enthusiasms are legion. I'm so glad Atrios stopped using modified Yes lyrics for the open threads, because they were giving me flashbacks. And that's far from the worst of it.
26: Wasn't that I Am the Cheese? I think in The Chocolate War some kid refuses to take part in the chocolate-selling fundraiser and eventually everyone beats him up.
I do not actually approve of or endorse beating up high-school existentialists who need to get over themselves. I myself was one. It may be good to have been one. But it should still be humiliating in retrospect, because one does indeed need to get over oneself.
I have to admit I still do like a good Nick Adams story. I also liked Stephen King a lot, before the Dark Tower stuff. Was pretty proud of myself when I finished IT.
I don't think Salinger is embarrassing. To a certain extent, everyone's adolescence is embarrassing. Your response to Salinger might embarrass you, but then your resposne to anything at that age would embarrass you.
I remember thinking R.W. Emerson (to distinguish between our own Emerson) was teh suxx when I was sixteen or so, but it was probably I and not Ralph Waldo who was teh suxx.
Wait, the kid in The Chocolate War deserved to get beat up? I thought the whole point of that was that the rest of the school had turned this fundraiser (a good thing, ideally) into some test of moral worth and bragging rights (bad), and the kid wanted no part of it. And got beat up. Good doesn't triumph over evil, etc. A good change of pace from most children's books, but we're supposed to think that what happened to the kid was pretty fucked up, right?
40: Yes, as I remember (and I haven't read it since high school at least) that's what happens. And that's the retrospective criticism of Cormier--it's all about romanticizing the Brave Lonely Kid who Thinks For Himself and gets Beat Up by the Conformist Hordes. Whereas if you don't want to participate in the chocolate fundraiser, that's fine (I hated them), but you're not really a martyr. The Cormier books seemed really cool and deep because they had unhappy endings, but you're better of reading Moominvalley in November.
I think the thing I feel more embarrassed or guilty about nowadays is books I did not read than about those I read, to tell the truth. Especially about that subset that I claimed to have read though I had not. I might achieve trifecta for a book that I did not read, claimed to have, and was cringe-worthy to recall having dug -- I think the only actual element of this intersection might be Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus! trilogy. But everything about my eighteenth year of life is heavily layered with sarcasm and bad faith -- I cannot tell from the perspective of these 17 years how sincerely I did anything.
The profoundly silly newsletter from these deeply unpleasant people. The best was after the LA riots when, instead of calling it a riot, they kept referring to it as a "spontaneous redistribution of wealth."
Don't all of these books fail because they earnestly (o-earnestly?) proffer a purportedly coherent worldview? Isn't the real point that there is only entertainment one can enjoy without embarrasment: Seinfeld?
do we have a working definition for o-earnest? Does it mean "earnest in a bad way," or "what ogged means when he uses the term earnest?" Or perhaps those are really the same definition?
A related class of books to what I was talking about in 45, would be those I read fully or partially but without at all getting, and then spoke of as part of my repertoire -- perhaps the principal instance of this class, is Sartre's "Being and Nothingness", of which I read about a quarter and understood not a word.
I think it does mean "earnest in a bad way". Nothing wrong with earnestness in general (ogged's objections duly noted). Perhaps it could mean something along the lines of "trying too hard to make an obvious (or simplistic) point".
yup. but it was more fun than writing "silence crickets, stop limning the silence resulting from my comments, which in turn, reflects poorly upon those comments and myself."
Humiliating: I decided to read Animal Farm when I was, I think, 9 or 10. My father thought this a bit peculiar. When I finished it, he asked me if I had understood it. "Of course I understood it!" was my indignant reply. I recounted the plot for him. He just said 'ok', and, I guess, decided not to burst my bubble. When I read it again about 5 years later, I was like 'oh'.
No, Elric doesn't count, childish tastes when you are a child are acceptable. I for instance read all of Harold Robbins cover-to-cover multiple times, which was an admirable activitity for pubescent males in the mid-sixties.
60: I first checked out Ulysses from the library when I was 12, and carried a copy with me until I was 28, at which time I finally read the book. There were crosscountry hitching trips with two shirts, a pair of socks, a space-blanket, and Ulysses. Entire libraries and record collections came and went to used book stores for rent, but Ulysses remained. Finally in the late 70s, after having read the entire works of Thomas Mann in order of publication, I felt I had learned how to read.
"(i) many people have mentioned Ayn Rand, but I was lucky enough to delay my first encounter with that stuff (in the form of The Fountainhead) until I was old enough to see pretty clearly that it's just terrible."
Ditto; I was 15. (It may have helped that -- I forget just now if it was The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged, but whichever, I read it all in the course of one 14-hour stint of intestinal distress, in my girlfriend's bathroom I got to leave only sporadically, until I had concluded both intake and outtake.)
"Gary Stu."
Interesting. I well recall when only a few hundred of us knew who Mary Sue was; it shouldn't surprise me that the theory has grown considerably more elaborate.
"I loved Robert Heinlein's early books about space cadets and Mars colonies and so on. Embarrassment enough for anyone!"
How so?
"The one benefit is I get to feel superior to the many people who don't see what a pretentious would-be talent Woody Allen is."
I certainly wouldn't recommend Annie Hall as an insightful or revelatory guide to typical adult life, and, of course, common opinion for many years has been to declaim his fall from true funnyness (I tend to take a rather more nuanced view, film by film; for instace, I'd certainly argue for there being plenty of value to be found in, say, Sweet And Lowdown, or even Deconstructing Harry, but tastes are always subjective, of course), but I'd have to say that calling the guy who did Annie Hall, Love And Death, Hannah And Her Sisters, Manhattan, and a fair number of other works, a "would-be talent" is a bit silly. But mileage varies.
"To a certain extent, everyone's adolescence is embarrassing."
I think that will often have a lot more to do with these sort of reactions than the works involved, myself. For one thing, it's only embarrassing depending upon how seriously you took the work in question, and that's something you bring to the question, not that the book (or movie or band or whatever) brings.
See, my Annie Hall experience was that my parents took me to see it at some extremely young age and I thought it was hilarious, mostly on the strength of the spider in the bathroom and the lobsters in the kitchen. I told one of my elementary school teachers it was my favorite movie, and she was shocked. Then I saw it again many years later and went, "oh."
He's the lion-christ. I'm totally going to put a Churchill poster in my dorm-room. Churchill teaches us that drunken misogyny is ok. The man saved freedom (indicating that he must have been a conservative) and the fact that he was a drunken misogynyst entails that my frat is righteous. Therefore Reagan was a genius, and all is good in the world. Suck my cock.
I'd have to say, or agree, that the notion that one should be embarrassed as an adult for the fact that one's tastes as a kid, or pre-adolescent, or adolescent, are apt to have changed somewhat, is more than a little questionable.
The one comment that somewhat bothers me in the CT thread is the assertion that kids may not have enough scientific education to understand why Erich von Daniken was insanely ludicrous; it's certainly a true assertion, but the fact that it's true is as alarming as is the general lack of grasp of basic science in the general populace is. I mean, I read von Dankiken at 7 or so, and observed that it was obvious nonsense. It wasn't very compatible with, say, George Gamow. Or Newton. And wasn't very interesting compared to any number of texts I was reading, be it Scientific American, or Arthur C. Clarke.
I find it interesting how nearly universal the number of citing in the CT threads of works of sf and fantasy are made, some far more flawed than others. Not at all surprising, though. It's not news how many adults still find the genres embarrassing. (How many folks are bothered, in contrast, that Sherlock Holmes is no less of a complete fantasy, or Nero Wolfe, or that neither cozy mysteries nor hardboiled are any more "realistic"? Not so many, it appears.)
"I told one of my elementary school teachers it was my favorite movie, and she was shocked."
Shocked? (Among my biases here is my quasi-non-relationship with Allan Stewart Koenigsberg, which I've written about a jillion times, which doesn't mean that anyone here has necessary seen such, which is that he grew up literally around the corner from me [on Ave. K and East 12th St., in Midwood; I was on East 10th, between J & K], twenty years earlier than I did, and we nonetheless had two elementary school teachers in common, and two high school teachers, at P.S. 99 and Midwood H.S.; so his milieu was, although earlier than mine, fairly similar; so, fair disclosure).
If it were, perhaps, Deconstructing Harry with a blow-job scene on a blind man, I might not be surprised. But what was shocking, or even terribly adult-understandable-only, about Annie Hall, a move that while deeper than, say, Bananas, isn't wildly more difficult to follow, or shocking.
"Churchill teaches us that drunken misogyny is ok."
Please, that's drunken racist misogyny. Although I'd lean towards the view that he teaches us that we can do good things despite having bad aspects and also doing bad things. I imagine no one ever thought of that one before, though.
(How many folks are bothered, in contrast, that Sherlock Holmes is no less of a complete fantasy, or Nero Wolfe, or that neither cozy mysteries nor hardboiled are any more "realistic"? Not so many, it appears.)
I'm kind of embarrassed about all the Nero Wolfe stories I read. I'm not embarrassed by Sherlock Holmes. The embarrassing thing about a lot of bad science fiction I loved as an adolescent was its wish-fulfilling quality and the callowness of the wishes it attempted to fulfill. The disguises were so thin, the desperation so great.
I'm flat-out disturbed by the SF/Fantasy concentration in the CT thread and think it shows how unseriously people took the assignment. OMG, at 13, I thought the punny silliness of Piers Anthony's Xanth (slash Robert Jordan slash David Eddings etc.) totally absorbing and now I know it's stupid, and OMG, how unsophisticated I was at 13! I don't know whether Heinlein should go in that category, since as a teen, I couldn't finish him.
The text that fucking changed my life as a teenager? Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Today I am better able to recognize that I misunderstood almost everything about Blake and what he was up to, but sure: Anne McCaffrey is a lot easier to make fun of.
John Emerson: I said that my beau was a wanna-be rockstar, didn't I? He has since returned to acting, and, as I last heard, he is now actually making a living at that. That episode was many years ago, now.
"For a girl, to remember my failure to see the manly manliness of the coming-of-age stories and how it was oppressin' me is kind of embarrassing."
Fair enough. Although why one should be expected to have the same political sensibilities (or any other sort of sensibilities) at age 8 or 12 or 14 or whatever, as at 25 or 32 or whatever, I don't follow. (And, again, the embarrassment seems to derive from one's own expectations about one's self, rather than directly from the work; if one simply looks at the work and says, well, here are its virtues and here are its flaws and omisssions, after all, what's to be embarrassed about?)
Just out of curiosity, what early Heinlein do you think of as having much "manly manliness"? Certainly, I think Podkayne of Mars tonally has always bothered many of us, and we'll try to avoid discussing the late, post Moon Is A Harsh Mistress work, but neither of those fits well with a reference to "I loved Robert Heinlein's early books about space cadets and Mars colonies and so on.." Okay, Podkayne might; but the tonal problems aren't really about "manly manliness" in any way that's clear to me. (Specifically, you're referring to the Scribner juveniles, of which Podkayne was technically not one, although it would have been the last if it hadn't been rejected by Alice Dagliesh.)
Re-reading it as an adult, I was appalled at how astonishingly thin the racial allegories in that series of novels are.
I never do this, but I haven't read to the end of the thread yet. Really!?! I read about a million of those, down to the Black Stallion's Great-Aunt Maude (describing her suspenseful victory in a shuffleboard tournament), and while I don't remember them with any clarity at all, I also don't remember any racial element, text or subtext. Did I just miss it completely? (I suppose at seven or eight I could have read right past a Stephin Fetchit accent without processing it.)
"I'm kind of embarrassed about all the Nero Wolfe stories I read. "
Okay. I'm not embarrassed by all the Rex Stout Nero Wolfe's you, I mean I've read (I've not read any non-Stout Wolfe). They're certainly not badly written. They do what they came to do, and did it well; they've amused and entertained millions of people. They're not the most beautiful prose ever written, nor offering of greatly deeper pleasures, but is that the standard of what we're embarrassed to enjoy?
But perhaps you could say more about why they, or your having read them, embarrasses you? As part of that, although Doyle, of course, created the paradigm, when you also say that "I'm not embarrassed by Sherlock Holmes," what virtues are you finding in Doyle that act as embarrassment-off from those of Stout? It can't simply be age. Do you discern some sort of "more worthwhile" literary virtues in Doyle? Or what?
And while I read pretty much everything that anyone's described as embarrassing, I can't say that I'm embarrassed by much of it. (Heinlein, check. Ayn Rand, check (anyone else think that there was a perfectly reasonable design critic spoiled there?). Nero Wolfe, check (Archie is fairly high on the list of literary characters who Mr. Breath has cause to worry about.) Elric, check. Sherlock Holmes, check. All right, Piers Anthony really does suck.) But I'm not getting the embarrassment here -- this is all entertainment. What's to be embarrassed about? You liked what you liked. (And I liked most of what I've ever read. Indiscriminate -- that's me.)
Crossposted with Gary, who, as often, I'm agreeing with. If you're going to get all 'too cool for school' about fiction, I can come up with reasons that absolutely anything is pretty shameful to admit you enjoyed. Nothing's perfect, but lots of imperfect stuff is fun, and that's what it's all for.
Just out of curiosity, what early Heinlein do you think of as having much "manly manliness"?
Trapped! okay, GaryFarber, my recollections are quite (haw!) nebulous. But I do remember the twins, one of whom left earth on a faster than light spaceship, and came back when his brother was a decrepit old man to find that women didn't wear hats at the table...but mainly what bothers me in retrospect is that it (juvenile science fiction) seemed to be always about the boys, and the girls were generally sidekicks or ornaments or whatever, but if I wanted interestin adventures, I had to put up with that, thus making me wish I was a boy so I could have interestin adventures, and reinforcing my internalized misogyny, etc, etc, etc. Girls in the meantime were invited to enjoy the none-too-interesting adventures of Beanie Malone et al., which were all about Relationships. I'd totally forgotten Podkayne of Mars. Is that the one where the kids spend the night inside the giant cabbage?
SB -- are you saying you're embarrassed about having liked the writings of Mr. Limbaugh as a young lad or lass? That would make you younger than I had figured you for.
In his early days, I feel compelled to note that he had ambitions as a writer. Macroscope is one giant mess of a semi-failed novel, but it did try hard.
I find it hard to talk much about Anthony, because fairness would compel me to disclose the many novels of his I've worked on, mostly when I was a boy editorlet at Avon Books, and then start talking about various other background stuff, which is pretty much a problem I have with an overwhelming number of modern sf/fantasy writers; John Cole just asked me in e-mail a day or three ago whether I was a "George R. R. Martin fan," and I had to start explaining that I've known George since circa 1973, and that we have enough passing personal stuff under the water that I was never going to be able to approach his stuff that way.
But let's just say that Piers has a number of children, and understandably concluded that making sure he could make them happy, and see them through to college, was an important goal; and he doesn't have another day job. (This consideration also arose with an arguably better writer I can also testify to personal knowledge of, Roger Zelazny, though to a considerably less degree.)
Non-sequitur, I might clarify that for all my various "what's to be embarrassed about" observations above, I certainly amn't oblivious to the simple emotional reaction of looking at something one once really liked, and concluding that it was really quite awful in ways that didn't bother us then, but do now. I'm just distinguishing, or trying to, between an understandable emotional response, and what's possibly actually rationally defensible about it.
But perhaps you could say more about why they, [Nero Wolfe] or your having read them, embarrasses you?
In this case, it's not so much the quality of the books as my reaction to them that is retrospectively embarrassing (okay, not really that embarrassing). I think they were the first adult popular fiction I read as a child, and I truly thought they were a glimpse into the way grownups actually think and interact. I still remember finding Might as Well Be Dead on the bookshelf. It was a Viking paperback and I misread the title as "Might as Well Be Dead, Viking" which I thought was weird but I was into Vikings, so I started to read it and found it riveting.
I never thought the Holmes stories were realistic, but for a while I thought New York was full of homicidal millionaires and smooth gumshoes, and sophisticated ladies who went dancing with them at the Flamingo.
Eventually I will have enough mystery to can it and sell it in the seasonal aisle of the supermarket. It will keep Libby's Pumpkin company when it is lonley, which is always.
For me, the most humiliating books which I won't name were trendy bits of very bad political and legal theory from the early 90s. For that, I blame my professors. The most humiliating works of fiction that I idolized were probably the Kundera books that I was completely obsessed with from the ages of 17-19. In fairness to me, the books were pretty dirty, although not in the least bit sexy, and I wasn't exactly very experienced in such things back then. Wait, maybe that's the humiliating part of this story.
