[a.g.bookworms] New book for September, reminder, and request for help
IHCOYC XPICTOC
Reminder that the book to read for Aug. 1 is *The 13 Clocks* by James
Thurber.
Now I know that some people had added some books for consideration this past
month. Unfortunately, I had to replace my hard drive over the last week and
a half, and the books that were added were unfortunately some of the data I
was unable to recover from the Frito Bandido. So if those who have
additions will be so good as to let me know what they were, I will add them
to the website.
--
IHCOYC XPICTOC D. G. IMP. LAVRASIĆ ET GONDWANALANDIĆ
http://members.iglou.com/gustavus
"To understand the heart beat of a villain you must *be* one. One must be
born with that inner hatred toward society that smoulders like a pot of
simmering stew."
--- Cyclops, in *Spyman* #2 (1966)
Matthew King
> Now I know that some people had added some books for consideration this past
> month. Unfortunately, I had to replace my hard drive over the last week and
> a half, and the books that were added were unfortunately some of the data I
> was unable to recover from the Frito Bandido. So if those who have
> additions will be so good as to let me know what they were, I will add them
> to the website.
Probably just as well--after some poking around Toronto's used bookstores,
I'd like to withdraw my nomination of the Sturgeon book until I can
actually find it. (I ain't never bought anything off the internet yet, and
I'd like to postpone it as long as possible.)
But still:
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
and
The Marquis de Sade, Justine.
And as a substitute third, for something completely different, how about:
Robert Frost, A Boy's Will.
Matthew
Matthew-King---Toronto---Canada---Have-you-come-here-to-play-Jesus-
----------------------------------to-the-lepers-in-your-head?--U2--
Joseph Brenner
Matthew King <mak...@crushed.velvet.net> writes:
> IHCOYC XPICTOC <ihcoyc...@aye.net> wrote:
>
> > Now I know that some people had added some books for consideration this past
> > month. Unfortunately, I had to replace my hard drive over the last week and
> > a half, and the books that were added were unfortunately some of the data I
> > was unable to recover from the Frito Bandido. So if those who have
> > additions will be so good as to let me know what they were, I will add them
> > to the website.
>
> Probably just as well--after some poking around Toronto's used bookstores,
> I'd like to withdraw my nomination of the Sturgeon book until I can
> actually find it. (I ain't never bought anything off the internet yet, and
> I'd like to postpone it as long as possible.)
Oh, don't be a wimp. Do you think it's likely to pop up
next month?
I hereby toss Thedore Sturgeon's "Some of Your Blood" into
the hat.
Oh, and Nabokov's "Pale Fire".
And let's say... Ian Fleming, "Casino Royale".
Matthew King
> Matthew King <mak...@crushed.velvet.net> writes:
>> Probably just as well--after some poking around Toronto's used bookstores,
>> I'd like to withdraw my nomination of the Sturgeon book until I can
>> actually find it. (I ain't never bought anything off the internet yet, and
>> I'd like to postpone it as long as possible.)
> Oh, don't be a wimp. Do you think it's likely to pop up
> next month?
Seems like a way the gods might punish me.
BTW, I finished "To Here and the Easel". I HATE the ending. Why would you
have such a bewildering story come slamming so hard down to earth? Why the
need for such hokum explanation?
I also read the grave reading story (because it's short). It was all
right. (Although it also has an ending in the area of hokum.) So I'll give
him another shot.
> Oh, and Nabokov's "Pale Fire".
It's already there, from the Olden Days.
Matthew
Matthew-King---Toronto---Canada---Have-you-come-here-to-play-Jesus-
----------------------------------to-the-lepers-in-your-head?--U2--
Joseph Brenner
Matthew King <mak...@crushed.velvet.net> writes:
> BTW, I finished "To Here and the Easel". I HATE the ending. Why would you
> have such a bewildering story come slamming so hard down to earth? Why the
> need for such hokum explanation?
Well, I just re-read it myself to see if I could see what
you're talking about, and I can see there are two possible
grounds for complaint, but only one I can really say I can see,
but I'll stop sawing and say it:
(1) The ending isn't ambiguous, and in fact appears to come
down to psychology. In High Art the high artist usually
cops-out on resolving questions like "haunted or mad?"
In Low Art, the fantasist is supposed to side with the
fantastic.
(2) The closing satori is explained at *slightly* excessive
length. There are probably some sentences, if not a few
short paragraphs that could be chopped out of there.
Notably I find that I remembered the beginning of the
explanation ("brown spots") and the end (" '... because
you're beautiful.' "). But on the intervening exposition --
nothing in the memory banks.
Obviously, one of the reasons I thought and still think it's a
great story is that I think the satori is really interesting,
and I still find myself thinking about such things...
I guess there's a third possible complaint, in that there
appears to be a major coincidence in him ending up at the same
joint as the Angelica-analog, but hey, maybe she was having him
followed, and entered after he did, without him noticing...
Actually I think the reason it works is that the first time
through you're having enough trouble figuring out what Giles is
going on about, so you don't notice that the author was
wringing things a little hard to get that twist. And on later
readings you know where it's going and are thinking about other
things (the entire story is really pretty tightly focused on
leading up to that ending...).
On this particular re-reading, I was a bit worried that I might
find Giles' patter to be some dated ersatz beatnik junk, but I
find it still holds up for me. And more often than not the
story leaves me thinking impressed with Sturgeon's plain
ability to stick words together:
He has a brush; I have no sword, and so it seems
his prisoning is less. Yet I may call my jailer
by a name, and see a face, and know the hands
which hold the iron key.
(I need not have feared: published 1954. Three years to go
before "On the Road" was published, though it had been written
some years before. Giles' schtick in fact reminds me now a bit
more of alcohol comedies ala Thorne Smith, which leads to the
funny thought that that kind of stuff may have been a distant
unacknowledged source of the beat fascination with Dionysian
spontaniety...)
> I also read the grave reading story (because it's short). It was all
> right. (Although it also has an ending in the area of hokum.) So I'll give
> him another shot.
Well, the standard recommendation would be the novel
(really, triptych) "More Than Human".
Matthew King
> Matthew King <mak...@crushed.velvet.net> writes:
>> BTW, I finished "To Here and the Easel". I HATE the ending. Why would you
>> have such a bewildering story come slamming so hard down to earth? Why the
>> need for such hokum explanation?
> Well, I just re-read it myself to see if I could see what
> you're talking about, and I can see there are two possible
> grounds for complaint, but only one I can really say I can see,
I meant both--and additionally, it just seems like bad psychology to me;
it seems like the sort of thing that people who aren't artists think about
artists. Are real artists--visual artists, I mean; this complaint is kind
of odd in that Sturgeon is some sort of artist himself, but I have the
feeling he thinks visual art is something else entirely--really that hung
up on beauty? At least, beauty in the sense Sturgeon seems to assume,
beauty in that sense that people assume when they come up with the Mona
Lisa as the paradigm of beauty in Art, because beauty has something to do
with being blissed out about women, or women being blissed out, or being
blissed out about beautiful women being blissed out. (Not that it
*necessarily* has to do with women, though women are always in the
forefront, and it certainly doesn't seem to have much or anything to do
with sex--more like motherhood.) (In another sense of beauty I do think
art, or good art, or something, is about beauty--but that's another
story. And I still doubt artists get hung up about it.)
> but I'll stop sawing and say it:
> (1) The ending isn't ambiguous, and in fact appears to come
> down to psychology. In High Art the high artist usually
> cops-out on resolving questions like "haunted or mad?"
> In Low Art, the fantasist is supposed to side with the
> fantastic.
Yeah. Is this High Art or Low Art, though? I was expecting to get Low Art,
mostly on the basis of the Kilgore Trout connection, so I surprised by its
loftiness when I started in. The ending, I guessed, might have been a
deliberate smack in the face of the High Art audience, e.g. me. (Today I
read "The Skills of Xanadu", which is more what I'd expected to begin
with, straight science fiction. And another hokum ending.) (Reminds me too
of something I was thinking about Eco and his Adso--you can write
characters who aren't as bright as you are, but you can't write characters
brighter than you. You can write stories not as bright as you, but you
can't write stories brighter. Unless your white swans just fly away from
you.)
Speaking of high and low and whatnot, last week I was reading a bit of
Pierre Bourdieu's _Homo Academicus_, a sociological study of French
universities in the decade or two after 1968. In the preface to the
English translation he notes how North Americans are shocked when he
tells them that all their intellectual heroes--this is like the early '80s
or so, when the big waves of pomo were breaking on American shores--are
stuck in the backwaters of French academia, some can't even get regular
academic jobs, many have never completed a dissertation, they're derided
for publishing for popular audiences, etc.
One of those backwaters, in his telling, is the College de France, which
I'd always imagined as the academic Olympus. Ian Hacking from the
University of Toronto recently became the first Canadian appointed to a
chair at the College de France, and some big deal was made of it. (Hacking
was one of those responsible for channeling the Foucauldian wave inland,
back in the day--Foucault also held a chair at the College de France, as
did Bourdieu himself in the end.) But then Hacking himself also writes for
popular audiences, at least relative to most philosophy profs.
Anyway. I guess it gets harder and harder to tell what's high from what's
low. The pomos have been telling us that all along, right--now Bourdieu
tells me it's just because they don't get no respect themselves! Bourdieu
himself helped spread the idea--maybe he invented it--of "cultural
capital", in opposition to Marxist class analyses; and what's capital in
one culture ain't current in another, and one culture comprises many and
many comprise one. Ain't many of the high anymore, I don't suppose, who
aren't immersed in the low along with everyone else for most of their
days. Yale PhDs write for Itchy and Scratchy. Did I tell you I'm writing
my dissertation on life experience? I'm posting it on alt.gothic, bit by
bit.
> Obviously, one of the reasons I thought and still think it's a
> great story is that I think the satori is really interesting,
> and I still find myself thinking about such things...
The bad psychology complaint aside, though, doesn't it strike you as a bit
clicheed? And by a bit, I mean a lot. Maybe it's not Sturgeon's fault it's
clicheed *now*. But look, it's been said that what Nietzsche wanted more
than anything was to be unique, not just backward, but forward, too--to be
unrepeatable. Look at Sturgeon's style, in this story. It's *the* short
story style--maybe Sturgeon invented it, or helped--the one that everyone
who wants to be a Writer picks up in highschool. But they don't get it,
hardly none. The words crackle, flip and slip like a hippogriff, under
Sturgeon's fingers--I'll give you that! In this story, anyway. So it's
been done again and again, but the original stands up, in this case. On
the other hand, "there's beauty in everything, if only you care to see
it"--you don't get to the end of the sentence, these days, without
thinking of American Beauty, and there'll be something else soon enough.
Hey, there's a crack in everything--that's how the light gets in! The
brown spot *is* the beauty! Hey hey!
> I guess there's a third possible complaint, in that there
> appears to be a major coincidence in him ending up at the same
> joint as the Angelica-analog, but hey, maybe she was having him
> followed, and entered after he did, without him noticing...
Things like that never bother me in books and movies. I mean, you don't
write stories about the *likely* thing happening, and unlikely things
happen all the time, likely as not.
> Actually I think the reason it works is that the first time
> through you're having enough trouble figuring out what Giles is
> going on about, so you don't notice that the author was
> wringing things a little hard to get that twist. And on later
> readings you know where it's going and are thinking about other
> things (the entire story is really pretty tightly focused on
> leading up to that ending...).
Yeah, no kidding! I'd only read it once, pretty quickly, when I made the
post you're replying to, and I just felt like I'd been tossed up in the
air and then hit with a baseball bat. And, you know, I wouldn't have hated
it so much if I hadn't liked it so much. Damn brown spot. I'll just snip
it off, right below "right from the beginning." I don't think anyone would
mind; according to the card, no one's taken this book out of the library
in nearly twenty years.
