And what is it with Colombians?
Nothing that isn't up with the Venezuelans and more so the Ecuadorians.
2. I assume this chart can be explained by varying ratios of people with positive penis length to people with zero penis length.
If it could, India and China would be Schlongsville and Schlongguo, respectively, but they're not. I have to assume it's just crappy data.
If heebie's observation #2 is supposed to mean that women were averaged in, heebie must have only encountered exceedingly well-endowed men.
Was this map created to assist women when creating travel plans?
As it's rather warm today, I'm cooling myself off with my enormous schlong.
I'm basking in the shade of Eggplant's enormous schlong.
Could that map help explain the difference in foreign policy between the US and Canada? France would then have to be an outlier.
But how did they take the data? Is it hand-stretched?
I'm wondering if the French-Canadian population pulled up the Canadian average? What is the relative penis size between Quebec and, say, Alberta?
You tuck one end of a tape measure in your anus...
... then you walk round that corner and wait for me to give the signal.
The hypothesized correlation between height and penis length sure as hell doesn't explain those mesoamericans. Seems like they should have balance problems.
Central America is one of the few areas that looks credible to me.
I had an Indian boyfriend and he would not have been coloured in red IYKWIMAITYD. Although he was born and bred here, so perhaps all that fresh North London air was good for him.
I suspect the following from Wikipedia might explain some of the variations, Results vary, with studies that rely on self-measurement reporting a significantly higher average than those with staff measuring. The map application is not working completely for me, but it seems there is an underlying spreadsheet which has sources noted for some of the countries. I am blocked here at work, but it looks like the data set might have come from http://www.everyoneweb.com/worldpenissize/ . I've already clicked on more than is probably wise.
They should have a complementary girth map. Would be interesting if the distributions were not the same.
... than those with staff measuring.
Some fruit just hangs too low...
17.last: And the cooling hypothesis might lead you to think that they would not be (sort of).
I had an Indian boyfriend and he would not have been coloured in red IYKWIMAITYD.
Ah, so he was a dot.
18: Shit, I forgot the "staff measuring staff" joke. Probably because I didn't have one.
We need to have these men dipping their schlongs in plaster casts so that we can determine if volume is constant across the world. What does your schlong displace?
17: Americans may not have the longest penises, but we make it up in volume.
The United States result makes no sense unless you assume that there is something about the USA that actively shrinks the penis size of its various immigrant groups. I blame high fructose corn syrup and Ronald Reagan, but I say that about everything.
22:
Wasnt there a candidate to become the Chicago mayor who made did paster casts of penises?
Somebody please buy the Andro-Penis (is there a Gyno-Penis?) and report results. Do it for science.
Is there an Android app for the Andro-Penis?
What does your schlong displace?
Judgment.
Which country has the biggest fucksaws?
Give me my schlong and a place to stand, and I will change these statistics.
24: Could be something to do with carbohydrates, with rice, corn-syrup and potato-eating regions doing poorly, wheat-dominated places doing better, and sorghum and quinoa-eating places doing very well.
Ned doesn't have a place to stand?
26: Are you thinking of Nancy Godfrey* who had a collection of casts of erect penises and made one on film in W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism? (Worth a look: Reichian weirdness, other off-the-wall sexual stuff, Tuli Kupferberg being Tuli Kupferberg). According to Wikipedia, This scene was a point of contention for the censors: on UK prints Buckley's penis is covered with psychedelic colors added in editing.
*Once again I am frustratingly limited in my ability to research this at the present.
35, 36: Perhaps it's an either/or question for Ned.
38: Oh, it appears that's actually German.
34: That apparatus is actually at home in Germany.
38: A machine for digging coal out of an open cast mine.
26, 37: And I do seem to recall that she was from Illinois. From "The A-Z of Spinal Tap"*:
Legendary rock chick Nancy Godfrey was famed for her collection of plastercasts of rock stars' dicks. Apparently Jimi Hendrix is the star exhibit. In a sequence featured in the original script for This Is Spinal Tap, Derek and Viv are seen in their Memphis hotel room with their bums immersed in plaster as a favour to two groupies who collect casts of rock stars' bottoms. The groupies strip the plaster off Derek and Viv - but too soon. The casts are shapeless messes.*Had never seen that article before--good stuff.
It had to be German. Really.
Also, my stereotyped view of Canadians leads me to believe that they were diligently honest in their self reported schlong figures. I can report that the male strip clubs in Montreal support this notion, albeit in increasingly ridiculous ways.
That German mining Leviathan reminds me of a copper mine facility that sprang from the horizon without warning in the middle of the Western Australian outback, prompting a fascinating driver-passenger discussion of how much it had cost to build and how much it had subsequently been sold for. It looked rather like a post-apocalyptic insta-fab city set down in the wasteland, especially with the sun behind it.
As for the OP, this seems as proper a place as any to link to io9's rare interview with the philosophy professor who wrote those Gor books that everyone online loves to repudiate in exacting, sensuous detail, like the Family Research Council counting naughty words and almost-breasts in PG-13 movies. He seems unsympathetic, purposely or not, but I'm not sure that unsympathetic and independent are the synonyms that he assumes.
Never read the Gor books, but your link reminded me of this, which cracked me up regardless.
This has to be the subtlest of ways to insult Colonel Khadaffi! He is not only a dick but a dwarf at it.
We've been digging into some genealogical stuff recently and last night we were dealing with a confusing bit where one branch of the family (who over multiple generations used a total of about eight total given names in different orders) had several marriages to the Dick family. So my daughter, wife and I traded a lot of, "Is she the Amanda that married the Dick?" and "That makes sense, they lived right down the road from the Dick farm." Fortunately our professionalism saw us through.
It would seem wrong if Unfogged didn't indulge in meaningless and uninformed speculation about this map.
Haven't we been doing that for years?
Speaking of fantasy, here's Breitbart's BigHollywood on The Bankrupt nihilism of our fallen fantasists Some of the commenters there argue, apparently without irony, that modern 'gritty' fantasy doesn't uphold the values the way old stuff like the Gor series did.
52: I got as far as the description of those "two titanic literary talents, the complete equal of each other, two flat-out geniuses" - JRR Tolkien, who was professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford for twenty years and redefined the study of Old English myth and legend, and Robert E Howard, who wrote "Conan the Barbarian". Then I had to stop for a bit.
I defer to no one in the strength of my belief that Tolkien was the most overrated writer in English of the c20, but even I have to accept that that is ridiculous.
