Is Fantasy the opium of the ignorant and the indolent ?
Mauk
Fantasy is the opium of the ignorant and the indolent
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto
The popularity of The Lord of the Rings signifies our cultural
impoverishment
Fantasy is our fix. In the past 20 or 30 years fantasy has become the
world's most bankable form of fiction, the genre of our times --
star-warring its way through cinemas, boldly going across video
screens, building Diskworlds, colonising imaginations with all the
tenacity of the Evil Empire. Superheroes win ratings wars against real
heroes: they have "special powers". Their magic is more potent than
mere myth.
The BBC has announced a search for "Britain's Greatest Book". We can
guess the result. The public will vote for The Lord of the Rings,
which has already topped most polls and is now reaching new audiences,
impelled by the impact of the blockbuster movie series, the second
episode of which opens today in cinemas.
Yet the rise of fantasy is puzzling, even to those of us who relish
its thrills. It defies common wisdom. Truth is supposed to be
stranger, stronger than fiction, for ours is the strangest of all
possible worlds: Middle Earth seems morally simple by comparison,
while the world beyond Harry Potter's railway platform is childishly
predictable. Realism is unbeatably interesting: that is why social
observation is the foundation of all the world's best books. When
there is so much reality to go round, it is hard to understand how
audiences can fall for fantasy.
For fantasy is self-doomed to be implausible. It is hard to feel
involved when the author can whistle up a wizard to get the hero out
of a fix. Magic, like madness, is no way to contrive a denouement: in
worlds where anything can happen, the tension of the plot -- which
depends on characters trapped in the constrictions of reality --
dissolves. Art demands discipline, and there are no disciplines
tighter than those of the real world. History and myth have the best
stories and the best images: fantasy-authors ransack them to get their
ideas. Why warp myths when they are wonderful unwarped?
Fantasy-writers do not generate myths; they make cut-and-paste
confections from the myths of the world. Star Wars imagery drew on the
Ancient Maya and feudal Japan. Tolkien's world evokes the Anglo-Saxons
and the Norse, as if in a distorting mirror. J. K.Rowling flits
between classical, medieval and Hindu myths. Of course, clever
literary pirates have always plundered legends to appropriate their
power. Ovid pillaged ancient repositories for his Metamorphoses. Homer
and the Arthurian bards wrenched Bronze Age tales into works of art.
But unreconstructed myths are usually better. They spring from
collective effort, from folk memory and from a shared subconscious.
Reading them gives you satisfactions no fantasy can supply: contact
with other cultures, insights into the past. They enhance your life by
stimulating your understanding, for the arts of every civilisation are
rooted in its myths. You cannot understand Renaissance painting
without knowing the myths of Greece and Rome. You cannot fully
appreciate the stories carved on Buddhist temple façades without
perusing the Jatakas composed to honour early Boddhisatvas.
Peter Brook shunned the fakery of fantasy-pastiche to film the 100,000
verses of the Mahabharata -- the world's greatest epic, composed over
800 years, culminating more than 1,500 years ago. With a Hollywood
budget, it could barge Lord of the Rings out of the box office. One of
the best cartoon versions of a mythic story is a cheaply made
Guatemalan film of the Popol Vuh -- the magical tale of the underworld
trials and triumphs of Mayan hero-twins. The Icelandic Edda or the
tales of the Sumerian gods could be dazzlingly cinematic and more
exciting than any fantasy game. But the video-geeks, playing Harry
Potter games, are too nerdy-eyed to notice.
The current supremacy of fantasy in the cinema relies, like most
conquests, on superior technology, building the empire of special
effects. Fantasy commands the timeless appeal of nonsense: plots which
make no sense, characters bereft of conviction and events untouched by
reason spare the reader or viewer the effort to think. Indeed, if you
subject the film version of The Lord of the Rings to critical
scrutiny, you cease to enjoy it. For the intellectuals in the
audience, the only pleasure lies in observing a world created by
cannibalising exotic cultures and eluding rational limitations. A
pterodactyl joins the battlers in The Lord of the Rings: the Two
Towers. In other movies, on a single field, warriors wield flaming
swords and inter-ballistic missiles without incongruity. It increases
the spectacle. It does not, however, enhance the art.
Our fantasy fixation is worrying. Fantasy doesn't just feed on the
imagination: it drains it. Virtuality erodes reality. Students who
sweat over Elvish and Klingon will never dream in Chinese or Greek.
Kids know more about the battles of Aragorn than of Alexander, the
life of Harry Potter than the life of Harry VIII. Fantasy endangers
history, some say: realism is on the way to extinction, shrinking from
the syllabus, extruded from bookshops, de-accessioned from libraries.
Fears like these, however, misrepresent the rise of fantasy. The
demise of history and the retreat of realism are not the results of
fantasy's popularity, but its causes. Unmindful of our real roots, we
reconstruct an imperfectly imagined antiquity. The fault lies with
historians, who have done their best to make the true past boring.
Similarly, writers of realistic fiction increasingly address each
other, or the prize-awarding committees, instead of the public.
Meanwhile, we recoil from history because we are afraid of its
lessons: it teaches us that we have made no moral or intellectual
progress for thousands of years and have grown most in our capacity to
do ill. We flee to fantasy in recoil from truth. We are suckered by
make-believe because we have lost touch with the majesty of myth.
Instead of the past, we fall for pastiche. For those who forget the
past, it seems, are condemned to reinvent it.
The author is a Fellow of Queen Mary, University of London
Zimri
news:11ef5ad6.03061...@posting.google.com...
> Opinion
>
> Fantasy is the opium of the ignorant and the indolent
>
> Felipe Fernandez-Armesto
>
>
>
> The popularity of The Lord of the Rings signifies our cultural
> impoverishment
>
>
> Fantasy is our fix. In the past 20 or 30 years fantasy has become the
> world's most bankable form of fiction,
And bankable == bad. STAMP IT OUT LIKE A NOXIOUS INSECT!!
> the genre of our times --
> star-warring its way through cinemas, boldly going across video
> screens, building Diskworlds, colonising imaginations with all the
> tenacity of the Evil Empire.
"Colonising" too! IMPERIALISM IS THE FINAL STAGE OF CAPITALISM! STAMP IT OUT
LIKE A NOXIOUS INSECT!
> Superheroes win ratings wars against real
> heroes: they have "special powers". Their magic is more potent than
> mere myth.
And is therefore more dangerous. Someone please save us!
> The BBC has announced a search for "Britain's Greatest Book". We can
> guess the result. The public will vote for The Lord of the Rings,
> which has already topped most polls and is now reaching new audiences,
> impelled by the impact of the blockbuster movie series, the second
> episode of which opens today in cinemas.
>
> Yet the rise of fantasy is puzzling, even to those of us who relish
> its thrills. It defies common wisdom. Truth is supposed to be
> stranger, stronger than fiction, for ours is the strangest of all
> possible worlds: Middle Earth seems morally simple by comparison,
> while the world beyond Harry Potter's railway platform is childishly
> predictable. Realism is unbeatably interesting: that is why social
> observation is the foundation of all the world's best books. When
> there is so much reality to go round, it is hard to understand how
> audiences can fall for fantasy.
And only gullible fools "fall for" anything.
> For fantasy is self-doomed to be implausible. It is hard to feel
> involved when the author can whistle up a wizard to get the hero out
> of a fix. Magic, like madness, is no way to contrive a denouement: in
> worlds where anything can happen, the tension of the plot -- which
> depends on characters trapped in the constrictions of reality --
> dissolves. Art demands discipline, and there are no disciplines
> tighter than those of the real world. History and myth have the best
> stories and the best images: fantasy-authors ransack them to get their
> ideas. Why warp myths when they are wonderful unwarped?
Of course, there are no deus ex machina devices in classic mythology. Jesus
doesn't rise from the dead, the Iliad doesn't have gods protecting their
worshippers outside the walls of Troy, Odysseus doesn't blind a giant who is
retroactively one-eyed etc etc.
> Fantasy-writers do not generate myths; they make cut-and-paste
> confections from the myths of the world. Star Wars imagery drew on the
> Ancient Maya and feudal Japan. Tolkien's world evokes the Anglo-Saxons
> and the Norse, as if in a distorting mirror. J. K.Rowling flits
> between classical, medieval and Hindu myths. Of course, clever
> literary pirates have always plundered legends to appropriate their
> power. Ovid pillaged ancient repositories for his Metamorphoses. Homer
> and the Arthurian bards wrenched Bronze Age tales into works of art.
So what's his problem?
> But unreconstructed myths are usually better. They spring from
> collective effort, from folk memory and from a shared subconscious.
> Reading them gives you satisfactions no fantasy can supply: contact
> with other cultures, insights into the past. They enhance your life by
> stimulating your understanding, for the arts of every civilisation are
> rooted in its myths. You cannot understand Renaissance painting
> without knowing the myths of Greece and Rome. You cannot fully
> appreciate the stories carved on Buddhist temple façades without
> perusing the Jatakas composed to honour early Boddhisatvas.