Matthew
Matthew-King---Toronto---Canada---Have-you-come-here-to-play-Jesus-
----------------------------------to-the-lepers-in-your-head?--U2--
Joseph Brenner
> I meant both--and additionally, it just seems like bad psychology to me;
> it seems like the sort of thing that people who aren't artists think about
> artists. Are real artists--visual artists, I mean; this complaint is kind
> of odd in that Sturgeon is some sort of artist himself, but I have the
> feeling he thinks visual art is something else entirely--really that hung
> up on beauty?
Sturgeon himself was no stranger to artist's blocks, and you
could take this story as some sort of veiled autobiography.
If I remember right, Sturgeon claimed he had written a draft of
the story but stalled out at the ending, and consulted a
painter to get some ideas about why a painter might be blocked.
I believe that Sturgeon believed that he was fudging a bit
here, in that most artists get over the problem that Giles had
really early -- Giles himself says this.
This is all a little complicated by the fact that Giles appears
to be a representational painter, the last of them, perhaps
save only Norman Rockwell. For us, the idea that a great
painter could have visceral popular appeal seems weird.
It's entirely possible that Sturgeon was a writer after the
same sort of beauty... he wanted to write stories that would
transform the common man into something greater.
> At least, beauty in the sense Sturgeon seems to assume,
> beauty in that sense that people assume when they come up with the Mona
> Lisa as the paradigm of beauty in Art, because beauty has something to do
> with being blissed out about women, or women being blissed out, or being
> blissed out about beautiful women being blissed out. (Not that it
> *necessarily* has to do with women, though women are always in the
> forefront, and it certainly doesn't seem to have much or anything to do
> with sex--more like motherhood.)
> (In another sense of beauty I do think art, or good art, or
> something, is about beauty--but that's another story. And I
> still doubt artists get hung up about it.)
Well, mostly artists get hung up on how they're going to pay
the rent.
> Yeah. Is this High Art or Low Art, though? I was expecting to get Low Art,
> mostly on the basis of the Kilgore Trout connection, so I surprised by its
> loftiness when I started in.
Ah that's funny. Sturgeon is much more like an SF&F author you
point to when trying to convince someone that this low genre
isn't quite so low.
(Vonnegut had issues on this subject: a genre author with no
genre loyalty whatsoever, who had no problem with shafting his
roots... sniping at Theodore Sturgeon rather than a genuine
hack writer, that shows some weird contempt or envy...)
> The ending, I guessed, might have been a
> deliberate smack in the face of the High Art audience,
> e.g. me.
Um... *probably* not.
> (Today I read "The Skills of Xanadu", which is more what I'd
> expected to begin with, straight science fiction. And another
> hokum ending.)
Okay. "Skills of Xanadu"... that story doesn't give you the
creeps? It reeks of hippie-fascism. The main character is
annoying and unsympathetic, so you're supposed to feel like
it's a *happy ending* when they trick him into joining their
telepatic, communal group-mind paradise. It's like the idea
that if only you could spike the Republican punch bowl with
acid, all our problems would be solved.
Straight science fiction? Hokum ending? I dunno... maybe
you need to remember it was written in 1956 and take it in
context?
> (Reminds me too
> of something I was thinking about Eco and his Adso--you can write
> characters who aren't as bright as you are, but you can't write characters
> brighter than you. You can write stories not as bright as you, but you
> can't write stories brighter. Unless your white swans just fly away from
> you.)
Well, Sturgeon has certainly attempted to write about
characters brighter than he is... (drawing a blank on a story
name here, and the online bibliographies aren't helping).
He doesn't do too bad a job of it, though it's not an easy
trick to *really* pull off, and I wouldn't expect you to think
it's perfect.
One of his obsessions is damaged super-men (e.g. "The Fabulous
Idiot" of _More Than Human_... maybe like Giles of "To Here and
the Easel").
Well, more later I hope, dinner awaits, and my concentration
isn't all that great just now (This ain't my computer, I'm
running about in the New York area this week, squeezing in my
virtual life where I can.)
Joseph Brenner
Matthew King <mak...@crushed.velvet.net> writes:
> Joseph Brenner <do...@kzsu.stanford.edu> wrote:
>
> > Matthew King <mak...@crushed.velvet.net> writes:
>
> At least, beauty in the sense Sturgeon seems to assume,
> beauty in that sense that people assume when they come up with the Mona
> Lisa as the paradigm of beauty in Art, because beauty has something to do
> with being blissed out about women, or women being blissed out, or being
> blissed out about beautiful women being blissed out. (Not that it
> *necessarily* has to do with women, though women are always in the
> forefront, and it certainly doesn't seem to have much or anything to do
> with sex--more like motherhood.)
If you're going to write a short story about the nature of
beauty, "boy must decide which girl is really beautiful" is
pretty obviously a solid move.
If you want to argue that it shouldn't be that way, well
maybe not, but my current policy is to avoid discussing
whether there's something dubious about the standard
association of "beautiful" and "woman". This is a subject
that's been talked to death, and yet has not died, and I've
no sword to do the job myself.
> > Obviously, one of the reasons I thought and still think it's a
> > great story is that I think the satori is really interesting,
> > and I still find myself thinking about such things...
>
> The bad psychology complaint aside, though, doesn't it strike you as a bit
> clicheed? And by a bit, I mean a lot.
Well, no. Though I wouldn't claim it's tremendously unique
or original, either. Researching the history of the notion
would be interesting.
> Maybe it's not Sturgeon's fault it's clicheed *now*. But
> look, it's been said that what Nietzsche wanted more than
> anything was to be unique, not just backward, but forward,
> too--to be unrepeatable.
If you're suggesting that for art to be valuable, it
must be valuable eternally, for all epochs, well that's a
formula for artist's blocks if ever I've heard one.
(And if you're saying that it has to work *in the same way*,
for all audiences, entirely without regard to cultural
context, I've got a hippogrif over here I'd like to sell you.)
Maybe uniqueness is an overrated value?
> On the other hand, "there's beauty in everything, if only
> you care to see it"--you don't get to the end of the
> sentence, these days, without thinking of American Beauty,
> and there'll be something else soon enough.
"American Beauty?" Why would you bring that up?
http://www.grin.net/~mirthles/doomfiles/AMERICANBEAUTY.html
Depending on the kind of person you
are, this is either trememdously
obvious, or nearly incomprehensible
> Hey, there's a crack in everything--that's how the light
> gets in!
If you're going to start taking Leonard Cohen's name in
vain, then we have even bigger problems here than I thought.
> The brown spot *is* the beauty! Hey hey!
Right, well, maybe you don't particular need to hear this
point (and maybe you're way more in touch with the inner
beauty of existance than I am), but if this message is
*really* that obvious why do people keep stumbling over it
in one form or another?
They like actresses with the brown spots neatly painted over
to the point where they're all about as distinctive as the
shades of white people use on kitchen ceilings.
They like to listen to relentlessly up-beat, major chord,
happy-happy music so that the soundtracks of their lives
sound like a beer commercial.
And rhetorical balance requires that I now add a third
point, probably something about suburban lawns and gleaming
chain-link fences, but let's skip it and leave a nice brown
gap here instead.
> > I guess there's a third possible complaint, in that there
> > appears to be a major coincidence in him ending up at the same
> > joint as the Angelica-analog, but hey, maybe she was having him
> > followed, and entered after he did, without him noticing...
>
> Things like that never bother me in books and movies. I mean, you don't
> write stories about the *likely* thing happening, and unlikely things
> happen all the time, likely as not.
I don't doubt that I could find examples of cheating with
coincidence that you would find grating, but this is
a subject for another day, I would guess.
Some possible starting points:
There's a difference between reality and realism.
Unlike reality, fiction has to worry about being
plausible.
Fiction must "live up to the real".
Fiction is not the opposite of truth, and not
a synonym for lies.
> And, you know, I wouldn't have hated it so much if I
> hadn't liked it so much. Damn brown spot. I'll just snip
> it off, right below "right from the beginning." I don't
> think anyone would mind; according to the card, no one's
> taken this book out of the library in nearly twenty years.
It's easier to do the editing in-memory, and not worry about
the hard copy so much.
Joseph Brenner
Matthew King <mak...@crushed.velvet.net> writes:
> Speaking of high and low and whatnot, last week I was reading a bit of
> Pierre Bourdieu's _Homo Academicus_, a sociological study of French
> universities in the decade or two after 1968. In the preface to the
> English translation he notes how North Americans are shocked when he
> tells them that all their intellectual heroes--this is like the early '80s
> or so, when the big waves of pomo were breaking on American shores--are
> stuck in the backwaters of French academia, some can't even get regular
> academic jobs, many have never completed a dissertation, they're derided
> for publishing for popular audiences, etc.
>
> One of those backwaters, in his telling, is the College de France, which
> I'd always imagined as the academic Olympus. Ian Hacking from the
> University of Toronto recently became the first Canadian appointed to a
> chair at the College de France, and some big deal was made of it. (Hacking
> was one of those responsible for channeling the Foucauldian wave inland,
> back in the day--Foucault also held a chair at the College de France, as
> did Bourdieu himself in the end.) But then Hacking himself also writes for
> popular audiences, at least relative to most philosophy profs.
Consider this rant by the Nowhere Man himself, James Howard
Kunstler (author of many entertaining New Urbanist rants
such as "Geography of Nowhere" and "Home from Nowhere"):
Well, for example, here is another example. Corbusier comes
up with a cockamamie scheme for destroying the Right Bank of
Paris, the Marais District. And the idea immigrates to
America where it takes America by storm. Meanwhile, in
France every year Corbusier goes back to the officials in
Paris and says I have this wonderful idea to destroy the
Right Bank and they laugh at him. For years -- decade after
decade -- they laugh at him. They never do what he
proposes. They do build a lot of crappy stuff outside of the
center of Paris. But they never knock down the center of
Paris. In America we took that idea and we just loved
it. Why didn't we laugh at it?
(This quote by the way, is from a long interview with Jane
Jacobs, author of the tremendously brilliant,
ground-breaking work "Death and Life of Great American
Cities". And in case it isn't obvious, "Corbusier" is the
architect whose utopian dreams somehow became the Projects
of American cities.)
So it would seem there's a pattern of whacked French
intellectuals being taken more seriously by intellectuals on
this side of the pond...
But that may just be a specific case of the general glow
surrounding the exotic. The San Francisco rock band has to
move to New York to hit it big. The New York jazz ensemble
has to move to Europe to get taken seriously.
> Anyway. I guess it gets harder and harder to tell what's high from what's
> low. The pomos have been telling us that all along, right--now Bourdieu
> tells me it's just because they don't get no respect themselves! Bourdieu
> himself helped spread the idea--maybe he invented it--of "cultural
> capital", in opposition to Marxist class analyses; and what's capital in
> one culture ain't current in another, and one culture comprises many and
> many comprise one. Ain't many of the high anymore, I don't suppose, who
> aren't immersed in the low along with everyone else for most of their
> days. Yale PhDs write for Itchy and Scratchy. Did I tell you I'm writing
> my dissertation on life experience? I'm posting it on alt.gothic, bit by
> bit.
The barrier between high and low isn't quite as solid as it
was once upon a time, but it's still there. No one confuses
"Physics Review" with "Social Text" and no one confuses
"Social Text" with "Maxim"....
Nyx
news:m3n0eed...@crack.nonagon.org:
> But that may just be a specific case of the general glow
> surrounding the exotic. The San Francisco rock band has to
> move to New York to hit it big. The New York jazz ensemble
> has to move to Europe to get taken seriously.
We're huge in Japan.