"but mainly what bothers me in retrospect is that it (juvenile science fiction) seemed to be always about the boys, "
Well, sure, but while one can note various exceptions from the Fifties and earlier (Catherine.L. Moore's Jirel of Joiry, Leigh Brackett, Ursula Le Guin was being publishec by 1962, and so on, not to mention arguably feminist work by Ted Sturgeon and other men) , this certainly begun to change by the Sixties, and then we had the whole Great Feminist Explosion/revolution in sf by the late Sixties and ever-more-so in the Seventies (Joanna Russ, my old pal, Vonda McIntyre, ditto, Lizzy Lynn, Suzy Charnas, the list is long.)
More to the point, this sexism in pre-Sixties sf, is hardly blameable on Robert Heinlein, who, if anything, rather stood out in the context of the times for having strong female characters. Peewee in Have Spacesuit, Will Travel was a secondary character to the main boy protagonist, but only barely so, and was portrayed as vastly brighter than he was. The fact is that Alice Dagliesh wouldn't have bought a book about a female protagonist, and in all frankness, that decision would could at least be slightly defended on the single ground that most buyers and readers of science fiction in the fifties were male. I would never say that such decisions should be defended, or justify them, but there's a partial element of chicken-and-egg to the sexism-in-old-science-fiction question. But, bottom line, Robert Heinlein wasn't responsible for sexism in science fiction, even if his dialogue by I Will Fear No Evil and later works became embarrassing. But even then his women characters only came out more up front than he was allowed to do in earlier work, as a rule.
But even the women in the Scribner juvenile The Rolling Stones/The Family Stone were all super-competent geniuses, as pretty much all of Heinlein's women were.
"Is that the one where the kids spend the night inside the giant cabbage?"
No, that's Red Planet. There was a fairly awful and unfaithful animated version made back in the Eighties or so, alas. Fortunately, relatively few have seen it.
Anyway, I would never want to minimize the seriousness of sexism in old sf (or say every last bit has been scrubbed out today, any more than we can say that of anything), but I'd simply like it to be seen as part of the context of the times; it's not as if science fiction or science fiction juveniles, were more guilty of sexism than any other literature, or aspect of our culture, of the day, and arguably was frequently leading our culture way in begining to work our way past that.
And I have no objection at all to beating up on Robert Heinlein's real literary failings and flaws; I just like to see it done accurately, rather than in any sort of vague guilt-by-association or "it's an easy laugh if you don't actually really know the work" kind of way.
"Jeremy, we are all of us 47 year old balding men."
I wouldn't say I was anywhere near "balding" yet. Thinning, absolutely, and greying, and receding. But not yet balding.
47 since November 5th, though.
"It was a Viking paperback and I misread the title as "Might as Well Be Dead, Viking" which I thought was weird but I was into Vikings, so I started to read it and found it riveting."
Well, that's probably why millions of people have loved Stout for all these years. Because they were splendid, amusing, highly accessible, stories. (Mostly; they weren't all gold, of course.) Have you tried reading any in recent years and found yourself throwing them against a wall? (It's not as if, frankly, I couldn't understand why someone might be embarrassed at a later date to have beloved Xanth or Pern a bit strongly, although they were all far too late in my life for me to have ever gone there; I certainly love lots of really badly written stuff from the Forties and Thirties, or even earlier pulps, though, for reasons other than that they are badly written, but because of their other virtues. Sometimes it's also not clear whether people are seeing a work in the context of its times well or not. One wouldn't read E. E. Smith's The Skylark of Space for either its writing, or its modern science fiction ideas, but it was written between 1915-20, after all; I couldn't recommend it today other than as of historical interest, or to someone young, or of just the right mind-set, but that doesn't mean it wasn't, er, seminally important to the genre in its time. (Although speaking of sexism, Smith had his neighbor and friend, Lee Hawkins Garby, "help him out" in that first book, so as to get the "love interest" bits "right"; now, there was writing about "manly men," when ya talk E. E. "Doc" Smith. And the contrast that Heinlein brought was revolutionary, in many ways, including how much better he handled female characters; to get Heinlein, it helps to be familiar with the milieu of sf in 1938, when he started.)
Actually, I'm not embarrassed by the Heinlein SF I read when I was a kid--I still think The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is a pretty good book, silly-ass libertarianism and all.
But I am really embarrassed to admit that I read Heinlein's nonfiction...
Now embarrassed to be such a snob, but proud to think I may have contributed a new ramification to an Unfogged in-joke. It's not just cocksucker, it's viking cocksucker!
Also I now have to read "Have Spacesuit Will Travel".
Hell, I had a complete collection of "Doc Savage" paperbacks. And I loved Podkayne.
As far as Piers Anthony, I remember his very interesting early work, yet do not at all begrudge his move to more commercial material. Since I spent most of Friday night looking for material on Lafferty, Harness, and especially George Alec Effinger. I don't need to pick up Malzberg to be depressed about the field.
I'm really tempted to sit out this thread but...in high school, I scoffed at the Hesse readers because he's just Nietzsche-lite, but I though Kahlil Gibran was awesome.
Fuck you all for reading that--this comment never happened.
I'm really tempted to sit out this thread but...in high school, I scoffed at the Hesse readers because he's just Nietzsche-lite, but I though Kahlil Gibran was awesome.
Fuck you all for reading that--this comment never happened.
I'm really tempted to sit out this thread but...in high school, I scoffed at the Hesse readers because he's just Nietzsche-lite, but I though Kahlil Gibran was awesome.
Fuck you all for reading that--this comment never happened.
"Also I now have to read "Have Spacesuit Will Travel"."
Keep in mind before you look for it that when I referred to Pee-wee as a strong female character, that she was, like, ten years old. Of course, Kip is just in high school, himself. Hey, these are juveniles; that was the premise.
It's very dated, in many ways, as are all the Heinlein juvies. It was major science-fictionally boggling in his stories when people would pull their phone out of their pocket or bag; that sort of thing, for one. And Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, was one of his slightly odder juveniles; it went off a bit further-afield in a rather more literally Out There space-operaish sort of way than pretty much any of his other novels, until the mess that is The Number Of The Beast, arguably.
So it's hard for me to recommend, or not, the Heinlein juveniles to someone today, particularly the younger they are, without, at least, having some idea of how they deal with that whole "need to see things in historical context" issue that I mentioned above. On the one hand, the Heinlein juveniles are, overall, classics of the genre (some more than others, to be sure; the first couple were a bit more simplistic, particularly the first, whose plot is, yes, somewhat embarrassing to describe); but they're definitely a different future history than our future, and they were of their time. This is a good piece by Adam Troy-Castro on HSWT, if anyone is interested. I agree with his assessment.
"And I loved Podkayne." You'd have voted to let her live, I guess? (Baen Books did an edition some years ago and held a vote as to whether to go with the published ending, or the unpublished version that Heinlein originally wrote, in which he knocked her off. [Um, spoilers for the entire book, to put it mildly].)
"Since I spent most of Friday night looking for material on Lafferty, Harness, and especially George Alec Effinger. I don't need to pick up Malzberg to be depressed about the field."
Charless Harness is a bit obscure these days, I'm afraid, particularly given that there still aren't all that many old fanzines online, despite the efforts at fanac.org. But Piglet/Effinger should be far less so. Lafferty was the only god I've ever met who was also an amazingly alcoholic little old man. Barry Malzberg is merely a much unappreciated prophet (and he also terribly damaged his career by taking far too many contracts in rapid succession, just because they were suddenly on offer, even if they money for each one wasn't much -- the usual few grand -- and it was entirely understandable; Ron Goulart also took the poison pills; unfortunately, being a writer is also something of a business). But I'm, overall, a big fan of both Barry's fiction and nonfiction, even if he repeated himself a bit much in his dying astronaut period. (In a different sort of way, I also admire Ron, actually; he's done endless terrific research into old radio shows, pulps, and comments, and in person in my limited experience, one of the funniest people I've ever met; much more so than even his funniest books (some of which were, unfortunately, not so funny, but that's that whole repeating yourself with a succession of similar books in a short period of time thing, again.) And, no, I never met Charless Harness or had direct contact with him! :-)
"The embarrassing thing about a lot of bad science fiction I loved as an adolescent was its wish-fulfilling quality and the callowness of the wishes it attempted to fulfill."
I left out my thought here, which runs along the lines of, so you're saying that adolescents are callow? But, you know, I'd want to say it in a gentle and kind way.
Yes, there's definitely a ton of callow and shallow wish-fulfillment in much -- though certainly not all -- science fiction and fantasy. In particular, much popular sf has featured themes of persecuted smart people, particularly persecuted, unappreciated, smart kids.
But I'm unconvinced this is anything to be embarrassed about. If anyone could use some wish-fufillment, well, actually, there are plenty of other candidates than unappreciated smart kids, but not so many who would find and obtain books that make their lives seem a little less hopeless and miserable and totally not understood!
I think that's a good thing, overall, that there are books and stories that provide that support and wish-fulfillment fantasy, and such callow messages as that it's okay to be different and it's okay to be smart, and you are not alone, while also providing some pleasure and thrills and sense of wonder at the possibilities of this and other universes, and maybe even some crunchy knowledge, or cool ideas, besides, like sprinkles. (Sometimes a bit deeper.)
That we won't have identical emotional needs at age 30 as age 13 doesn't change my mind.
(It's when stories ever lean past "it's okay and good to be smart" into "you are a better person simply by virtue of being smarter" that I start to become disturbed, but that's because I was alarmingly prone to such nasty thinking when I was a screwed-up adolescent.)
"I don't need to pick up Malzberg to be depressed about the field."
I'm pretty out of touch with the field these days, relatively speaking, but I'm pretty sure there's a ton of good stuff coming out, just as there always has been every time I've read someone explain how depressed they are about the current field since I first started reach that plaint circa 1966 or so. Certainly there have been shitloads of great sf and fantasy books published in the last ten years.
I don't know man, I am still embarrassed. I was deep into SF 65-75, and picking up Fourth Mansions(title alludes to Theresa of Avila) and Wolves of Memory and Herovit's World and the New Dimension series and stuff even Gary probably hasn't heard of (Volteface? James Sallis? Still got em.) off the store shelves and thinkin this was really good and interesting stuff. And Aldiss was maybe self-indulgent when he ripped off Jealousy but I didn't think Robbe-Grillet was all that superior and when Aldiss and the field went back to stuff like Helliconia Summer I said why bother and stopped reading.
I tried a year or so ago to turn Holbo onto Lafferty because that is really the kind of reader Lafferty needs but he couldn't be bothered. It is SF. Old. Idiosyncratic understates. Written by an Catholic electrical engineer who rarely left Tulsa. Few read it then, few now, few ever will.
That was my youth. I read a bunch of certifiable polymath geniuses who were attempting to write ambitious literature in a quasi-genre format. Now most are out of print and forgotten, while Turtledove makes millions. I was a fool.
And Gary, of course you know of James Sallis, he has become all famous. I just swear I have a pb from around 1970 novel of his that isn't listed on any bibliography. One of these boxes, somewhere, something about a torture machine.
"I just got depressed by Effinger's obituaries. Really, really depressed."
That's entirely understandable. Following his life was all too depressing. I first met him at the 1973 Lunacon, where Guest of Honor Harlan Ellison "moderated" a panel of "new writers" (as they were then), Gardner Dozois, Jack Dann, and George Alec Effinger; we never had much direct contact, and I wouldn't expect him to remember me (although I'm often surprised by who does, as we saw here the other night; you could have knocked me over with a toothpick when Pat Cadigan swore up and down to my face when we first met in Britain some years ago how "oh, everyone knows you, Gary!," because we'd never had an atom's worth of contact, and I'd have sworn she didn't know me from a [insert preferred metaphor here]), but we had a number of good mutual friends, so news of his innumerable travails was not infrequent.
Excellent writer; not such a great life, though, sadly. (There tended to be themes of endless illness, poverty, and alcoholism, is the short version for those who don't know; unfortunately, I can name too many other good writers, and some not so good, I've known with not dissimilar stories; and, of course, this does fulfill one stereotype of some writers, but it's a stereotype because of the kernel of truth.)
I hope you're not implying I shouldn't know from James Sallis?
"And Gary, of course you know of James Sallis, he has become all famous." Has he? I read him in New Worlds, of course, circa 1968. And Orbit, and Again, Dangerous Visions, and so on. These weren't hardly obscure works, but among the most prestigious forums in the field at the time, after all. (I see he has an excellent, interesting look back here; I commend it to the attention of all.) (One reason I get cranky at the ignorant dismissals of sf as if it were all E. E. Smith or worse is that you'd have to think the whole New Wave never happened to think that. Though if we're having an obscure-off, did you ever notice J. J. Pierce? [Not to be confused with his father, John R.] (Or we could play with people published in Orbit, or even Quark, as well as the many permutations of New Worlds.) (I have no idea how familiar Fontana Labs is with Meester Moorcock's career, beyond Elric, which was some fairly weird shit I never particularly got into myself.)
I have no idea what you're referring to about "Volteface," though. But, anyway, I remember Sallis basically from the late Sixties/early Seventies, and only occasionally noticed him thereafter.
"...Now most are out of print and forgotten,"
Bob, if you could ever be stirred from Texas, I'd highly recommend you give going to Readercon a try. Or even Boskone. Or to Potlatch. There's a whole culture of people who liked -- no, passionately loved, though not everyone all about the same thing, of course, all this stuff, and who still do. And are you familiar with NESFA Press? (Again, disclosure, I go back with most every of the folks involved to at least the early Seventies, or however long they've been around.) And the many other fine sf small presses?
Being in a place where everyone knows the writers we're talking about, and has for decades, might lift your spirits some.
I hope you're not implying I shouldn't know from James Sallis?
"And Gary, of course you know of James Sallis, he has become all famous." Has he? I read him in New Worlds, of course, circa 1968. And Orbit, and Again, Dangerous Visions, and so on. These weren't hardly obscure works, but among the most prestigious forums in the field at the time, after all. (I see he has an excellent, interesting look back here; I commend it to the attention of all.) (One reason I get cranky at the ignorant dismissals of sf as if it were all E. E. Smith or worse is that you'd have to think the whole New Wave never happened to think that. Though if we're having an obscure-off, did you ever notice J. J. Pierce? [Not to be confused with his father, John R.] (Or we could play with people published in Orbit, or even Quark, as well as the many permutations of New Worlds.) (I have no idea how familiar Fontana Labs is with Meester Moorcock's career, beyond Elric, which was some fairly weird shit I never particularly got into myself.)
I have no idea what you're referring to about "Volteface," though. But, anyway, I remember Sallis basically from the late Sixties/early Seventies, and only occasionally noticed him thereafter.
"...Now most are out of print and forgotten,"
Bob, if you could ever be stirred from Texas, I'd highly recommend you give going to Readercon a try. Or even Boskone. Or to Potlatch. There's a whole culture of people who liked -- no, passionately loved, though not everyone all about the same thing, of course, all this stuff, and who still do. And are you familiar with NESFA Press? (Again, disclosure, I go back with most every of the folks involved to at least the early Seventies, or however long they've been around.) And the many other fine sf small presses?
Being in a place where everyone knows the writers we're talking about, and has for decades, might lift your spirits some.
"I tried a year or so ago to turn Holbo onto Lafferty because that is really the kind of reader Lafferty needs but he couldn't be bothered."
As I would with many writers, I'd recommend starting with short stories first, although this wouldn't work for some readers. I'd recommend the collectionNine Hundred Grandmothers to start. Or you could read the title story here, whole, legal, and free. And Slow Tuesday Night here. Those should give a sufficient taste to get a clue as to whether he interests you or not.
There are some fine classic stories legally readable for free and in whole here, by the way. Scott Edelman classed up the "scific.com" operation quite a bit when he was hired, although sadly some of it is coming to an end. You can find the Lafferty stories there indexed here, as Bob presumably knows.
So it's hard for me to recommend, or not, the Heinlein juveniles to someone today, particularly the younger they are, without, at least, having some idea of how they deal with that whole "need to see things in historical context" issue that I mentioned above.
I would point out, that the first few books (which mcmc seems be remembering unfondly) were written to be serialized in Boys Life. So they had to be appealing to (white) Boy Scouts of the early 40's and 50's. So, in the first one, Rocket Ship Galileo (which is bad, BTW, very 30's pulpish), his characters are three boys who fly off to the moon to fight...Nazis. (I think he was the first one to use the 'some Nazis escaped WWII via Nazi secret science' motif. Which culminated in They Saved Hitler's Brain. And then had an encore with The Boys From Brazil. Which is a terrible thing to be responsible for in retrospect but fairly inventive for 1947.) Did I mention one of the three boys was Jewish and one of the other two was from a single-parent (female) home? People are reasonably blase about that sort of thing now, but to sneak that into a magazine for Boy Scouts in 1947 should probably be considered actively subversive.