"But I fully appreciate them, so bow down before my superior intellect, puny
mortals."
> Peter Brook shunned the fakery of fantasy-pastiche to film the 100,000
> verses of the Mahabharata -- the world's greatest epic, composed over
> 800 years, culminating more than 1,500 years ago. With a Hollywood
> budget, it could barge Lord of the Rings out of the box office. One of
> the best cartoon versions of a mythic story is a cheaply made
> Guatemalan film of the Popol Vuh -- the magical tale of the underworld
> trials and triumphs of Mayan hero-twins. The Icelandic Edda or the
> tales of the Sumerian gods could be dazzlingly cinematic and more
> exciting than any fantasy game. But the video-geeks, playing Harry
> Potter games, are too nerdy-eyed to notice.
"But I'm not going to prove this assertion. Did I mention I know about
Jatakas and Boddhisatvas?"
> The current supremacy of fantasy in the cinema relies, like most
> conquests, on superior technology, building the empire of special
> effects. Fantasy commands the timeless appeal of nonsense: plots which
> make no sense, characters bereft of conviction and events untouched by
> reason spare the reader or viewer the effort to think. Indeed, if you
> subject the film version of The Lord of the Rings to critical
> scrutiny, you cease to enjoy it. For the intellectuals in the
> audience, the only pleasure lies in observing a world created by
> cannibalising exotic cultures and eluding rational limitations. A
> pterodactyl joins the battlers in The Lord of the Rings: the Two
> Towers. In other movies, on a single field, warriors wield flaming
> swords and inter-ballistic missiles without incongruity. It increases
> the spectacle. It does not, however, enhance the art.
"But I'm not going to prove this assertion. Did I mention I know about
Jatakas and Boddhisatvas?"
> Our fantasy fixation is worrying. Fantasy doesn't just feed on the
> imagination: it drains it. Virtuality erodes reality. Students who
> sweat over Elvish and Klingon will never dream in Chinese or Greek.
> Kids know more about the battles of Aragorn than of Alexander, the
> life of Harry Potter than the life of Harry VIII. Fantasy endangers
> history, some say: realism is on the way to extinction, shrinking from
> the syllabus, extruded from bookshops, de-accessioned from libraries.
"But I'm not going to prove this assertion. Did I mention I know about
Jatakas and Boddhisatvas?"
> Fears like these, however, misrepresent the rise of fantasy. The
> demise of history and the retreat of realism are not the results of
> fantasy's popularity, but its causes. Unmindful of our real roots, we
> reconstruct an imperfectly imagined antiquity. The fault lies with
> historians, who have done their best to make the true past boring.
> Similarly, writers of realistic fiction increasingly address each
> other, or the prize-awarding committees, instead of the public.
Not that the gullible uninformed nerdy-eyed video-geek public is worth
addressing.
> Meanwhile, we recoil from history because we are afraid of its
> lessons: it teaches us that we have made no moral or intellectual
> progress for thousands of years and have grown most in our capacity to
> do ill. We flee to fantasy in recoil from truth. We are suckered by
> make-believe because we have lost touch with the majesty of myth.
> Instead of the past, we fall for pastiche. For those who forget the
> past, it seems, are condemned to reinvent it.
>
>
>
> The author is a Fellow of Queen Mary, University of London
Admissions standards just aren't what they used to be.
--
zimriel sbc dot
at global net
.
http://pages.sbcglobal.net/zimriel/blog/zimblog.html
because everyone else is doing it
Morgil
"Mauk" <grea...@123mail.org> kirjoitti
viestissä:11ef5ad6.03061...@posting.google.com...
> Opinion
>
> Fantasy is the opium of the ignorant and the indolent
>
> Felipe Fernandez-Armesto
>
>
>
> The popularity of The Lord of the Rings signifies our cultural
> impoverishment
> The author is a Fellow of Queen Mary, University of London
and a moron, who obviously has only read
modern D&D fantasy rip-offs, and is judging
LotR on the basis of the MOVIE!! People
like this make Louis Epstein look smart...
Morgil
AC
Brad Murray
M> Fantasy-writers do not generate myths; they make cut-and-paste
M> confections from the myths of the world. Star Wars imagery drew on the
M> Ancient Maya and feudal Japan. Tolkien's world evokes the Anglo-Saxons
M> and the Norse, as if in a distorting mirror. J. K.Rowling flits
M> between classical, medieval and Hindu myths. Of course, clever
M> literary pirates have always plundered legends to appropriate their
M> power. Ovid pillaged ancient repositories for his Metamorphoses. Homer
M> and the Arthurian bards wrenched Bronze Age tales into works of art.
Actually one might argue that both myths and modern fantasy (or any
other fiction for that matter) simply draw from the same pool of
archetypes rather than being directly related in some sort of clear
lineage. If this is the case (and it seems plausible) then myth and
fanatasy are in fact the same things --- simply our efforts to express
the Platonic ideals of human behaviour in story. Their similarity
would occur because of the unchanging archetypes that underly them and
not because one has plundered from the other.
--
Brad Murray * The trouble with troubleshooting is that trouble
VSCA Founder * sometimes shoots back -- <Rejo>
coyotes morgan mair fheal greykitten tomys des anges
want a toke?
Certic
>
> Fantasy is the opium of the ignorant and the indolent
>
Generally I've found the only people who use the word "indolent" are those
with a fondness for marching songs...
--
You are Not entering Chapeltown.
We walk on two legs, the one abstract
the other surreal.
'When genes came along late in the second milennium
of the Christian era, they found a place already prepared
for them at the table of philosophy. They were the fates
of ancient myth' -- Matt Ridley in New Scientist magazine
--
Werebat
(Snip)
It's not fair trolling with someone else's material. You're supposed to
write your own!
- Ron ^*^
Zath, the Spider God of Zamora
jh
Werebat
People like this make JUAN Epstein look smart...
- Ron ^*^
Werebat
>
> Mauk <grea...@123mail.org> wrote in message
> news:11ef5ad6.03061...@posting.google.com..
> >
> > Fantasy is the opium of the ignorant and the indolent
> >
> --------
> Generally I've found the only people who use the word "indolent" are those
> with a fondness for marching songs...
You know, that's a great quote...
- Ron ^*^
Malachias Invictus
My favorite line:
> For fantasy is self-doomed to be implausible.
--
^v^v^Malachias Invictus^v^v^
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishment the scroll,
I am the Master of my fate:
I am the Captain of my soul.
from _Invictus_, by William Ernest Henley
Andrew Plotkin
> Opinion
(If you want to call it that.)
Please do not oblige the troll with crosspostings. If you want to
discuss the subject, pick a single newsgroup and direct followups
there. Thank you.
Followups reduced to rec.arts.sf.written. (Which, in case it's not
obvious, also includes the topic of written fantasy.)
--Z
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."
*
* Make your vote count. Get your vote counted.
Francis A. Miniter
Mauk wrote:
>Opinion
>
>Fantasy is the opium of the ignorant and the indolent
>
>Felipe Fernandez-Armesto
>
>
>
>The popularity of The Lord of the Rings signifies our cultural
>impoverishment
>
>
>Fantasy is our fix. In the past 20 or 30 years fantasy has become the
>world's most bankable form of fiction, the genre of our times --
>star-warring its way through cinemas, boldly going across video
>screens, building Diskworlds, colonising imaginations with all the
>tenacity of the Evil Empire. Superheroes win ratings wars against real
>heroes: they have "special powers". Their magic is more potent than
>mere myth.
>
Yeah, it was pretty bad around 1600, as well, what with Shakespeare's
"Midsummer Night's Dream", Marlowe's "Faust" and such like. Should have
stamped out the whole thing then. Actually, go back farther and drag
out Mallory's bones and burn them. After all, that fantasy sequence
about going after the grail fits right in.
>
>The BBC has announced a search for "Britain's Greatest Book". We can
>guess the result. The public will vote for The Lord of the Rings,
>which has already topped most polls and is now reaching new audiences,
>impelled by the impact of the blockbuster movie series, the second
>episode of which opens today in cinemas.
>
>Yet the rise of fantasy is puzzling, even to those of us who relish
>its thrills. It defies common wisdom. Truth is supposed to be
>stranger, stronger than fiction, for ours is the strangest of all
>possible worlds: Middle Earth seems morally simple by comparison,
>
It was written right after WWII. A lot of things seemed morally simple
at that particular time in history. But if the proponent of this
position had read the Silmarillion or perhaps the Nin Narn i Hurin in
The Lost Tales, he might find a great deal more complexity.
>while the world beyond Harry Potter's railway platform is childishly
>predictable.
>
I cannot put Harry Potter on the same level as the Lord of the Rings.
>Realism is unbeatably interesting:
>
Then why is fiction so popular? Maybe, good fiction distills truths
that reality obscures with a clutter of facts.
>that is why social
>observation is the foundation of all the world's best books. When
>there is so much reality to go round, it is hard to understand how
>audiences can fall for fantasy.
>
>
See lasst comment.
>For fantasy is self-doomed to be implausible. It is hard to feel
>involved when the author can whistle up a wizard to get the hero out
>of a fix.