Nyx
--
The Dude: Fortunately, I'm adhering to a pretty strict, uh, drug, uh,
regimen to keep my mind, you know, uh, limber.
www.sxxxy.org
Joseph Brenner
>
> Consider this rant by the Nowhere Man himself, James Howard
> Kunstler (author of many entertaining New Urbanist rants
> such as "Geography of Nowhere" and "Home from Nowhere"):
>
> Well, for example, here is another example. Corbusier comes
> up with a cockamamie scheme for destroying the Right Bank of
> Paris, the Marais District. And the idea immigrates to
> America where it takes America by storm. Meanwhile, in
> France every year Corbusier goes back to the officials in
> Paris and says I have this wonderful idea to destroy the
> Right Bank and they laugh at him. For years -- decade after
> decade -- they laugh at him. They never do what he
> proposes. They do build a lot of crappy stuff outside of the
> center of Paris. But they never knock down the center of
> Paris. In America we took that idea and we just loved
> it. Why didn't we laugh at it?
>
> (This quote by the way, is from a long interview with Jane
> Jacobs, author of the tremendously brilliant,
> ground-breaking work "Death and Life of Great American
> Cities". And in case it isn't obvious, "Corbusier" is the
> architect whose utopian dreams somehow became the Projects
> of American cities.)
A link might help here, eh?
http://www.kunstler.com/mags_jacobs1.htm
erithromycin
>Joe Brenner:
>>But that may just be a specific case of the general glow
>>surrounding the exotic. The San Francisco rock band has to
>>move to New York to hit it big. The New York jazz ensemble
>>has to move to Europe to get taken seriously.
>We're huge in Japan.
I'm _massive_ in Lilliput.
--
erith - .sig
Matthew King
> http://www.kunstler.com/mags_jacobs1.htm
"Local Citizens For Wal-Mart" is pretty appalling, but I can't find a
single thing referring to it (or various possible variations) on google,
other than this interview.
Local Citizens Against Wal-Mart, of course, happens all over the place,
and I think it's an interesting phenomenon, kind of like Odysseus having
himself bound to the mast--they'd better prevent Wal-Mart from coming in
the first place, because once it comes, nobody will be able to stop
themselves from shopping there. (Has any Wal-Mart ever gone out of
business?)
Matthew
Matthew-King---Toronto---Canada---Have-you-come-here-to-play-Jesus-
----------------------------------to-the-lepers-in-your-head?--U2--
Matthew King
> This is all a little complicated by the fact that Giles appears
> to be a representational painter, the last of them, perhaps
> save only Norman Rockwell. For us, the idea that a great
> painter could have visceral popular appeal seems weird.
I happened to step on Alex Colville's star on Canada's Walk of Fame last
week, and I said to Tetsab, hey, there's a painter for Brenner! Colville
is a current representational painter with at least enough popular appear
to get a star on a Walk of Fame, and who is a held in a lot higher regard
by the critics than Rockwell (or, to take a current Canadian example,
Trisha Romance--has anyone in the States heard of Trisha Romance? She
paints sentimental pictures of glowing houses. Various members of my
family love them. Or, to take a current Canadian example who is less of a
complete critical joke, Robert Bateman, who paints photographic pictures
of wildlife which I actually quite admire, whether or not they're all
that wonderful as Art.)
> (Vonnegut had issues on this subject: a genre author with no
> genre loyalty whatsoever, who had no problem with shafting his
> roots... sniping at Theodore Sturgeon rather than a genuine
> hack writer, that shows some weird contempt or envy...)
Another thing I happened across last week, when I ducked into a library to
cool off: a quote proclaiming Sturgeon "a master storyteller certain to
fascinate", on the covers of the Vintage editions of Sturgeon's books,
from Vonnegut. (Apparently there are no copies of _Some of Your Blood_ in
the Toronto public library system.)
I always thought Trout was a tribute. Ever read _Venus on a Half-Shell_?
Just struck me recently how odd it is that someone wrote some books as a
fictional author who was based on (inspired by, whatever) an actual
author.
> Okay. "Skills of Xanadu"... that story doesn't give you the
> creeps? It reeks of hippie-fascism. The main character is
> annoying and unsympathetic, so you're supposed to feel like
> it's a *happy ending* when they trick him into joining their
> telepatic, communal group-mind paradise. It's like the idea
> that if only you could spike the Republican punch bowl with
> acid, all our problems would be solved.
Hum. I don't know if that's the effect Sturgeon was aiming at--seems to me
you're probably more misanthropic than he is. Nevertheless, I take your
point.
I used to have an edition of _The Fountainhead_ with a blurb on the back
extolling Ayn Rand as the most important woman "novelist of ideas" of our
time, or something like that. It's funny how naturally I read that as a
compliment then, considering how suspicious I am of the idea now. Once
upon a time I heard about this story by Ursula LeGuin, about a utopian
society that sustains its extraordinary well-being by allowing a child to
be tortured. I loved the idea, so "The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas"
went on my must-read list. Eventually I found it and read it and
discovered that the story in its execution really adds very little to the
idea.
When I would teach tutorials on utilitarianism, I'd think I ought to point
them to this story, or read them a bit of it ... but then I'd realize
that, as an illustration of what's wrong with utilitarianism, it doesn't
really illustrate anything. It just says it: if the greatest happiness of
the greatest number is all that counts, then it's OK to torture an
innocent child, if that's what it takes. (Actually, there's a more
important ethico-political point in "Omelas", which is that some things
are ethically intolerable even though you can't justify their
intolerability. But the story in its execution doesn't really add much to
that idea, either.) On the other hand, it's a handy touchstone. Sometimes
you just gotta walk away from Omelas.
Anyway ... it seems like you'll put up with more by way of execution to
get at the idea than I will.
I said:
>> (Reminds me too
>> of something I was thinking about Eco and his Adso--you can write
>> characters who aren't as bright as you are, but you can't write characters
>> brighter than you. You can write stories not as bright as you, but you
>> can't write stories brighter. Unless your white swans just fly away from
>> you.)
> Well, Sturgeon has certainly attempted to write about
> characters brighter than he is...
OK, more like this: you can write a character who is more consistently
bright than you are, but you can't write a character who's brighter than
you are at your brightest moments, or even whose brightest moments are
brighter than your brightest moments. Well, maybe you can do that, in the
sense that you can have a character make a snappy off-the-cuff response
it'd take you a week to come up with....
I guess what I was really getting at was something like something I often
think about people and their pets: people generally seem to think their
dogs are exactly as smart as they are. (Although it seems to me that a lot
of people get dogs so that there's someone around who's lower on the totem
pole than they are. I've always wondered if there's a correlation between
being the youngest child and "being a dog person"; in my anecdotal
experience, there certainly seems to be one. Anyway, if that's what you
want your dog for, you might be invested in thinking that your dog is an
idiot. Of course, some people probably want children for similar reasons.)
Authors generally seem to make their narrators, at least, if not their
characters or even their lead characters, just about as bright as they
are. But Adso is clearly, remarkably, not as bright as Eco, and it struck
me, based on the bulk of "To Here and the Easel", that the narrator at the
end of "To Here and the Easel" is not as bright as Sturgeon. (I'm now
more or less dissuaded of that notion.)
Matthew
Matthew-King---Toronto---Canada---Have-you-come-here-to-play-Jesus-
----------------------------------to-the-lepers-in-your-head?--U2--
erithromycin
>Joseph Brenner:
>> http://www.kunstler.com/mags_jacobs1.htm
>"Local Citizens For Wal-Mart" is pretty appalling, but I can't find a
>single thing referring to it (or various possible variations) on google,
>other than this interview.
>Local Citizens Against Wal-Mart, of course, happens all over the place,
>and I think it's an interesting phenomenon, kind of like Odysseus having
>himself bound to the mast--they'd better prevent Wal-Mart from coming in
>the first place, because once it comes, nobody will be able to stop
>themselves from shopping there. (Has any Wal-Mart ever gone out of
>business?)
ISTR reading in 'Fortune' about Wal-Marts closing because they weren't
profitable enough, but I think they were in regions that had several that
weren't doing too well, and now have several -1 that are within expected
parameters.
--
erith - .sig
erithromycin
>Joseph Brenner wrote:
>>This is all a little complicated by the fact that Giles appears
>>to be a representational painter, the last of them, perhaps
>>save only Norman Rockwell. For us, the idea that a great
>>painter could have visceral popular appeal seems weird.
>I happened to step on Alex Colville's star on Canada's Walk of Fame last
>week, and I said to Tetsab, hey, there's a painter for Brenner! Colville
>is a current representational painter with at least enough popular appear
>to get a star on a Walk of Fame, and who is a held in a lot higher regard
>by the critics than Rockwell (or, to take a current Canadian example,
>Trisha Romance--has anyone in the States heard of Trisha Romance? She
>paints sentimental pictures of glowing houses.
Are they radioactive? I have never heard of Trisha Romance, and the notion
of glowing houses scares me.
>>(Vonnegut had issues on this subject: a genre author with no
>>genre loyalty whatsoever, who had no problem with shafting his
>>roots... sniping at Theodore Sturgeon rather than a genuine
>>hack writer, that shows some weird contempt or envy...)
>Another thing I happened across last week, when I ducked into a library to
>cool off: a quote proclaiming Sturgeon "a master storyteller certain to
>fascinate", on the covers of the Vintage editions of Sturgeon's books,
>from Vonnegut. (Apparently there are no copies of _Some of Your Blood_ in
>the Toronto public library system.)
I think I discovered Vonnegut through one of those quotes, or the other way
round. I forget. I like 'em both, but I can't remember which I read first.
Probably a generational thing.
>I always thought Trout was a tribute. Ever read _Venus on a Half-Shell_?
I can see my copy from here. According to my copy of the Illustrated
Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, it were Philip Jose Farmer what wrote it.
"Homage" is what they called it.
--
erith - .sig
Peter H. Coffin
Would a Sam's Club count? One of them died in Milwaukee on Hawley Rd,
which isn't exactly an impoverished area.
--
"... I've seen Sun monitors on fire off the side of the multimedia lab.
I've seen NTU lights glitter in the dark near the Mail Gate.
All these things will be lost in time, like the root partition last week.
Time to die...". -- Peter Gutmann in the scary.devil.monastery
Matthew King
> Matthew King:
>>I happened to step on Alex Colville's star on Canada's Walk of Fame last
>>week, and I said to Tetsab, hey, there's a painter for Brenner! Colville
>>is a current representational painter with at least enough popular appear
>>to get a star on a Walk of Fame, and who is a held in a lot higher regard
>>by the critics than Rockwell (or, to take a current Canadian example,
>>Trisha Romance--has anyone in the States heard of Trisha Romance? She
>>paints sentimental pictures of glowing houses.
> Are they radioactive? I have never heard of Trisha Romance, and the notion
> of glowing houses scares me.
If you think that's frightening, and speaking of glowing houses, try this:
http://www.salon.com/mwt/style/2002/03/18/kinkade_village/print.html
America needs no Trisha Romance, for it already has Thomas Kinkade,
Painter of Light (TM).
Anyway, here's some crap:
http://www.thelagallery.com/romance.html
>>I always thought Trout was a tribute. Ever read _Venus on a Half-Shell_?
> I can see my copy from here. According to my copy of the Illustrated
> Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, it were Philip Jose Farmer what wrote it.
> "Homage" is what they called it.
Apparently he and Vonnegut came to have a difference of opinion on the
matter:
http://www.pjfarmer.com/trout.htm
(You suppose that beard's real?)
Matthew
Matthew-King---Toronto---Canada---Have-you-come-here-to-play-Jesus-
----------------------------------to-the-lepers-in-your-head?--U2--
kest
> Local Citizens Against Wal-Mart, of course, happens all over the place,
> and I think it's an interesting phenomenon, kind of like Odysseus having
> himself bound to the mast--they'd better prevent Wal-Mart from coming in
> the first place, because once it comes, nobody will be able to stop
> themselves from shopping there. (Has any Wal-Mart ever gone out of
> business?)
What seems to happen is that if even a few people shop there, the
other local businesses no longer carry things like shower curtains
because WalMart has them and for cheaper. So you go get a shower
curtain and while you're there pick up some garden tools and such, and
before you know it, all the local business owners have become WalMart
employees.