Which brings us to
But I do remember the twins, one of whom left earth on a faster than light spaceship, and came back when his brother was a decrepit old man to find that women didn't wear hats at the table...
Yes. He had a technical problem there. He had to illustrate both Einsteinian relativity and 80 (100?) years of cultural changes in roughly 200 pages. So, at the start the of the book, the position of women in society resembles that of American women of say 1910...and when the protagonist returns it resembles the position of women in society circa 1980-1990 as envisioned by an old white guy in 1955. In a book written ('to order') for Boy Scouts of the 1950's. And all the changes are encapsulated in two paragraphs:
"Instead I started thinking about my re-education, which, I was beginning to realize, was going to have to be extensive; the changes had been more than I bargained for. Take female styles, for example - look, I'm no Puritan, but they didn't dress, if you want to call it that, this way when I was a kid. Girls running around without a thing on their heads, not even on top... heads bare-naked, like an animal. It was good thing Dad hadn't lived to see it. He never let our sisters come to the table without a hat, even if Pat and I were the only unmarried males present."
The fact that you think it's misogynistic (or unbelievable, or whatever) is perfectly sensible, since Heinlein himself thought the same thing. It's one of his fishslap moments. fishslapGIRLS ARE SMART AND CAPABLE, DORKS! fishslap BLACK PEOPLE ARE JUST THE SAME AS YOU fishslapSLAVERY AND SEGREGATION ARE EVIL!
In this case fishslap BOY, THINGS SURE DO CHANGE IN 80 YEARS, HUH?
If you read the juvies now, and pay attention, those moments have become jarring because they don't need to be said anymore, unlike in the 1950's.
If you were going to re/read any of those books, the one you ought to read first would be Tunnel In the Sky.
I've previously mentioned it in Unfogged threads: Gone With the Wind was my favorite book when I was ten, and for a few years thereafter. It's racist and it has a rape that is treated as unambiguously sexually satisfying for the woman--that's pretty bad. On the other hand, Scarlett does shoot a marauding Yankee (implied potential racist) in the face and grind her bare heel in the wound. She also owns a business despite societal disapproval. But in fact I'm not that embarrassed; I forgive myself for my taste when I was ten. I'm kind of embarrassed by claiming to have loved books I didn't really, like The Once and Future King (12?), and sometimes telling myself I had a deeper emotional reaction to a book than I did (Grapes of Wrath, 13) even when I did genuinely enjoy it. I was into The Clan of the Cave Bear, but I'm pretty sure even at 11 or so I knew just how juvenile it was (I'm not sure if I was hip to the racism.) By the time I was in high school I think my taste was pretty decent: Garp, Tess of the D's, Catch-22, Of Human Bondage, Cuckoo's Nest. I suspect my opinion of Garp and Cuckoo's Nest would go down if I revisited them, but I'm still not embarrassed.
I'm way more embarrassed about all of my actual behavior until, I don't know, maybe two weeks ago.
What happened two weeks ago? A mid-life conversion and change of path? Lucky thing you came over to the side of the light before our meet-up, I deal harshly with darklings.
All sorts of embarrassing stuff for me, musicwise and litwise.
I read most of Hesse, though in retrospect I think of him less as embarrassing and more just boring.
At around 14 or 15, I listened a whole lot to the New Age piano player George Winston; I think I found his simplicity sort of startling. I imitated his piano playing style for a time.
I listened to a lot of math metal, even as I embraced the grunge revolution (I was a h.s. freshman in 1991, graduated in 1995, so it all came and went during my tenure).
The qualities I sought out in George Winston led me to Phillip Glass, who I still think is great, but still seems to have only a few ideas that he reuses over and over (and I mean that sincerely, not as a cute joke on his "minimalism").
I went through a big "seeking" period with theology and psychology, though I never dug into the real serious philosophers (this is what happens when you're mostly self-educated, I think). I read some Kant, though, and some Nietzsche. But also nearly everything that Jung ever wrote, along with a number of Jungian psychologists (Marie Louise Von Franz, Edward Edinger and others).
Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale blew my head off when I was a teenager, and I still have fond memories of it and admire a lot of the writing, but he's so distasteful and the book gets kind of ridiculous toward the end, so I've mostly gotten over it.
I also wrote some awful, awful stuff: awful music, awful prose, awful drama. But! I remain convinced that the only way to get to writing good, original stuff is to write awful stuff for a time, so long as it's awful in a unique way (and not, say, a romance novel or something).
In thinking back, I really read and listened to a lot of work because I was passionately looking for "It" -- this certain quality that manifested Itself in a few beloved passages of prose or music that truly haunted me day and night. So, I'd listen to composers/bands/artists who were said to be similar to those who'd achieved It, but was almost always disappointed. Same thing with authors.
Several of these It-makers have stayed as points of reference for me, though: Tony Kushner, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Benjamin Britten, John Adams (the composer, not the 2nd president). It's hard for me to escape the conclusion that my years-long searching finally bore some fruit for me, in that I discovered works that I believe will sustain me and my soul (if there is such a thing) for a lifetime. Then again, I'm not even 30, so who knows?
"So, in the first one, Rocket Ship Galileo (which is bad, BTW, very 30's pulpish), his characters are three boys who fly off to the moon to fight...Nazis."
Aided, of course, but their wise older professor friend.
I already referred to the plot as embarrassing. But it was also written in 1946-7, when post-war Nazis were not hardly cartoon villains. That's what I mean about the context of the times. Ditto the notion that they could build a working rocket ship while the V-2 was still the hot kid on the block.
Feel free to wake up any time, Ogged, or FL, or -- Unf, Bob, are you alive? -- and approve my embargoed comment from last night, as you like. You have my permission. (I'm rarely likely to remember that 5 links will make my comment go into lock-up, since I still type with Banned HTM:L every damn time at Jim Henley's, and post embedded links, which fail, every damn time at deLong's and Dr. Frank's. Every time I remember after the software smacks me. After. Every time. Too many blogs (like, two or three, even), and apparently I have no available brain-file space for their individual quirks while I'm, you know, thinking about the words said instead. Naturally, their quirks should revolve around mine, not vice versa.
" ... but I'd have to say that calling the guy who did Annie Hall, Love And Death, Hannah And Her Sisters, Manhattan, and a fair number of other works, a 'would-be talent' is a bit silly. But mileage varies."
Mr. Farber, did you mention "Manhattan"? Then you made my case.
Kyle, I am intrigued. Manhattan is one of my favorite movies. Sure, the characters are selfish and narcissistic, but then again, so are the characters in MacBeth. I guess my question is: what the hell is wrong with Manhattan?
I thought What's Up Tiger Lily? (the original version, before TCM went and fucked it up) was pretty doggone funny, but I've had lots of people tell me I'm wrong.
sometimes I think Allen -- especially when writing for his own persona -- gets a little too precious with literary references. Often the references aren't spot-on, and you get the idea that he's trying too hard to sound sophisticated. That is the one problem with his own "Woody" shtick.
But he usually overcomes it, and is capable of creating some really haunting characters. His movies aren't really about the Woody schtick, and some of them don't suffer from it at all.
So aside from that complaint, what can you say against movies like Manhattan and Crimes & Misdemeanors?
"Love and Death" is chock full of precious references, literary and otherwise, and is not at all haunting. But it's also pretty funny. One forgives precious when it comes with funny, doesn't one?
I don't see how you can trash a guy who trashes himself. Maybe that's his strategy. You have to qualifiy his own self-deprecation a little, though: he thinks he sucks, but it's because he compares himself to Bergman. The implication is that all other American directors suck too.
not embarassment, but sometimes slightly sad when getting another look at the things i once thought the platonic ideal of viking cocksucker: reading every xanth book (and the utterly bizarre experience of reading piers anthony's horror sci fi porno book at 14), wearing out my blood sweat and tears tape, watching aliens after school every day for a month, and seeing phish more times than i can count on both hands.
then again, if i hadn't developed a crack-like addiction to choose your own adventure books in my youth, which led to my reading compuslion, i may never have had the option to leave west by-god virginia. maybe the intellectual masturbatory fodder i enjoy has evolved, but i guess i wouldn't have reached my current ever-so-much-less-embarassing tastes now ("Not A Chat Room!"s). i regrets nothings.
well, other than once loving w/ that same thing SB linked. i'm a little embarassed.
I could see having a reaction to Manhattan. I bet it would be a little creepy and pedophilic, if you were looking at it in a certain way. The relationship with a high school student doesn't look the same way it did when the film first came out. Maybe the problem, for some critics of Woody Allen is his lack of self-awareness, in this sense? It's the knowledge of how close--and uncritical--he is to his subject.
I don't really have that problem myself, but had moments of queasiness on seeing Manhattan again.
In the 70s was it ok for a man in his mid-thirties to carry on a relationship with a high school student? Is she even a senior?
I thought that was the point, that it was creepy. The fact that she is remarkably intelligent, and acts like an adult makes it funny. But still a little creepy: a joke made at Woody's own expense, as are most of his jokes.
Part of what makes it work is that woody seems so inept. And then at some points, it just seems cruel, and not at all funny, as when woody breaks up with the Mariel Hemingway character, and she goes through this pain for the first time. And the scene at the end is partly triumphal, partly just sick. But it's intended, I think.
do you ever wonder if the people responsible for creating all of these things ever feel embarassed about it? "wow, american beauty actually was shallow, trite, and insulting. here, take this trophy back." or, "hey, can we pretend i never wrote this, or had that haircut? or that author blurb?"
It's not that it wasn't creepy. Just that at the time he would have seemed to have more distance from it? Not sure.
There's a difference between exploring themes because they're inherently interesting, and because they're your obsessions. I'm saying I could see that being a critical objection, rather than a moral one.
I was getting an inadvertent degree in math and listening to metal back in Metallica's heyday, but that's a new term for me. Apparently The Tony Danza Tapdance Extravaganza is an example.
I see: it comes out that woody actually has a thing for high school students -- or did for one in particular, who he raised, which is gross -- so you see those scenes in a new light. That's fair, to a certain extent. But I think you ought not dismiss a work on the basis of the personal faults of the author. The work should stand on its own. All writers may as well be horrible people -- many of them probably are -- but it shouldn't affect whether you like what they've written.
what if it came out that Nabokov was actually a pedophile. Would it chage the way you read Lolita? On the one hand, you probably couldn't help thinking about it, but on the other hand, you shouldn't.
You can see that Nabokov had tendancies from his autobiography. His ideal women was under 16. He was under sixteen at the time so he had an excuse, but he was lucky there was no Internet in the 50s.
Perhaps. But it tends to throw judgment and impulses and into question. I mean, no friend of mine will go see a Christian Bale movie with me, no matter how good it's supposed to be, for similar reasons.
Hitchens has written a couple things that make sense recently. Maybe he's kicked the booze. He did write a good book about Kissinger some time ago. Hard to forgive him for the past four or so years though.
Christian Bale has done nothing. I hope he leaves this thread without a stain on his character. I meant people don't trust my artistic judgment, where he's involved.
But text is himself a filter, a filter of awesome dimension and granularity.
As to Christian Bale -- if I am remembering my news stories properly, he was rather notorious about 2 years ago for a string of murders perpetrated through South Dakota and Nebraska.
I read that Hitchens piece on Lolita, I thought it was pretty good. Say what you will, but the man is a talented writer. Especially on non-Iraq War topics.
My barber, whom I trust implicitly and I'm sure would never willfully mislead me, told me the other day that Christian Bale breaks into orphanages and breaks the pinkies of the smallest children. Mind, this is just a rumor I heard while getting my hair cut, and may not be true, but it would surprise me if it weren't.
My roommate last year was a big fan of The Locust. This was the same person who could listen to My Bloody Valentine for hours on end, and whose role in a noise band was to scream, un-mic'd, lines from Dante's Inferno, in the original latin, at the top of his lungs. Interesting fellow.
I am very sorry I missed all the Heinlein discussion. As a youth and young adult I read everything Heinlein put out, and I'm suprised no one else listed "Starship Troopers" as their embarrassing book.
I really, really got into that book. Maybe that is why I am harsh on libertarians - because I used to be one, sort of. A little bit fascist, too.
Most of Heinlein's juvies were "Boy Scouts in Space," big on exploration and self sufficiency. Then he had some good adult novels, and then, wow, he really went off the deep end.
Piers Anthony I also loved, and I forgive him for selling every little scrap he ever wrote, regardless of quality. As John says, he had bills to pay.
My most embarassing read was a little book called "Mits Wits and Logic." "Mits" = Man in the Street and "Wits" = Woman in the Street.
That book caused my normally pompous 8th grade self to become insufferable. For a year I considered logic to be king and emotions to be stupid. God what a smug horse's ass I was.
Elderly Latin teacher finally saves up enough to visit Rome. Doesn't know Italian but figures she can scrape by on derivatives and cognates. Trying to find the Tiber, asks the first civis Romanus she sees, "ubi flumen est?" To which he replies, in English, "My, madam, it has been a while since your last visit."
"Vastly overrated popcorn for the over-educated, and not much else."
And it takes "no talent" to do that. Okay. As I said, tastes vary. Presumably there's far more talent involved in making such claims of no talent. (Explaining what one likes is great; explaining why other people shouldn't like what they like is a different sort of thing.)
"I'm suprised no one else listed "Starship Troopers" as their embarrassing book."
I'd call liking the alleged movie embarrassing. The book tends to frequently misunderstood (nor, you know, did Heinlein actually favor only allowing vetarans to vote; it's part of that whole "speculative fiction" thing). But I got bored with ST debates almost, though not really quite, the time it was still "Starship Soldiers." (It was interesting the first 800 debates or so, back in the Sixties.) (Taking ST too seriously is as silly an error as taking anything too seriously is, of course.) (And if anyone does want to debate the alleged "fascism" of Starship Troopers, that's fine, too; I'm not trying to claim anyone else has gone through my experiences with Heinlein and should feel at all similarly.)
"Unf, Bob, are you alive? -- and approve my embargoed comment "
I approve. Even "Continued on Next Rock" should carry enough of the post-modern amalgam that is Lafferty to impress.
Not sure I am alive. Insomnia alternating with caffeine highs;weird hallucinations about gov't surveilance;the anti-spyware thingy I installed last night that erases my cookies and passwords as fast as I enter them;people dissing Manhattan:
You all have read too much. Clearly you didn't spend much of your free time in your late teens watching just about every college basketball game broadcast on ESPN and other channels.
I'm with you, eb. And I disagree with slol that there's not room for embarrasment there. I mean, if you knew Luc Longley's stats while he was still at New Mexico, that's pretty embarrassing (not that I did, but I knew people who did).
It could be a girl thing, but I guess that's my problem with watching sports - when you finish a book or a movie or other form of entertainment, there's at least a mild sense of accomplishment because you completed something. When watching sports, it's just lost time. There will be another game next week. What's the point?
Well, what attracted me to sports as a spectator - and still attracts me, though now I usually try to be doing something else at the same time if I'm watching a game, like skimming the news, etc. - was the fact that they're unscripted and actually happening, as opposed to movies and fiction.
"Gary, I see no need to back away from my comment here."
Well, I'm not seriously arguing, as I said, that people shouldn't like what they like. But I think it unlikely you care as to whether an interpretation of a movie utterly reverses the morals and points of a book, or at least that specific book, to hold that opinion. Also, I suspect you care a fig about whether portrayls of a military, any military, make even the remotest amount of sense. Do let me know if I'm overly-presuming or wrong. As for some clues as what's unbearably dumb about the movie, as I've done a million times, I link to Jim MacDonald's review, which everyone should read, even if you've never heard of "Starship Troopers" and couldn't give a flying frig about Heinlein.
Basically, the movie has little to do with the book, shafts the points of the book (however worthless or worthwhile that they are), and is blatantly moronic. But, hey, I like lots of moronic things, too, so there's nothing wrong with that. I'm sure there are people who like The Scarlet Letter with a happy ending, or... oh, gee, look what Google turns up on the front page for a google of "worst movie adaption" +ever.
If they wanted to call it a comedy interpretation of the book, that would have been different. "National Lampoon's Starship Troopers" could be great. Doing it while claiming it was a serious representation of the "fascist nature" of the book -- which Verhoven did in countless interviews, is insulting anyone who actually had a clue about the book. What would one make of an adaption of Moby Dick in which Ahab got bored with his whale hunting, and went off to be a taxidermist? I'm sure there would be people who would like it, and see no reason not to. It wouldn't have much to do with the book, though, would it?
(On rare occasion, changes in movie adaptions help; The Player is an excellent novel, but the changes made for the movie made the story even better; hard to see how that applies to Verhoeven's piece of work, unless one starts from the position that the book is fascist trash that only fascists could like.