>
Like Merlin, or Wotan, or Zeus, or Krishna.
>Magic, like madness, is no way to contrive a denouement: in
>worlds where anything can happen, the tension of the plot -- which
>depends on characters trapped in the constrictions of reality --
>dissolves.
>
The writer misses the point that these personages symbolize principles
of action or nature.
>Art demands discipline, and there are no disciplines
>tighter than those of the real world. History and myth have the best
>stories
>
how did history get tied together with myth???
>and the best images: fantasy-authors ransack them to get their
>ideas. Why warp myths when they are wonderful unwarped?
>
>
OK, everyone. Stop creating myths. We have all the myths we need. The
old ones have got to be better than anything you can think of.
>Fantasy-writers do not generate myths; they make cut-and-paste
>confections from the myths of the world.
>
If true, is it a bad thing? Why? If not, then they do generate myths.
Seems to me that Tolkien was pretty innovative.
>Star Wars imagery drew on the
>Ancient Maya and feudal Japan.
>
And without that, those symbols might not have ever become known to the
mass of humanity.
>Tolkien's world evokes the Anglo-Saxons
>and the Norse, as if in a distorting mirror.
>
First of all, there are no two tellings of the Arthurian legends that
are identical. Did Wagner just recite Norse mythology? So why does
Tolkien have to retell Gaelic myth precisely? Second, it is in the
nature or humanity to take a theme and play with it. Musical composers
do it. Are writers now barred from it?
>J. K.Rowling flits
>between classical, medieval and Hindu myths.
>
It is fun to try and spot them, actually.
>Of course, clever
>literary pirates have always plundered legends to appropriate their
>power. Ovid pillaged ancient repositories for his Metamorphoses. Homer
>and the Arthurian bards wrenched Bronze Age tales into works of art.
>
>But unreconstructed myths are usually better.
>
Yes, the world can only grind from better to worse. No change is for
the better. The golden age in everything has passed.
>They spring from
>collective effort, from folk memory and from a shared subconscious.
>
Bobby Fischer showed that an individual consciousness could beat the
collective wisdom of the Soviet group consciousness.
>Reading them gives you satisfactions no fantasy can supply: contact
>with other cultures, insights into the past. They enhance your life by
>stimulating your understanding, for the arts of every civilisation are
>rooted in its myths. You cannot understand Renaissance painting
>without knowing the myths of Greece and Rome. You cannot fully
>appreciate the stories carved on Buddhist temple façades without
>perusing the Jatakas composed to honour early Boddhisatvas.
>
This does not make a case for not reading myths written today, only for
reading ancient myths too.
>
>Peter Brook shunned the fakery of fantasy-pastiche to film the 100,000
>verses of the Mahabharata -- the world's greatest epic, composed over
>800 years, culminating more than 1,500 years ago. With a Hollywood
>budget, it could barge Lord of the Rings out of the box office. One of
>the best cartoon versions of a mythic story is a cheaply made
>Guatemalan film of the Popol Vuh -- the magical tale of the underworld
>trials and triumphs of Mayan hero-twins. The Icelandic Edda or the
>tales of the Sumerian gods could be dazzlingly cinematic and more
>exciting than any fantasy game. But the video-geeks, playing Harry
>Potter games, are too nerdy-eyed to notice.
>
There has been a switch in the argument from literature to film. This
is significant but elided.
>The current supremacy of fantasy in the cinema relies, like most
>conquests, on superior technology, building the empire of special
>effects. Fantasy commands the timeless appeal of nonsense: plots which
>make no sense, characters bereft of conviction and events untouched by
>reason spare the reader or viewer the effort to think. Indeed, if you
>subject the film version of The Lord of the Rings to critical
>scrutiny, you cease to enjoy it. For the intellectuals in the
>audience, the only pleasure lies in observing a world created by
>cannibalising exotic cultures and eluding rational limitations. A
>pterodactyl joins the battlers in The Lord of the Rings: the Two
>Towers.
>
Tolkien gave the Nazgul winged steeds. The director only made an
interpretation. This happens in all film-making, all of it.
>In other movies, on a single field, warriors wield flaming
>swords and inter-ballistic missiles without incongruity. It increases
>the spectacle. It does not, however, enhance the art.
>
Maybe it does. Does the writer disapprove of the paintings of
Hieronymous Bosch or Rousseau as well?
>
>Our fantasy fixation is worrying. Fantasy doesn't just feed on the
>imagination: it drains it.
>
This statement needs support.
>Virtuality erodes reality.
>
????
>Students who
>sweat over Elvish and Klingon will never dream in Chinese or Greek.
>
Students who sweat over Chinese and Greek will never dream in Swahili.
I do hope there are enough students to go around.
>Kids know more about the battles of Aragorn than of Alexander, the
>life of Harry Potter than the life of Harry VIII. Fantasy endangers
>history, some say: realism is on the way to extinction, shrinking from
>the syllabus, extruded from bookshops, de-accessioned from libraries.
>
In the days of Henry VIII (or at least Queen Elizabeth I) they use to
say that kids knew more about Faust than they did about Empress Maud.
Just kidding. But the point is that the latest has always fought with
the ancient for interest in peoples' minds. This is not a new phenomenon.
>
>Fears like these, however, misrepresent the rise of fantasy. The
>demise of history and the retreat of realism are not the results of
>fantasy's popularity, but its causes. Unmindful of our real roots, we
>reconstruct an imperfectly imagined antiquity.
>
This is true of every age.
>The fault lies with
>historians, who have done their best to make the true past boring.
>
Historians or teachers?
>Similarly, writers of realistic fiction increasingly address each
>other, or the prize-awarding committees, instead of the public.
>
Where would the writer place Ellis Peters?
>
>Meanwhile, we recoil from history because we are afraid of its
>lessons: it teaches us that we have made no moral or intellectual
>progress for thousands of years
>
Again, the pessimistic view that we can only get worse. The writer
sounds like a devotee of Karl Popper.
>and have grown most in our capacity to
>do ill. We flee to fantasy in recoil from truth. We are suckered by
>make-believe because we have lost touch with the majesty of myth.
>Instead of the past, we fall for pastiche. For those who forget the
>past, it seems, are condemned to reinvent it.
>
>
>
>The author is a Fellow of Queen Mary, University of London
>
>
>
>www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,482-517489,00.html
>
>
Francis A. Miniter
Eric Jarvis
actually he has a point...he overplays the hand...but
there is a lot of fantasy that would be improved if the
authors took time out to read the Kalevala, the
Mahabharata, the Mabinogion etc
LOTR is a worthy and honest attempt at making an epic
myth...it works...but like many people, I think my
astonishment when I first read it was as much due to
being ignorant of other older myths as to LOTR
itself...that doesn't make it less in itself...but it
means there was a lot I was unable to compare it to
so I wouldn't agree with the article as such...but I
would say that the fact that so many fantasy authors are
relatively unambitious opens the genre to such attacks
that doesn't mean that all fantasy should be on an epic
scale...for instance I've loved pretty much all of Terry
Pratchett's Discworld novels, at times Fritz Lieber
managed to create myth on a human scale, and many other
writers have managed to write wonderful small scale
gems...but there is also a lot out there that aims low
and ends up simply producing a vaguely consistent milieu,
one or two nearly believable characters, and a lot of
dead trees
--
eric
www.ericjarvis.co.uk
"Hey Lord don't ask me questions
There ain't no answer in me"
Eric Jarvis
>
> "Mauk" <grea...@123mail.org> wrote in message
> news:11ef5ad6.03061...@posting.google.com...
>
> My favorite line:
>
> > For fantasy is self-doomed to be implausible.
>
possibly the pointless truism of the year :)
Chris Wright
>
> Fantasy is the opium of the ignorant and the indolent
>
> Felipe Fernandez-Armesto
>
>
>
> The popularity of The Lord of the Rings signifies our cultural
> impoverishment
>
Our? There is no "our". One's cultural tastes are theirs alone, and to pass
judgement on another's is the snobbery, pure and simple.
And nobody likes a snob.
Hasdrubal Hamilcar
yet speaking economically, if the best car your country produces is a
Lada, then there is something wrong. The author is comparing the
dominant fantasy work in our culture to other things.
I think LOTR is different from other myths in some modern 20th century
ways--the languages are scientifically accurate. This 20th century
feature of his myth is worth looking into, but the recent films
completely ignored it ('cept for Liv Tylers lines of Elvish).
Myths are encyclopedaic, in that they encompass ALL of knowledge. So
its not enough to have a small universe of freaks. You have to have a
complete of freaks, and you can view the whole ensemble in the totality.
It is a holistic type of fiction, which is difficult to do. That is
unique. Tolkien invents all kinds of things, and the whole is more than
the sum of its many parts. The popularity shows that the myths "works"
in that it is believable, and that is it's appeal--you can study it in
your brain.