In the name of God, Amen. We, whose names are underwritten, the Loyal Subjects of our dread Sovereign Lord, King James, by the Grace of God, of England, France and Ireland, King, Defender of the Faith, e&. Having undertaken for the Glory of God, and Advancement of the Christian Faith, and the Honour of our King, Country and our small penises, a voyage to plant the first colony in the northern parts of Virginia; do by these presents, solemnly and mutually in the Presence of God and one of another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil Body Politick, for our better Ordering and Preservation, and Furtherance of the Ends aforesaid, free from the ridicule of those with large penises; And by Virtue hereof to enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal Laws, Ordinances, Acts, Constitutions and Offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the General good of the Colony, with no favor to those with large penises; unto which we promise all due submission and obedience. In Witness whereof we have hereunto subscribed our names at Cape Cod the eleventh of November, in the Reign of our Sovereign Lord, King James of England, France and Ireland, the eighteenth, and of Scotland the fifty-fourth. Anno Domini, 1620.
54: "Bilbo, what is best in life?"
I don't get 55. If you defer to no one in that belief, why "even I"?
57: would you rather watch a film in which Ian Holm played Conan the Barbarian, or a film in which Arnold Schwarzenegger played Bilbo Baggins? The answer, I submit, is obvious. QED.
I defer to no one in the strength of my belief that Tolkien was the most overrated writer in English of the c20
Ooh, contest time!
I'd say DH Lawrence. Or Pearl Buck (Nobel Prize for Literature 1938, and where is she now?)
Bilbo probably believed that what is best in life is hanging out with elves, smoking, reading, and writing.
It sounds pretty reasonable to me.
Or Pearl Buck (Nobel Prize for Literature 1938, and where is she now?)
But her decline set in long before now, didn't it? Surely we should take into account not only the height the overrating reached but also the duration of the overrating.
64: so not the maximum overrating, but the total area under the curve? Won't that give an unfair (dis)advantage to people like Shaw, who have been slightly overrated for the whole of the 20th century, rather than Salman Rushdie, who was highly overrated but only for the last quarter of it?
60 - Some people still read The Good Earth, but does anyone read Harry Martinson? He won a Nobel Prize the year he served on the awarding committee.
I've read some letters from R. E. Howard to Lovecraft talking about the architecture of small-town Texas and Oklahoma; once the fandom wore off, Howard seems to have treated Lovecraft mostly like a beloved crazy uncle.
62: also cooking, eating and drinking.
Basically pretty much the same as Tolkien believed (for elves read intelligent learned people).
"Bilbo, what is best in life?"
Is Bilbo ok with rolling conservatives off of a pier?
What about Norman Mailer? High peak, long duration, and we can quantify his overration now that nobody likes him anymore.
Michael Swanwick's subversive 1993 novel The Iron Dragon's Daughter sported a title that lured in many young girls thinking they were getting a standard Young Adult fantasy. According to Publisher's Weekly (and confirmed by my torturous slog through it a few years ago), it was actually a "nihilistic tale features a human changeling who tries to make her way in a cutthroat society that mirrors contemporary life. . . a powerful, yet dark and hopeless fantasy that should forever shatter charming illusions of Faerie and its folk." Scenes of teenybopper elf sex and coke-snorting pile one atop the other until the book becomes to fantasy literature what the films of Larry Clark (Kids, Bully) are to cinema.
Also, as you can tell from Breitbart's grinning crony's review, The Iron Dragon's Daughter is an absolutely terrific book which I highly recommend.
Can anyone dig up that article in, I believe, the New Yorker, examining bestsellers of past decades (maybe the 40's) and how shit they consistently were?
65: Total area under the curve would be one way of doing it, but if you're concerned about low-grade but persistent overratings I'm sure different techniques could be thought up—transformations of the initial curve in various ways.
But it doesn't seem right to take into account the highest point alone.
69.--The Hitler book wasn't bad. Of course it was the first volume of a projected trilogy and he died before finishing it, and I promised myself I'd never read unfinished serials again--and it has weird Hitler-producing sex scenes--but other than that, it was interesting.
"It is so difficult, when one first glances into The Robe, to imagine that anyone with even the faintest trace of literary taste could ever get more than two pages of it for pleasure that that one is astounded and terrified at the thought that seven million Americans have found something in it to hold their attention."
High peak, long duration
Remarkably similar to your mother's assessment of me, only I remain well liked.
Also, "It differs from Bulwer-Lytton only in being written worse."
Ah, so The Robe is like The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, for Christians.
77: If only you'd spent the last three years masturbating to his Hitler sex scenes instead of to him himself.
Total area under the curve would be one way of doing it, but if you're concerned about low-grade but persistent overratings I'm sure different techniques could be thought up--transformations of the initial curve in various ways.
But it doesn't seem right to take into account the highest point alone.
Remarkably similar to your mother's assessment of me.
of past decades (maybe the 40's) and how shit they consistently wereare
Fixed.
Oops. Shoulda been:
bestsellers of past decades (maybe the 40's) and how shit they consistently wereare
Fixed.
Sinclair Lewis, Th Mann, Joyce. Not Anatole France, I like him.
Tolkien was popular but not taken seriously until recently, right? So reputation should be not just a single number, but at least a tuple. Google's ngram viewer generates actual curves, with pre 1900 data for estimating false positives.
Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children and Shame are both pretty good, IMO.
As in all "overrated" conversations, there's a question about "overrated by whom.". Tolkein isn't taken very seriously as a literary author (I think, and if he is he shouldn't be) even though he's obviously incredibly influential. Going by "overrated in the canon" my own view is that Scott Fitzgerald is by far the most overrated 20th Century American author, even though I like some of his books a lot.
"Underrated" is in many ways more fun. I say: Larry McMurtry.
I'm not needlessly drinking the haterade here. I just think that maxim about writing for people who move their lips when they read is largely true, unless you can manage to write that book that everyone buys to prove they're literary and cultured but that no one actually enjoys. My bookshelves are littered with those.
I mean, the good ones are hard enough to find that I have to periodically ask the Mineshaft.
Most overrated ever would have to be Ayn Rand.
That Tolkien-Howard thing was taken up with an embarrassing vengeance by the Tolkien nerds, the even worse Howard nerds* and of course the everything-written-today-is-better-than-Tolkien-because-racism-blah-blah-blah nerds.
As for the Nobel, (i) I find it hard to believe that Borges did not get it and (ii) I recall reading about an attempt to nominate Heidegger after S&Z, which I think would have been pretty funny.
* The poor man deserves a better fancy than a bunch of neckbeards protesting with excessive vigor the occasional suggestion of an Oedipal complex or homoerotic interest.
good ones are hard enough to find
Here's a hard one that was not good to find:
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=round+tits%2Cround+ass&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=5&smoothing=3
I expected the other result.
"Underrated" is in many ways more fun. I say: Larry McMurtry.
Will the blog let me type a little heart emoticon, I wonder? Becase The Last Picture Show) [deleted several times: me blithering in superlatives.]
(and the answer is no the blog will not)
Borges did not get the prize because he leaned right in Argentine politics.
By the way, that NYer bestseller article was by Anthony Lane. It's probably in his collection Nobody's Perfect, but I remember that Samuel Shellabarger's Captain from Castile was on it. I found that book in the university stacks -- entertaining trash comparable to my grandfather's old Sax Rohmers and WWI flying ace novels.