I was actually trying to invoke the blog-owners there, Bob McManus. Remember that theoretically they include guys who go by "Unf" and "Bob."
But sympathies anyway, of course.
"I think this may be the title I was misremembering as Space Cadets--was there a scene in it about how to eat pie?"
Trivial note: Heinlein's second juvenile was "Space Cadet," not plural; it was an improvement on his first, but still not up to the par he'd strike, although it also served as the basis for the tv show Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. It reads about 100,000 percent more cliche now than it did then, because it established the cliches.
I'm vaguely remembering a pie scene in Space Cadet, in which there's a moral lesson about "pie with a fork," which I vaguely recall had something to do with being comfortable with other people's cultures and not intolerant, but my memory is vague; I don't presently have copies of any Heinlein, and it's been a good number of years since I've read either. I see that a real cadet found valuable lessons in the book still, though. As I think, more comes back to me. I vaguely recall that a Space Cadet is eating pie without a fork (and making a mess), and is ordered not to; he questions the order, and it is explained to him that he has to learn how to cope with cultures and practices other than those he grew up with to be a proper officer. Something to that effect, anyway.
"Clearly you didn't spend much of your free time in your late teens watching just about every college basketball game broadcast on ESPN and other channels."
Not a minute. In my life. Or much other time on any sports, other than politics (there was that brief summer of chess, but having my camp bunkmate turn out to be a repeating guest on Shelby Lyman kinda taught me I had little serious future there; anyone remember Shelby Lyman?). I'm a classic dweeb geek. (Of a certain sort; not the bow-tie wearing, stuttering, sort. The sort who was actually incredibly popular with smart older women when he was a teen and in his twenties.)
But you knew that. (Incidentally, I haven't blogged too much while you were traveling, Ogged, but there were a few posts I thought you might enjoy, if you ever have time to ketchup.)
"When watching sports, it's just lost time. There will be another game next week. What's the point?"
I'd be in utter agreement, were it not for the minor fact that I play a lot of computer games.
And I don't seriously deprecate appreciating the many physical aspects of many sports; I did when I was an adolescent, and for quite some time later, but haven't for a couple of decades now, at least. I suspect there was a teeny-tad of "growing up" involved, but it's only a theory.
So I'm fine with other people enjoying sports. I'm just not interested in doing so myself, still. We're all allowed our unique, or not so unique, pleasures.
I'll wait for someone to compare the point of sports to the point of having sex for other than reproduction. At least, it seems to work that way for some, perhaps.
"I'll wait for someone to compare the point of sports to the point of having sex for other than reproduction. At least, it seems to work that way for some, perhaps."
This can be taken in so many different directions, I declare it a poem, and a good one. Let us pause and appreciate.
Looking back at that thread you linked to, FL, it seems that you regard ST as a campy hoot of a bad film, enjoyable for the nasty insects and Denise Richards' tits. Well, I have nothing against that, or Denise Richards' endowment, but imagine if you took the book seriously as an important, much debated, book in its field, what you might think?
I suppose Pride and Prejudice with giant killer insects, brain bugs, and hooters, would also be a, um, hoot, but not so much if you were looking forward to the only serious movie adaption of it ever made.
237 - I see the point of playing sports, just not watching them. When you play a sport, there's an element of meaning or growth. Similarly, I can appreciate getting together with friends to watch a sporting event - with that, the takeaway can come from the shared experience. What I don't understand is what someone would get out of sitting down and watching a baseball game by themselves.
i think sports have some meaning. even apart from the whole "let's form tribes and mine beats up yours in hobbesian proxy", i think athletics is (are? ack) itself an amazing and occasionally inspiring thing. allen iverson's driving ability and lynne swann's acrobatice catches may not represent a deeper meaning in the way a ballet might, but they can be incredible expressions of what the human body and drive is capable. they provide structure for improvisation, and sometimes blazing talent is impressive itself, even when not in service of deeper meaning (also the only explanation for Yngwie Malmstein)
and when you grow up in rural wv, for example, you find yourself with some time on your hands after you've spent your allowance on books, read them all, and its too late to walk over the hills to see friends.
Movies tell a different type of story, differently. I would never claim that a sports event doesn't have a narrative, but they are different kinds of narrative. And, yes, scripted and unscripted is one of the those differences. Nothing wrong with either of them. Nothing inherently wrong with "reality tv"; we used to call it "a documentary." (Back when they were unscripted.)
Actually, I'm sitting here with a friend watching it. And I'll just say that this is primarily a gender-driven difference and we still respect you despite your charming difficulties in understanding.
Thanks, ogged, but years of watching meaningless monday night games between teams that weren't expected to be so bad have really turned me away. That said, if my sister and her husband hadn't taken over the tv, I'd probably be watching.
Here's something we can talk about: Michael Vick: sure, he can be exciting, but I really don't understand the hype around someone who's basically a mediocre quarterback. He's not nearly as good as Randall Cunningham, for example, but there weren't nearly so many stories about defenses quaking when Cunningham was coming to town.
I read a lot of Gillian Bradshaw and felt vaguely embarrassed about it even at the time.
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 12:42 PM
People on that thread haven't really taken the point as seriously as they might have. Yeah, I read Anne McCaffrey, but even at twelve, I knew I was indulging a somewhat childish taste, as you say FL.
More interesting are those books to which one commits one's youthful self-identity, for a time: "This is the adult world I will enter! This is how it works!" And the painful self-humiliation part is the realization of not only how young one was, but also how totally rolled one was by a flawed and even stupid worldview.
By those criteria, I wouldn't say that either Alexander or Anthony really count. Rand counts, but I hope that there are a few other authors out there with similar influence, otherwise we're all really in trouble.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 12:58 PM
You mean like works that portray a really stupid version of the grown-up world as being the real grown-up world? Maybe that's why a few people at CT have mentioned, say, Tom Clancy. If I were much younger, my nomination would be "Instapundit."
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 1:02 PM
Yeah, Clancy would count. I also read Jett's Ian Fleming, and I'll even throw in the ridiculous Robert Ludlum, although these latter two are more clearly Gary Stu fantasies.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 1:07 PM
I don't know whether to be embarrassed by the fact that I liked The Witch of Blackbird Pond or by the fact that I lost my copy and had to reimburse the school.
Also, I may have idolized Thoreau without actually reading him. I no longer idolize him but still haven't read him.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 1:08 PM
I noticed at some point that the theme of all young adult novels seemed to be, "people, they disappoint you." Which was actually fairly useful, as morals go.
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 1:11 PM
This all may be too youngish to count, but here goes: FL, I think it does get worse than rocking out to Asia. I rocked out to the Bay City Rollers. I dressed as a Roller for my last Halloween. Also, my first concert was Andy Gibb, where I rushed the stage for a close up photo with my instamatic camera.
Posted by annie | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 1:15 PM
I think everything that I'm embarrassed about having liked in the past, I'm embarrassed because I have assimilated an outside-world sense that I should be, rather than because I have independently decided that it is lame.
Take Richard Bach, for instance. I just loved JLS when I was in high school, must have read it 20 times, I thought it was great. (I got to Illusions a little too late I think, to find it great -- though if memory serves I did struggle to do so.) And I recognize now that it is not acceptable within a crowd of literate folks, to say something good about JLS; so in that sense I am embarrassed about having liked it. And my tastes have changed, I don't think I would pick it up now, though I might recommend it to my daughter when she is 13 or something. But I don't feel the kind of repulsion toward it that I would need to, in order to feel ashamed or embarrassed-for-my-own-sake at the memory of enjoying it.
Posted by Jeremy Osner | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 1:21 PM
For an unsettling length of time, I really liked Rush.
Posted by Isle of Toads | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 1:24 PM
I was really into Robert Jordan.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 1:28 PM
The Black Stallion. Re-reading it as an adult, I was appalled at how astonishingly thin the racial allegories in that series of novels are. Shudder.
Also, Shogun, which I read several times at around the age of 9 / 10.
A movie I'm embarrassed to have liked--all the more so because I finally made Mr. B. see it a few years ago, swearing up and down it was great--is Harold and Maude. Jesus, what pap the movie is.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 1:31 PM
I hereby humiliate myself.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 1:43 PM
I used to know the woman who trained the horse in the Black Stallion mocie. She's now an MD.
I also met one of the ex-Lassies -- Lassie VII I think. They're all guys, and all fixed. They put them out to retirement pretty early.
Lassie was a perfectly normal dog, not stuck up at all.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 1:54 PM
Racial allegories in The Black Stallion? I thought it was just horses. I'll have to read it again someday so I can be embarrassed about it.
I loved Robert Heinlein's early books about space cadets and Mars colonies and so on. Embarrassment enough for anyone! Although I never liked Stranger in a Strange Land, I'm happy to say. I also loved the Hardy Boys.
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 1:56 PM
What's wrong with Elric? A bit doomy and portentous, but that won't kill you. Or Lloyd Alexander and his Prydain books -- those were quite good, nothing embarrassing about them. No worse than Tolkien.
A book that I took seriously and shouldn't have (this was age 15): Mailer's Miami and the Siege of Chicago. I reread it a few years back and it's sludge.
I also read Advertisements for Myself many times as a kid, but I don't think it did me any harm. Various misimpressions regarding intercourse derived from "The Time of Her Time" were soon cleared up by the real thing.
But a commenter clarifies an important point here: "More interesting are those books to which one commits one's youthful self-identity, for a time: 'This is the adult world I will enter! This is how it works!' "
For me that was no book, that was Woody Allen's Annie Hall. I did think adult life would be like that, and now I resent the film for its misleading egocentricity and triteness. The one benefit is I get to feel superior to the many people who don't see what a pretentious would-be talent Woody Allen is.
Posted by kyle | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 2:45 PM
We watched Annie Hall in my latin class.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 2:52 PM
Piers Anthony at least started off writing promising and well-regarded stuff (_Macroscope_) before turning into an amusing YA hack then a hack.
_Elric_'s by a nearly heavyweight (Guardian Fiction prize winner, Whitbread shortlist, ...) author - maybe it's a derivative genre piece, but consciously so.
When I was about 15 I was really into _Goedel, Escher, Bach_ - don't know if that has aged well.
Posted by rilkefan | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 2:55 PM
_Goedel, Escher, Bach_ - don't know if that has aged well
Yes.
Posted by ogmb | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 2:56 PM
kyle doesn't have a soul, or seems to have misplaced it at the time he stopped admiring Annie Hall.
I was really into Hemingway. I probably thought his sentences encapsulated the good life. Which meant you had to be both stoic and ironical at all times, and drink a lot without getting very drunk. I failed to notice that he shot himself in the head.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 3:10 PM
I couldn't get a rise out of anyone at CT for my suggestion of Robert Cormier. Do I have to go all "Flowers for Algernon" on you?
Embarrassing art-rock enthusiasms are legion. I'm so glad Atrios stopped using modified Yes lyrics for the open threads, because they were giving me flashbacks. And that's far from the worst of it.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 3:28 PM
Elric_'s by a nearly heavyweight (Guardian Fiction prize winner, Whitbread shortlist, ...) author
And Blue Öyster Cult collaborator. Which only adds to the humiliation.
Posted by JL | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 3:29 PM
that's good, text.
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 3:31 PM
Raymond Chandler on Hemingway, filtered through Marlowe (scroll past the Rembrandt and Shakespeare).
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 3:32 PM
Flowers for Fonzie.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 3:32 PM
What about Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance?
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 3:33 PM
Did The Chocolate War involve some kid who learned he'd been kidnapped? Or was that some other Robert Cormier?
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 3:33 PM
I don't think either Elric or Prydain should be embarassing (meaning, I enjoyed both myself).
What would be embarassing is if anyone would admit to having read and enjoyed John Norman's Gor series.
Posted by NickS | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 3:33 PM
26: Wasn't that I Am the Cheese? I think in The Chocolate War some kid refuses to take part in the chocolate-selling fundraiser and eventually everyone beats him up.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 3:35 PM
We are not supposed to perceive that the kid deserves it. As I remember it, that's the problem with Cormier.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 3:37 PM
The cheese stands alone.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 3:39 PM
I do not actually approve of or endorse beating up high-school existentialists who need to get over themselves. I myself was one. It may be good to have been one. But it should still be humiliating in retrospect, because one does indeed need to get over oneself.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 3:40 PM
I have to admit I still do like a good Nick Adams story. I also liked Stephen King a lot, before the Dark Tower stuff. Was pretty proud of myself when I finished IT.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 3:44 PM
Adam is alone, and he is an orphan in all senses: he has lost his mind, has lost his parents, and has lost himself.
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 3:54 PM
I'm going to beat the crap out of Weiner at the APA.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 3:56 PM
Is J.D. Salinger is embarrassing, in retrospect? Speaking of high school existentialism.
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 4:01 PM
Still not over yourself, Labs?
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 4:02 PM
I don't think Salinger is embarrassing. To a certain extent, everyone's adolescence is embarrassing. Your response to Salinger might embarrass you, but then your resposne to anything at that age would embarrass you.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 4:05 PM
I remember thinking R.W. Emerson (to distinguish between our own Emerson) was teh suxx when I was sixteen or so, but it was probably I and not Ralph Waldo who was teh suxx.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 4:07 PM
shouldn't the title of this post be "humiliate self for the amusement of others?" And shouldn't that be the Unfogged motto?
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 4:12 PM
Wait, the kid in The Chocolate War deserved to get beat up? I thought the whole point of that was that the rest of the school had turned this fundraiser (a good thing, ideally) into some test of moral worth and bragging rights (bad), and the kid wanted no part of it. And got beat up. Good doesn't triumph over evil, etc. A good change of pace from most children's books, but we're supposed to think that what happened to the kid was pretty fucked up, right?
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 4:13 PM
blub blub blub
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 4:15 PM
I would like to read Flowers for Algernon In The Attic.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 4:26 PM
40: Yes, as I remember (and I haven't read it since high school at least) that's what happens. And that's the retrospective criticism of Cormier--it's all about romanticizing the Brave Lonely Kid who Thinks For Himself and gets Beat Up by the Conformist Hordes. Whereas if you don't want to participate in the chocolate fundraiser, that's fine (I hated them), but you're not really a martyr. The Cormier books seemed really cool and deep because they had unhappy endings, but you're better of reading Moominvalley in November.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 4:33 PM
Becks- That reminds me of this CT thread.
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 4:34 PM
I think the thing I feel more embarrassed or guilty about nowadays is books I did not read than about those I read, to tell the truth. Especially about that subset that I claimed to have read though I had not. I might achieve trifecta for a book that I did not read, claimed to have, and was cringe-worthy to recall having dug -- I think the only actual element of this intersection might be Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus! trilogy. But everything about my eighteenth year of life is heavily layered with sarcasm and bad faith -- I cannot tell from the perspective of these 17 years how sincerely I did anything.
Posted by Jeremy Osner | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 4:40 PM
The profoundly silly newsletter from these deeply unpleasant people. The best was after the LA riots when, instead of calling it a riot, they kept referring to it as a "spontaneous redistribution of wealth."
Which, I suppose, was pretty accurate, but still.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 4:48 PM
44 - Good link. Fontana of course pwns with Are You There, Godot? It's Me, Margaret.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 4:53 PM
Herman Hesse, anyone?
Steppenwolf!
I felt bad because I couldn't make myself read Magister Ludi, but in retrospect I think it was a good thing.
Now I'm really embarrassed.
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 4:58 PM
I carried Steppenwolf around in high school, as if I was reading it. Does that count?
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 5:02 PM
Don't all of these books fail because they earnestly (o-earnestly?) proffer a purportedly coherent worldview? Isn't the real point that there is only entertainment one can enjoy without embarrasment: Seinfeld?
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 5:03 PM
I carried Steppenwolf around in high school, as if I was reading it. Does that count?
I did that with Derrida. I was always aready about to begin reading.
Posted by Anonymous | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 5:07 PM
Isn't the real point that there is only entertainment one can enjoy without embarrasment: Seinfeld?
No.
Also, 51 - 50 = 1, which is the edit distance between "proffer" and "reproof".
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 5:07 PM
To the author of 51, I say: humpf.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 5:08 PM
But secretly I was thinking "this book is too thick."
Posted by Anonymous | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 5:08 PM
54 is me.
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 5:09 PM
do we have a working definition for o-earnest? Does it mean "earnest in a bad way," or "what ogged means when he uses the term earnest?" Or perhaps those are really the same definition?
This needs to be fleshed out.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 5:10 PM
and so is 51. sorry, SB.
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 5:10 PM
damn you, silence crickets! stop limning me.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 5:16 PM
Also, 51 - 50 = 1, which is the edit distance between "proffer" and "reproof".