It's the Borg.
k
erithromycin
>erithromycin wrote:
>>Matthew King:
>>>Has any Wal-Mart ever gone out of business?)
>>ISTR reading in 'Fortune' about Wal-Marts closing because they weren't
>>profitable enough, but I think they were in regions that had several that
>>weren't doing too well, and now have several -1 that are within expected
>>parameters.
>Would a Sam's Club count? One of them died in Milwaukee on Hawley Rd,
>which isn't exactly an impoverished area.
Probably - the WalMart is a strange place, but it's a focused one. I'm
currently curious about what their going to do with ASDA, the large British
supermarket chain that they bought not too long ago.
--
erith - though I'm also curious about the hegemony of the supermarket here,
and just how far reaching their actions are likely to be as they move into
urban centres with a frenzy that's, well, intriguing to watch.
DJ Satori
> Painter of Light (TM).
Often referred to in my group of friends in an overly dramatic tone:
"Painter of LIGHT! (+4, is a magic item)
----------------------
DJ Satori, Las Vegas
Sanctuary, Wednesday nights (http://www.vegasgoths.com/sanctuary/)
erithromycin
>erith wrote:
>>Matthew King:
[snip]
>>>(or, to take a current Canadian example,
>>>Trisha Romance--has anyone in the States heard of Trisha Romance? She
>>>paints sentimental pictures of glowing houses.
>>Are they radioactive? I have never heard of Trisha Romance, and the
>>notion of glowing houses scares me.
>If you think that's frightening, and speaking of glowing houses, try this:
>http://www.salon.com/mwt/style/2002/03/18/kinkade_village/print.html
I'm currently boycotting salon, until it's got less adverts than the Onion.
Or, you know, until somebody makes Arianna Huffington vanish.
>America needs no Trisha Romance, for it already has Thomas Kinkade,
>Painter of Light (TM).
Hmm. I don't pay enough attention to notice if we've such things. Well, no,
actually, there's Jack Vettriano, who gets some of this stuff about him, but
his stuff's quite nice, it's just really well marketed.
>>>I always thought Trout was a tribute. Ever read _Venus on a Half-Shell_?
>>I can see my copy from here. According to my copy of the Illustrated
>>Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, it were Philip Jose Farmer what wrote
>>it. "Homage" is what they called it.
>Apparently he and Vonnegut came to have a difference of opinion on the
>matter:
>http://www.pjfarmer.com/trout.htm
I will have a look when I remember. This doesn't surprise me though - it
probably really confuses Farmer's [1] position on the hierarchy of
geekyness, not least because it's basically fan fiction with the author in
the lead role _and_ it's a bit like a furry thing _and_ it's got spaceships
that look a bit like penises.
>(You suppose that beard's real?)
Farmer's? No. I think it's sprayed on by technicians. Probably to hide his
second mouth, or something.
erith -
[1] I was going to call him "Phil", but there's only one "Phil", and he
wrote "Foster, You're Dead", and whole bunch of other things too.
--
go and read "Foster, You're Dead". go!
Matthew King
> If you're going to write a short story about the nature of
> beauty, "boy must decide which girl is really beautiful" is
> pretty obviously a solid move.
> If you want to argue that it shouldn't be that way, well
> maybe not, but my current policy is to avoid discussing
> whether there's something dubious about the standard
> association of "beautiful" and "woman". This is a subject
> that's been talked to death, and yet has not died, and I've
> no sword to do the job myself.
Maybe so. But where I come from, "beauty" is a seriously deprecated
concept. Aesthetics as a discipline has been trounced by "philosophy of
art". Maybe it's about time people started talking *seriously* about
beauty again.
Sure there's something *dubious* about the standard association, but
obviously there's something to it, too. You know, philosophy only gets
kicked in the balls when it sets itself up as the dictator of experience.
If you take up as an ideological position that everything is socially
constructed or whatever, and thence proclaim that the evil of killing
babies or the beauty of women is *only a social construction* (just like
everything else), then human experience is going to kick you in the balls.
(Maybe klaatu will kick you in the balls if you proclaim his gas station
girl's beauty is only a social construction.)
There's *something* to it, but what? What is it in the experience of the
(potential) beloved that is beauty? (You could start with the _Phaedrus_.)
I said:
>> Maybe it's not Sturgeon's fault it's clicheed *now*. But
>> look, it's been said that what Nietzsche wanted more than
>> anything was to be unique, not just backward, but forward,
>> too--to be unrepeatable.
> If you're suggesting that for art to be valuable, it
> must be valuable eternally, for all epochs, well that's a
> formula for artist's blocks if ever I've heard one.
To mark a turn in history, to be epoch-creating: yes, not to be
*valuable*, but certainly to be *great*. To be great is to be something
that everyone ought to acknowledge. Everyone ought to acknowledge Nabakov.
Sturgeon, well, if you like that sort of thing....
> (And if you're saying that it has to work *in the same way*,
> for all audiences, entirely without regard to cultural
> context, I've got a hippogrif over here I'd like to sell you.)
As epochs pile together, the nature of the epoch created by a Plato
changes again and again, but still he remains an epoch-creator.
>> On the other hand, "there's beauty in everything, if only
>> you care to see it"--you don't get to the end of the
>> sentence, these days, without thinking of American Beauty,
>> and there'll be something else soon enough.
> "American Beauty?" Why would you bring that up?
> http://www.grin.net/~mirthles/doomfiles/AMERICANBEAUTY.html
Heh. I wasn't actually thinking of that.
American Beauty is one of those movies that I've only seen once and really
ought to see again, since I've thought about it and seen a lot of
discussion of it since I saw it and I wonder how well it all stands up.
(Fight Club is another one.) The dope dealer kid is an interesting figure,
anyway. Someone with much more important things to do with his time once
sent me a long e-mail explaining why the kid is an Epicurean and not a
Stoic.
I've always liked the idea that what the movie means to show is that the
kid is absolutely wrong, that thinking that a plastic bag--an *empty*
*shopping* bag, a *garbage* bag--is beautiful, just as beautiful as
anything else, is the very abyss of aesthetic bankruptcy. The makers of
the film might mean no such thing, but I appreciate that the film at least
leaves room for the ambiguity (or at least it does in my memory).
> If you're going to start taking Leonard Cohen's name in
> vain, then we have even bigger problems here than I thought.
Heh, well. Leonard Cohen wouldn't be quite so charming if he hadn't made a
record as truly lousy as Death of a Ladies' Man, would he?
> Right, well, maybe you don't particular need to hear this
> point (and maybe you're way more in touch with the inner
> beauty of existance than I am)
I do my best. ;)
> They like actresses with the brown spots neatly painted over
> to the point where they're all about as distinctive as the
> shades of white people use on kitchen ceilings.
> They like to listen to relentlessly up-beat, major chord,
> happy-happy music so that the soundtracks of their lives
> sound like a beer commercial.
Yeah, well, maybe uniqueness is an overrated value? ;)
Anyway, I don't know why people get so hyped up about what *they* think.
*They* think it's really exciting that Madonna kissed Britney. Well,
whoop-dee-doodle. *They* are dumb. (When *we* are *they*, which we all are
sometimes, and even most of the time, we are dumb, too.) Dumb people are
dumb. QED. So what?
> And rhetorical balance requires that I now add a third
> point, probably something about suburban lawns
I think Brad has some nice spots *on* his lawn, but I think, overall, I
have a better lawn.
> There's a difference between reality and realism.
> Unlike reality, fiction has to worry about being
> plausible.
Yeah, but you know, I don't think fiction has to worry so much about the
plausibility of events as the plausibility of human responses to them. An
example from Sturgeon: he has people *grinning* all the time, at the
dumbest times. Like in "There is No Defense", when the guy beats on the
pacifist to get him to admit that you have to defend yourself sometimes,
and then grins when he's won the point. You don't *grin* there; you're in
the middle of saving the solar system!
Today as it happens I'm back at York, starting my sixth and final year as
a full-time doctoral student; I woulda shoulda coulda been done two years
ago but god knows when if ever I'll actually be done. There's something
weird about being back here today--I told someone it feels kind of like
Groundhog Day. Now there's a piece of fiction that doesn't aim anywhere
near plausibility of events, but it's really damned good on the
plausibility of human response.
Matthew
Matthew-King---Toronto---Canada---Have-you-come-here-to-play-Jesus-
----------------------------------to-the-lepers-in-your-head?--U2--
Tiny Human Ferret
> Joseph Brenner <do...@kzsu.stanford.edu> wrote:
>
>
>>If you're going to write a short story about the nature of
>>beauty, "boy must decide which girl is really beautiful" is
>>pretty obviously a solid move.
>
>
>>If you want to argue that it shouldn't be that way, well
>>maybe not, but my current policy is to avoid discussing
>>whether there's something dubious about the standard
>>association of "beautiful" and "woman". This is a subject
>>that's been talked to death, and yet has not died, and I've
>>no sword to do the job myself.
>
>
> Maybe so. But where I come from, "beauty" is a seriously deprecated
> concept. Aesthetics as a discipline has been trounced by "philosophy of
> art". Maybe it's about time people started talking *seriously* about
> beauty again.
>
> Sure there's something *dubious* about the standard association, but
> obviously there's something to it, too. You know, philosophy only gets
> kicked in the balls when it sets itself up as the dictator of experience.
> If you take up as an ideological position that everything is socially
> constructed or whatever, and thence proclaim that the evil of killing
> babies or the beauty of women is *only a social construction* (just like
> everything else), then human experience is going to kick you in the balls.
> (Maybe klaatu will kick you in the balls if you proclaim his gas station
> girl's beauty is only a social construction.)
Hey! No way! Um I couldn't tell you if she was actually "beautiful" because
most of her face was covered in sunglasses. No immense glaring deformity,
blemishes, or anything. However, and of course this is an entirely personal
aesthetic, she was exactly to _my_ aesthetic standards. Now I shall spare
you the waxing eloquent on how she seemed (to me) to have the sort of figure
that comes from a combination of good breeding and taking care of yourself,
without that stringy look one sometimes sees on models and work-out addicts.
Padding in all of the places I like to see padding etc. Others would of
course have ideas about where they'd have preferred the padding, more or
less of it, etc.
Now of course as you know, for many years now I have just tended to look
away, not so much since it's impolite to stare as much as because if I start
staring I'll perhaps never stop, or could go on and on on UseNet about it
for months.
But the thing is, you could possibly use me as a case in point that perhaps
a woman's beauty isn't at all a social construction, but a personal
aesthetic, whether chosen or not. Sure, I watch TV and you might suggest
that inevitably I am thus programmed to accept as the standard of beauty the
standards presented to me by network television. But my standard isn't
exactly what's presented on TV. Sure, there are some examples of pretty darn
close to my aesthetic to be seen on TV, but I've heard bunches of folks
going drool drool over women that only turn my lust-o-meter dial slightly to
the right of "tepid". So maybe _they_ are all being programmed in their
sensibilities by the mass media, but maybe I'm not. Let's just say that back
when I used to subscribe to Playboy, maybe one gal out of 20 or so was close
to cranking all of my knobs completely clockwise... and this from a
publication generally known for having really pretty good taste in picking
the exceptional out of the crowds of the merely marvelous.
So, no, my sense of beauty isn't a social construction. Does my sense of
beauty match that of society? Now and then. Does society's sense of beauty
match klaatu's sense of beauty? IMNSHO, "on a lucky day". Does this mean I'm
picky? Not really. It's just that I make up my own mind about what attracts
me. If society and I agree on what's attractive, it's a fluke, not
causality, though what I consider "beautiful" society is likely to consider
attractive, and what society considers "beautiful" I am likely to consider
attractive. YMMV.