Most underrated would likely be somebody whose name none of us have heard.
(ii) I recall reading about an attempt to nominate Heidegger after S&Z, which I think would have been pretty funny.
For what? Literature? Chemistry?
Whoops I < 3 Lion Feuchtwanger, huh is there a way to do that without an embedded space?
93: That seems a little unfair. Did anyone on the Argentine right take inspiration from Borges?
Most underrated would likely be somebody whose name none of us have heard.
Who is a man who has never been in my kitchen?
88 gets it exactly right. There really is no contest. The whole discussion can be about the second most overrated, I guess.
104: I'd have a much higher opinion of Argentinian reactionaries if they'd had the balls to forcibly implement a Lottery of Babylon.
107: Has anyone ever praised her prose style, though? Even the most enthusiastic wannabe serial killers Star Trek LARPers Second Life prosthesis dealers libertarians don't seem to venerate her for aesthetic reasons.
Most underrated would likely be somebody whose name none of us have heard.
John Edward Williams combines an incredibly boring name with one incredibly depressing novel with a boring name that gets championed once a decade. He won a National Book Award for a different book though.
85:Th Mann, Joyce
Pagan.
Mann remains perhaps the most underrated 20c writer, admired from a distance rather than apprehended. His ironies and pessimism are unfashionable. But M & J both predict our devolution, and so their own ever increasing obscurity and opacity. There is something about the modern and post-modern that requires an denial of and escape from the past (Leverkuhn's contract/sin, HCE's transgression in the park) and thereby disables history as a foundation for progress.
Just kidding. Fukuyama, fuck ya! Where's my comic book?
109: "This last is something that needs emphasizing, because Rand's many detractors so often dismiss her as a writer of no redeeming virtue whatsoever. This is typical of the emphatic energy that people put into their denunciations of her--and indicative of the fact that many of these detractors are motivated by something other than a reasonable appraisal of the facts. (Of course, precisely the same could be said in reverse of her obsessive acolytes.) But the fact is that Ayn Rand was a great writer of fiction, a brilliant prose stylist, and a deeply insightful creator of characters. She just wrote it all in the wrong century."
(Pssst. Egypt, the land of cults and plenty = America)
112: Christ. The "perfect geste"?
"And yes, of course her writing has its quirks.... Her sex scenes are bizarre, and sometimes even questionable on her own philosophical terms.... But in her abilities to express theme in plot, diagnose characters' philosophical roots, caricature the ludicrous principles of statists, compose the perfect geste, even to name characters, she was ingenious. Yet these are usually ignored by critics."
109: Well, for one thing, I don't think "most overrated writer" is synonymous with "most overrated prose stylist". But some people seem to like her writing. I even had a fairly recent conversation with a liberal who said "I hate her ideas, but you have to admit she wrote good stories with believable characters!" And then I just kind of made incoherent sounds for a few minutes in response.
I'll say Rand had something, and I found her books entertaining. I'm not quite sure how to describe it -- it's the same thing that lots of godawful mid-century SF has -- but the over-the-top goofiness of it all made for entertaining beach reading. Come to think, sort of the same appeal the Lee Child novels have.
Overrated? Nabokov is horribly served by his fans, as if Vlad gave a flying fuck about the patriarchy.
John Edward Williams combines an incredibly boring name with one incredibly depressing novel with a boring name that gets championed once a decade.
Stoner? Stoner is really good.
116: I once got a lecture on the subject of "missing the point" for reading one of John Keegan's books (maps, etc.) at the beach.
117: There is a very loud amusement park right in front of bob's present lodgings.
I tend to think of Hemingway as ranking pretty high among overrated writers, but I realize it's idiosyncratic and lots of people with perfectly good taste disagree with me.
I, too, rectangle Dawn Powell.
The ratio of literary discussion to cock jokes is too big.
119: From whom? I'd like to imagine a be-suited Keegan himself, turning up from behind your beach umbrella McLuhan-in-Annie-Hall-style.
121: Maybe it's an era question. The Nick Adams stories, For Whom the Bell Tolls and other relatively early stuff are all really good, but later stuff like Across the River and Into the Trees is pretty crappy.
Along whatever axis it is that Borges is the best at, I think Calvino is overrated and Lem is underrated.
You know who's really overrated along that axis? The guy who wrote Einstein's Dreams. Or that book is, anyway. I can't really assess his work in theoretical physics.
126: The translations I've read of Danilo Kis make him seem overrated, but I'm not sure he has been rated sufficiently in the English-reading world to be ranked.
Milan Kundera is overrated, but, oddly, most of the readers doing the overrating seem to be women, which I would not have expected.
I'm with you on Hemmingway. I like some of Calvino's stuff quite a bit (Invisible Cities, and If on a winter's night a traveller...), but he has other stuff I just haven't liked at all. At any rate, I think the axis that Calvino is good on is not really the axis that Borges is the best at. So maybe it's not that he's being overrated on that axis, but rather that he brings other things to the table.
Who's the most rated writer of the 20th century?
Apropos of filthy things, I was watching Goodfellas (Martin Scorcese, 1990) the other night, and was reminded that the famous Copacabana steadycam shot is done to the strains of The Crystals "And Then He Kissed Me". Which song is ostensibly of the most saccharin sort of sentimental pop ballad. And yet, it contains the lines "He kissed me in a way that I'd never been kissed before/ He kissed me in a way that I want to be kissed for evermore", which immediately calls to mind the Gestapo interrogator's question "Ja, Fraulein Brooks, und chust how vas it zat he did kiss you?"
Of course, speaking of Nazis and their Nazi accents, it has to be said that this song was released in an era when it was considered completely unobjectionable, indeed, unworthy of any comment at all, to release a film, which was even marketed to children and families, in which one character refers to another as a "cunt-face"! So, you know, the past is a different country.
124: A lady.
Maybe you misunderstood and she meant you were missing the pointe. She was inviting you on a walk-on-the-beach date, you fool!
125 gets it exactly right in re Hemmingway; the problem is exacerbated by the fact that the later, not very good Hemmingway is more widely exposed. E.g., "The Old Man and the Sea," which is pretty bad, is read all the time in American high schools.
I remember being shocked when a friend -- at Steinford, no less -- was reading Ayn Rand as part of some kind of Freshman literature seminar, I believe not for purposes of irony or in order to denounce her politics, but apparently because she was worthy of treatment as a serious writer. WTF?
I need to read Dawn Powell.
126, 130: I'd like to read the Borges/Calvino/Lem eigenauthors.
It is difficult to separate Rand's failings as a novelist from her failings as a political theorist because they both have the same root: an impoverished understanding of human nature.
Her characters are unbelievable because they fall into two categories: the strong, good, and decisive and the weak, evil, and indecisive. And her crappy political ideology stems from the same binary view of human nature.
This literature discussion reminds me why I try to avoid knowing what books are on the New York Times' Best Sellers Lists. Oh, the stupid.