On the other hand, I think the fantastical element of it is (I think)
designed to make it easy to remember. Nobody remembers a wizard who
does the same deed every time there is trouble, but everyone remembers a
wizard who always has a surprise for his audience and always knows more
than the rest of the posse does at any time. That is his character and
makes him more "rememberable".
Hasan
Hasdrubal Hamilcar
> complete of freaks, and you can view the whole ensemble in the totality.
complete *universe* of freaks.
Leonardo Dasso
"Certic" <P...@winwaed.demon.co.uk> wrote in message
news:bcsvut$c3i$1$830f...@news.demon.co.uk...
>
> Mauk <grea...@123mail.org> wrote in message
> news:11ef5ad6.03061...@posting.google.com...
> > Opinion
> >
> > Fantasy is the opium of the ignorant and the indolent
> >
> --------
> Generally I've found the only people who use the word "indolent" are
those
> with a fondness for marching songs...
>
I'm sure that Baudelaire would like to know that he was fond of marching
songs.
regards
leo
Howard Whitehouse
"Francis A. Miniter" <min...@attglobal.net> wrote in message
news:3EF20DBA...@attglobal.net...
a long snip --
What a terrific rebuttal of this smarmy pseud! Congratulations Francis!
Howard Whitehouse
Steinn Sigurdsson
> "Mauk" <grea...@123mail.org> wrote in message
> news:11ef5ad6.03061...@posting.google.com...
> > Opinion
> > Fantasy is the opium of the ignorant and the indolent
> > The popularity of The Lord of the Rings signifies our cultural
> > impoverishment
> Our? There is no "our". One's cultural tastes are theirs alone, and to pass
> judgement on another's is the snobbery, pure and simple.
They are culturally impoverished
You have eclectic tastes
I determine what is worthwhile
> And nobody likes a snob.
Oh, well, never mind then
Xaonon
<grea...@123mail.org> teithant i thiw hin:
> Opinion
>
> Fantasy is the opium of the ignorant and the indolent
>
> Felipe Fernandez-Armesto
An interesting article. I especially like how the author doesn't let his
complete and total unfamiliarity with the genre stop him from making broad
generalizations of it. Good job!
--
Xaonon, EAC Chief of Mad Scientists and informal BAAWA, aa #1821, Kibo #: 1
Visit The Nexus Of All Coolness (i.e. my site) at http://xaonon.dyndns.org/
You were an atheist. You were stridently aligned. You were poison resistant.
You were invisible. You were a werejackal. You were lucky. You are dead.
Frank Martin
"Mauk" <grea...@123mail.org> wrote in message
news:11ef5ad6.03061...@posting.google.com...
Brandon Cope
> Opinion
>
> Fantasy is the opium of the ignorant and the indolent
If the poster laid off the opium himself, he might not make posts like this.
Brandon
David J. Loftus
>
> Fantasy is the opium of the ignorant and the indolent
>
> Felipe Fernandez-Armesto
Fantasy as consciously-created and consumed entertainment
is "the opium etc.," as opposed to fantasy as unreflective
faith(s)?
David Loftus
Eric Jarvis
>
> Mauk wrote:
>
> >Opinion
> >
> >Fantasy is the opium of the ignorant and the indolent
> >
> >Felipe Fernandez-Armesto
> >
> >and the Norse, as if in a distorting mirror.
> >
> First of all, there are no two tellings of the Arthurian legends that
> are identical. Did Wagner just recite Norse mythology? So why does
> Tolkien have to retell Gaelic myth precisely? Second, it is in the
> nature or humanity to take a theme and play with it. Musical composers
> do it. Are writers now barred from it?
>
in fact the nature of myth is that successive generations
have rewritten and reinterpreted the stories...the fact
that the advent of the written word has also made it
possible to look at earlier versions doesn't mean we
should stop the process
additionally...I though the whole point of Tolkien's
writing of LOTR was to combine some of the Celtic, Norse
and Saxon myths and ideals into something appropriate to
his idea of an English epic myth...so, in fact, the
writer is stating that he believes that Tolkien succeeded
in this
>
> >Reading them gives you satisfactions no fantasy can supply: contact
> >with other cultures, insights into the past. They enhance your life by
> >stimulating your understanding, for the arts of every civilisation are
> >rooted in its myths. You cannot understand Renaissance painting
> >without knowing the myths of Greece and Rome. You cannot fully
> >appreciate the stories carved on Buddhist temple façades without
> >perusing the Jatakas composed to honour early Boddhisatvas.
> >
> This does not make a case for not reading myths written today, only for
> reading ancient myths too.
>
absolutely...and it does not mean that one must read
everything ever written in the order of
publication...which seems to be the reductio ad absurdam
from the stated position
> >
> >Peter Brook shunned the fakery of fantasy-pastiche to film the 100,000
> >verses of the Mahabharata -- the world's greatest epic, composed over
> >800 years, culminating more than 1,500 years ago. With a Hollywood
> >budget, it could barge Lord of the Rings out of the box office. One of
> >the best cartoon versions of a mythic story is a cheaply made
> >Guatemalan film of the Popol Vuh -- the magical tale of the underworld
> >trials and triumphs of Mayan hero-twins. The Icelandic Edda or the
> >tales of the Sumerian gods could be dazzlingly cinematic and more
> >exciting than any fantasy game. But the video-geeks, playing Harry
> >Potter games, are too nerdy-eyed to notice.
> >
> There has been a switch in the argument from literature to film. This
> is significant but elided.
>
and rather ignorant...there have been several film
versions of the Mahabharata...some with quite large
budgets...and often very successfully, possibly outdoing
LOTR at the box office (provided you look at bums on
seats not dollars)
the difficulty with all such projects is that epic myths
are damn expensive to film...and tend to last a tad too
long if you try to cover everything
does anyone else get the impression that the original
piece was written by a rather self important young fogey
who has been told to lighten up by his head of department
and is now sulking about having been made to watch LOTR
at the flicks and read a Harry Potter book?
Sam's the Man
>
> Fantasy is the opium of the ignorant and the indolent
>
> Felipe Fernandez-Armesto
>
>
>
> impoverishment
>
>
> Fantasy is our fix. In the past 20 or 30 years fantasy has become the
> world's most bankable form of fiction, the genre of our times --
> star-warring its way through cinemas, boldly going across video
> screens, building Diskworlds, colonising imaginations with all the
> tenacity of the Evil Empire. Superheroes win ratings wars against real
> heroes: they have "special powers". Their magic is more potent than
> mere myth.
>
> The BBC has announced a search for "Britain's Greatest Book". We can
> guess the result. The public will vote for The Lord of the Rings,
> which has already topped most polls and is now reaching new audiences,
> impelled by the impact of the blockbuster movie series, the second
> episode of which opens today in cinemas.
>
> Yet the rise of fantasy is puzzling, even to those of us who relish
> its thrills. It defies common wisdom. Truth is supposed to be
> stranger, stronger than fiction, for ours is the strangest of all
> possible worlds: Middle Earth seems morally simple by comparison,
{snigger} Perhaps we should get this guy in on our discussions Re: The
Sinking of Numenor, the morality of killing orcs, the behaviour of the
Valar toward the Eldar.
> while the world beyond Harry Potter's railway platform is childishly
> predictable.
Yah. Right. So perhaps we should give this guy a call. Obviously, he
predicted who Wormtail was and who put Harrys name into the Goblet. He
must also know who is going to 'get it'. Only about 500 million want
to know right now.
> Realism is unbeatably interesting: that is why social
> observation is the foundation of all the world's best books. When
> there is so much reality to go round, it is hard to understand how
> audiences can fall for fantasy.
>
Ah. What we need is more social commentary. And clearly, subjective
opinion on works of art is also expressible in objective terms.
>
> Our fantasy fixation is worrying. Fantasy doesn't just feed on the
> imagination: it drains it. Virtuality erodes reality.
- Unlike other genre - it's comforting to know that RomComs, Action,
Horror and revisionist military movies are striving to reconnect us
with reality.
> Similarly, writers of realistic fiction increasingly address each
> other, or the prize-awarding committees, instead of the public.
>
There isn't any such thing as realistic fiction. That's why it is
called fiction.
> Meanwhile, we recoil from history because we are afraid of its
> lessons: it teaches us that we have made no moral or intellectual
> progress for thousands of years and have grown most in our capacity to
> do ill. We flee to fantasy in recoil from truth. We are suckered by
> make-believe because we have lost touch with the majesty of myth.
> Instead of the past, we fall for pastiche. For those who forget the
> past, it seems, are condemned to reinvent it.
>
But societies that retained their myth (rather than attempting to
reinvent it, as Tolkien did) haven't progressed morally or
intellectually either.
Rupert Boleyn
carved onto a tablet of ether:
>actually he has a point...he overplays the hand...but
>there is a lot of fantasy that would be improved if the
>authors took time out to read the Kalevala, the
>Mahabharata, the Mabinogion etc
There's a surprise - Sturgeon's Law, remember? "Ninety percent of
anything is crap." The only difference between mondern fantasy and
myth is that most of the really bad myth is lost to us.
--
Rupert Boleyn <rbo...@paradise.net.nz>
The media industry is a long, dark, narrow hallway where thieves and
pimps run free and good people die like dogs.