I don't get it. Should I be embarrassed about that?
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 5:17 PM
A related class of books to what I was talking about in 45, would be those I read fully or partially but without at all getting, and then spoke of as part of my repertoire -- perhaps the principal instance of this class, is Sartre's "Being and Nothingness", of which I read about a quarter and understood not a word.
Posted by Jeremy Osner | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 5:19 PM
53: It's your chance to do the dance they call the humpf.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 5:21 PM
do we have a working definition for o-earnest?
I think it does mean "earnest in a bad way". Nothing wrong with earnestness in general (ogged's objections duly noted). Perhaps it could mean something along the lines of "trying too hard to make an obvious (or simplistic) point".
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 5:22 PM
sorry, SB.
'Salright. One calls one's comment number at one's peril. I say to you: fpmuh.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 5:22 PM
my humph, my humph!
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 5:29 PM
A related class of books to what I was talking about in 45, would be those I read fully or partially but without at all getting,
But it made us feel so smartre.
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 5:34 PM
I ban myself.
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 5:37 PM
damn you, silence crickets! stop limning me.
text, this sentence implies (presupposes? Matt will correct me) that you are of one being with (a particular extent of) silence.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 5:39 PM
yup. but it was more fun than writing "silence crickets, stop limning the silence resulting from my comments, which in turn, reflects poorly upon those comments and myself."
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 5:41 PM
#48, mcdc: Great adolescent minds, lockstep in the wrong direction.
More embarassing? Dating a wanna-be French rock star whose band was named after a Hesse novel. By then I really should have known better.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 5:43 PM
a wanna-be French rock star whose band was named after a Hesse novel.
Named in French translation? Let's see, Steppenwolf was taken... anyway, up to around thirty, frenchness will trump common sense every time.
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 5:55 PM
Humiliating: I decided to read Animal Farm when I was, I think, 9 or 10. My father thought this a bit peculiar. When I finished it, he asked me if I had understood it. "Of course I understood it!" was my indignant reply. I recounted the plot for him. He just said 'ok', and, I guess, decided not to burst my bubble. When I read it again about 5 years later, I was like 'oh'.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 5:57 PM
Silvana -- you mean at 15 you got the Christian allegory, Snowdrop-as-Christ-figure subtext of the Animal Farm rebellion?
(I was 12 before it dawned on me that Aslan was really Winston Churchill.)
Posted by Jeremy Osner | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 5:59 PM
No, Elric doesn't count, childish tastes when you are a child are acceptable. I for instance read all of Harold Robbins cover-to-cover multiple times, which was an admirable activitity for pubescent males in the mid-sixties.
60: I first checked out Ulysses from the library when I was 12, and carried a copy with me until I was 28, at which time I finally read the book. There were crosscountry hitching trips with two shirts, a pair of socks, a space-blanket, and Ulysses. Entire libraries and record collections came and went to used book stores for rent, but Ulysses remained. Finally in the late 70s, after having read the entire works of Thomas Mann in order of publication, I felt I had learned how to read.
That is too revealing, and embarrassing.
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 6:02 PM
I tried to read Huckleberry Finn when I was 8 or 9 but gave up pretty quickly.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 6:04 PM
"(i) many people have mentioned Ayn Rand, but I was lucky enough to delay my first encounter with that stuff (in the form of The Fountainhead) until I was old enough to see pretty clearly that it's just terrible."
Ditto; I was 15. (It may have helped that -- I forget just now if it was The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged, but whichever, I read it all in the course of one 14-hour stint of intestinal distress, in my girlfriend's bathroom I got to leave only sporadically, until I had concluded both intake and outtake.)
"Gary Stu."
Interesting. I well recall when only a few hundred of us knew who Mary Sue was; it shouldn't surprise me that the theory has grown considerably more elaborate.
"I loved Robert Heinlein's early books about space cadets and Mars colonies and so on. Embarrassment enough for anyone!"
How so?
"The one benefit is I get to feel superior to the many people who don't see what a pretentious would-be talent Woody Allen is."
I certainly wouldn't recommend Annie Hall as an insightful or revelatory guide to typical adult life, and, of course, common opinion for many years has been to declaim his fall from true funnyness (I tend to take a rather more nuanced view, film by film; for instace, I'd certainly argue for there being plenty of value to be found in, say, Sweet And Lowdown, or even Deconstructing Harry, but tastes are always subjective, of course), but I'd have to say that calling the guy who did Annie Hall, Love And Death, Hannah And Her Sisters, Manhattan, and a fair number of other works, a "would-be talent" is a bit silly. But mileage varies.
"To a certain extent, everyone's adolescence is embarrassing."
I think that will often have a lot more to do with these sort of reactions than the works involved, myself. For one thing, it's only embarrassing depending upon how seriously you took the work in question, and that's something you bring to the question, not that the book (or movie or band or whatever) brings.
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 6:05 PM
Here's a rock band ultimately called Demien, but they're not French and about JM's parents' age.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_Puppy
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 6:06 PM
There's a Slovenian Siddharta band. I don't think Google is going to help us find JM's beau.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 6:11 PM
See, my Annie Hall experience was that my parents took me to see it at some extremely young age and I thought it was hilarious, mostly on the strength of the spider in the bathroom and the lobsters in the kitchen. I told one of my elementary school teachers it was my favorite movie, and she was shocked. Then I saw it again many years later and went, "oh."
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 6:12 PM
Aslan totally was Winston Churchill.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 6:12 PM
"I loved Robert Heinlein's early books about space cadets and Mars colonies and so on. Embarrassment enough for anyone!"
How so?
For a girl, to remember my failure to see the manly manliness of the coming-of-age stories and how it was oppressin' me is kind of embarrassing.
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 6:14 PM
By extension, does that mean that Churchill is Christ?
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 6:17 PM
He's the lion-christ. I'm totally going to put a Churchill poster in my dorm-room. Churchill teaches us that drunken misogyny is ok. The man saved freedom (indicating that he must have been a conservative) and the fact that he was a drunken misogynyst entails that my frat is righteous. Therefore Reagan was a genius, and all is good in the world. Suck my cock.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 6:22 PM
I'd have to say, or agree, that the notion that one should be embarrassed as an adult for the fact that one's tastes as a kid, or pre-adolescent, or adolescent, are apt to have changed somewhat, is more than a little questionable.
The one comment that somewhat bothers me in the CT thread is the assertion that kids may not have enough scientific education to understand why Erich von Daniken was insanely ludicrous; it's certainly a true assertion, but the fact that it's true is as alarming as is the general lack of grasp of basic science in the general populace is. I mean, I read von Dankiken at 7 or so, and observed that it was obvious nonsense. It wasn't very compatible with, say, George Gamow. Or Newton. And wasn't very interesting compared to any number of texts I was reading, be it Scientific American, or Arthur C. Clarke.
I find it interesting how nearly universal the number of citing in the CT threads of works of sf and fantasy are made, some far more flawed than others. Not at all surprising, though. It's not news how many adults still find the genres embarrassing. (How many folks are bothered, in contrast, that Sherlock Holmes is no less of a complete fantasy, or Nero Wolfe, or that neither cozy mysteries nor hardboiled are any more "realistic"? Not so many, it appears.)
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 6:27 PM
I told one of my elementary school teachers it was my favorite movie, and she was shocked.
because you forgot to mention the sneezing-in-the-coke scene, prolly.
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 6:30 PM
"I told one of my elementary school teachers it was my favorite movie, and she was shocked."
Shocked? (Among my biases here is my quasi-non-relationship with Allan Stewart Koenigsberg, which I've written about a jillion times, which doesn't mean that anyone here has necessary seen such, which is that he grew up literally around the corner from me [on Ave. K and East 12th St., in Midwood; I was on East 10th, between J & K], twenty years earlier than I did, and we nonetheless had two elementary school teachers in common, and two high school teachers, at P.S. 99 and Midwood H.S.; so his milieu was, although earlier than mine, fairly similar; so, fair disclosure).
If it were, perhaps, Deconstructing Harry with a blow-job scene on a blind man, I might not be surprised. But what was shocking, or even terribly adult-understandable-only, about Annie Hall, a move that while deeper than, say, Bananas, isn't wildly more difficult to follow, or shocking.
"Churchill teaches us that drunken misogyny is ok."
Please, that's drunken racist misogyny. Although I'd lean towards the view that he teaches us that we can do good things despite having bad aspects and also doing bad things. I imagine no one ever thought of that one before, though.
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 6:38 PM
(How many folks are bothered, in contrast, that Sherlock Holmes is no less of a complete fantasy, or Nero Wolfe, or that neither cozy mysteries nor hardboiled are any more "realistic"? Not so many, it appears.)
I'm kind of embarrassed about all the Nero Wolfe stories I read. I'm not embarrassed by Sherlock Holmes. The embarrassing thing about a lot of bad science fiction I loved as an adolescent was its wish-fulfilling quality and the callowness of the wishes it attempted to fulfill. The disguises were so thin, the desperation so great.
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 6:39 PM
I dislike seeing drunkennes lumped in with misogyny and racism.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 6:42 PM
I'm flat-out disturbed by the SF/Fantasy concentration in the CT thread and think it shows how unseriously people took the assignment. OMG, at 13, I thought the punny silliness of Piers Anthony's Xanth (slash Robert Jordan slash David Eddings etc.) totally absorbing and now I know it's stupid, and OMG, how unsophisticated I was at 13! I don't know whether Heinlein should go in that category, since as a teen, I couldn't finish him.
The text that fucking changed my life as a teenager? Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Today I am better able to recognize that I misunderstood almost everything about Blake and what he was up to, but sure: Anne McCaffrey is a lot easier to make fun of.
John Emerson: I said that my beau was a wanna-be rockstar, didn't I? He has since returned to acting, and, as I last heard, he is now actually making a living at that. That episode was many years ago, now.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 6:44 PM
I now regret that, as a teen, I misread Nietzsche in such a way as to lead me to kill several of my schoolmates.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 6:49 PM
But you learned from the experience, right?
jm,
The embarrassment we'll admit to is just to distract from the actually embarrassing embarrassments.
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 6:52 PM
I'm kind of embarrassed about all the Nero Wolfe stories I read. I'm not embarrassed by Sherlock Holmes.
That should be reversed, no?
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 6:57 PM
to distract from the actually embarrassing embarrassments
I thought that was sort of the whole point of "life of the mind".
Posted by Jeremy Osner | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 6:59 PM
"For a girl, to remember my failure to see the manly manliness of the coming-of-age stories and how it was oppressin' me is kind of embarrassing."
Fair enough. Although why one should be expected to have the same political sensibilities (or any other sort of sensibilities) at age 8 or 12 or 14 or whatever, as at 25 or 32 or whatever, I don't follow. (And, again, the embarrassment seems to derive from one's own expectations about one's self, rather than directly from the work; if one simply looks at the work and says, well, here are its virtues and here are its flaws and omisssions, after all, what's to be embarrassed about?)
Just out of curiosity, what early Heinlein do you think of as having much "manly manliness"? Certainly, I think Podkayne of Mars tonally has always bothered many of us, and we'll try to avoid discussing the late, post Moon Is A Harsh Mistress work, but neither of those fits well with a reference to "I loved Robert Heinlein's early books about space cadets and Mars colonies and so on.." Okay, Podkayne might; but the tonal problems aren't really about "manly manliness" in any way that's clear to me. (Specifically, you're referring to the Scribner juveniles, of which Podkayne was technically not one, although it would have been the last if it hadn't been rejected by Alice Dagliesh.)
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 6:59 PM
Re-reading it as an adult, I was appalled at how astonishingly thin the racial allegories in that series of novels are.
I never do this, but I haven't read to the end of the thread yet. Really!?! I read about a million of those, down to the Black Stallion's Great-Aunt Maude (describing her suspenseful victory in a shuffleboard tournament), and while I don't remember them with any clarity at all, I also don't remember any racial element, text or subtext. Did I just miss it completely? (I suppose at seven or eight I could have read right past a Stephin Fetchit accent without processing it.)
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 7:04 PM
"I'm kind of embarrassed about all the Nero Wolfe stories I read. "
Okay. I'm not embarrassed by all the Rex Stout Nero Wolfe's you, I mean I've read (I've not read any non-Stout Wolfe). They're certainly not badly written. They do what they came to do, and did it well; they've amused and entertained millions of people. They're not the most beautiful prose ever written, nor offering of greatly deeper pleasures, but is that the standard of what we're embarrassed to enjoy?
But perhaps you could say more about why they, or your having read them, embarrasses you? As part of that, although Doyle, of course, created the paradigm, when you also say that "I'm not embarrassed by Sherlock Holmes," what virtues are you finding in Doyle that act as embarrassment-off from those of Stout? It can't simply be age. Do you discern some sort of "more worthwhile" literary virtues in Doyle? Or what?
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 7:12 PM
I'm embarrassed by the Agatha Christie I read.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 7:14 PM
And while I read pretty much everything that anyone's described as embarrassing, I can't say that I'm embarrassed by much of it. (Heinlein, check. Ayn Rand, check (anyone else think that there was a perfectly reasonable design critic spoiled there?). Nero Wolfe, check (Archie is fairly high on the list of literary characters who Mr. Breath has cause to worry about.) Elric, check. Sherlock Holmes, check. All right, Piers Anthony really does suck.) But I'm not getting the embarrassment here -- this is all entertainment. What's to be embarrassed about? You liked what you liked. (And I liked most of what I've ever read. Indiscriminate -- that's me.)
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 7:15 PM
Crossposted with Gary, who, as often, I'm agreeing with. If you're going to get all 'too cool for school' about fiction, I can come up with reasons that absolutely anything is pretty shameful to admit you enjoyed. Nothing's perfect, but lots of imperfect stuff is fun, and that's what it's all for.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 7:18 PM
Just out of curiosity, what early Heinlein do you think of as having much "manly manliness"?
Trapped! okay, GaryFarber, my recollections are quite (haw!) nebulous. But I do remember the twins, one of whom left earth on a faster than light spaceship, and came back when his brother was a decrepit old man to find that women didn't wear hats at the table...but mainly what bothers me in retrospect is that it (juvenile science fiction) seemed to be always about the boys, and the girls were generally sidekicks or ornaments or whatever, but if I wanted interestin adventures, I had to put up with that, thus making me wish I was a boy so I could have interestin adventures, and reinforcing my internalized misogyny, etc, etc, etc. Girls in the meantime were invited to enjoy the none-too-interesting adventures of Beanie Malone et al., which were all about Relationships. I'd totally forgotten Podkayne of Mars. Is that the one where the kids spend the night inside the giant cabbage?
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 7:20 PM
I get the feeling nobody clicked on my link. My dignity and I thank you.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 7:20 PM
I rushed to click on your link, SB.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 7:23 PM
SB -- are you saying you're embarrassed about having liked the writings of Mr. Limbaugh as a young lad or lass? That would make you younger than I had figured you for.
Posted by Jeremy Osner | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 7:25 PM
"All right, Piers Anthony really does suck."
In his early days, I feel compelled to note that he had ambitions as a writer. Macroscope is one giant mess of a semi-failed novel, but it did try hard.
I find it hard to talk much about Anthony, because fairness would compel me to disclose the many novels of his I've worked on, mostly when I was a boy editorlet at Avon Books, and then start talking about various other background stuff, which is pretty much a problem I have with an overwhelming number of modern sf/fantasy writers; John Cole just asked me in e-mail a day or three ago whether I was a "George R. R. Martin fan," and I had to start explaining that I've known George since circa 1973, and that we have enough passing personal stuff under the water that I was never going to be able to approach his stuff that way.
But let's just say that Piers has a number of children, and understandably concluded that making sure he could make them happy, and see them through to college, was an important goal; and he doesn't have another day job. (This consideration also arose with an arguably better writer I can also testify to personal knowledge of, Roger Zelazny, though to a considerably less degree.)
Non-sequitur, I might clarify that for all my various "what's to be embarrassed about" observations above, I certainly amn't oblivious to the simple emotional reaction of looking at something one once really liked, and concluding that it was really quite awful in ways that didn't bother us then, but do now. I'm just distinguishing, or trying to, between an understandable emotional response, and what's possibly actually rationally defensible about it.
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 7:25 PM
SB, I assumed it was not a serious link. Or, if it was, it added so much to your mystery as to be overwhelming.
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 7:26 PM
younger than I had figured you for
Jeremy, we are all of us 47 year old balding men.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 7:31 PM
I read pretty good books when I was young, but the quality of the pornography available in 1962 was really low.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 7:34 PM
But perhaps you could say more about why they, [Nero Wolfe] or your having read them, embarrasses you?