127: "[I]mpoverished" suggests that she was not at fault in that respect, which I daresay does her too much justice. Perhaps "a limited appreciation of"?
"I hate her ideas, but you have to admit she wrote good stories with believable characters!"
When people say this, I hear "I was turned on by the rape scene, but I don't actually believe in raping people."
In case it hasn't yet been said, I kind of love that the penis length thread is now about literature.
141: J.R.R. Tolkien wrote long where it counts, ladies.
"It's still basically about penis length", he said, looking up from Infinite Jest.
"He means that in passing judgment on various authors, the commenters are attempting to show their discrimination and, basically, superiority as compared to hoi polloi, so the metaphor of a 'dick-size thread' is still applicable", Tom said, enlarging on the topic.
[L]ooking up from Infinite Jest.
Talk about a supposedly fun thing I'll never do again, right? Right?
Mishima was robbed of a Nobel, and I think we are only now understanding his entire life and work as a snarling piece of performance art. The coup d'etat and seppuku were hilarious, better than Mailer's fake priapism. (Clue:if you are laughing at a genius, he is laughing with you.) Schrader...hey why can't we give lit Nobels to moviemakers? Poetry, drama, prose but not film?
Are most of the lit winners really more important or worthy than Bresson, Antonioni, Kurosawa?
PS:Re:Taylor. Watched another Japanese movie last night, and decided that however good she was, Kyo Michiko got a string of challenging varied parts in the 50s/early 60s that Taylor would have killed for. Conclusions? Taylor was wasted, America sucks, Japan is complicated.
133 is excellent.
Is Henry Roth underrated? The cognoscenti acknowledge the greatness of Call it Sleep, yet it is not as widely read as many other equally great novels. Opinions differ on the later works (which I haven't read). Perhaps ratedness itself is a flawed measure.
I thought the cognoscenti spoke more or less as one in not finding the later works very good.
Mishima was robbed of a Nobel
Since no apparent rationale underlies the awarding of the Nobel Prize in literature, can it be said that any writer has ever been robbed of a Nobel?
Georges Perec if you like Invisible Cities. Life: A User's Manual holds up to several rereadings, and the possibility to read this in French with facing English is making me seriously consider an Ipad.
I am puzzled about including Lem-- Imaginary Magnitudes sort of, I guess, but most of his writing is much more jokey about the possibilities he considers, and he's wordy rather than laconic.
Kundera's realistic books (so before Laughter and Forgetting) are excellent. I prefer his glib takes on large ideas to say Malcolm Gladwell's or DF Wallace.
"That skyscraper is strangely alluring," said Tom, randily.
So what writers would be good in the sack?
All I'm coming up with right now is a dead certainty that Thomas Bernhard would be annoying in bed.
143: "It's still basically about penis length", he said, looking up from Infinite Jest.
Which by replacing Moby Dick as the canonical long, hard book amply demonstrates the bankrupt nihilism of our current times.
David Markson, if we can believe Springer's Progress.
151: he's wordy rather than laconic
THIS IS SPARTAAAA!!!
So what writers would be good in the sack?
Dorothy Parker.
149: Really? I thought that reliable types were divided over Mercy of a Rude Stream. I suppose that means I'll have to read it myself.
So what writers would be good in the sack?
Norman Mailer now that he's dead.
So what writers would be good in the sack?
Angela Carter could probably get pretty enthusiastic, and enthusiasm is the heart of the game, as the French would say.
This blog is absolutely required to keep going until Philip Roth dies (just looked, only 78).
Silvia Plath, Mme de Sevigne, MFK Fisher, Annie Dillard
So what writers would be good in the sack?
Emily and Charlotte Brontë, if you could first impress them enough with your loutishness.
I have long had a crush on Joyce Carol Oates. I like her looks, and, well, y'all know me.
There is an "underrated."
It's a little telling about our common understanding of the ink-stained rackets that no one ever asks which writers would be good spouses.
Oh, life is a glorious cycle of songs,
A medley of extemporanea;
And Colombians all have oversized schlongs
And I am Marie of Romania.
MFK Fisher seems like a strong candidate for best-looking writer of the 20th century, at least. I haven't read much of her work, but I always tend to, because I've really liked the fragments I have read.
171: That game has always irritated me. I am old-fashioned enough not to be enthused by the requirement that I choose a woman to murder.
It's the 21st century, Flippanter. Your list could be all men.
170: Certainly better than T.S. "Not with a bang but a whimper" Eliot.
Silvia Plath
Sylvia. And, um, maybe not.
Also: Sei Shonagon.
176: Everyone knows men don't write.
Longer 179: Two wangs don't make a write.
180: Stanley goes under "kill".
Anaïs Nin looks pretty cute in some photographs, but I can't decided whether the worse fate would be to be mentioned in her diaries or omitted.
Man do I dislike MFK Fisher. STFU about food and how hot you are.
STFU about food and how hot you are.
A college classmate of mine described a date with one girl as three hours of listening to "He likes me... and he likes me... and he totally likes me... and he liked me freshman year... he's liked me since Andover..." until he interrupted her with "I don't like you."
All of you people who are nattering on about the greatness of Larry McMurtry, have you read his non-fiction or his criticism? Both are typically so awful as to render even a truly great book like Last Picture Show somewhat suspect. Or maybe, as I've long hoped, there are actually two Larry McMurtrys (Larrys McMurtry?).
Are we supposed to judge fiction writers by their criticism now? If so, T.S. Eliot would have to be posthumously exhumed and burned at the stake.
I have never sufficiently distinguished MFK Fisher from MR James (whom I really like but not in that way).
I like Clive "Bring Me the Sweat of Gabriela Sabatini, For the Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered" James but not in that way.
188: I just ate a blueberry muffin. It was delicious.
Larry McMurtry, have you read his non-fiction or his criticism
But his historigraphical essays are great, right?
[ducks, runs away]
Osamu Dazai appears to have a dramatic effect on his lovers. (3 failed love suicides! 3!)
188: TS Eliot a bad critic? But surely we all agree that Hamlet was a dismal failure?
193: s/b "have had." He was eventually successful. Well, kind of. His buddy had to help him out.
Speaking of great writing, I've got a copy of the Lincoln Lawyer if anyone wants to borrow it.
All of you people who are nattering on about the greatness of Larry McMurtry, have you read his non-fiction or his criticism? Both are typically so awful as to render even a truly great book like Last Picture Show somewhat suspect.
How much more wrong could you be? None. None more wrong.
197: so you think his fiction is lousy and his criticism and non-fiction make up for it? Or you think the fiction is good enough that the non-fiction and the criticism doesn't matter? Or you think it's all good? Or you want a bite of my blueberry muffin?
I wouldn't mind a blueberry muffin.
196: I just read that! And liked it! And thought his opinions on lawyering sound!
I wouldn't mind a blueberry muffin.