Joseph Brenner
> Joseph Brenner <do...@kzsu.stanford.edu> wrote:
>
> > http://www.kunstler.com/mags_jacobs1.htm
>
> "Local Citizens For Wal-Mart" is pretty appalling, but I can't find a
> single thing referring to it (or various possible variations) on google,
> other than this interview.
Maybe it's just that the idea died pretty quickly, but I
should point out that Kunstler is not exactly a detail-man.
In fact, I think it's fascinating that he doesn't seem to be
able to write three pages straight without hitting something
seriously questionable (even though I almost always agree
with the general direction he's arguing).
I've been reading "Home from Nowhere" lately (largely
because I thought it would be funny to be reading it while
hanging around at Burning Man), and in the beginning of
Chapter 4 "Charm", he actually tries to put the concept
of "charm" on a physical basis:
Nature appears to consist of things, of stuff we
call matter, but more correctly may be said to
consist of patterns of energy. The patterns are
bound atomically by charm and animated by
gravity, which is charm at a higher order of
magnitude. At the quantum level nature
miraculously springs to being as a set of mere
probabilities, and upward from there elaborates
itself into evermore complex intersections, or
relationships of relationships. It is in the
nature of nature to be charming and therefore
beautiful. The many patterns of nature are
charming at all their levels of intersection.
Where patterns live -- and here on Earth is so
far the only known dwelling place of living
patterns, which we call biological organisms --
they reach out tropistically, ever-evolving, to
become something else, arguable something higher
and better.
In terms of human behavior and
self-consciousness, charm is the quality of
*inviting* us to participate in another pattern
...
Is there any need to list all of the stupid things about
that one paragraph? It's probably more physically correct
to talk about patterns of mass-energy, and there's no
fundamental advantage to using units of mass or energy.
There's no connection between the use of the term "charm" in
quark theory, and it's use in esthetics. If you think
organisms are trying to evolve into something "higher and
better", you don't understand evolution very well.
The absolute worst thing about it, though, is that there's
no point to it at all: you could drop it from the book and
just begin with that assertion about charm inviting
participation.
And the paragraph that comes *before* that paragraph is an
amazing example of over-writing:
... why does the experience of standing in the
street of a suburban housing subdivision, or in
the parking lot of a shopping mall, or beneath the
glass-box skyscrapers in downtown Minneapolis or
Austin, or under the elevated freeway in Seattle,
fill a healthy, normal person with the very primal
dread of everlasting darkness?
Who is this written for? I think it's ridiculous (albeit
PFG), and *I'm on his side*. Who is supposed to be
impressed with this stuff?
> Local Citizens Against Wal-Mart, of course, happens all over the place,
> and I think it's an interesting phenomenon, kind of like Odysseus having
> himself bound to the mast--they'd better prevent Wal-Mart from coming in
> the first place, because once it comes, nobody will be able to stop
> themselves from shopping there.
Yeah, there is at the very least a paradox here... if people
really hate big boxes, then people wouldn't go there, and we
wouldn't have big boxes, right? Maybe it's just that in
practice the big boxes suck up the clueless fraction of the
populace, and the real places have trouble surviving without
the subsidy of the clueless. So then we're into a classic
battle of elitism vs. the regular folks, right? Or possibly
it's the established businesses using political means to
suppress competition from the more efficient big boxes?
But really, a lot of the regular folks don't seem to like
living in a big box world either... they go to them because
they're cheap and predictable, but would like them to
disappear when not needed (or maybe they don't get the
concept that their actions have consequences?).
"Odysseus bound to the mast" isn't a bad metaphor.
> (Has any Wal-Mart ever gone out of business?)
I dunno. I have seen big chains fail when placed in
particularly stupid locations (the Gap on St. Marks Place in
New York, a Taco Bell in the Mission in San Francisco). On
the other hand, they often seem to struggle along for
decades in equivalent places (e.g. The Gap on Haight Street
in SF).
Joseph Brenner
Matthew King <mak...@crushed.velvet.net> writes:
> Joseph Brenner <do...@kzsu.stanford.edu> wrote:
>
> > If you're going to write a short story about the nature of
> > beauty, "boy must decide which girl is really beautiful" is
> > pretty obviously a solid move.
>
> > If you want to argue that it shouldn't be that way, well
> > maybe not, but my current policy is to avoid discussing
> > whether there's something dubious about the standard
> > association of "beautiful" and "woman". This is a subject
> > that's been talked to death, and yet has not died, and I've
> > no sword to do the job myself.
>
> Maybe so. But where I come from, "beauty" is a seriously deprecated
> concept. Aesthetics as a discipline has been trounced by "philosophy of
> art".
So you're used to associating women with art?
> Maybe it's about time people started talking *seriously* about
> beauty again.
I thought you were talking about philosphers.
> Sure there's something *dubious* about the standard association, but
> obviously there's something to it, too. You know, philosophy only gets
> kicked in the balls when it sets itself up as the dictator of experience.
> If you take up as an ideological position that everything is socially
> constructed or whatever, and thence proclaim that the evil of killing
> babies or the beauty of women is *only a social construction* (just like
> everything else), then human experience is going to kick you in the balls.
Yes, well there are reasons I was vauge about it, and
avoiding addressing the issue.
> There's *something* to it, but what? What is it in the experience of the
> (potential) beloved that is beauty? (You could start with the _Phaedrus_.)
Some velvet morning, when I'm straight
I'm gonna open up your gate
Just as an aside, I managed to mis-read and mis-remember
"Phaedrus" in nearly every way possible. I thought "Hm,
Plato dialog", and wandered away. I picked up the usual
Mentor paperback volume of Plato thinking something like
"Phadra", and started flipping through the Phaedo on the
off-chance that it was an alternate name (though I didn't
think that likely). I also picked up my volume of Racine,
on the off chance that you were referring to the play
"Phaedra" (though I didn't think that was likely, either).
(The "logic" in the "Phaedo", by the way, strikes me as a
bad joke... all things must be created from their
opposites, just as the larger must have come from the
smaller, so the living must have come from the dead, and
vice-versa, hence dead souls have an independant existance
in Hades, where they lead a purely mental existance
undistracted by the flesh, where they can focus on
philosphical concerns like "Damn, I wish I had a mocha
right now." )
> I said:
> >> Maybe it's not Sturgeon's fault it's clicheed *now*. But
> >> look, it's been said that what Nietzsche wanted more than
> >> anything was to be unique, not just backward, but forward,
> >> too--to be unrepeatable.
>
> > If you're suggesting that for art to be valuable, it
> > must be valuable eternally, for all epochs, well that's a
> > formula for artist's blocks if ever I've heard one.
>
> To mark a turn in history, to be epoch-creating: yes, not to be
> *valuable*, but certainly to be *great*. To be great is to be something
> that everyone ought to acknowledge. Everyone ought to acknowledge Nabakov.
> Sturgeon, well, if you like that sort of thing....
But (a) this is an absurdly high standard and (b) any artists
who begins entertaining the day dream that they might meet
that standard should knock it off and get back to work.
("Never try to be great, just play the scene.")
I think what's really going on here is you want to judge the
story in your own context, rather than the author's original
context. If so, that's fine by me, were I in that position I
would just say "this may be of historical interest, but it's
not so interesting to me personally". There isn't any need
to elevate that mismatch to a grand criticism.
> American Beauty is one of those movies that I've only seen once and really
> ought to see again, since I've thought about it and seen a lot of
> discussion of it since I saw it and I wonder how well it all stands up.
> (Fight Club is another one.) The dope dealer kid is an interesting figure,
> anyway. Someone with much more important things to do with his time once
> sent me a long e-mail explaining why the kid is an Epicurean and not a
> Stoic.
I would've thought that was obvious, but I guess I'm lucky
to be unburdened with a detailed understanding of the
subject.
> I've always liked the idea that what the movie means to show is that the
> kid is absolutely wrong, that thinking that a plastic bag--an *empty*
> *shopping* bag, a *garbage* bag--is beautiful, just as beautiful as
> anything else, is the very abyss of aesthetic bankruptcy. The makers of
> the film might mean no such thing, but I appreciate that the film at least
> leaves room for the ambiguity (or at least it does in my memory).
I would need to check, but I think the closing narration
probably chokes off any alternative interpretations.
But to take that line: the point you're making is then
that if you can see beauty in anything than it becomes
impossible to distinguish between the beautiful and the
ugly, and the concept loses it's force? The suggestion
is that there needs to be an esthetic standard
(absolute? relative?), a way of evaluating things in
order to choose The Good, or else you're led into some
sort of vapid "It's all good, man" philosophy (which is
a definite invitation to being kicked in the balls).
I think there are a few ways out of that one... taking the
movie on it's own terms, the boy-hero doesn't actually seem
to think that *everything* is beautiful, he is in fact
willing to call the teen-model character "ugly". So he just
has a (relatively) unconventional sense of what's beautiful.
Myself, I would *guess* that there are different things being
conflated under the one tag of "beauty". It wouldn't be
terribly hard to come up with some multiple definitions of
beauty, such that it's possible to claim that "everything
is beautiful" and still hate the wallpaper, and realize that
you'd be better off with a coat of paint.
But maybe the definition game is an ugly a solution.
> > If you're going to start taking Leonard Cohen's name in
> > vain, then we have even bigger problems here than I thought.
>
> Heh, well. Leonard Cohen wouldn't be quite so charming if he hadn't made a
> record as truly lousy as Death of a Ladies' Man, would he?
You don't like it, blame it on Phil Spector, that was
Cohen's excuse. "If the world hates it, it's not my
fault. If the world loves it, I want part credit."
> > They like actresses with the brown spots neatly painted over
> > to the point where they're all about as distinctive as the
> > shades of white people use on kitchen ceilings.
>
> > They like to listen to relentlessly up-beat, major chord,
> > happy-happy music so that the soundtracks of their lives
> > sound like a beer commercial.
>
> Yeah, well, maybe uniqueness is an overrated value? ;)
>
> Anyway, I don't know why people get so hyped up about what *they* think.
> *They* think it's really exciting that Madonna kissed Britney. Well,
> whoop-dee-doodle.
Madonna kissed Britney?!!!
> *They* are dumb.
Could be, but they're also a big part of the intended audience
of "American Beauty", not to mention "To Here and the Easel".
Pinning down exactly *how* that they're dumb, and what it
is they need to learn, and how it can be taught to them;
that's the real game.
> > And rhetorical balance requires that I now add a third
> > point, probably something about suburban lawns
>
> I think Brad has some nice spots *on* his lawn, but I think, overall, I
> have a better lawn.
But I bet both of your lawns lose out in comparison to a
forest meadow.
There's something really warped about a need for order that
requires destroying the beautiful.
> > There's a difference between reality and realism.
>
> > Unlike reality, fiction has to worry about being
> > plausible.
>
> Yeah, but you know, I don't think fiction has to worry so much about the
> plausibility of events as the plausibility of human responses to them. An
> example from Sturgeon: he has people *grinning* all the time, at the
> dumbest times. Like in "There is No Defense", when the guy beats on the
> pacifist to get him to admit that you have to defend yourself sometimes,
> and then grins when he's won the point. You don't *grin* there; you're in
> the middle of saving the solar system!
Maybe he was grinning grimly. I don't remember the story
off-hand. (Myself, I suspect it would take more than a war to
completely eliminate my tendency toward irritating smirking.)
(Aside: there's a line in Delany's "Tides of Lust" that
goes something like "And then he grinned, because black
guys don't smile in this story.")
Sturgeon claimed that his method of writing was to write for
one single person, and keep that person's face in mind while
working, imagining their reactions to what he was writing.
(Maybe he had some friends who grin at weird moments.)
> There's something weird about being back here
> today--I told someone it feels kind of like Groundhog
> Day. Now there's a piece of fiction that doesn't aim
> anywhere near plausibility of events, but it's really
> damned good on the plausibility of human response.
Exploring the implications of one single fantastic
premise is the classic formula for SF &/or F.