There's also a negative side.
Chris Wright
"Hasdrubal Hamilcar" <syed_hasa...@rogers.com-nospam> wrote in message
news:YzoIa.22418$111....@news04.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com...
> Chris Wright wrote:
> > "Mauk" <grea...@123mail.org> wrote in message
> > news:11ef5ad6.03061...@posting.google.com...
> >
> >>Opinion
> >>
> >>Fantasy is the opium of the ignorant and the indolent
> >>
> >>Felipe Fernandez-Armesto
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>The popularity of The Lord of the Rings signifies our cultural
> >>impoverishment
> >>
> >
> >
> > Our? There is no "our". One's cultural tastes are theirs alone, and to
pass
> > judgement on another's is the snobbery, pure and simple.
> >
> > And nobody likes a snob.
> >
> >
>
> yet speaking economically, if the best car your country produces is a
> Lada, then there is something wrong. The author is comparing the
> dominant fantasy work in our culture to other things.
To bring money into a conversation about culture is crass, no offense
intended. =)
I really think that Roger Ebert's criterion for judging quality is the best:
How well does the artist accomplish what he set out to do?
Of course, more often than not, artists are confused in their efforts.
Tolkien seems utterly unconfused in what he was trying to accomplish in
writing
Lord of the Rings: alleviating the impoverishment of mythology in his native
England. Which is truly admirable and wonderful in my books, being a person
of dual Canadian and British citizenship.
He could not have done a grander job. Reading LotR for the first time is
enthralling
and wonderous.
My 2 pents.
Chris Wright
"Steinn Sigurdsson" <ste...@najma.astro.psu.edu> wrote in message
news:rx7k7bh...@najma.astro.psu.edu...
I'll bite.
Just what do you think that I am missing out on, good sir?
What "culture" is most enriched?
One might well argue Japanese culture is most refined, but there are some
definite signs of sickness.
Hentai.
World's highest suicide rate.
Kamakazee pilots.
Sex vacations.
Everything that can be mechanized, is.
Fundamental lack of true innovation.
Kurosawa dying an embittered man.
I think innovation is important to culture. Keep things evolving, but don't
neglect the classics.
Morgil
"Rupert Boleyn" <rbo...@paradise.net.nz> kirjoitti
viestissä:euh4fvk4mqo02t92m...@4ax.com...
> On Thu, 19 Jun 2003 20:23:46 +0100, Eric Jarvis <w...@ericjarvis.co.uk>
> carved onto a tablet of ether:
>
> >actually he has a point...he overplays the hand...but
> >there is a lot of fantasy that would be improved if the
> >authors took time out to read the Kalevala, the
> >Mahabharata, the Mabinogion etc
>
> There's a surprise - Sturgeon's Law, remember? "Ninety percent of
> anything is crap." The only difference between mondern fantasy and
> myth is that most of the really bad myth is lost to us.
I think it's more that anything old enough
is automatically considered to be 'good'...
Morgil
Hasdrubal Hamilcar
> "Mauk" <grea...@123mail.org> wrote in message
> news:11ef5ad6.03061...@posting.google.com...
>
> My favorite line:
>
>
>>For fantasy is self-doomed to be implausible.
>
>
Restated:
Fantasy is by definition, unreal.
Hasan
tomca...@yanospamhoo.com
> Fantasy is the opium of the ignorant and the indolent
Iris Murdoch in "Against Dryness" (1961) says:
If we consider twentieth-century literature as compared with
nineteenth-century literature, we notice certain significant contrasts.
I said that, in a way, we were back in the eighteenth century, the era of
rationalistic allegories and moral tales, the era when the idea of human
nature was unitary and single. The nineteenth-century novel (I use these
terms boldly and roughly: of course there were exceptions) was not concerned
with 'the human condition', it was concerned with real various individuals
struggling in society. The twentieth-century novel is usually either
crystalline or journalistic; that is, it is either a small quasi-allegorical
object portraying the human condition and not containing 'characters' in
the nineteenth-century sense, or else it is a large shapeless
quasi-documentary object, the degenerate descendant of the nineteenth-century
novel, telling, with pale conventional characters, some straightforward story
enlivened with empirical facts. Neither of these kinds of literature
engages with the problem I mentioned above.
It may readily be noted that if our prose fiction is either
crystalline or journalistic, the crystalline works are usually the better ones.
They are what the more serious writers want to create. We may recall the
ideal of 'dryness' which we associate with the symbolist movement, with
writers such as T. E. Hulme and T. S. Eliot, with Paul Valery, with
Wittgenstein. This 'dryness' (smallness, clearness, self-containedness)
is a nemesis of Romanticism. Indeed it is Romanticism in a later phase.
The pure, clean, self-contained 'symbol', the exemplar incidentally of
what Kant, ancestor of both Liberalism and Romanticism, required art to be,
is the analogue of the lonely self-contained individual. It is what is left
of the other-worldliness of Romanticism when the 'messy' humanitarian and
revolutionary elements have spent their force. The temptation of art, a
temptation to which every work of art yields except the greatest ones, is to
console. The modern writer, frightened of technology and (in England)
abandoned by philosophy and (in France) presented with simplified dramatic
theories, attempts to console us by myths or by stories.
On the whole: his truth is sincerity and his imagination is fantasy. Fantasy
operates either with shapeless day-dreams (the journalistic story) or
with small myths, toys, crystals. Each in his own way produces a sort
of 'dream necessity'; Neither grapples with reality: hence 'fantasy'
not 'imagination'.
Sir Bob
>
> Fantasy is the opium of the ignorant and the indolent
<snip>
It's an... *interesting* idea, but his arguement depends entirely upon the
ability to define a point in history at which the evolution of conceptual
mythology stopped dead in its tracks, and after which nothing exists but
pale imitation - and he makes no effort to define or even identify that
point, apparently taking both its existance and its location and
self-evident truths (indicentally, an assumption he fails to justify).
- Sir Bob.
Sir Bob
news:bct6qs$hr2ue$1...@ID-102497.news.dfncis.de...
He *did* say "generally". =P
- Sir Bob.
Bryan J. Maloney
"I went to the 'doctor' of philosophy
With bad-smelling breath and a beard down to his knee.
He was a curmudgeon who thought he was 'groovy'.
He never had married nor seen a great movie.
I spent four years prostrate to bombastic ego,
Got my paper and was free."
The poor fellow is obviously one of those bitter old tits who takes
particular relish in _post mortem_ vengeance upon Tolkien and his ilk for
daring to make more money than they shall ever see.
Bryan J. Maloney
news:MPG.195c1e0f3...@News.CIS.DFN.DE:
> LOTR is a worthy and honest attempt at making an epic
> myth...it works...but like many people, I think my
> astonishment when I first read it was as much due to
> being ignorant of other older myths as to LOTR
And I had no "astonishment". Instead, I greatly appreciated it in part
because I did know the old myths.
That hyperinflated academic, that "Fellow" of some daffy "college" or
another, who took it upon himself to castigate mere "fantasy" no doubt
likewise spends his days maundering on about how Shakespeare is so
inferior for having stolen all his plotlines and invoked implausible saves
for his heroes--oh, wait, he wouldn't do that. If he did that, he
couldn't be a hypocrite.
> so I wouldn't agree with the article as such...but I
> would say that the fact that so many fantasy authors are
> relatively unambitious opens the genre to such attacks
Ever read what has survived from any era's literature? The greater the
_corpus_ the more trash there is. The myths of ancient days only look so
good because the millenia have mercifully ground the dross to dust. Of
course, those poor besotted souls who are afflicted with Creeping
Reaganism (this is the inability to see anything except when looking
backwards through a rose-colored mist) can never realize that.
Leonardo Dasso
"Frank Martin" <fr...@general.com.au> wrote in message
news:bctc7d$b15$1...@otis.netspace.net.au...
> Can it be bad if it feels so good????
>
It doesnt after you turn 12. It's just a matter of waiting.
regards
leo
Leonardo Dasso
>
> Mauk wrote:
>
> >Opinion
> >
> >Fantasy is the opium of the ignorant and the indolent
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >The popularity of The Lord of the Rings signifies our cultural
> >impoverishment
> >
> >
> >world's most bankable form of fiction, the genre of our times --
> >star-warring its way through cinemas, boldly going across video
> >screens, building Diskworlds, colonising imaginations with all the
> >tenacity of the Evil Empire. Superheroes win ratings wars against
real
> >heroes: they have "special powers". Their magic is more potent than
> >mere myth.
> >
> "Midsummer Night's Dream", Marlowe's "Faust" and such like. Should
have
> stamped out the whole thing then. Actually, go back farther and drag
> out Mallory's bones and burn them. After all, that fantasy sequence
> about going after the grail fits right in.
>
> >
> >The BBC has announced a search for "Britain's Greatest Book". We can
> >guess the result. The public will vote for The Lord of the Rings,
> >which has already topped most polls and is now reaching new
audiences,
> >impelled by the impact of the blockbuster movie series, the second
> >episode of which opens today in cinemas.