Then next time you should think twice before making cheap jokes at the expense of Cleveland, shouldn't you?
199: I've liked all of his work. (Admittedly, it's been years since I read most of his non-fiction books, but I didn't think his recent essay on Marilyn Monroe in the NRYB was objectionable in any way.)
The blueberry muffins likely explain how Von became the dominant force in the NBA that he is today.
Further to 203: What exactly do you find so atrocious about his non-fiction?
202: Buy some appropriate shoes and we'll talk.
Hey, Dutch Cookie, what do you think of the book "Imperial San Francisco" by Gary Rivlin? I picked that up recently and it seems like the kind of thing you would have read. Adjectives that come to mind are "entertaining" "totally unreliable" and "ridiculously overwraught" but what do I know about San Francisco.
By Gray Brechin, I guess. Gary Rivlin is someone else. Also, I know that San Francisco sucks, but what else do I know about it?
183: My candle burns at both ends/It will not last the night/But even so, it's longer than/The average schlong that's white.
169 is far superior but I had to try my hand at it, if you will.
207: What I've heard about it from people doing related stuff is: polemical, provocative, read it, but with a grain of salt. I've done the salt part, but not the reading.
210: Some jokes write themselves.
26, 27: Wasnt there a candidate to become the Chicago mayor who made did paster casts of penises?
Yes, Cynthia Plaster Caster was right, I conflated her with a different penis-caster in the movie mentioned in 37*. Jimi Hendrix (NSFW). Interview.
*Seen at work near the bottom of this montage from the movie.
121 is right and Hemingway wins, of course, and he'd probably be lousy in bed. His entire oeuvre reeks of compensation.
214: Hemingway is pretty accurately rated. Though his oeuvre [i]does[/i] reek of compensation, he's far from the worst offender for this and at least has other virtues. (Howard's Conan was after all basically a sword-wielding penis put through a series of formulaic wanks.)
Ayn Rand would be a close contender, but she's only overrated by political followers. Tolkien really is the winner of most overrated, I think; great world-builder, good action novelist, just okay as anything else, work elevated virtually into scripture by his adherents (who unlike Rand's are from across the political spectrum).
Howard's Conan was after all basically a sword-wielding penis put through a series of formulaic wanks.
I quite like Robert E. Howard's stories, but this guy and his pals could stand to read this every couple of hours for a few months.
Where are people willing to put F. Scott Fitzgerald in the ranks of the overrated?
This should go without saying, but I find it difficult if not impossible to name those who are overrated without asking what measure of high rating we're looking at. Admittance to the canon? Critical acclaim? Book sales? Staying power over time?
Some may be familiar with Garrison Keillor's NPR segment, the "Writer's Almanac" -- a 5-minute-long thing in which he talks through literary dates of note on this very date. The other day he explained that James Patterson has outsold Stephen King, Dan Brown, and, um, James Michener (? someone like that) combined. Huh. Well. That's interesting. Stephen King's a big seller. Dan Brown?
Where are people willing to put F. Scott Fitzgerald in the ranks of the overrated?
217: In the "old academy" scene of Manhattan if nowhere else. ("Van Gokh! Like an Arab she spoke.")
I once got a lecture on the subject of "missing the point" for reading one of John Keegan's books (maps, etc.) at the beach.
116
I'll say Rand had something, and I found her books entertaining. I'm not quite sure how to describe it -- it's the same thing that lots of godawful mid-century SF has -- but the over-the-top goofiness of it all made for entertaining beach reading. Come to think, sort of the same appeal the Lee Child novels have.
I've never read Rand, but if the admirers of the craft and style of her writing itself are merely saying that she's better than most mid-century SF, well, knock me over with a feather because that's damning with faint praise, blinded to the forest by the trees, and other clichéd idioms indicating stupidity.
I mean, I like SF and fantasy, as I'm pretty sure is obvious by now, but I'd never call it a genre full of good literature. Even classics of the genre are generally recognized as such for prescience, exploring interesting philosophical ideas, or a tone that exemplifies their subgenre really well, not for any crazy perks like interesting, believable characters or good prose.
merely saying that she's better than most mid-century SF
Whoa, whoa. I didn't say 'better than'. I said that I could see the appeal as entertainment, and that it reminded me of a lot of clunky mid-century SF that I also enjoy.
That is, even considered by genre standards, Rand's not a good writer. But a sometimes entertaining one.
has anyone read eifelheim? I really enjoyed it.
but i saw another book by the author, but goodreads says its 'aynn rand in space'
I think i might have been mislead by the fact that the only other people i know who ever talk about mediaeval philosophy are extremely liberal.
"Bilbo probably believed that what is best in life is hanging out with elves, smoking, reading, and writing.
It sounds pretty reasonable to me.
the list would be like 99% things like fried eggs, fried tomatos, strong tea, cheese, mince pie, bacon, buttered scones, ale, etc.
Not fried tomatoes, yoyo: Tolkien had them in an early draft but took them out because they were too New World. (He included potatoes and pipeweed, though, so there you are.)
Eifelheim was pretty good I thought; it was very obviously trying to be "The Name of the Rose - and Aliens!" but there are worse things to try to be. I can quite believe that the author's other books have been lunatic right-wing nonsense. American historical/SF novelists seem to tend that way. I think it's the evil influence of Dungeons and Dragons.
Matterhorn: also rather good; like Mailer but not quite as overbearingly hairy.
221.2: Samuel Delany? But you're right, I don't generally hold SF/fantasy to that standard.
Calling DS.
Ha, i'm finishing name of the rose right now. I had to stop reading anathem as i was getting things confused. and while i don't like to much boring realism infiltrating my books, i'm finding rocheworld has to have the most distractingly bad writing imaginable.
I'm here! I'm here! Is someone being wrong on the Internet?
Well, not wrong, exactly. I didn't notice this earlier:
116: I'll say Rand had something, and I found her books entertaining. I'm not quite sure how to describe it -- it's the same thing that lots of godawful mid-century SF has -- but the over-the-top goofiness of it all made for entertaining beach reading.
... but it's comprehensible.
Generally speaking, whatever appeal Ayn Rand had came from her ideology. Looked at casually, and especially through the lens of fiction worlds where all the conditions can be jigged in its favor, it sounded superficially original and bracing. This was also a common feature of mid-century SF, which was big on ideological experimentation and at the time that Rand was marketing the supposed genius of "A is A" was also exploring tough-guy mechanistic fatalism in classic stories like "The Cold Equations," or various forms of mathematical determinism or Messianism or macho pseudo-militarism a la Heinlein.
So I can see why the comparison would make sense. And though I haven't read Lee Child, I can practically smell the "rugged individualism" bullshit wafting from the Jack Reacher premise and have a strong suspicion he'd fit this company on those grounds.
Now, I don't know if that's what LB was appreciating in her work. But if she was appreciating anything else about Rand -- characterization? action? description? the sex, God forbid? -- I've no idea how.