In this case, it's not so much the quality of the books as my reaction to them that is retrospectively embarrassing (okay, not really that embarrassing). I think they were the first adult popular fiction I read as a child, and I truly thought they were a glimpse into the way grownups actually think and interact. I still remember finding Might as Well Be Dead on the bookshelf. It was a Viking paperback and I misread the title as "Might as Well Be Dead, Viking" which I thought was weird but I was into Vikings, so I started to read it and found it riveting.
I never thought the Holmes stories were realistic, but for a while I thought New York was full of homicidal millionaires and smooth gumshoes, and sophisticated ladies who went dancing with them at the Flamingo.
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 7:37 PM
It's not? Fine. Shatter my illusions.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 7:40 PM
Eventually I will have enough mystery to can it and sell it in the seasonal aisle of the supermarket. It will keep Libby's Pumpkin company when it is lonley, which is always.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 7:40 PM
quality of the pornography available in 1962 was really low
But by 1965 there was already too much for Charles Keating.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 7:41 PM
For me, the most humiliating books which I won't name were trendy bits of very bad political and legal theory from the early 90s. For that, I blame my professors. The most humiliating works of fiction that I idolized were probably the Kundera books that I was completely obsessed with from the ages of 17-19. In fairness to me, the books were pretty dirty, although not in the least bit sexy, and I wasn't exactly very experienced in such things back then. Wait, maybe that's the humiliating part of this story.
Posted by pjs | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 7:43 PM
It was a Viking paperback and I misread the title as "Might as Well Be Dead, Viking" which I thought was weird but I was into Vikings
Awesome.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 7:45 PM
"the twins,"
Time For The Stars.
"but mainly what bothers me in retrospect is that it (juvenile science fiction) seemed to be always about the boys, "
Well, sure, but while one can note various exceptions from the Fifties and earlier (Catherine.L. Moore's Jirel of Joiry, Leigh Brackett, Ursula Le Guin was being publishec by 1962, and so on, not to mention arguably feminist work by Ted Sturgeon and other men) , this certainly begun to change by the Sixties, and then we had the whole Great Feminist Explosion/revolution in sf by the late Sixties and ever-more-so in the Seventies (Joanna Russ, my old pal, Vonda McIntyre, ditto, Lizzy Lynn, Suzy Charnas, the list is long.)
More to the point, this sexism in pre-Sixties sf, is hardly blameable on Robert Heinlein, who, if anything, rather stood out in the context of the times for having strong female characters. Peewee in Have Spacesuit, Will Travel was a secondary character to the main boy protagonist, but only barely so, and was portrayed as vastly brighter than he was. The fact is that Alice Dagliesh wouldn't have bought a book about a female protagonist, and in all frankness, that decision would could at least be slightly defended on the single ground that most buyers and readers of science fiction in the fifties were male. I would never say that such decisions should be defended, or justify them, but there's a partial element of chicken-and-egg to the sexism-in-old-science-fiction question. But, bottom line, Robert Heinlein wasn't responsible for sexism in science fiction, even if his dialogue by I Will Fear No Evil and later works became embarrassing. But even then his women characters only came out more up front than he was allowed to do in earlier work, as a rule.
But even the women in the Scribner juvenile The Rolling Stones/The Family Stone were all super-competent geniuses, as pretty much all of Heinlein's women were.
"Is that the one where the kids spend the night inside the giant cabbage?"
No, that's Red Planet. There was a fairly awful and unfaithful animated version made back in the Eighties or so, alas. Fortunately, relatively few have seen it.
Anyway, I would never want to minimize the seriousness of sexism in old sf (or say every last bit has been scrubbed out today, any more than we can say that of anything), but I'd simply like it to be seen as part of the context of the times; it's not as if science fiction or science fiction juveniles, were more guilty of sexism than any other literature, or aspect of our culture, of the day, and arguably was frequently leading our culture way in begining to work our way past that.
And I have no objection at all to beating up on Robert Heinlein's real literary failings and flaws; I just like to see it done accurately, rather than in any sort of vague guilt-by-association or "it's an easy laugh if you don't actually really know the work" kind of way.
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 7:45 PM
I think most sentiments benefit from the addition of a viking.
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 7:45 PM
Archie is fairly high on the list of literary characters who Mr. Breath has cause to worry about.
The non-creepy blog crush is so back on, LB.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 7:47 PM
I think most sentiments benefit from the addition of a viking.
As viking cocksucker an observation as there ever was.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 7:52 PM
I think most sentiments benefit from the addition of a viking.
Except bon voyage.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 7:56 PM
"Jeremy, we are all of us 47 year old balding men."
I wouldn't say I was anywhere near "balding" yet. Thinning, absolutely, and greying, and receding. But not yet balding.
47 since November 5th, though.
"It was a Viking paperback and I misread the title as "Might as Well Be Dead, Viking" which I thought was weird but I was into Vikings, so I started to read it and found it riveting."
Well, that's probably why millions of people have loved Stout for all these years. Because they were splendid, amusing, highly accessible, stories. (Mostly; they weren't all gold, of course.) Have you tried reading any in recent years and found yourself throwing them against a wall? (It's not as if, frankly, I couldn't understand why someone might be embarrassed at a later date to have beloved Xanth or Pern a bit strongly, although they were all far too late in my life for me to have ever gone there; I certainly love lots of really badly written stuff from the Forties and Thirties, or even earlier pulps, though, for reasons other than that they are badly written, but because of their other virtues. Sometimes it's also not clear whether people are seeing a work in the context of its times well or not. One wouldn't read E. E. Smith's The Skylark of Space for either its writing, or its modern science fiction ideas, but it was written between 1915-20, after all; I couldn't recommend it today other than as of historical interest, or to someone young, or of just the right mind-set, but that doesn't mean it wasn't, er, seminally important to the genre in its time. (Although speaking of sexism, Smith had his neighbor and friend, Lee Hawkins Garby, "help him out" in that first book, so as to get the "love interest" bits "right"; now, there was writing about "manly men," when ya talk E. E. "Doc" Smith. And the contrast that Heinlein brought was revolutionary, in many ways, including how much better he handled female characters; to get Heinlein, it helps to be familiar with the milieu of sf in 1938, when he started.)
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 8:01 PM
That entire site (of your link) doesn't seem to be available at the momet, by the way.
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 8:28 PM
Did Standpipe read the book to which Standpipe linked, or did Standpipe write the book to which Standpipe linked?
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 8:30 PM
"That entire site (of your link) doesn't seem to be available at the momet, by the way."
Wrong blog thread. Never mind.
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 8:34 PM
As viking cocksucker an observation as there ever was.
We have a new cocksucker corrolary, I believe. For even fiercer awesomeness.
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 8:42 PM
Speaking of 117, where's Chopper?
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 8:44 PM
Actually, I'm not embarrassed by the Heinlein SF I read when I was a kid--I still think The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is a pretty good book, silly-ass libertarianism and all.
But I am really embarrassed to admit that I read Heinlein's nonfiction...
Posted by monboddo | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 8:52 PM
I am a naturally-hairy 59 year old man.
The secret?
Something you can't buy in a store: low testosterone.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 9:00 PM
Now embarrassed to be such a snob, but proud to think I may have contributed a new ramification to an Unfogged in-joke. It's not just cocksucker, it's viking cocksucker!
Also I now have to read "Have Spacesuit Will Travel".
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 9:13 PM
Hell, I had a complete collection of "Doc Savage" paperbacks. And I loved Podkayne.
As far as Piers Anthony, I remember his very interesting early work, yet do not at all begrudge his move to more commercial material. Since I spent most of Friday night looking for material on Lafferty, Harness, and especially George Alec Effinger. I don't need to pick up Malzberg to be depressed about the field.
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 9:37 PM
[redacted]
Posted by [redacted] | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 9:38 PM
I'm really tempted to sit out this thread but...in high school, I scoffed at the Hesse readers because he's just Nietzsche-lite, but I though Kahlil Gibran was awesome.
Fuck you all for reading that--this comment never happened.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 9:48 PM
I'm really tempted to sit out this thread but...in high school, I scoffed at the Hesse readers because he's just Nietzsche-lite, but I though Kahlil Gibran was awesome.
Fuck you all for reading that--this comment never happened.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 9:51 PM
It never happened--twice, no less.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 9:56 PM
I'm really tempted to sit out this thread but...in high school, I scoffed at the Hesse readers because he's just Nietzsche-lite, but I though Kahlil Gibran was awesome.
Fuck you all for reading that--this comment never happened.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 10:01 PM
What he says three times is true.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 10:02 PM
Hey, wow, someone should really look into that problem.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 10:03 PM
but I though Kahlil Gibran was awesome.
Not basketball again. Ugh.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 10:03 PM
SB: the best!
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 10:05 PM
"Also I now have to read "Have Spacesuit Will Travel"."
Keep in mind before you look for it that when I referred to Pee-wee as a strong female character, that she was, like, ten years old. Of course, Kip is just in high school, himself. Hey, these are juveniles; that was the premise.
It's very dated, in many ways, as are all the Heinlein juvies. It was major science-fictionally boggling in his stories when people would pull their phone out of their pocket or bag; that sort of thing, for one. And Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, was one of his slightly odder juveniles; it went off a bit further-afield in a rather more literally Out There space-operaish sort of way than pretty much any of his other novels, until the mess that is The Number Of The Beast, arguably.
So it's hard for me to recommend, or not, the Heinlein juveniles to someone today, particularly the younger they are, without, at least, having some idea of how they deal with that whole "need to see things in historical context" issue that I mentioned above. On the one hand, the Heinlein juveniles are, overall, classics of the genre (some more than others, to be sure; the first couple were a bit more simplistic, particularly the first, whose plot is, yes, somewhat embarrassing to describe); but they're definitely a different future history than our future, and they were of their time. This is a good piece by Adam Troy-Castro on HSWT, if anyone is interested. I agree with his assessment.
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 10:21 PM
SB: the best!
Thanks!
I don't care if it's evil. I so do not regret putting the mind-control in the reservoir.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 10:24 PM
"And I loved Podkayne." You'd have voted to let her live, I guess? (Baen Books did an edition some years ago and held a vote as to whether to go with the published ending, or the unpublished version that Heinlein originally wrote, in which he knocked her off. [Um, spoilers for the entire book, to put it mildly].)
"Since I spent most of Friday night looking for material on Lafferty, Harness, and especially George Alec Effinger. I don't need to pick up Malzberg to be depressed about the field."
Charless Harness is a bit obscure these days, I'm afraid, particularly given that there still aren't all that many old fanzines online, despite the efforts at fanac.org. But Piglet/Effinger should be far less so. Lafferty was the only god I've ever met who was also an amazingly alcoholic little old man. Barry Malzberg is merely a much unappreciated prophet (and he also terribly damaged his career by taking far too many contracts in rapid succession, just because they were suddenly on offer, even if they money for each one wasn't much -- the usual few grand -- and it was entirely understandable; Ron Goulart also took the poison pills; unfortunately, being a writer is also something of a business). But I'm, overall, a big fan of both Barry's fiction and nonfiction, even if he repeated himself a bit much in his dying astronaut period. (In a different sort of way, I also admire Ron, actually; he's done endless terrific research into old radio shows, pulps, and comments, and in person in my limited experience, one of the funniest people I've ever met; much more so than even his funniest books (some of which were, unfortunately, not so funny, but that's that whole repeating yourself with a succession of similar books in a short period of time thing, again.) And, no, I never met Charless Harness or had direct contact with him! :-)
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 10:37 PM
"The embarrassing thing about a lot of bad science fiction I loved as an adolescent was its wish-fulfilling quality and the callowness of the wishes it attempted to fulfill."
I left out my thought here, which runs along the lines of, so you're saying that adolescents are callow? But, you know, I'd want to say it in a gentle and kind way.
Yes, there's definitely a ton of callow and shallow wish-fulfillment in much -- though certainly not all -- science fiction and fantasy. In particular, much popular sf has featured themes of persecuted smart people, particularly persecuted, unappreciated, smart kids.
But I'm unconvinced this is anything to be embarrassed about. If anyone could use some wish-fufillment, well, actually, there are plenty of other candidates than unappreciated smart kids, but not so many who would find and obtain books that make their lives seem a little less hopeless and miserable and totally not understood!
I think that's a good thing, overall, that there are books and stories that provide that support and wish-fulfillment fantasy, and such callow messages as that it's okay to be different and it's okay to be smart, and you are not alone, while also providing some pleasure and thrills and sense of wonder at the possibilities of this and other universes, and maybe even some crunchy knowledge, or cool ideas, besides, like sprinkles. (Sometimes a bit deeper.)
That we won't have identical emotional needs at age 30 as age 13 doesn't change my mind.
(It's when stories ever lean past "it's okay and good to be smart" into "you are a better person simply by virtue of being smarter" that I start to become disturbed, but that's because I was alarmingly prone to such nasty thinking when I was a screwed-up adolescent.)
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 10:53 PM
"I don't need to pick up Malzberg to be depressed about the field."
I'm pretty out of touch with the field these days, relatively speaking, but I'm pretty sure there's a ton of good stuff coming out, just as there always has been every time I've read someone explain how depressed they are about the current field since I first started reach that plaint circa 1966 or so. Certainly there have been shitloads of great sf and fantasy books published in the last ten years.
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 11:05 PM
I don't know man, I am still embarrassed. I was deep into SF 65-75, and picking up Fourth Mansions(title alludes to Theresa of Avila) and Wolves of Memory and Herovit's World and the New Dimension series and stuff even Gary probably hasn't heard of (Volteface? James Sallis? Still got em.) off the store shelves and thinkin this was really good and interesting stuff. And Aldiss was maybe self-indulgent when he ripped off Jealousy but I didn't think Robbe-Grillet was all that superior and when Aldiss and the field went back to stuff like Helliconia Summer I said why bother and stopped reading.
I tried a year or so ago to turn Holbo onto Lafferty because that is really the kind of reader Lafferty needs but he couldn't be bothered. It is SF. Old. Idiosyncratic understates. Written by an Catholic electrical engineer who rarely left Tulsa. Few read it then, few now, few ever will.
That was my youth. I read a bunch of certifiable polymath geniuses who were attempting to write ambitious literature in a quasi-genre format. Now most are out of print and forgotten, while Turtledove makes millions. I was a fool.
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 11:13 PM
Gary I just got depressed by Effinger's obituaries. Really, really depressed.
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 11:15 PM
Don't be depressed, Bob; you're steadily edging out for my favorite cranky-uncle-commmenter despite stiff competition.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 11:20 PM
And Gary, of course you know of James Sallis, he has become all famous. I just swear I have a pb from around 1970 novel of his that isn't listed on any bibliography. One of these boxes, somewhere, something about a torture machine.
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 11:43 PM
Coming back from SF to see how this thread has grown, I feel all of a sudden like a certain wise yeti who sometimes comments here.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 12-18-05 11:54 PM
"I just got depressed by Effinger's obituaries. Really, really depressed."
That's entirely understandable. Following his life was all too depressing. I first met him at the 1973 Lunacon, where Guest of Honor Harlan Ellison "moderated" a panel of "new writers" (as they were then), Gardner Dozois, Jack Dann, and George Alec Effinger; we never had much direct contact, and I wouldn't expect him to remember me (although I'm often surprised by who does, as we saw here the other night; you could have knocked me over with a toothpick when Pat Cadigan swore up and down to my face when we first met in Britain some years ago how "oh, everyone knows you, Gary!," because we'd never had an atom's worth of contact, and I'd have sworn she didn't know me from a [insert preferred metaphor here]), but we had a number of good mutual friends, so news of his innumerable travails was not infrequent.
Excellent writer; not such a great life, though, sadly. (There tended to be themes of endless illness, poverty, and alcoholism, is the short version for those who don't know; unfortunately, I can name too many other good writers, and some not so good, I've known with not dissimilar stories; and, of course, this does fulfill one stereotype of some writers, but it's a stereotype because of the kernel of truth.)
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 1:27 AM
"James Sallis?"
I hope you're not implying I shouldn't know from James Sallis?
"And Gary, of course you know of James Sallis, he has become all famous." Has he? I read him in New Worlds, of course, circa 1968. And Orbit, and Again, Dangerous Visions, and so on. These weren't hardly obscure works, but among the most prestigious forums in the field at the time, after all. (I see he has an excellent, interesting look back here; I commend it to the attention of all.) (One reason I get cranky at the ignorant dismissals of sf as if it were all E. E. Smith or worse is that you'd have to think the whole New Wave never happened to think that. Though if we're having an obscure-off, did you ever notice J. J. Pierce? [Not to be confused with his father, John R.] (Or we could play with people published in Orbit, or even Quark, as well as the many permutations of New Worlds.) (I have no idea how familiar Fontana Labs is with Meester Moorcock's career, beyond Elric, which was some fairly weird shit I never particularly got into myself.)