> >
> >Yet the rise of fantasy is puzzling, even to those of us who relish
> >its thrills. It defies common wisdom. Truth is supposed to be
> >stranger, stronger than fiction, for ours is the strangest of all
> >possible worlds: Middle Earth seems morally simple by comparison,
> >
simple
> at that particular time in history. But if the proponent of this
> position had read the Silmarillion or perhaps the Nin Narn i Hurin in
> The Lost Tales, he might find a great deal more complexity.
>
> >while the world beyond Harry Potter's railway platform is childishly
> >predictable.
> >
>
> >Realism is unbeatably interesting:
> >
> Then why is fiction so popular? Maybe, good fiction distills truths
> that reality obscures with a clutter of facts.
>
Some works of fiction do, some dont . Some are a metaphor, a mirror or a
vehicle for truths. Some are just monodimensional , pure childish
fiction. To which group do LOTR and HP belong? Easy question.
regards
leo
Bryan J. Maloney
And Bryan Maloney in "Against Dried-Up Prunish Ivory Tower Intellectuals"
(Right-friggin' now, Baby!) says:
In yer ear, Iris. Too bad you never bothered to have a real life. Yeah,
nearly everything written today stinks on ice. I got news for ya,
babycakes. Nearly everything written in the 19th century stinks on ice,
too. You've just been lucky enough to get the crap pre-filtered out for
you. So then you sit on your under-utilized backside and pontificate to
the rest of the world about how culture has deteriorated. I got news for
ya. Culture has been doomed and deteriorated for at least the last three
thousand years, if all the stuff I've read is anything to go by. There is
always some miserable old fart who can't abide the thought that he or she
made a stupid mistake years ago and saddled herself with a nowhere job,
set to eke out nothing more than dry existence instead of really living.
Said miserable old fart then sits back and spouts rubbish about how
literature, art, culture, children, whateverornuthin, just ain't as good
as it was in the old days.
Lewis Mammel
Mauk wrote:
>
> Opinion
>
> Fantasy is the opium of the ignorant and the indolent
>
> Felipe Fernandez-Armesto
> ...
>
> Yet the rise of fantasy is puzzling, ...
I think there's a simple answer and that is the collpase of
our vision of the future. In my youth, Tom Swift Jr. played
a similar child hero role to that of Harry Potter, but the
differences are telling. His exploits, though fantastical,
were based on a vision of the future and he was the apotheosis
of the virtues necessary for its realization - genius and vigor.
Of course, he also had unlimited material means at his disposal,
thanks to his father's technological empire. This was an image
of postwar Big Science, which was valorized as such. Thus the
young dreamers reading these books were being primed to take
up roles supporting the driving social and economic elements
of the fifties. This drive peaked with the Apollo program
and rapidly dissipated.
Now we have Harry Potter. The very basis of the Potter world is
resentment and rejection of the Muggle - i.e. real - world.
The books are not just escapism, they are ABOUT escapism. They
valorize escapism the way Tom Swift valorized scientific conquest.
Compare and contrast the social and economic roles of the books
themselves. Tom Swift was an economically trivial enterprise which
promoted the larger social goals propounded by the political and
educational establishments. Harry Potter is an engine of wealth
serving the globalized media giants. It feeds on a youth which is
being urged into an inner world of self-indulgent fantasy, and away
from an awareness of and participation in the world. Hmmmm.
Lew Mammel, Jr.
smw
Lewis Mammel wrote:
Or perhaps the kids were getting tired of reading novel after novel in
which daddy raped the hero's younger sister while mom was in rehab.
"Escapism," my ass. "Gee, let's not have fiction around here, hear?"
Donald Shepherd
alleged...
Well, if it has survived that long, then presumably there may be some
merit to it still existing, or at least considerable resources dedicated
to perpetuating it.
--
Donald Shepherd
<donald_shepherd @ hotmail . com>
"Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open
sewer and die." - Mel Brooks
Richard Shewmaker
> Wow, a troll who's trying to look intellectual.
>
> jh
Intellitroll?
--
My mother used to laugh and say that the only thing my father wouldn't
do for Axel Kern was promise him his only child. Of course, she was
wrong about that.
-- Elizabeth Hand, "Black Light"
Duane VanderPol
>
> Fantasy is the opium of the ignorant and the indolent
I thought drugs like opium were the opium of the ignorant and indolent.
> The popularity of The Lord of the Rings signifies our cultural
> impoverishment
The popularity of reality TV signifies our cultural impoverishment. The
popularity of worthwhile examples of the written word like LotR signifies
that the culture war is far from over.
> The BBC has announced a search for "Britain's Greatest Book". We can
> guess the result.
Then perhaps the search for the Greatest Book should not be conducted by
broadcast media? Perhaps you might examine how the search is to be
conducted and what effects that will have on the outcome.
> The public will vote for The Lord of the Rings,
> which has already topped most polls and is now reaching new audiences,
> impelled by the impact of the blockbuster movie series, the second
> episode of which opens today in cinemas.
So then you _have_ examined the impact of the search parameters upon the
outcome. It's a sheer popularity contest which says absolutely nothing
about cultural value - unless you can define LotR as in and of itself being
culturally impoverished.
> Yet the rise of fantasy is puzzling, even to those of us who relish
> its thrills. It defies common wisdom. Truth is supposed to be
> stranger, stronger than fiction, for ours is the strangest of all
> possible worlds:
A wise person once said that the reason that truth is stranger than
fiction is that fiction has to be _believable_.
> For fantasy is self-doomed to be implausible. It is hard to feel
> involved when the author can whistle up a wizard to get the hero out
> of a fix.
Probably why good authors of any genre do not resort to deus ex machina.
> Fantasy-writers do not generate myths; they make cut-and-paste
> confections from the myths of the world.
Nobody generates myths. All fiction is cut up and reassembled myth
regardless of genre. The same themes and myths are reused because they are
valuable, useful, entertaining etc. Who needs to reinvent the wheel?
> Of course, clever
> literary pirates have always plundered legends to appropriate their
> power. Ovid pillaged ancient repositories for his Metamorphoses. Homer
> and the Arthurian bards wrenched Bronze Age tales into works of art.
So not only is Tolkien culturally impoverished but Ovid, Homer and
Arthurian bards are mere literary pirates?
> Peter Brook shunned the fakery of fantasy-pastiche to film the 100,000
> verses of the Mahabharata -- the world's greatest epic, composed over
> 800 years, culminating more than 1,500 years ago. With a Hollywood
> budget, it could barge Lord of the Rings out of the box office.
There are some ideas so ludicrous only an intellectual could think of
them. Or believe them, no doubt.
> The current supremacy of fantasy in the cinema relies, like most
> conquests, on superior technology, building the empire of special
> effects.
Power word: Duh. It is only recently that cinematic technology has
advanced to the point where the myriad visuals of fantasy can be so
convincingly portrayed on film. Should it then be a surprise that it
becomes popular? Get a clue.
Fantasy commands the timeless appeal of nonsense: plots which
> make no sense, characters bereft of conviction and events untouched by
> reason spare the reader or viewer the effort to think. Indeed, if you
> subject the film version of The Lord of the Rings to critical
> scrutiny, you cease to enjoy it.
Subject to sufficient critical scrutiny any entertainment ceases to be
enjoyable.
For the intellectuals in the
> audience, the only pleasure lies in observing a world created by
> cannibalising exotic cultures and eluding rational limitations.
Good thing they aren't MADE for intellectuals then. Intellectuals tend
to forget that not all entertainment is derived from intellectualISM. Tell
me, if intellectuals such as yourself are so knowledgeable about what
comprises good entertainment why aren't you creating it for the benighted
masses to consume and be enlightened by it?
> Fears like these, however, misrepresent the rise of fantasy. The
> demise of history and the retreat of realism are not the results of
> fantasy's popularity, but its causes. Unmindful of our real roots, we
> reconstruct an imperfectly imagined antiquity. The fault lies with
> historians, who have done their best to make the true past boring.
> Similarly, writers of realistic fiction increasingly address each
> other, or the prize-awarding committees, instead of the public.
The only reasonable thing you've said.
> Meanwhile, we recoil from history because we are afraid of its
> lessons: it teaches us that we have made no moral or intellectual
> progress for thousands of years and have grown most in our capacity to
> do ill.
Sounds like a good supporting argument against humanism. And we haven't
grown in our capacity to do ill, it's the same as it has been since original
sin. The results of our illdoing may carry more spectacular effects but our
innate capacity to perpetrate ill is unchanged.
> For those who forget the
> past, it seems, are condemned to reinvent it.
I've heard that before but I forget where it was.
--
Duane VanderPol
http://home.earthlink.net/~duanevp
last site update: 6/6/03
Cerberus AOD
I give it a solid 2 out of 10.
People have been retreating from hsitory for centuries, always nastalgic for
a world that never was. So now it's Middle Earth, instead of a false version
of the previous reality.
"Mauk" <grea...@123mail.org> wrote in message
news:11ef5ad6.03061...@posting.google.com...