221.2: I've never read Rand, but if the admirers of the craft and style of her writing itself are merely saying that she's better than most mid-century SF, well, knock me over with a feather because that's damning with faint praise, blinded to the forest by the trees, and other clichéd idioms indicating stupidity.
Whether Rand was "better than" most mid-century SF -- which is not really what LB said -- is highly questionable. You're of course totally right that SF of any era, and certainly SF of that era, does not set a high bar of literary craft on average. But Rand is at best on a par with an average talent of the day in terms of craftsmanship; it's the intensity and confidence of her demagoguery that sets her apart.
Whatever literary disadvantages SF has, the subsequent decades have produced dozens of figures who -- in terms of quality of characterization, action, plotting, what-have-you -- could writing circles around Rand in their sleep.
That's what I think, anyway.
"could write circles around"
Heh, now there's an ironic typo.
Ok. SO. A long time ago, when I worked in the evil world, a client gave me a copy of...shit, what was it? I think the Fountainhead? Anyway, I tried to read it. i really, really did. But I couldn't get past the first 10* pages. (She went on and on about metal or iron or copper or some such shit like she was about to fuck it; it was weird.) Because it was the worst writing I'd ever seen published. Full stop. To this day. This includes self published authors who sell their books for $0.99 on Amazon.
So I honestly don't know what to do with the comparison btwn Rand and Sci Fi, no matter what decade. Or the generally accepted assertion that SciFi writing isn't literary. I don't know what that means. I'm not being clever; I'm genuinely asking: what does that mean? My book shelf is littered with books that have been or are considered literary and are fucking dreary to read. (I have a theory about this: name me an MFA writing program that teaches people how to plot. Or the basics of fucking storytelling. Seriously; I might just be ignorant, in which case I have to search for a new theory.)
So can somebody please tell me: what does it mean to have "literary merit"? This is an honest question.
*It may have been longer, but it definitely wasn't more than like 25 pages. Seriously, it was awful. And I wanted to maintain a minimum level of respect for the person who'd gifted it to me as, like, some sort of initiation ritual or something, so I opted for the denial / ignorance approach.
231: You basically have to be at a certain age, I think, to be receptive to Rand. She's heavy on industrial porn * and ridiculously stoic heroism and cardboard characters -- these essentially are what pass for her Big Ideas -- and if you can spot those things as ridiculous then she's sunk right out of the gate. Certainly the actual quality of the prose isn't going to rescue the experience.
(* But then, a lot of mid-century SF was heavy on similar things; I can remember eating up dry technical-manual exposition in plenty of bad SF novels. Rand is just creepier and more over-the-top about it.)
229: Whatever literary disadvantages SF has
? Literary disadvantages aren't written into SF, are they? I've never considered that possibility, which probably means I haven't read much about the writing of SF. At a first pass: creating believable characters, and therefore dialogue, is problematic from the outset if you're working with alternate worlds. Is that the idea?
Oh, "literary merit" as I think of it is a combination of craftsmanship (how sentences are structured, words are chosen, narratives are paced and so on), "the pleasure of the text" (be it your classic three-act plot in dramatic, melodramatic or comedic forms, or in the form of various other kinds of narrative, non-narrative, anti-narrative, "avant garde" experimentation or what-have-you), and intellectual content (a text wrangling with ideas large or small by various methods). Rand was generally able to sell her novels as having the third of these virtues, though on closer examination they really didn't.
233: Literary disadvantages aren't written into SF, are they?
No, naturally. Sorry if it came across that way, I just meant "tends to have." It's nothing inherent.
233 kind of gets to the secret heart of my question. I simply can't believe that there's some literary limitation inherent to genre. Nope, doesn't make sense. Structure can be liberating. (Sonnets. Btw, I missed out on a famed sonnet competition? Goddammit.) I find it much more plausible that "literary merit" is a function of social status, in the sense that you've sipped brandy with the JCO (as one of her students at Princeton was wont to call her) and been found worthy. Which is to say, bullshit.
236: I find it much more plausible that "literary merit" is a function of social status, in the sense that you've sipped brandy with the JCO (as one of her students at Princeton was wont to call her) and been found worthy.
Oh, if you're thinking that the common assessment of SF's overall literary quality is just down to snobbery, no. That would be bullshit, although it's certainly something SF writers are fond of telling themselves. (I, like Cyrus, am saying this as a fan of SF.) That's not to say there isn't SF with good literary quality. But on average, genre writing is more lucrative than "mainstream fiction" for the basic reason that much of it is unconcerned with literary quality per se.
235: Okay. I take it that the literary disadvantages SF tends to have are a function of its heritage, as it were. There are certain tropes that the readership remains attracted to, say, and one might have to nod in their direction.
I fear I'm being dense, and this might be a case of my needing to have dinner.
I think I've become generally suspicious of writers with Ideas. Lowercase-i ideas are great, but when they get Ideas, and especially if they want to write a Novel of Ideas, I lose interest.
Ok, again. No one has defined, or attempted to define, "literary merit." To me this is a big problem, as far as conversation is concerned. I agree that genre conventions make it easier to sell more books w/o, say, going through the angst of trying to expand your audience's minds, but that's rather imprecise. In fact it almost classifies anything that doesn't fall into a genre as "literary," and that can't possibly be right, or the word should have no merit attached to it.
(I'm aware that defining "literary merit" might be difficult, but I feel like if people are going to throw the term around, maybe we could have a working definition?)
238: Sort of a function of the genre, I'm not sure how "heritage" would fit in. Huge amounts of the SF bookshelf aren't stand-alone novels, they're tie-ins to existing game, movie, television or RPG properties and aren't produced with particularly artistic considerations. Even the more "traditional" SF novel is often written, like the bulk of crime fiction, thrillers or "techno-thrillers," with profit rather than high art in mind.
This kinda reminds me of a when I won this weird charity lottery thing that was organized by a Fantasy writer -- he had pledged to match every dollar donated to this charity up to a certain amount, and he was giving away prizes consisting of his backlist to donors in the form of a lottery. I ended up winning like 10 books. Weird, right? Ok, whatever. So I peruse them. Fucking...seriously? SERIOUSLY? This guy makes enough off these books to give shit tons to charity (which, as an aside, well done, dude) and these are the books?
I almost wish I'd kept them. I didn't.
245, 234: I think you have a more equitable / honorable definition than is commonly in use. (To judge by, say, the NYTimes?)
234 works for me.
Aside from its literary merit or lack thereof, I have a weird mental block around science fiction (or "SFF," I guess) that seems to prevent me from enjoying it -- the genre tradition itself is a turnoff. I've tried reading William Gibson and a few others and they're entertaining enough but it just doesn't seem to work. Who knows why.
In conclusion, NERDS!!!! (said in Ogre from Revenge of the Nerds voice).