"Groundhog Day" is a relatively awkward ground for me to
argue on, but as I remember it there aren't any gross
violations of The Rules (except that I think it had something
of a Deus Ex Machina happy ending, right?). In any case, one
form of the rule is "the hero must extricate himself by his
own efforts", which is pretty much what happens in "Groundhog
Day". This isn't necessarily a rule against "coincidence",
it's a rule against lucking out. But bad luck is still
allowed. Lightening may strike, but it must not strike the
villain.
Nightfall
"Joseph Brenner" ...
>
> Matthew King <mak...@crushed.velvet.net> writes:
>
> > Joseph Brenner <do...@kzsu.stanford.edu> wrote:
> >
> > > If you're going to write a short story about the nature of
> > > beauty, "boy must decide which girl is really beautiful" is
> > > pretty obviously a solid move.
> >
> > Maybe so. But where I come from, "beauty" is a seriously deprecated
> > concept. Aesthetics as a discipline has been trounced by "philosophy of
> > art".
I have two different thoughts about this. On the one hand, art doesn't need
to be beautiful to be good art. Of course, if you start asking me to define
good art, my head will ache, so I'm hoping you'll slide past that one.
Suffice to say I know it (IMNSHO, of course) when I see it, and usually can
even point out to my companions what elements bring me to that conclusion.
I just can't seem to do it here and now. I need a visual cue, or something.
> > Maybe it's about time people started talking *seriously* about
> > beauty again.
This is my other thought. A lot of worthless crap has been passed off as
art (the Hilton sisters come to mind... oh wait, that's fame, not art) that
has no original artistic merit, nor does it have any beauty. It's just crap
thrown on a wall (anyone here read 'Get Fuzzy' when Bucky was in his
artiste phase?) and hoping to make a quick buck, or at least get the
'artist' laid once or twice.
'Own nothing you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.' Or
something like that. I love that thought. Things are not always required to
be both. Beauty bears a certain worth, in and of itself.
> > American Beauty is one of those movies that I've only seen once and
really
> > ought to see again, since I've thought about it and seen a lot of
> > discussion of it since I saw it and I wonder how well it all stands up.
I agree. I've very much been wanting to see it again. Especially as the
first time we saw it, we were 10 minutes late to the theater, so didn't
know how the movie ended until it actually did. We were a little shocked,
to say the least.
> > I've always liked the idea that what the movie means to show is that
the
> > kid is absolutely wrong, that thinking that a plastic bag--an *empty*
> > *shopping* bag, a *garbage* bag--is beautiful, just as beautiful as
> > anything else, is the very abyss of aesthetic bankruptcy. The makers of
> > the film might mean no such thing, but I appreciate that the film at
least
> > leaves room for the ambiguity (or at least it does in my memory).
>
> But to take that line: the point you're making is then
> that if you can see beauty in anything than it becomes
> impossible to distinguish between the beautiful and the
> ugly, and the concept loses it's force? The suggestion
> is that there needs to be an esthetic standard
> (absolute? relative?), a way of evaluating things in
> order to choose The Good, or else you're led into some
> sort of vapid "It's all good, man" philosophy (which is
> a definite invitation to being kicked in the balls).
I used to (and still do, when I have the time and the idle thought to
remember) look at people while I'm driving, and try to picture them the way
someone who loved them without reserve would. Your perception changes, you
know - often what was most jarring becomes endearing and sweet to you, if
you love someone. Generally speaking, I try to find the people I would
normally find unattractive; the ones you tend to look away from before they
can turn and see you staring - toothless, snarly, nicotine-stained,
balding, fat. After all, it's not hard to find beauty in someone
attractive, but in people that repel you for whatever reason, it's more of
a challenge. I find that when I can shift my perception, they usually do
become attractive to me - some element of them, at least - and I find yself
wondering if they have anyone that really _does_ feel that way about them.
I've been told it's an odd habit, but I prefer to believe that everyone has
some beauty in them, somewhere. People have ugly in them, too - all people.
That's usually easy to see, though, and it doesn't make me feel good
inside, so I don't bother. On an individual basis, I'm really quite
sentimental and optimistic. Viewing the human race in general, though, I'm
definitely antisocial and gloomy. I can't figure out how to fix our
problems without eliminating at least 60% of the population. Of course, I'd
probably end up in the 60%. Oh well, lucky for me no one's voted me into
despotic power yet.
> Myself, I would *guess* that there are different things being
> conflated under the one tag of "beauty". It wouldn't be
> terribly hard to come up with some multiple definitions of
> beauty, such that it's possible to claim that "everything
> is beautiful" and still hate the wallpaper, and realize that
> you'd be better off with a coat of paint.
>
> But maybe the definition game is an ugly a solution.
Definitions are hard, as there are exceptions to every rule, which require
handlers, and so forth. Opinions work better, because no one can take them
away, or even really argue them.
> > > And rhetorical balance requires that I now add a third
> > > point, probably something about suburban lawns
> >
> > I think Brad has some nice spots *on* his lawn, but I think, overall, I
> > have a better lawn.
>
> But I bet both of your lawns lose out in comparison to a
> forest meadow.
>
> There's something really warped about a need for order that
> requires destroying the beautiful.
God yes. But most people need their daily dose of beauty in neatly
contained and ordered packages. Does that mean that in it's natural state
it's scary or just too big for their brains?
Nightfall
Tonight's postings are brought to you by white merlot: long answers to
short questions. Get used to it.
Dag
news:aWz8b.433893$uu5.77639@sccrnsc04:
> <snipped here and there, but I think I've kept the thoughts in order>
>
> "Joseph Brenner" ...
>> > Maybe so. But where I come from, "beauty" is a seriously deprecated
>> > concept. Aesthetics as a discipline has been trounced by
>> > "philosophy of art".
>
> I have two different thoughts about this. On the one hand, art doesn't
> need to be beautiful to be good art.
With that I'll agree, but does art have to be aesthetic to be good art?
> Suffice to say I know it (IMNSHO, of course) when I see it,
> and usually can even point out to my companions what elements bring me
> to that conclusion.
Also one might not appreciate something on the first viewing oo often one
won't appreciate something until someone explains what there is to
appreciate. Which leads to another question. Does the fact that one
Isn't able to appreciate something right away make it better or worse
art.
>> > Maybe it's about time people started talking *seriously* about
>> > beauty again.
>
> This is my other thought. A lot of worthless crap has been passed off
> as art.
Not that I disagree with this sentiment, but we're now back at the value
and definition of art (and definition of worthless crap at that).
Assume someone created something in 10 minutes while drunk, purely to
make a buck. Now assume someone else sees true artistic and aesthetic
value in it and feels happy to have it hanging on their livingroom wall,
as a thing of beauty and art. Is it worthless crap or is it art? Isn't
it possible to accedently create art and not recognise the value of that
which you have created.
Dag
Peter H. Coffin
> "Nightfall" <nigh...@spamthirteen74.com> wrote in
> news:aWz8b.433893$uu5.77639@sccrnsc04:
>
>> need to be beautiful to be good art.
>
> With that I'll agree, but does art have to be aesthetic to be good art?
I don't think so. I think it DOES have to say something though.
Something can be aesthetically appealing or beautiful without being art.
Then again, it's entirely possible that we're all expressing the same
factor without the same vocabulary.
--
"If sharing a thing in no way diminishes it, it is not rightly owned if it is
not shared." -St. Augustine
Nightfall
> "Nightfall" <nigh...@spamthirteen74.com> wrote:
>
> > <snipped here and there, but I think I've kept the thoughts in order>
> >
> > "Joseph Brenner" ...
>
> >> > Maybe so. But where I come from, "beauty" is a seriously deprecated
> >> > concept. Aesthetics as a discipline has been trounced by
> >> > "philosophy of art".
> >
> > I have two different thoughts about this. On the one hand, art doesn't
> > need to be beautiful to be good art.
>
> With that I'll agree, but does art have to be aesthetic to be good art?
According to my dictionary, aesthetic references beauty and good taste.
This seems to me to be turning into circular logic.
> > Suffice to say I know it (IMNSHO, of course) when I see it,
> > and usually can even point out to my companions what elements bring me
> > to that conclusion.
>
> Also one might not appreciate something on the first viewing oo often one
> won't appreciate something until someone explains what there is to
> appreciate. Which leads to another question. Does the fact that one
> Isn't able to appreciate something right away make it better or worse
> art.
Neither. Art is, ultimately, in the eye of the beholder. Technical skill
can be debated, but that is merely the process used to create art.
Something can be high art to you at one point, and merely decoration at
another. Witness the posters on my prepubescent bedroom walls. They were
art then - I would definitely not consider them so today.
> >> > Maybe it's about time people started talking *seriously* about
> >> > beauty again.
> >
> > This is my other thought. A lot of worthless crap has been passed off
> > as art.
>
> Not that I disagree with this sentiment, but we're now back at the value
> and definition of art (and definition of worthless crap at that).
Which is my point. I don't see how art can be defined any more concretely
than beauty. They are perception-based, not flat value-scaled. Peopl who
discuss (critique, whatever) art do so by agreeing on a whole set of
opinions and meanings, but that doesn't necessarily mean that those
opinions/meanings have more worth or truth than yours or mine.
> Assume someone created something in 10 minutes while drunk, purely to
> make a buck. Now assume someone else sees true artistic and aesthetic
> value in it and feels happy to have it hanging on their livingroom wall,
> as a thing of beauty and art. Is it worthless crap or is it art? Isn't
> it possible to accedently create art and not recognise the value of that
> which you have created.
It can be art, but I don't know that I'd consider the creator as an artist,
other than coincidentally. I think that an artist is someone who can tap
into himself repeatedly. If every time sie got drunk, something of 'true
artistic and aesthetic value' were created, I'd be liable to consider them
as such, even if it wasn't by their design or intent. On the other hand, if
it's a one-time fluke, whether sober or drunk, the result may be art, but
it's just lucky happenstance.
Worthless crap is, for example, the stuff that everyone in the gallery
secretly hates, but they all sit around and praise it's complexity because
they don't want to be the first one to tell the Emperor he's nekkid.
Nightfall
Jennie
> On Sat, 13 Sep 2003 13:38:28 GMT, Dag wrote:
>> With that I'll agree, but does art have to be aesthetic to be good art?
> I don't think so. I think it DOES have to say something though.
> Something can be aesthetically appealing or beautiful without being art.
I agree. Sometimes beauty can itself make a statement because
of the surrounding context, as in the work of Leni Riefenstahl, but a
thing that is _only_ beautiful, with no greater depth, isn't art, just
decoration. Natural objects can be decorative in the same way. Of course,
this could bring us on to 'found art', but that's something I'll only pay
money for if it involves the juxtaposition of several objects to
(accidentally) imply an idea. Natural things can appear to have something
to say without being art, given that there was no artifice involved in
their creation. This is what draws people to admire such phenomena as the
emerald iceburgs of the Antarctic and the famous ancient face-like pebble.
Jennie
--
Jennie Kermode jen...@innocent.com
http://www.triffid.demon.co.uk/jennie
Matthew King
> On Sat, 13 Sep 2003 13:38:28 GMT, Dag wrote:
>> "Nightfall" <nigh...@spamthirteen74.com> wrote in
>> news:aWz8b.433893$uu5.77639@sccrnsc04:
>>
>>> I have two different thoughts about this. On the one hand, art doesn't
>>> need to be beautiful to be good art.
>>
>> With that I'll agree, but does art have to be aesthetic to be good art?
> I don't think so. I think it DOES have to say something though.
> Something can be aesthetically appealing or beautiful without being art.
> Then again, it's entirely possible that we're all expressing the same
> factor without the same vocabulary.