[snip]
Michael Grosberg
> Opinion
>
> www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,482-517489,00.html
Me, I'm just wondering what the intent of the OP was here, when he
quoted a whole article from the Times website (from their restricted
subscription section, by the way).
Is that some kind of trolling-by-proxy: a troll who doesn't even
bother writing his own bait messages?
An attempt to increase newsgroup traffic for whatever reason?
And speaking of which, just what IS the reason for those heavuily
cross-posted messages with random generated text (like the one with
the Segway header)?
Morthond
Interesting point, but terribly developed.
Myths and fantasy are... well not real.
They have their use in 'reality'. If the use you want to see is
escaping reality and nothing more, then you are probably right about
fantasy and myth, applied to *yourself*.
As many more have written here before me, how can you censor Virgil,
the Eneid, the Illiad, the Arthurian cycle, Shakespeare, Don Quixote,
et all?
Sorry greatmauk, but the argument does not stand. If you are the
author himself, I would suggest a little less aggressiveness and a
little more moderation in your flames.
Then again, if you only want to draw attention to yourself, you are
probably on the right track.
Cheers
Morthond
PS: good luck with your quest for fame.
Alan Kellogg
grea...@123mail.org (Mauk) wrote:
Mauk, thanks for posting that. it was the funniest snit I've read in a
long time. Reminded me of seven year old girls talking about guys with
long hair. ("Oooh, he looks like a girl!")
I was not aware that 15 year old boys could get a fellowship at the
University of London. ("That's not how it's supposed to be! It's
supposed to be like this!")
Not the sort of thing you would see coming out of an institute of higher
education.
Alan
--
http://www.mythusmage.com
Writing Practice at: http://www.gamingoutpost.com
sol
No, you're confusing it with religion.
Alan Kellogg
<s...@inorbit.com> wrote:
> > Fantasy is the opium of the ignorant and the indolent
>
> No, you're confusing it with religion.
>
>
Academics are often confused. It's the old adage, "If you can't dazzle
with brilliance, baffle with bull."
Smaug The Magnificent
>
> Fantasy is the opium of the ignorant and the indolent
>
>
This Fernandez-Armesto fellow seems to be a born pontificator. A quick
google search shows the breathtaking scale of his ignorance. His
ruminations include:
On nationalism
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,889634,00.html
On bullfighting
alt.culture.bullfight - 28 Apr 1999 by boup...@my-dejanews.com
On food
kw.eats - 20 Sep 2002 by Joe Szalai
(includes the opinion - "Clearly, the quotes above show that
Fernandez-Armesto is pompous")
On civilisation
alt.books - 17 Nov 2000 by David Smillie
soc.history.moderated - 22 Oct 1999 by Phil and Woody
("risible parochialism")
among others.
There was also some debate in soc.history.medieval in December 02 on
the Fantasy article.
For my part I think Fenandez-Arnesto suffers from a poverty of the
imagination. All fiction (literary or not) is a sub-gendre of fantasy
by definition, all philosophy speculation.
He also does not seem to realise that just as modern fantasy (as a
literary genre) has roots in the old epic tales, these tales
themselves have deeper roots. Are we to criticise likes of the Beowulf
poet or Aneurin, Homer or Malory for "being suckered by make belief"
and making "cut and paste confections from the myths of the world?" I
think not. Even the creators of Gilgamesh legend or the Popol Vuh
(both rightly praised) got their ideas somewhere.
I would hate to have to live in this guys world where the stars would
be called HD 39801 or HD 124897 instead of betelgeuse and arcturus.
Cheers
Smoky
Chris Byler
>> Fantasy is the opium of the ignorant and the indolent
>
>No, you're confusing it with religion.
The only difference between fantasy and religion is how seriously you
take it.
In fantasy, typically the *author* admits it is fictional (although
some adherents may not); religion is usually presented as Actually
True.
Oh, and in Marx's time, opiates were widely used and well regarded
*medicines*, not abusable drugs with a rather sordid image. Please
understand the source before alluding to it.
--
Chris Byler cby...@vt.edu
"Between justice and genocide there is, in the long run, no middle
ground." -- Lois McMaster Bujold (Aral Vorkosigan)
smw
Chris Byler wrote:
> Oh, and in Marx's time, opiates were widely used and well regarded
> *medicines*, not abusable drugs with a rather sordid image. Please
> understand the source before alluding to it.
Yeah. What Marx really meant was that the masses can only be healed by
judicious application of religion under medical supervision. Thank
goodness for the historically informed critic. Without you, people might
think Marx was taking an anti-religious stance here.
Hasdrubal Hamilcar
>
>
> Chris Byler wrote:
>
>> Oh, and in Marx's time, opiates were widely used and well regarded
>> *medicines*, not abusable drugs with a rather sordid image. Please
>> understand the source before alluding to it.
>
>
>
> Yeah. What Marx really meant was that the masses can only be healed by
> judicious application of religion under medical supervision. Thank
That 'medical supervision' is the priesthood that has hijacked most
religions.
80% of the problem with religion is the religious establishment. After
5000 years any institution will become corrupt and useless.
Hasan
steve miller
Re: Is Fantasy the opium of the ignorant and the indolent ?
Nope.
Steve
Lewis Mammel
Smaug The Magnificent wrote:
> I would hate to have to live in this guys world where the stars would
> be called HD 39801 or HD 124897 instead of betelgeuse and arcturus.
Heh. Did you look those up or do you know them by heart?
I doubt that Felipe Fernandez-Armesto would know what they
meant if he saw them.
http://www.history.qmul.ac.uk/staff/biography/fernandez-armesto.htm
Lew Mammel, Jr.
Malachias Invictus
> Can it be bad if it feels so good????
Are you referring to top-posting and quoting massive amounts of unneeded
text? In that case, yes.
--
^v^v^Malachias Invictus^v^v^
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishment the scroll,
I am the Master of my fate:
I am the Captain of my soul.
from _Invictus_, by William Ernest Henley
tomca...@yanospamhoo.com
> The BBC has announced a search for "Britain's Greatest Book". We can
> guess the result. The public will vote for The Lord of the Rings,
> which has already topped most polls and is now reaching new audiences,
> impelled by the impact of the blockbuster movie series, the second
> episode of which opens today in cinemas.
If Tolkein was trying to invent a British mythology, it looked like he
succeeded. America is still waiting for hers. I see Kevin Costner is
coming out with a new cowboy movie - the problem is that cowboys are
lone individuals, we need a group myth.
> For fantasy is self-doomed to be implausible. It is hard to feel
> involved when the author can whistle up a wizard to get the hero out
> of a fix.
This is my beef with Terminator-type movies. How do we know what a
superbeing can do and can't do?
> Indeed, if you subject the film version of The Lord of the Rings
> to critical scrutiny, you cease to enjoy it.
But what about the Matrix trilogy? It seems that one gets more
enjoyment out of it the more it is analyzed.
smw
tomca...@yaNOSPAMhoo.com wrote:
> In rec.arts.books Mauk <grea...@123mail.org> wrote:
>
>
>>The BBC has announced a search for "Britain's Greatest Book". We can
>>guess the result. The public will vote for The Lord of the Rings,
>>which has already topped most polls and is now reaching new audiences,
>>impelled by the impact of the blockbuster movie series, the second
>>episode of which opens today in cinemas.
>>
>
> If Tolkein was trying to invent a British mythology, it looked like he
> succeeded. America is still waiting for hers. I see Kevin Costner is
> coming out with a new cowboy movie - the problem is that cowboys are
> lone individuals, we need a group myth.
They sure as hell try to sell the Civil War to the school kids as
exactly that...
Malachias Invictus
"Lewis Mammel" <l.ma...@worldnet.att.net> wrote in message
news:3EF26715...@worldnet.att.net...
> Harry Potter is an engine of wealth
> serving the globalized media giants. It feeds on a youth which is
> being urged into an inner world of self-indulgent fantasy, and away
> from an awareness of and participation in the world. Hmmmm.
So, what time does that train leave?
Brad Murray
tyc> But what about the Matrix trilogy? It seems that one gets more
tyc> enjoyment out of it the more it is analyzed.
Please tell me this is sarcasm.
--
Brad Murray * The trouble with troubleshooting is that trouble
VSCA Founder * sometimes shoots back -- <Rejo>
Steve Holland
> tyc> But what about the Matrix trilogy? It seems that one gets more
> tyc> enjoyment out of it the more it is analyzed.
> Please tell me this is sarcasm.
I get enjoyment out of watching people overanalyse the Matrix
movies. :-)
==========================================================================
To find out who and where I am look at:
http://www.nd.edu/~sholland/index.html
"Normal people scare me."
==========================================================================
francis muir
Holland" <hol...@origo.phys.au.dk> wrote:
> Brad Murray <bjm-...@vsca.ca> writes:
>> In rec.games.frp.dnd tomca...@yanospamhoo.com wrote:
>
>> tyc> But what about the Matrix trilogy? It seems that one gets more
>> tyc> enjoyment out of it the more it is analyzed.