247: I dunno, it's basically the sort of thing a good "how to write" book tells aspiring writers about literary merit. I try not to compare it with the NYTimes standard, that way lies madness. London's Times Literary Supplement, though, would probably be closer.
244: Huge amounts of the SF bookshelf aren't stand-alone novels, they're tie-ins to existing game, movie, television or RPG properties
Ah, I'd forgotten about this. Old-fashioned, I am, apparently. Or under a rock. Or, in truth, keep trying to overlook it.
What a grim proposition.
Also, donaquixote's hyperbole in 231.1 is pretty hilarious: Because it was the worst writing I'd ever seen published. Full stop. To this day.
Dude. You have apparently not read bad writing.
Really? Thank God, then. Maybe it was the combination of "terrible" and "pretense" that elevated it so.
Sort of on topic: NMM to Lanford Wilson. Bummer.
parsimon I'm impressed you've been able to keep your extensive reading in bad writing unsullied by the taint of cash-in. You must have a particularly pure source for literary trash!
239: that's probably a healthy suspicion, but there have been good novels written by authors with Ideas.
253: I had to google him. Do I have to buy a collection of his plays now? I hate doing that. Does anyone still go to plays? Can anyone still really do it regularly? It was hard enough when I was making oodles of money. Now it's just...not gonna happen.
Does anyone still go to plays?
Yes.
256 leads me to believe that I'm a lot older than you, dq. But I guess I knew that already. Anyway, should you buy some of his plays? I don't really know. I've never read them. But I have seen several of them performed -- back when it was affordable to do such a thing -- and enjoyed them when I was a younger, less cynical man. Oh wait, I think I read The Madness of Lady Bright (or whatever it's called) once upon a time, probably in a class in which I also read Giovanni's Room. You know, the literature of teh gay.
Dude. You have apparently not read bad writing.
I will agree with dq that the pretense elevates it to a completely different level of bad writing.
Whereas Dan Brown, for instance, is objectively bad writing, but is fascinating, because you can read all of the aspirations in it, in a way that struck me as very innocent. (Innocent on the part of readers who loved the book, not necessarily on the author's part.) Try searching for the word 'famous' in the google books version of The DaVinci Code. You get the 'famous' parquet floor of the grand gallery in the Louvre, the 'famous' red roof tiles of Paris, the 'famous' Parisian artist Jean Cocteau, the 'famous' marble staircase from the I.M. Pei pyramid down into the Louvre... it goes on and on. The word 'famous' comes up every time the narrative is describing something marked as cultured, as something that one should know.
Bear in mind that Sifu Tweety always wears a top hat and tails and regularly dines on pheasant under glass (when he's not sucking the marrow from the bones of the working classes). He's an old-school aristocrat, that one.
259: That's actually really interesting. Recently I've found myself marveling at the apparent cynicism of many bestselling authors, but that is...way above and beyond. Kind of amazing, really.
260: Under silver, Dutch Cookie. Silver.
258: I'm actually not convinced that age has anything to do with it -- I'm equally uninformed about today's bright young things of the playwriting world. Further: are there any? I mean. There must be. But you see my point. Although I do own collections of mid century greats, and also Harold Pinter and Christopher Durang. Yay!
Google seems to support Von Wafer. Maybe, dq, you were thinking of pressed duck, which Sifu regularly enjoys at La Tour d'Argent.
Does anyone still go to plays?
At times more often than movies.
Can anyone still really do it regularly?
This at least partly depends on where you are (especially what country) and what kind of theater you are willing to see. My hard core dissertation research year in Berlin, I was going to the theater 4-6 times a week. But even student discounts in the U.S. wouldn't allow one to afford that.
And Godot, duh. Though when I went to see that, with John Goodman and that dude who is in fact better than John Goodman, I made the mistake of eating shrooms beforehand. In retrospect, this must have been a lame attempt at being self destruction? I don't know. It was interesting.
233: Literary disadvantages aren't written into SF, are they?
Kind of, yes. There was a sizable backlash to Frederic Pohl and Judith Merritt's efforts as editors to improve the literary merit of science fiction (with things like three-dimensional characters and non-risible dialogue) in the '50s and early '60s, and then later the arrival of writers with a serious literary sensibility via the British New Wave (which brought British writers like J. G. Ballard and John Brunner, then later Americans like Samuel Delaney, Ursula K. LeGuin, Gene Wolfe, James Tiptree etc. to people's attention). Faster-than-light travel and psionics are serious scientific pursuits, but explorations of themes like gender fluidity and techniques like pastiche are for squares, girls, and/or mundanes.
I am interested in learning more about this effort and this backlash.
Perhaps it's helpful if one sees "literary fiction" as a distinct genre of its own, one whose audience is by and large the same folks who define literary merit, and whose conventions tend to align with, or at least not go against, what counts as same. You can point to particular features like "quality of the writing" or "psychological characterisation", I suppose, but I suspect that's ultimately going to be less helpful than the genealogical/sociological/market-segment approach.
And I meant by that, first and foremost, that I am interested in being told more about those things.
254: What?
That is to say, I work with books, so they're everywhere. Thousands upon thousands. You can get a fair amount of garbage in a lot of books you might acquire at auction, and if you open the random thing, god knows what you'll read. Some of it is charming, though awfully written. I'm not sure what you're talking about in 254.
the 'famous' marble staircase from the I.M. Pei pyramid down into the Louvre
There's a marble staircase there? My memory has it as an escalator.
And I would say that literary disadvantages are indeed built into sf/f, at least as a genre and on average, because of the very nature of the question. That is, of course genre X is going to be, generally speaking, worse than genre Y according to the standards of genre Y. Naturally this is only a ceteris paribus sort of this, but there it is. By the same token, literary fiction typically has worse sex scenes than romance novels.
Christopher Durang. Yay!
My high school drama teacher was waaay into Durang. I was going to comment that I even once got to ham it up in front of an auditorium of students for Zero Sum Mind, but I see now that it was written by Stephen Gregg, not Durang.
(Good contribution to the thread, self!)
273: I don't remember one way or the other, but escalator comes closer to ringing a bell for me. I took it as a sign that I was not the book's target audience that my reaction to most of the things was, Whaa? Why the hell would I know about the floor in a particular gallery in the Louvre?
I just ate a quarter of a blueberry bagel (long story) with some nutella on it. As a consequence, I'm pretty sure I'm not Jewish anymore.
So is it the blueberries or the nutella that provide the magical foreskin-growing power?
Oh, x.trapnel, with your reasonable insights. (Also, hi! Thanks.) I suppose it makes sense that there be elitism amongst the class of genres, just as there is everywhere else. (Heeellloooo hippy self!)
Per Stanley, I'm starting to think my theatrical ignorance is due to a lack of high school drama...class.
Really, don't listen to me. There are actual literature phds/profs here; I never took anything of the sort beyond first-year "Human Being & Citizen."