Yeah. I should give some context for the statement that aesthetics has
been replaced by philosophy of art in academic philosophy: "aesthetics" is
traditionally the name for "the science of the beautiful"--one branch of
the traditional division of philosophy into the sciences of the true, the
beautiful, and the good (where "science" is not limited to the modern,
positivistic or technological senses of the term). Aesthetics
traditionally has not been concerned with art (much) more than with other
potential objects of beauty. They say that Kant didn't care much for art--
he was principally concerned with beauty in nature--but he wrote the
seminal work of modern aesthetics.
So, aesthetics is concerned with beauty and only derivatively with art;
the philosophy of art is concerned with art and only derivatively (if, and
frequently not, at all) with beauty.
Matthew
Matthew-King---Toronto---Canada---Have-you-come-here-to-play-Jesus-
----------------------------------to-the-lepers-in-your-head?--U2--
Tetsab
> I think what's really going on here is you want to judge the
> story in your own context, rather than the author's original
> context. If so, that's fine by me, were I in that position I
> would just say "this may be of historical interest, but it's
> not so interesting to me personally". There isn't any need
> to elevate that mismatch to a grand criticism.
Reading this has prompted me to plumb the depths of Ancient
History and dig out again the 'Stand Up' bookworms thread.
This bit, to be exact [that's >me 'n' Joe, for the folks
just now tuning in]:
--------------
> but if there is, and that the author can show that his
> writing is more than just a Trick, then all will certainly
> be forgiven.
This seems like a deeply puzzling remark to me -- and all of
a sudden this confusion on my part sounds familiar, I think
I might get it if I re-read your older stuff looking for
other puzzling remarks... But I can't put my finger on it
now. Anyway:
Just a Trick? But what's the trick?
Maybe you mean, can he write about anything besides writing?
But how could any later work change your experience of the
work in front of you? I would think that either "Standup"
stands up or it doesn't.
A one-trick writer or not, the trick has been played, and
there it is...
--------------
The reason I want a second book from Chaim is to increase
context, and with an expansion of that I feel I could better
judge (this) earlier work.
I have little idea where to place this on the context scale
[between my own has his original context]. Indeed, if I judge
him only by his original context, then you're right, either
"Standup" stands up or it doesn't [and never let it be said
that the book didn't give me something to think about here].
[right now he's filed as typical modern, self-reflexive,
hyper-individualist fiction-non line blurrer with plenty of
brains knocking around in his head. He wrote the kind of book
I'd expect someone to write in the Nauty 90s -- the great
homeless wanderer in a mush of Tradition and The Now].
The Trick [&, finally, this is what brings this into context]
is that he doesn't write a story -- he writes His Life As A
Story [and wiggles this in your face]. He has pulled a sleight
of hand on you, replacing imagination with observation.
[I was cleaning out some old file folders a month or two ago
and I came across a sheet I was given in my College Prep (OAC
for those In the Know) Writers Class course. It's a list of
common writing failures performed by amature writers [this
list has introduced the phrase "For you *see* we all live in a
Jar of Tang" into the daily life of Matthew and I]. One of
these is titled [something to the effect of] the "Grubby writer
in small grubby apartment with writers block" story.
So at this point, a strong argument could be made that I was
just brainwashed in Highschool with the numbing chant of "You
must know the rules before you can break them" ... and hey!
Chaim you bastard! This is your first book! You haven't shown
in any way that you Know The Rules!]
*ANYWAY*
The. Point. Is.
Sturgeon is the opposite. He is the imaginative writer.
And yet in stories like 'To Here & the Easel' and 'The Perfect
Host'] he is clearly not just writing an imaginative story, he
is concerned with what he is doing as a writer -- but he's not
smashing you in the face with it and rubbing real hard [he's
not totally clear of this (he has a clear interest in what
could be poorly termed a Moral ... it's more like a Meaning)
but it is set much further in <highschool zombie> "Shooooow
Doooooon't Teeeeeeeell </highschool zombie>].
I am impressed with Sturgeon because he does things I wouldn't
think to do [write 'There is No Defence' outer space story,
along with 'Graveyard Reader' humanity study, along with the
'Shottle Bop' Twilight Zone episode].
And still, I can say of both of these authors I do want to read
more [probably even more so for Chaim... just to see what that
mind could do with the writing of a /story/].
Tetsab.
>^..^<
Joseph Brenner
> Joseph Brenner wrote:
>
> > I think what's really going on here is you want to judge the
> > story in your own context, rather than the author's original
> > context. If so, that's fine by me, were I in that position I
> > would just say "this may be of historical interest, but it's
> > not so interesting to me personally". There isn't any need
> > to elevate that mismatch to a grand criticism.
>
> Reading this has prompted me to plumb the depths of Ancient
> History and dig out again the 'Stand Up' bookworms thread.
[ Once upon a time, concerning 'Stand-Up Tragedian' by Chaim Bertman: ]
> Joe Brenner wrote:
> > Tetsab wrote:
> >
> > > but if there is, and that the author can show that his
> > > writing is more than just a Trick, then all will certainly
> > > be forgiven.
> >
> > This seems like a deeply puzzling remark to me -- and all of
> > a sudden this confusion on my part sounds familiar, I think
> > I might get it if I re-read your older stuff looking for
> > other puzzling remarks... But I can't put my finger on it
> > now. Anyway:
> >
> > Just a Trick? But what's the trick?
> >
> > Maybe you mean, can he write about anything besides writing?
> >
> > But how could any later work change your experience of the
> > work in front of you? I would think that either "Standup"
> > stands up or it doesn't.
> >
> > A one-trick writer or not, the trick has been played, and
> > there it is...
[back to the future]
> The reason I want a second book from Chaim is to increase
> context, and with an expansion of that I feel I could better
> judge (this) earlier work.
This still seems like a fairly odd requirement, but I can think
of distant analogies that make some sense to me... recently I
was thinking about the standard jazz improv trick of repeating a
mistake to make it become part of the melody retroactively: the
meaning of every given note is not just determined by the
context provided by the previous notes, but also the future
notes.
> I have little idea where to place this on the context scale
> [between my own and his original context]. Indeed, if I judge
> him only by his original context, then you're right, either
> "Standup" stands up or it doesn't [and never let it be said
> that the book didn't give me something to think about here].
>
> [right now he's filed as typical modern, self-reflexive,
> hyper-individualist fiction-non line blurrer with plenty of
> brains knocking around in his head. He wrote the kind of book
> I'd expect someone to write in the Nauty 90s -- the great
> homeless wanderer in a mush of Tradition and The Now].
>
> The Trick [&, finally, this is what brings this into context]
> is that he doesn't write a story -- he writes His Life As A
> Story [and wiggles this in your face]. He has pulled a sleight
> of hand on you, replacing imagination with observation.
As tricks go, that one's not that unusual. Kerouac made a
career out of doing that, and he wasn't the first by any means.
If anything I would suspect that historically, autobiography
preceeded fiction... certainly the standard trick used to be
to pretend that you were writing autobiography even when the
reader was expected to understand otherwise (e.g. Sherlock
Holmes stories, where the initial context is always Watson
scribbling remarks in retrospect).
> [I was cleaning out some old file folders a month or two ago
> and I came across a sheet I was given in my College Prep (OAC
> for those In the Know) Writers Class course. It's a list of
> common writing failures performed by amature writers [this
> list has introduced the phrase "For you *see* we all live in a
> Jar of Tang"
Yes, exactly!!! Oh, the orangeness of it all!
> into the daily life of Matthew and I]. One of
> these is titled [something to the effect of] the "Grubby writer
> in small grubby apartment with writers block" story.
Ah yes. I think I've heard this under a different name (but
I can't remember what): the tendency for the author's present
circumstances to leak into the story. Hence you get
character's constantly drinking coffee and lighting
cigarettes. [1]
But then there's another piece of standard advice: "Write
what you know." Maybe mastering the Struggling Writer
narrative is a necessary right-of-passage.
(By the way. Given the two principles "write what you know"
and "don't write about being a writer", there's a fairly
obvious logical conclusion: Don't be a writer. Or at least
not a professional writer.)
There's another way of looking at all these advice lists. Any
time you lay down a rule, someone is going to think it's cute to
try and break it, so you might as well think of them as writing
assignments. After all, if you really want to sour someone on
something, you should just make them them do it in school. "All
right class, this week's assignment is to write the 'Adam and Eve
in the Radioactive Ruins of Cleveland' story... next week we will
do the 'Astronaut Struggling to Escape Capsule Turns out to be
Baby Struggling from Womb' narrative."
> So at this point, a strong argument could be made that I was
> just brainwashed in Highschool with the numbing chant of "You
> must know the rules before you can break them" ... and hey!
> Chaim you bastard! This is your first book! You haven't shown
> in any way that you Know The Rules!]
Okay. So the way I would put it is not that you can't evaluate
"Stand-Up Tragedian" without more context, but that you still
don't know what to make of Chaim Bertman himself, which is maybe
a different issue (albeit blurred by his pretense that he's
offering his life up in "Stand-Up").
(Do you *really* need to know the rules before you can break them?
Did Einsteurzende Neubauten need percussion lessons before they
could start banging on scrap metal effectively?)
> *ANYWAY*
>
> The. Point. Is.
>
> Sturgeon is the opposite. He is the imaginative writer.
>
> And yet in stories like 'To Here & the Easel' and 'The Perfect
> Host'] he is clearly not just writing an imaginative story, he
> is concerned with what he is doing as a writer -- but he's not
> smashing you in the face with it and rubbing real hard [he's
> not totally clear of this (he has a clear interest in what
> could be poorly termed a Moral ... it's more like a Meaning)
> but it is set much further in <highschool zombie> "Shooooow
> Doooooon't Teeeeeeeell </highschool zombie>].
The "show don't tell" bit is a funny one... for one thing, it's
in clear opposition to parsimony. If you've got something you
want to say, shouldn't you usually say it as simply and directly
as possible? (I suspect that in practice what it's really an
admonition against saying anything. Uh oh, straight-forward
didactic intent! Bad, bad, bad. Where's your ironic shield?
Your pages of existential description? Your wallowing in
free-floating guilt? You'll never get a job as a creative
writing teacher *that* way.)
I can't say it would've occured to me to compare Sturgeon and
Bertman, but okay... is it interesting that Chaim Bertman
mentioned in passing that he had an interest in writing
philosophic science fiction at one point? He wanted to do a series
about a space man lugging around the Talmud with him.
> I am impressed with Sturgeon because he does things I wouldn't
> think to do [write 'There is No Defence' outer space story,
> along with 'Graveyard Reader' humanity study, along with the
> 'Shottle Bop' Twilight Zone episode].
You guys have your Sturgeon fresher in mind than I do at this
point... but if I were going to do a thumbnail rave about what's
cool about Sturgeon, I guess I would say that it's a combination
of two things: (1) he could really write well on all levels,
turning out well-crafted, stylish sentences that evoke living
characters; (2) he had things that he wanted to say about life
and how to live it, and really believed that fiction, even
(especially?) fantastic fiction, was a valid medium to say it
with.
And if I've got any trepidation about Sturgeon at this point,
it's a fear that a lot of what he was saying might strike me as
kind of earnestly adolescent in retrospect... (like say the
story "A Touch of Strange". I have a fear of re-reading that
one). But overall, when I do go back to his stuff, I think
Sturgeon holds up pretty well. And if you want to talk
historical context, I have a strong feeling that Sturgeon, like
a lot of Science Fiction writer's from that era, was one of the
secret masters of reality: a man whose influence far outstrips
his reputation. For better or worse, books like "More Than
Human" were probably one of the things that helped create The
Sixties.
[1] This is a passage from near the end of an early Leslie
Charteris novel "Daredevil" (1929):
He head still throbbed painfully from the concussion
of the Piccadilly Circus explosion, but his mind had
taken unto itself a new lease of energy. Everything
had clarified suddenly, partly through the stimulus
of those four photographs, partly because excessive
weariness was already entering upon a reaction --
that reaction which takes one to a quality
approaching brilliance, when the whole body has
become so tired that there are no restraints whatever
upon the heights which may be attained by the
feverishly soaring brain.
p. 190
This sounds an awful lot to me like the author describing his own
state of mind, typing with giddy speed as the deadline nears.