I have no idea what you're referring to about "Volteface," though. But, anyway, I remember Sallis basically from the late Sixties/early Seventies, and only occasionally noticed him thereafter.
"...Now most are out of print and forgotten,"
Bob, if you could ever be stirred from Texas, I'd highly recommend you give going to Readercon a try. Or even Boskone. Or to Potlatch. There's a whole culture of people who liked -- no, passionately loved, though not everyone all about the same thing, of course, all this stuff, and who still do. And are you familiar with NESFA Press? (Again, disclosure, I go back with most every of the folks involved to at least the early Seventies, or however long they've been around.) And the many other fine sf small presses?
Being in a place where everyone knows the writers we're talking about, and has for decades, might lift your spirits some.
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 1:45 AM
"James Sallis?"
I hope you're not implying I shouldn't know from James Sallis?
"And Gary, of course you know of James Sallis, he has become all famous." Has he? I read him in New Worlds, of course, circa 1968. And Orbit, and Again, Dangerous Visions, and so on. These weren't hardly obscure works, but among the most prestigious forums in the field at the time, after all. (I see he has an excellent, interesting look back here; I commend it to the attention of all.) (One reason I get cranky at the ignorant dismissals of sf as if it were all E. E. Smith or worse is that you'd have to think the whole New Wave never happened to think that. Though if we're having an obscure-off, did you ever notice J. J. Pierce? [Not to be confused with his father, John R.] (Or we could play with people published in Orbit, or even Quark, as well as the many permutations of New Worlds.) (I have no idea how familiar Fontana Labs is with Meester Moorcock's career, beyond Elric, which was some fairly weird shit I never particularly got into myself.)
I have no idea what you're referring to about "Volteface," though. But, anyway, I remember Sallis basically from the late Sixties/early Seventies, and only occasionally noticed him thereafter.
"...Now most are out of print and forgotten,"
Bob, if you could ever be stirred from Texas, I'd highly recommend you give going to Readercon a try. Or even Boskone. Or to Potlatch. There's a whole culture of people who liked -- no, passionately loved, though not everyone all about the same thing, of course, all this stuff, and who still do. And are you familiar with NESFA Press? (Again, disclosure, I go back with most every of the folks involved to at least the early Seventies, or however long they've been around.) And the many other fine sf small presses?
Being in a place where everyone knows the writers we're talking about, and has for decades, might lift your spirits some.
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 1:46 AM
"I tried a year or so ago to turn Holbo onto Lafferty because that is really the kind of reader Lafferty needs but he couldn't be bothered."
As I would with many writers, I'd recommend starting with short stories first, although this wouldn't work for some readers. I'd recommend the collectionNine Hundred Grandmothers to start. Or you could read the title story here, whole, legal, and free. And Slow Tuesday Night here. Those should give a sufficient taste to get a clue as to whether he interests you or not.
There are some fine classic stories legally readable for free and in whole here, by the way. Scott Edelman classed up the "scific.com" operation quite a bit when he was hired, although sadly some of it is coming to an end. You can find the Lafferty stories there indexed here, as Bob presumably knows.
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 2:02 AM
"The site moderator will review your comment soon."
But probably not tonight. Oh, well. Anyway, going to two crucial links, I commend Nine Hundred Grandmothers and Slow Tuesday Night to all, and would certainly be curious as to reactions. (Although those not well-familiar with sf might run into that unfamiliarity with how to read sf problem that's been discussed since least at least Chip Delany's "About 5,750 Words," but arguably back to Heinlein's 1941 Denvention speech.)
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 2:09 AM
So it's hard for me to recommend, or not, the Heinlein juveniles to someone today, particularly the younger they are, without, at least, having some idea of how they deal with that whole "need to see things in historical context" issue that I mentioned above.
I would point out, that the first few books (which mcmc seems be remembering unfondly) were written to be serialized in Boys Life. So they had to be appealing to (white) Boy Scouts of the early 40's and 50's. So, in the first one, Rocket Ship Galileo (which is bad, BTW, very 30's pulpish), his characters are three boys who fly off to the moon to fight...Nazis. (I think he was the first one to use the 'some Nazis escaped WWII via Nazi secret science' motif. Which culminated in They Saved Hitler's Brain. And then had an encore with The Boys From Brazil. Which is a terrible thing to be responsible for in retrospect but fairly inventive for 1947.) Did I mention one of the three boys was Jewish and one of the other two was from a single-parent (female) home? People are reasonably blase about that sort of thing now, but to sneak that into a magazine for Boy Scouts in 1947 should probably be considered actively subversive.
Which brings us to
But I do remember the twins, one of whom left earth on a faster than light spaceship, and came back when his brother was a decrepit old man to find that women didn't wear hats at the table...
Yes. He had a technical problem there. He had to illustrate both Einsteinian relativity and 80 (100?) years of cultural changes in roughly 200 pages. So, at the start the of the book, the position of women in society resembles that of American women of say 1910...and when the protagonist returns it resembles the position of women in society circa 1980-1990 as envisioned by an old white guy in 1955. In a book written ('to order') for Boy Scouts of the 1950's. And all the changes are encapsulated in two paragraphs:
"Instead I started thinking about my re-education, which, I was beginning to realize, was going to have to be extensive; the changes had been more than I bargained for. Take female styles, for example - look, I'm no Puritan, but they didn't dress, if you want to call it that, this way when I was a kid. Girls running around without a thing on their heads, not even on top... heads bare-naked, like an animal. It was good thing Dad hadn't lived to see it. He never let our sisters come to the table without a hat, even if Pat and I were the only unmarried males present."
The fact that you think it's misogynistic (or unbelievable, or whatever) is perfectly sensible, since Heinlein himself thought the same thing. It's one of his fishslap moments. fishslapGIRLS ARE SMART AND CAPABLE, DORKS! fishslap BLACK PEOPLE ARE JUST THE SAME AS YOU fishslapSLAVERY AND SEGREGATION ARE EVIL!
In this case fishslap BOY, THINGS SURE DO CHANGE IN 80 YEARS, HUH?
If you read the juvies now, and pay attention, those moments have become jarring because they don't need to be said anymore, unlike in the 1950's.
If you were going to re/read any of those books, the one you ought to read first would be Tunnel In the Sky.
ash
['I like Carmen.']
Posted by ash | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 4:10 AM
Fortunately it's possible to have several cranky uncles. Otherwise McManus and Farber would be in trouble.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 6:13 AM
I've previously mentioned it in Unfogged threads: Gone With the Wind was my favorite book when I was ten, and for a few years thereafter. It's racist and it has a rape that is treated as unambiguously sexually satisfying for the woman--that's pretty bad. On the other hand, Scarlett does shoot a marauding Yankee (implied potential racist) in the face and grind her bare heel in the wound. She also owns a business despite societal disapproval. But in fact I'm not that embarrassed; I forgive myself for my taste when I was ten. I'm kind of embarrassed by claiming to have loved books I didn't really, like The Once and Future King (12?), and sometimes telling myself I had a deeper emotional reaction to a book than I did (Grapes of Wrath, 13) even when I did genuinely enjoy it. I was into The Clan of the Cave Bear, but I'm pretty sure even at 11 or so I knew just how juvenile it was (I'm not sure if I was hip to the racism.) By the time I was in high school I think my taste was pretty decent: Garp, Tess of the D's, Catch-22, Of Human Bondage, Cuckoo's Nest. I suspect my opinion of Garp and Cuckoo's Nest would go down if I revisited them, but I'm still not embarrassed.
I'm way more embarrassed about all of my actual behavior until, I don't know, maybe two weeks ago.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 7:18 AM
implied potential racist s/b implied potential rapist
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 7:22 AM
What happened two weeks ago? A mid-life conversion and change of path? Lucky thing you came over to the side of the light before our meet-up, I deal harshly with darklings.
Posted by Jeremy Osner | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 7:36 AM
"Osner, Osner and Malloy: dealing harshly with darklings since 1972"
Posted by Jeremy Osner | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 7:40 AM
All sorts of embarrassing stuff for me, musicwise and litwise.
I read most of Hesse, though in retrospect I think of him less as embarrassing and more just boring.
At around 14 or 15, I listened a whole lot to the New Age piano player George Winston; I think I found his simplicity sort of startling. I imitated his piano playing style for a time.
I listened to a lot of math metal, even as I embraced the grunge revolution (I was a h.s. freshman in 1991, graduated in 1995, so it all came and went during my tenure).
The qualities I sought out in George Winston led me to Phillip Glass, who I still think is great, but still seems to have only a few ideas that he reuses over and over (and I mean that sincerely, not as a cute joke on his "minimalism").
I went through a big "seeking" period with theology and psychology, though I never dug into the real serious philosophers (this is what happens when you're mostly self-educated, I think). I read some Kant, though, and some Nietzsche. But also nearly everything that Jung ever wrote, along with a number of Jungian psychologists (Marie Louise Von Franz, Edward Edinger and others).
Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale blew my head off when I was a teenager, and I still have fond memories of it and admire a lot of the writing, but he's so distasteful and the book gets kind of ridiculous toward the end, so I've mostly gotten over it.
I also wrote some awful, awful stuff: awful music, awful prose, awful drama. But! I remain convinced that the only way to get to writing good, original stuff is to write awful stuff for a time, so long as it's awful in a unique way (and not, say, a romance novel or something).
In thinking back, I really read and listened to a lot of work because I was passionately looking for "It" -- this certain quality that manifested Itself in a few beloved passages of prose or music that truly haunted me day and night. So, I'd listen to composers/bands/artists who were said to be similar to those who'd achieved It, but was almost always disappointed. Same thing with authors.
Several of these It-makers have stayed as points of reference for me, though: Tony Kushner, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Benjamin Britten, John Adams (the composer, not the 2nd president). It's hard for me to escape the conclusion that my years-long searching finally bore some fruit for me, in that I discovered works that I believe will sustain me and my soul (if there is such a thing) for a lifetime. Then again, I'm not even 30, so who knows?
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 8:51 AM
Oh no, J.O. I just haven't had time enough for reflection. Soon enough my recent behavior will embarrass me too.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 8:53 AM
"So it's hard for me to recommend, or not, the Heinlein juveniles to someone today"#
"Citizen of the Galaxy". I'm afraid I still re-read it.
Likewise Lafferty. I think I know "Slow Tuesday Night" by heart. Wanna buy a Manus Module?
Posted by dave heasman | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 10:14 AM
Speaking of being reminded of embarrassing opinions, this, which is striking just below my threshold of blogging.
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 10:22 AM
"So, in the first one, Rocket Ship Galileo (which is bad, BTW, very 30's pulpish), his characters are three boys who fly off to the moon to fight...Nazis."
Aided, of course, but their wise older professor friend.
I already referred to the plot as embarrassing. But it was also written in 1946-7, when post-war Nazis were not hardly cartoon villains. That's what I mean about the context of the times. Ditto the notion that they could build a working rocket ship while the V-2 was still the hot kid on the block.
Feel free to wake up any time, Ogged, or FL, or -- Unf, Bob, are you alive? -- and approve my embargoed comment from last night, as you like. You have my permission. (I'm rarely likely to remember that 5 links will make my comment go into lock-up, since I still type with Banned HTM:L every damn time at Jim Henley's, and post embedded links, which fail, every damn time at deLong's and Dr. Frank's. Every time I remember after the software smacks me. After. Every time. Too many blogs (like, two or three, even), and apparently I have no available brain-file space for their individual quirks while I'm, you know, thinking about the words said instead. Naturally, their quirks should revolve around mine, not vice versa.
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 10:34 AM
" ... but I'd have to say that calling the guy who did Annie Hall, Love And Death, Hannah And Her Sisters, Manhattan, and a fair number of other works, a 'would-be talent' is a bit silly. But mileage varies."
Mr. Farber, did you mention "Manhattan"? Then you made my case.
Posted by Kyle | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 1:16 PM
Gary:
Color me silly, too. Vastly overrated popcorn for the over-educated, and not much else.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 1:18 PM
Kyle, I am intrigued. Manhattan is one of my favorite movies. Sure, the characters are selfish and narcissistic, but then again, so are the characters in MacBeth. I guess my question is: what the hell is wrong with Manhattan?
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 1:20 PM
I thought What's Up Tiger Lily? (the original version, before TCM went and fucked it up) was pretty doggone funny, but I've had lots of people tell me I'm wrong.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 1:24 PM
Vastly overrated popcorn for the over-educated, and not much else.
That comment in this forum is ironic or something.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 1:26 PM
sometimes I think Allen -- especially when writing for his own persona -- gets a little too precious with literary references. Often the references aren't spot-on, and you get the idea that he's trying too hard to sound sophisticated. That is the one problem with his own "Woody" shtick.
But he usually overcomes it, and is capable of creating some really haunting characters. His movies aren't really about the Woody schtick, and some of them don't suffer from it at all.
So aside from that complaint, what can you say against movies like Manhattan and Crimes & Misdemeanors?
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 1:26 PM
"Love and Death" is chock full of precious references, literary and otherwise, and is not at all haunting. But it's also pretty funny. One forgives precious when it comes with funny, doesn't one?
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 1:28 PM
I'm a big Woody Allen fan, also; I think Hannah and Her Sisters is a small masterpiece.
You know who thinks Woody Allen sucks, though? Woody Allen.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 1:28 PM
I'm convinced, on the basis of that interview, that Woody Allen is an Unfogged commenter.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 1:30 PM
Damn, I've been found out!
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 1:35 PM
I don't see how you can trash a guy who trashes himself. Maybe that's his strategy. You have to qualifiy his own self-deprecation a little, though: he thinks he sucks, but it's because he compares himself to Bergman. The implication is that all other American directors suck too.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 1:37 PM
The implication is that all other American directors suck too.
And...?
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 1:38 PM
I'm with you, slo. I likes him, and most American directors do suck.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 1:40 PM
not embarassment, but sometimes slightly sad when getting another look at the things i once thought the platonic ideal of viking cocksucker: reading every xanth book (and the utterly bizarre experience of reading piers anthony's horror sci fi porno book at 14), wearing out my blood sweat and tears tape, watching aliens after school every day for a month, and seeing phish more times than i can count on both hands.
then again, if i hadn't developed a crack-like addiction to choose your own adventure books in my youth, which led to my reading compuslion, i may never have had the option to leave west by-god virginia. maybe the intellectual masturbatory fodder i enjoy has evolved, but i guess i wouldn't have reached my current ever-so-much-less-embarassing tastes now ("Not A Chat Room!"s). i regrets nothings.
well, other than once loving w/ that same thing SB linked. i'm a little embarassed.
Posted by matty | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 1:51 PM
I could see having a reaction to Manhattan. I bet it would be a little creepy and pedophilic, if you were looking at it in a certain way. The relationship with a high school student doesn't look the same way it did when the film first came out. Maybe the problem, for some critics of Woody Allen is his lack of self-awareness, in this sense? It's the knowledge of how close--and uncritical--he is to his subject.
I don't really have that problem myself, but had moments of queasiness on seeing Manhattan again.
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 1:54 PM
I would be embarrassed if I'd fucked a Rush Limbaugh book, too.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 1:55 PM
In the 70s was it ok for a man in his mid-thirties to carry on a relationship with a high school student? Is she even a senior?
I thought that was the point, that it was creepy. The fact that she is remarkably intelligent, and acts like an adult makes it funny. But still a little creepy: a joke made at Woody's own expense, as are most of his jokes.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 1:57 PM
Part of what makes it work is that woody seems so inept. And then at some points, it just seems cruel, and not at all funny, as when woody breaks up with the Mariel Hemingway character, and she goes through this pain for the first time. And the scene at the end is partly triumphal, partly just sick. But it's intended, I think.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 2:01 PM
i'm actually daryn kagan.
do you ever wonder if the people responsible for creating all of these things ever feel embarassed about it? "wow, american beauty actually was shallow, trite, and insulting. here, take this trophy back." or, "hey, can we pretend i never wrote this, or had that haircut? or that author blurb?"
http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=47735
i wonder about these things.
Posted by matty | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 2:03 PM
It's not that it wasn't creepy. Just that at the time he would have seemed to have more distance from it? Not sure.
There's a difference between exploring themes because they're inherently interesting, and because they're your obsessions. I'm saying I could see that being a critical objection, rather than a moral one.
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 2:03 PM
for the record, i never ever once for one second liked that worldnet thing. that would indeed be mortifying.
Posted by matty | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 2:04 PM
"I listened to a lot of math metal"
I was getting an inadvertent degree in math and listening to metal back in Metallica's heyday, but that's a new term for me. Apparently The Tony Danza Tapdance Extravaganza is an example.