I think it's fair to say that a blueberry bagel, without any adornment at all, is pretty goyish. But when I chose to spread nutella on my bagel, my blueberry bagel, I'm pretty sure that I made Philip Roth and Mordecai Richler cry.
... and now I shall read my trashy stuff until I fall asleep.
267: Snarkout! I regretted after the fact not calling on you, and Frowner, about this as well. I too would be interested in hearing about the effort and backlash you refer to.
... but before I do! Yet another of my periodic shoutouts to Aqueduct Press (and their blog), for excellent, literarily meritorious, feminist-oriented speculative fiction! Now with affordable, DRM-free ebooks!
268, 269 - I should have mentioned Damon Knight alongside Pohl and Merrill. Knight founded the Milford Writer's Workshop (he and Merrill lived in Milford, PA, at the time). Search for "Milford" in this:
The Milford Conferences, at first welcomed by the authorial community, came to be seen by some as promoting a party line that valorized "fine writing" over more basic storytelling values; for writers tutored by [Astounding editor John W.] Campbell, individual style was always secondary to ideational content, logical extrapolation, and scientific literacy.
I agree 'literary' is mostly a marketing segments (neurotic professionals), but I think the easiest way to describe it is a singleminded focus on realism.
This is also useful, but I've always read the great hard SF/New Wave schism as basically a gender issue which may not be universally accepted. I've seen good examples on the interwebs of the horrendous crap people were writing about LeGuin and Joanna Russ at the time, but am having trouble tracking it down (and, you know, wasn't alive then). If you turn on the Gary Farber signal, this sort of thing is right in his wheelhouse.
Literary fiction as described here is the fiction of a generation which discovered "good" novels via B-format in 1980. It is a fiction so very clearly generic that when I read John Mullan's description of it (complete with successful business model, strict boundary conditions and committed fanbase which won't read anything else) as not genre fiction, I weep with laughter at the sheer depth of his self-deception. Still, by the usual Freudian processes he has said what he really means, & that's a step forward. The sooner literary fiction recognises & accepts its generic identity, the sooner it can get help.
M. John Harrison.
287: Joanna Russ' How To suppress Women Writing might be of interest too. Mind, at this point it's almost three decades old so somewhat dated.
274: And I would say that literary disadvantages are indeed built into sf/f, at least as a genre and on average, because of the very nature of the question.
Sure. It's like definitions of "bad acting." Of course porn actors are going to look "bad" when you're defining people like Brando or Denzel Washington as "good." And where did being a slave to standards like that ever get anyone?
Thanks for clearing that up for us!
Borges did not get the prize because he leaned right in Argentine politics.
This was not comparable to, say, voting CDU in Germany. I propose that nobody here would be happy with a Nobel Prize for someone who, say, defended Alberto Gonzales.
While I was rude about SF literary quality generally, that's not what I meant -- I was talking about a specific type of clunky writing that I still enjoy, kind of, and that smells like Rand. And I think Slack's right when he says it's about ideas: the trick is that they don't have to be good ideas, or ideas that make any sense. It's this semi-crazed "my ideas, let me show you them" that Rand shares with, say, Mack Reynolds, that I find appealing.
I propose that nobody here would be happy with a Nobel Prize for someone who, say, defended Alberto Gonzales.
I wouldn't mind, if the literature was good enough. I'm not sure that I count as someone here, though. Are you happy with the Nobel Prizes that went to people who defended Stalin?
Also, I'm not sure that Borges ever went so far as affirmatively supporting the Argentine junta or Pinochet.
241
(I'm aware that defining "literary merit" might be difficult, but I feel like if people are going to throw the term around, maybe we could have a working definition?)
It's what the group of people who are interested in "literary merit" collectively decide. One can probably deduce some objective criteria by studying their decisions but it is basically subjective.
292: yes, a lot of classic pre-New Wave science fiction reads the way it does because of a combination of the inherent didactism of the genre as shaped by its first important editors (Hugo Gernsback, John W. Campbell) and authors and its pulp origins. So you get people being very earnest telling you about the World of Tomorrow in prose for which "workman like" is a compliment.
291, 293 - Knut Hamsun literally gave his Nobel medal to Josef Goebbels as a gift.
No one has defined, or attempted to define, "literary merit."
There's the prior problem of defining 'literary', which a lot of theorists have spent a lot of time on.
288: The sooner literary fiction recognises & accepts its generic identity, the sooner it can get help.
Yeah, I was thinking of that post, too. (Via Henry F.) A very good post it is.
299: Seemed sort of petty and dyspeptic to me, and non-responsive to the contention in the actual piece it was purportedly responding to that more than being a marketing tactic, "literary" fiction is most characteristic by being irreducible to any particular "generic" concern beyond good prose craftsmanship. In fact, if one actually reads Mullan's piece from beginning to end, that post looks almost totally irrelevant to it.
Incidentally: there should be an annual Unfogged Awards, and 292 should be nominated for Best Deployment of LOLcats.
301 - Sadly, there is no more masturbating to kleine eisbar Knut. No, the author of Hunger, who was a prominent Norweigan Nazi sympathizer and supporter of the Quisling government. (Like Pound, he was found to be suffering from an acute case of literarygeniusfascitis and confined to a mental institution instead of being tried as a collaborator.) Hunger is still a hell of a book.
In defense of the departed Eisbaer,* I believe he was named after a polar explorer, not Hamsun.
* Ave atque vale, Knut! You were too beautiful for this fallen world.
This is also useful, but I've always read the great hard SF/New Wave schism as basically a gender issue which may not be universally accepted.
The British are a little proprietary about "New Wave" SF, and since I remember very few British women SF writers of the period, I would dispute the gender base of the schism. Just to say that it is reductionist, there was a more general divide opening up 1965-75 that included gender but also included many other things. Russ herself mentions the economic conditions of the global boom, when anyone could get published.
As far as "literary merit" goes, I have to ask of a "good book"...good for whom? When a tweener says Twilight is well-written and Doris Lessing is unreadable dreck, I think she is saying something not just true for her, but something that is more generally true. A book that is readable or enjoyable for only 1% of those who attempt it is, in some sense for me, not a good book and not well-written.
Frankly, intelligence and education usually are alienating, in a Levi-Strauss/Sontag way, and are the roads to a barbarism in opposition to one's native culture. Thus I do consider Joyce, Mann, Nietzsche etc as barbaric and wicked. This is a good thing...for me.
Ya know, those of us (and I am one quite often) who say that our Wolff and Schoenberg and Francis Bacon are the real true island of enlightened civilization in a vast sea of barbarous ignorance...this is insane. Incoherent and anti-social and destructive. Stark raving bonkers.
Carol Emshwiller is the only woman I associate with New Worlds, so I think 305.1 is just as valid an account as 287, particularly when applied to the original, British New Wave. Advocates of "hard SF" were overdetermined to resent and vituperate stuff not coming out of the Campbellian school. (I think the backlash itself is strikingly gendered, but that's not actually the claim I advanced in 287. Und so!)