("He head" obviously should be "His head", but that's not my
mistake. It is, as they say, "[sic]".)
Joseph Brenner
> Joseph Brenner <do...@kzsu.stanford.edu> wrote:
>
> > This is all a little complicated by the fact that Giles appears
> > to be a representational painter, the last of them, perhaps
> > save only Norman Rockwell. For us, the idea that a great
> > painter could have visceral popular appeal seems weird.
>
> I happened to step on Alex Colville's star on Canada's Walk of Fame last
> week, and I said to Tetsab, hey, there's a painter for Brenner!
By the way... did I give the impression that I was down on
"modern" art? As far as I'm concerned Robert Rauschenberg
and Windor McKay were both pretty brilliant.
> Colville is a current representational painter with at least enough
> popular appear to get a star on a Walk of Fame, and who is a held in a lot
> higher regard by the critics than Rockwell
My understanding is that Rockwell was in his critical-reevaluation phase, as
you might expect. Saw a print of one of his paintings in the New York Times
a while back that I thought was genuinely brilliant. It was a full-frontal
view of a Jackson Pollock painting hanging in a museum, with a few people
standing in front of it, looking up at it (but not doing anything as obvious
as scraching their heads). It was an absolutely perfect, photo-realistic
representation of an abstract splatter art painting... there's a kind of
one-ups-manship about that that I thought was tremendously funny.
> (or, to take a current Canadian example, Trisha Romance--has anyone in the
> States heard of Trisha Romance? She paints sentimental pictures of
> glowing houses. Various members of my family love them. Or, to take a
> current Canadian example who is less of a complete critical joke, Robert
> Bateman, who paints photographic pictures of wildlife which I actually
> quite admire, whether or not they're all that wonderful as Art.)
Well, the names are all noted, though I can't say I'm up on any of 'em.
> > (Vonnegut had issues on this subject: a genre author with no
> > genre loyalty whatsoever, who had no problem with shafting his
> > roots... sniping at Theodore Sturgeon rather than a genuine
> > hack writer, that shows some weird contempt or envy...)
>
> Another thing I happened across last week, when I ducked into a library to
> cool off: a quote proclaiming Sturgeon "a master storyteller certain to
> fascinate", on the covers of the Vintage editions of Sturgeon's books,
> from Vonnegut.
Maybe Vonnegut has calmed down a bit in his old age. Once upon a time
he was doing this "what me, a science fiction writer?" jive. But
that was before people like Asimov, Heinlein and Herbert started blowing
holes through the best seller list.
> (Apparently there are no copies of _Some of Your Blood_ in
> the Toronto public library system.)
None dare call it conspiracy.
(It's entirely possible that the book was censored/repressed though
I would doubt it was done in any systematic. No one has ever
seemed to know quite what to make of it. Not radical enough to
become a cause celebre, and yet not exactly Normal, either. It's
the kind of thing that slips through the cracks.)
> I always thought Trout was a tribute. Ever read _Venus on a Half-Shell_?
> Just struck me recently how odd it is that someone wrote some books as a
> fictional author who was based on (inspired by, whatever) an actual
> author.
Yes, I've read it, and thought it was pretty bad, and not
bad enough to be good, either. You do understand it was
written by Philip Jose Farmer? He did it with Vonnegut's
permission, though as I understand it that was later
regretted... no one can shake the idea that Vonnegut wrote
the book.
> > Okay. "Skills of Xanadu"... that story doesn't give you the
> > creeps? It reeks of hippie-fascism. The main character is
> > annoying and unsympathetic, so you're supposed to feel like
> > it's a *happy ending* when they trick him into joining their
> > telepatic, communal group-mind paradise. It's like the idea
> > that if only you could spike the Republican punch bowl with
> > acid, all our problems would be solved.
>
> Hum. I don't know if that's the effect Sturgeon was aiming at--seems to me
> you're probably more misanthropic than he is. Nevertheless, I take your
> point.
Certainly it's not what he was aiming at with that story...
But Sturgeon is one of the people *responsible* for the sixties
mind-set in my opinion (as I just put it elsewhere one of "The
Secret Masters of Reality")... the unintended effects of ideas he
was pushing are relevant.
He also wrote a short novel (usually titled "The Cosmic Rape")
that's evidentally more on a Borg theme. It would be interesting
to to do a compare and contrast.
> I used to have an edition of _The Fountainhead_ with a blurb on the back
> extolling Ayn Rand as the most important woman "novelist of ideas" of our
> time, or something like that.
Ayn Rand really *is* one of the greatest authors of "novels
of ideas" of the century. The other novelists weren't trying.
> It's funny how naturally I read that as a compliment then,
> considering how suspicious I am of the idea now. Once upon
> a time I heard about this story by Ursula LeGuin, about a
> utopian society that sustains its extraordinary well-being
> by allowing a child to be tortured. I loved the idea, so
> "The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas" went on my
> must-read list. Eventually I found it and read it and
> discovered that the story in its execution really adds
> very little to the idea.
Well, "Omelas" may not have a lot of ideas going for it, but
at least it's brief. To me the notable thing about it is
the continual finger-pointing at the reader's own reactions.
"Do they seem believeable?" The point is that we have a
visceral, gut-level disbelief in the Utopian. For us
negative elements are required for a sense of reality.
> When I would teach tutorials on utilitarianism, I'd think I ought to point
> them to this story, or read them a bit of it ... but then I'd realize
> that, as an illustration of what's wrong with utilitarianism, it doesn't
> really illustrate anything. It just says it: if the greatest happiness of
> the greatest number is all that counts, then it's OK to torture an
> innocent child, if that's what it takes.
Many, many people really seem to believe this, provided the
children live far enough away, and ideally don't have the same
skin color.
> Anyway ... it seems like you'll put up with more by way of execution to
> get at the idea than I will.
Well... could be.
I think that fiction is a good way to play with ideas, to
rub your nose in the details of the way the ideas will work.
Even if the author ends up cheating and stacking the deck,
that's significant in itself (e.g. the way Rand's heroes in
"Atlas Shrugged" go through intellectual gyrations to
convince themselves that they're not indulging in "altruism"
if they care about each other).
> I said:
>
> >> (Reminds me too
> >> of something I was thinking about Eco and his Adso--you can write
> >> characters who aren't as bright as you are, but you can't write characters
> >> brighter than you. You can write stories not as bright as you, but you
> >> can't write stories brighter. Unless your white swans just fly away from
> >> you.)
>
> > Well, Sturgeon has certainly attempted to write about
> > characters brighter than he is...
By the way, the story I was trying to remember was "Maturity".
> OK, more like this: you can write a character who is more consistently
> bright than you are, but you can't write a character who's brighter than
> you are at your brightest moments, or even whose brightest moments are
> brighter than your brightest moments. Well, maybe you can do that, in the
> sense that you can have a character make a snappy off-the-cuff response
> it'd take you a week to come up with....
Well, okay, that's one gimmick you can use, a compression of
time. The genius thinks as you or I do, but does it faster.
Another is to have the character succeed at things you can only
just conceive, e.g. in "Maturity", the main character cranks out
a lot of different inventions that Sturgeon had to be able to
think of, but probably wouldn't be able to execute on his own.
And the success of the inventions is something Sturgeon can
achieve by fiat, just by saying that it was so.
(Aside: in fiction about artists, the author often describes some
of their work, and has characters rave about how great it is.
I find that if I work at imagining what the artwork would
probably really be like from the description, the character
reactions usually seem much less plausible...)
Joseph Brenner
> erithromycin <erithr...@ananzi.co.za> wrote:
> > Are they radioactive? I have never heard of Trisha Romance, and the notion
> > of glowing houses scares me.
>
> If you think that's frightening, and speaking of glowing houses, try this:
> http://www.salon.com/mwt/style/2002/03/18/kinkade_village/print.html
For decades, planners and sociologists, following
Jane Jacobs' 1961 classic "The Death and Life of
Great American Cities," have been decrying the
devastation wrought by the loss of vital urban
living centers to suburban sprawl. "The suburban
build-out of the last 50 years has been a fiasco
for our culture, because it destroyed our most
important civic communities -- it impoverished the
public realm, and in so doing, it impoverished our
public life," says James Howard Kunstler, author
of "The City in Mind."
Or alternatively, you might think of him as "The Nowhere Man",
which is what I was just calling him.
> America needs no Trisha Romance, for it already has Thomas Kinkade,
> Painter of Light (TM).
>
> Anyway, here's some crap:
> http://www.thelagallery.com/romance.html
Um... Chistmas Card art. Interesting.
> >>I always thought Trout was a tribute. Ever read _Venus on a Half-Shell_?
>
> > I can see my copy from here. According to my copy of the Illustrated
> > Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, it were Philip Jose Farmer what wrote it.
> > "Homage" is what they called it.
Yes, there you go.
> Apparently he and Vonnegut came to have a difference of
> opinion on the matter:
> http://www.pjfarmer.com/trout.htm
Of course they did. Vonnegut gave him a go-ahead, then
realized that (a) the book sucked and (b) everyone else
thought that Vonnegut wrote it.
> (You suppose that beard's real?)
Uh, no.
Joseph Brenner
"erithromycin" <erithr...@ananzi.co.za> writes:
> >If you think that's frightening, and speaking of glowing houses, try this:
> >http://www.salon.com/mwt/style/2002/03/18/kinkade_village/print.html
>
> I'm currently boycotting salon, until it's got less adverts than the Onion.
I'm actually paying for the no-advert salon subscription at
the moment, just for the sake of supporting the idea of
paying more for no-ads (I could, after all, just use
mozilla's ad-blocking features to make them vanish).
It's exceedingly difficult to think of a magazine that isn't
comprised by ad revenue (or risking being compromised, which
is much the same thing from the reader's point of view).
"Z Magazine" and "Adbusters" are the only two I can think
of. "The Whole Earth Review" and "Mad Magazine" both run
ads now.
> Or, you know, until somebody makes Arianna Huffington vanish.
Arianna Huffington raised money to do some anti-SUV ads.
She's not all bad.
Joseph Brenner
> By the way... did I give the impression that I was down on
> "modern" art? As far as I'm concerned Robert Rauschenberg
> and Windor McKay were both pretty brilliant.
Not to mention Robert McGinnis.
But I meant "Windsor McKay", of "Little Nemo in Slumberland"
fame.
erithromycin
>erithromycin writes:
>>>If you think that's frightening, and speaking of glowing houses, try
>>>this:
>>>http://www.salon.com/mwt/style/2002/03/18/kinkade_village/print.html
>>I'm currently boycotting salon, until it's got less adverts than the
>>Onion.
>I'm actually paying for the no-advert salon subscription at
>the moment, just for the sake of supporting the idea of
>paying more for no-ads (I could, after all, just use
>mozilla's ad-blocking features to make them vanish).
I do agree with the idea in principal. However, I don't have a credit card.
I'm not sure I'd want to get one until I had a whole heap of money to avoid
actually requiring the credit part, either.
>It's exceedingly difficult to think of a magazine that isn't
>comprised by ad revenue (or risking being compromised, which
>is much the same thing from the reader's point of view).
Indeed. The waning of Wired was one such waste of time. I mean, it's still
wired, but it's _very_ _very_ thin.
>"Z Magazine" and "Adbusters" are the only two I can think
>of. "The Whole Earth Review" and "Mad Magazine" both run
>ads now.
Aren't Adbusters trying to break into the lucrative sneaker market?
>>Or, you know, until somebody makes Arianna Huffington vanish.
>Arianna Huffington raised money to do some anti-SUV ads.
>She's not all bad.
Pol Pot built a mountain of skulls. I'm not saying they're analogous, but,
you know, for every silver lining there's a cloud.
--
erith - are we not goths?