Posted by rilkefan | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 2:06 PM
I see: it comes out that woody actually has a thing for high school students -- or did for one in particular, who he raised, which is gross -- so you see those scenes in a new light. That's fair, to a certain extent. But I think you ought not dismiss a work on the basis of the personal faults of the author. The work should stand on its own. All writers may as well be horrible people -- many of them probably are -- but it shouldn't affect whether you like what they've written.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 2:09 PM
what if it came out that Nabokov was actually a pedophile. Would it chage the way you read Lolita? On the one hand, you probably couldn't help thinking about it, but on the other hand, you shouldn't.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 2:11 PM
You can see that Nabokov had tendancies from his autobiography. His ideal women was under 16. He was under sixteen at the time so he had an excuse, but he was lucky there was no Internet in the 50s.
Posted by Joe O | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 2:16 PM
I just read a terrific article on Lolita by Christopher Hitchens, of all the infuriating people. In The Atlantic Monthly, I think.
I've never listened to a single one of those bands listed in Wikipedia. But I'll say no more on that subject, for I've said too much already.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 2:19 PM
Perhaps. But it tends to throw judgment and impulses and into question. I mean, no friend of mine will go see a Christian Bale movie with me, no matter how good it's supposed to be, for similar reasons.
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 2:21 PM
Hitchens has written a couple things that make sense recently. Maybe he's kicked the booze. He did write a good book about Kissinger some time ago. Hard to forgive him for the past four or so years though.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 2:23 PM
Christian Bale is a pedophile?
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 2:23 PM
I suppose if Christian Bale had been cast in brokeback mountain as the third cowboy, we wouldn't here from you for a few weeks, a.c.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 2:24 PM
"Christian Bale is a pedophile?"
It stands to reason. But the way I heard it was, he murders grandparents and steals their medications.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 2:26 PM
What did Christian Bale do? (I confess, I am celebrity-impaired.)
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 2:27 PM
I'm not sure Lolita is actually about pedophilia (or nymphetophilia) in the same way that Manhattan is.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 2:29 PM
I can't believe I wrote here for hear.
exile.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 2:30 PM
Wait, but before you ban yourself, explain about Bale. Please? I don't want to have to google for celebrity gossip. I want to get it unfiltered.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 2:31 PM
Christian Bale has done nothing. I hope he leaves this thread without a stain on his character. I meant people don't trust my artistic judgment, where he's involved.
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 2:45 PM
I want to get it unfiltered.
But text is himself a filter, a filter of awesome dimension and granularity.
As to Christian Bale -- if I am remembering my news stories properly, he was rather notorious about 2 years ago for a string of murders perpetrated through South Dakota and Nebraska.
Posted by Jeremy Osner | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 2:45 PM
I read that Hitchens piece on Lolita, I thought it was pretty good. Say what you will, but the man is a talented writer. Especially on non-Iraq War topics.
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 2:49 PM
text is, by definition, the source. There is nothing outside....
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 2:51 PM
My barber, whom I trust implicitly and I'm sure would never willfully mislead me, told me the other day that Christian Bale breaks into orphanages and breaks the pinkies of the smallest children. Mind, this is just a rumor I heard while getting my hair cut, and may not be true, but it would surprise me if it weren't.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 2:51 PM
Is your barber a right-winger?
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 2:52 PM
The Dillinger Escape Plan and Behold…the Arctopus! are pretty good.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 2:53 PM
Math metal might fit The Locust. A friend once referred to them as sci-fi terrorcore.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 2:57 PM
My roommate last year was a big fan of The Locust. This was the same person who could listen to My Bloody Valentine for hours on end, and whose role in a noise band was to scream, un-mic'd, lines from Dante's Inferno, in the original latin, at the top of his lungs. Interesting fellow.
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 3:01 PM
I am very sorry I missed all the Heinlein discussion. As a youth and young adult I read everything Heinlein put out, and I'm suprised no one else listed "Starship Troopers" as their embarrassing book.
I really, really got into that book. Maybe that is why I am harsh on libertarians - because I used to be one, sort of. A little bit fascist, too.
Most of Heinlein's juvies were "Boy Scouts in Space," big on exploration and self sufficiency. Then he had some good adult novels, and then, wow, he really went off the deep end.
Piers Anthony I also loved, and I forgive him for selling every little scrap he ever wrote, regardless of quality. As John says, he had bills to pay.
My most embarassing read was a little book called "Mits Wits and Logic." "Mits" = Man in the Street and "Wits" = Woman in the Street.
That book caused my normally pompous 8th grade self to become insufferable. For a year I considered logic to be king and emotions to be stupid. God what a smug horse's ass I was.
Posted by Tripp | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 3:02 PM
Does the Locust just scream or scream in imitation of a siren?
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 3:03 PM
lines from Dante's Inferno, in the original latin
That must have been quite a challenge.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 3:04 PM
"Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" came later, but I'm not embarrassed about getting into that book.
Posted by Tripp | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 3:05 PM
Italian. Fuck. Whatever.
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 3:06 PM
I guess for me it's P. J. O'Rourke's output of the 1980s.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 3:06 PM
And now I need to go, but I can't leave without putting in "Jonathan Livingston Seagull."
Wow was that some fluffy pretentiousness.
Posted by Tripp | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 3:07 PM
That must have been quite a challenge.
You know the "ubi flumen est?" joke, right?
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 3:07 PM
Is that joke told by Dante, in Italian?
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 3:18 PM
Elderly Latin teacher finally saves up enough to visit Rome. Doesn't know Italian but figures she can scrape by on derivatives and cognates. Trying to find the Tiber, asks the first civis Romanus she sees, "ubi flumen est?" To which he replies, in English, "My, madam, it has been a while since your last visit."
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 3:20 PM
"Vastly overrated popcorn for the over-educated, and not much else."
And it takes "no talent" to do that. Okay. As I said, tastes vary. Presumably there's far more talent involved in making such claims of no talent. (Explaining what one likes is great; explaining why other people shouldn't like what they like is a different sort of thing.)
"I'm suprised no one else listed "Starship Troopers" as their embarrassing book."
I'd call liking the alleged movie embarrassing. The book tends to frequently misunderstood (nor, you know, did Heinlein actually favor only allowing vetarans to vote; it's part of that whole "speculative fiction" thing). But I got bored with ST debates almost, though not really quite, the time it was still "Starship Soldiers." (It was interesting the first 800 debates or so, back in the Sixties.) (Taking ST too seriously is as silly an error as taking anything too seriously is, of course.) (And if anyone does want to debate the alleged "fascism" of Starship Troopers, that's fine, too; I'm not trying to claim anyone else has gone through my experiences with Heinlein and should feel at all similarly.)
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 3:34 PM
Gary, I see no need to back away from my comment here.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 3:41 PM
"Unf, Bob, are you alive? -- and approve my embargoed comment "
I approve. Even "Continued on Next Rock" should carry enough of the post-modern amalgam that is Lafferty to impress.
Not sure I am alive. Insomnia alternating with caffeine highs;weird hallucinations about gov't surveilance;the anti-spyware thingy I installed last night that erases my cookies and passwords as fast as I enter them;people dissing Manhattan:
This can't be real.
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 4:12 PM
181: wow, american beauty actually was shallow, trite, and insulting. here, take this trophy back
Fametracker used to perform this service so the artists didn't have to.
Ah, sweet, sweet Fametracker....
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 4:17 PM
Speaking of humiliation, I'm not going back through the whole thread, but has anyone yet remarked that the post title is misspelled?
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 4:26 PM
"Starship Troopers"
I think this may be the title I was misremembering as Space Cadets--was there a scene in it about how to eat pie?
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 4:30 PM
Weiner, I have no idea what you're talking about.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 4:35 PM
There is nothing embarassing about Prydain. You shouldn't even be thinking about it in connection to this topic.
Posted by Timothy Burke | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 5:32 PM
Total agreement.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 5:38 PM
You all have read too much. Clearly you didn't spend much of your free time in your late teens watching just about every college basketball game broadcast on ESPN and other channels.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 5:41 PM
Yeah, but that's not embarrassing.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 5:42 PM
I'm with you, eb. And I disagree with slol that there's not room for embarrasment there. I mean, if you knew Luc Longley's stats while he was still at New Mexico, that's pretty embarrassing (not that I did, but I knew people who did).
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 5:47 PM
I'm certainly embarrassed: so much time lost. Although I'll admit that I saw a lot of fun games (but even more mediocre ones).
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 5:59 PM
It could be a girl thing, but I guess that's my problem with watching sports - when you finish a book or a movie or other form of entertainment, there's at least a mild sense of accomplishment because you completed something. When watching sports, it's just lost time. There will be another game next week. What's the point?
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 6:07 PM
Well, what attracted me to sports as a spectator - and still attracts me, though now I usually try to be doing something else at the same time if I'm watching a game, like skimming the news, etc. - was the fact that they're unscripted and actually happening, as opposed to movies and fiction.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 6:25 PM
it's just lost time. There will be another game next week.
How is this any different from a movie?
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 7:07 PM
"Gary, I see no need to back away from my comment here."
Well, I'm not seriously arguing, as I said, that people shouldn't like what they like. But I think it unlikely you care as to whether an interpretation of a movie utterly reverses the morals and points of a book, or at least that specific book, to hold that opinion. Also, I suspect you care a fig about whether portrayls of a military, any military, make even the remotest amount of sense. Do let me know if I'm overly-presuming or wrong. As for some clues as what's unbearably dumb about the movie, as I've done a million times, I link to Jim MacDonald's review, which everyone should read, even if you've never heard of "Starship Troopers" and couldn't give a flying frig about Heinlein.
Basically, the movie has little to do with the book, shafts the points of the book (however worthless or worthwhile that they are), and is blatantly moronic. But, hey, I like lots of moronic things, too, so there's nothing wrong with that. I'm sure there are people who like The Scarlet Letter with a happy ending, or... oh, gee, look what Google turns up on the front page for a google of "worst movie adaption" +ever.
If they wanted to call it a comedy interpretation of the book, that would have been different. "National Lampoon's Starship Troopers" could be great. Doing it while claiming it was a serious representation of the "fascist nature" of the book -- which Verhoven did in countless interviews, is insulting anyone who actually had a clue about the book. What would one make of an adaption of Moby Dick in which Ahab got bored with his whale hunting, and went off to be a taxidermist? I'm sure there would be people who would like it, and see no reason not to. It wouldn't have much to do with the book, though, would it?
(On rare occasion, changes in movie adaptions help; The Player is an excellent novel, but the changes made for the movie made the story even better; hard to see how that applies to Verhoeven's piece of work, unless one starts from the position that the book is fascist trash that only fascists could like.
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 7:08 PM
"Not sure I am alive."
I was actually trying to invoke the blog-owners there, Bob McManus. Remember that theoretically they include guys who go by "Unf" and "Bob."
But sympathies anyway, of course.
"I think this may be the title I was misremembering as Space Cadets--was there a scene in it about how to eat pie?"
Trivial note: Heinlein's second juvenile was "Space Cadet," not plural; it was an improvement on his first, but still not up to the par he'd strike, although it also served as the basis for the tv show Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. It reads about 100,000 percent more cliche now than it did then, because it established the cliches.
I'm vaguely remembering a pie scene in Space Cadet, in which there's a moral lesson about "pie with a fork," which I vaguely recall had something to do with being comfortable with other people's cultures and not intolerant, but my memory is vague; I don't presently have copies of any Heinlein, and it's been a good number of years since I've read either. I see that a real cadet found valuable lessons in the book still, though. As I think, more comes back to me. I vaguely recall that a Space Cadet is eating pie without a fork (and making a mess), and is ordered not to; he questions the order, and it is explained to him that he has to learn how to cope with cultures and practices other than those he grew up with to be a proper officer. Something to that effect, anyway.
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 7:22 PM
#232: Art has meaning; a football game does not.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 7:28 PM
"Clearly you didn't spend much of your free time in your late teens watching just about every college basketball game broadcast on ESPN and other channels."
Not a minute. In my life. Or much other time on any sports, other than politics (there was that brief summer of chess, but having my camp bunkmate turn out to be a repeating guest on Shelby Lyman kinda taught me I had little serious future there; anyone remember Shelby Lyman?). I'm a classic dweeb geek. (Of a certain sort; not the bow-tie wearing, stuttering, sort. The sort who was actually incredibly popular with smart older women when he was a teen and in his twenties.)
But you knew that. (Incidentally, I haven't blogged too much while you were traveling, Ogged, but there were a few posts I thought you might enjoy, if you ever have time to ketchup.)
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 7:31 PM
"When watching sports, it's just lost time. There will be another game next week. What's the point?"
I'd be in utter agreement, were it not for the minor fact that I play a lot of computer games.
And I don't seriously deprecate appreciating the many physical aspects of many sports; I did when I was an adolescent, and for quite some time later, but haven't for a couple of decades now, at least. I suspect there was a teeny-tad of "growing up" involved, but it's only a theory.
So I'm fine with other people enjoying sports. I'm just not interested in doing so myself, still. We're all allowed our unique, or not so unique, pleasures.
I'll wait for someone to compare the point of sports to the point of having sex for other than reproduction. At least, it seems to work that way for some, perhaps.
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 7:37 PM
235 - Exactly.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 7:38 PM
#235: Some movies have meaning, as do some football games. Sitting through either is no accomplishment, it's just passive entertainment.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 7:40 PM
>"When watching sports, it's just lost time.
I was looking for that.
Posted by Proust | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 7:42 PM
"I'll wait for someone to compare the point of sports to the point of having sex for other than reproduction. At least, it seems to work that way for some, perhaps."
This can be taken in so many different directions, I declare it a poem, and a good one. Let us pause and appreciate.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 7:43 PM
Looking back at that thread you linked to, FL, it seems that you regard ST as a campy hoot of a bad film, enjoyable for the nasty insects and Denise Richards' tits. Well, I have nothing against that, or Denise Richards' endowment, but imagine if you took the book seriously as an important, much debated, book in its field, what you might think?
I suppose Pride and Prejudice with giant killer insects, brain bugs, and hooters, would also be a, um, hoot, but not so much if you were looking forward to the only serious movie adaption of it ever made.
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 7:44 PM
237 - I see the point of playing sports, just not watching them. When you play a sport, there's an element of meaning or growth. Similarly, I can appreciate getting together with friends to watch a sporting event - with that, the takeaway can come from the shared experience. What I don't understand is what someone would get out of sitting down and watching a baseball game by themselves.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 7:47 PM
i think sports have some meaning. even apart from the whole "let's form tribes and mine beats up yours in hobbesian proxy", i think athletics is (are? ack) itself an amazing and occasionally inspiring thing. allen iverson's driving ability and lynne swann's acrobatice catches may not represent a deeper meaning in the way a ballet might, but they can be incredible expressions of what the human body and drive is capable. they provide structure for improvisation, and sometimes blazing talent is impressive itself, even when not in service of deeper meaning (also the only explanation for Yngwie Malmstein)
and when you grow up in rural wv, for example, you find yourself with some time on your hands after you've spent your allowance on books, read them all, and its too late to walk over the hills to see friends.
and later, they're an excuse to get drunk.
sports!
Posted by matty | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 7:48 PM
"How is this any different from a movie?"
Movies tell a different type of story, differently. I would never claim that a sports event doesn't have a narrative, but they are different kinds of narrative. And, yes, scripted and unscripted is one of the those differences. Nothing wrong with either of them. Nothing inherently wrong with "reality tv"; we used to call it "a documentary." (Back when they were unscripted.)
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 7:48 PM
Becks, you realize half the male commenters are sitting alone, watching Monday Night Football right now.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 7:49 PM
you realize half the male commenters are sitting alone, watching Monday Night Football right now.
My admission started this conversation, but even I have limits. Baltimore and Green Bay are terrible.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 7:52 PM
Screw you, eb.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 7:53 PM
Actually, I'm sitting here with a friend watching it. And I'll just say that this is primarily a gender-driven difference and we still respect you despite your charming difficulties in understanding.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 7:54 PM
246 - Yes, but they're commenting on Unfogged, which gives it meaning by making it social. Demented and sad, but social.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 7:54 PM
Thanks, ogged, but years of watching meaningless monday night games between teams that weren't expected to be so bad have really turned me away. That said, if my sister and her husband hadn't taken over the tv, I'd probably be watching.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 7:58 PM
It's all about the fantasy football these days, anyhow. It's gambling, people. Does the appeal really need explaining?
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 8:01 PM
Here's something we can talk about: Michael Vick: sure, he can be exciting, but I really don't understand the hype around someone who's basically a mediocre quarterback. He's not nearly as good as Randall Cunningham, for example, but there weren't nearly so many stories about defenses quaking when Cunningham was coming to town.