>
>> Please tell me this is sarcasm.
>
> I get enjoyment out of watching people overanalyse the Matrix
> movies. :-)
Personally I like my analysis over easy.
Don Tuite
. . .
>
>If Tolkein was trying to invent a British mythology, it looked like he
>succeeded. America is still waiting for hers. I see Kevin Costner is
>coming out with a new cowboy movie - the problem is that cowboys are
>lone individuals, we need a group myth.
How about The Godfather et seq?
Don
Andrew Plotkin
crossposted to draw flames, not to discuss anything.
If you want to reply, pick a single newsgroup.
Thank you.
(Followups reduced to rec.arts.sf.written.)
--Z
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."
*
* Make your vote count. Get your vote counted.
Michael Stemper
>smw wrote:
>> Chris Byler wrote:
>>> Oh, and in Marx's time, opiates were widely used and well regarded
>>> *medicines*, not abusable drugs with a rather sordid image. Please
>>> understand the source before alluding to it.
>>
>> Yeah. What Marx really meant was that the masses can only be healed by
>> judicious application of religion under medical supervision. Thank
>
>That 'medical supervision' is the priesthood that has hijacked most
>religions.
>
>80% of the problem with religion is the religious establishment. After
>5000 years any institution will become corrupt and useless.
Would you care to list some 5000-year-old institutions?
--
Michael F. Stemper
#include <Standard_Disclaimer>
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him talk like Mr. Ed
by rubbing peanut butter on his gums.
Smaug The Magnificent
Looked 'em up. I knew that at least one stellar nomenclature started
with HD (Henry Draper catalogue - contains about 225,000 stars) but
didn't know the exact references.
Most bright stars have many names. Betelguese is for example known
also as; alf Ori (i.e. constellation Orion, alpha star), HR2061, SKY#
9804, CCDM JO5552+0724AP among others.
FYI
http://www.ras.ucalgary.ca/~gibson/starnames/
Cheers
Smoky.
Taemon
> Brad Murray <bjm-...@vsca.ca> writes:
> > In rec.games.frp.dnd tomca...@yanospamhoo.com wrote:
> > tyc> But what about the Matrix trilogy? It seems that one gets more
> > tyc> enjoyment out of it the more it is analyzed.
> > Please tell me this is sarcasm.
> I get enjoyment out of watching people overanalyse the Matrix
> movies. :-)
I say that every analysis of the Matrix is an overanalysis.
Greetings, T.
Matt Ruff
>
> Realism is unbeatably interesting:
Apparently not.
-- M. Ruff
Keith Morrison
>>>tyc> But what about the Matrix trilogy? It seems that one gets more
>>>tyc> enjoyment out of it the more it is analyzed.
>>
>>>Please tell me this is sarcasm.
>>
>> I get enjoyment out of watching people overanalyse the Matrix
>>movies. :-)
>
> Personally I like my analysis over easy.
Personally, I like my analyst over easy (but only if she's really good
looking--glasses are a plus).
--
Keith
Steinn Sigurdsson
> "Steinn Sigurdsson" <ste...@najma.astro.psu.edu> wrote in message
> news:rx7k7bh...@najma.astro.psu.edu...
> > "Chris Wright" <cjwri...@shaw.ca> writes:
> > > "Mauk" <grea...@123mail.org> wrote in message
> > > news:11ef5ad6.03061...@posting.google.com...
> > > > Opinion
> > > > Fantasy is the opium of the ignorant and the indolent
> > > > The popularity of The Lord of the Rings signifies our cultural
> > > > impoverishment
> > > Our? There is no "our". One's cultural tastes are theirs alone, and to
> pass
> > > judgement on another's is the snobbery, pure and simple.
> > They are culturally impoverished
> > You have eclectic tastes
> > I determine what is worthwhile
> > > And nobody likes a snob.
> > Oh, well, never mind then
> I'll bite.
> Just what do you think that I am missing out on, good sir?
Nothing far as I can tell.
I was agreeing with you...
In an excessively sardonic way admittedly.
> What "culture" is most enriched?
Don't know, I'll let you know soon as I have sampled
them all. Or someone will tell us, this being Usenet.
Jette Goldie
"smw" <sm...@ameritech.net> wrote in message
news:3EF315FF...@ameritech.net...
In Marx's time you could buy your opium over the counter,
often without prescription. Mothers dosed their children
with Laudenum (morphine + alcohol) when they wouldn't
sleep. "Gripe water" was administered to teething babies.
(guess what that was? - the formula wasn't changed until
somewhere around the 1970s). Opiates *were* a useful
medicine, *not* considered a danger to most normal
people - of course there were always those who became
addicted to them, but that was considered a flaw *in those
people* not in the drugs themselves.
So yes, Marx was likely saying that the problem with religion
lay with *the masses* rather than the religion itself.
--
Jette
"Work for Peace and remain Fiercely Loving" - Jim Byrnes
je...@blueyonder.co.uk
http://www.jette.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/
Jette Goldie
<tomca...@yaNOSPAMhoo.com> wrote in message
news:bcvb7i$s69$1...@news1.radix.net...
> In rec.arts.books Mauk <grea...@123mail.org> wrote:
>
> > The BBC has announced a search for "Britain's Greatest Book". We can
> > guess the result. The public will vote for The Lord of the Rings,
> > which has already topped most polls and is now reaching new audiences,
> > impelled by the impact of the blockbuster movie series, the second
> > episode of which opens today in cinemas.
>
> If Tolkein was trying to invent a British mythology, it looked like he
> succeeded. America is still waiting for hers. I see Kevin Costner is
> coming out with a new cowboy movie - the problem is that cowboys are
> lone individuals, we need a group myth.
But the American *myth* IS the "individual against the world"
myth. The cowboy fits so well with that.
--
Jette
Never bet on Star Trek trivia if your opponent speaks Klingon.
- Ancient Kung Foole Proverb
je...@blueyonder.co.uk
smw
Jette Goldie wrote:
Yeah, sure. How about reading some Marx?
smw
Jette Goldie wrote:
> <tomca...@yaNOSPAMhoo.com> wrote in message
> news:bcvb7i$s69$1...@news1.radix.net...
>
>>In rec.arts.books Mauk <grea...@123mail.org> wrote:
>>
>>
>>>The BBC has announced a search for "Britain's Greatest Book". We can
>>>guess the result. The public will vote for The Lord of the Rings,
>>>which has already topped most polls and is now reaching new audiences,
>>>impelled by the impact of the blockbuster movie series, the second
>>>episode of which opens today in cinemas.
>>>
>>If Tolkein was trying to invent a British mythology, it looked like he
>>succeeded. America is still waiting for hers. I see Kevin Costner is
>>coming out with a new cowboy movie - the problem is that cowboys are
>>lone individuals, we need a group myth.
>>
>
>
> But the American *myth* IS the "individual against the world"
> myth. The cowboy fits so well with that.
No. The American myth is that the US is a democracy. The Iraqi war
wasn't mythologized as "an individual against the world," but as
"democracy against tyranny."
David Brewer
>
> In rec.games.frp.dnd tomca...@yanospamhoo.com wrote:
> tyc> But what about the Matrix trilogy? It seems that one gets more
> tyc> enjoyment out of it the more it is analyzed.
>
> Please tell me this is sarcasm.
The wonderful thing about The Matrix was how it brought new widths
to shallowness.
--
David Brewer
"The mentally disturbed do not employ the Theory of Scientific
Parsimony: the most simple theory to explain a given set of
facts." - P.K.Dick (from VALIS)
JChung2003
This is news?
Thanks, Felipe; that's fifteen minutes of my life I won't be getting back.
Jette Goldie
<yawn> We did that at school.
Hasdrubal Hamilcar
> On Fri, 20 Jun 2003 02:51:35 +0300, Morgil <more...@hotmail.com>
> alleged...
>
>>"Rupert Boleyn" <rbo...@paradise.net.nz> kirjoitti
>>viestissä:euh4fvk4mqo02t92m...@4ax.com...
>>
>>>On Thu, 19 Jun 2003 20:23:46 +0100, Eric Jarvis <w...@ericjarvis.co.uk>
>>>carved onto a tablet of ether:
>>>
>>>
>>>>actually he has a point...he overplays the hand...but
>>>>there is a lot of fantasy that would be improved if the
>>>>authors took time out to read the Kalevala, the
>>>>Mahabharata, the Mabinogion etc
>>>
>>>There's a surprise - Sturgeon's Law, remember? "Ninety percent of
>>>anything is crap." The only difference between mondern fantasy and
>>>myth is that most of the really bad myth is lost to us.
>>
>>I think it's more that anything old enough
>>is automatically considered to be 'good'...
>
>
> Well, if it has survived that long, then presumably there may be some
> merit to it still existing, or at least considerable resources dedicated
> to perpetuating it.
Apparently Sophocles had many more plays to his name, in the library of
Alexandria. Many of them were lost.
Carl Sagan wrote in "Cosmos" that (imagine if) we knew about one Will
Shakespeare and we had several of his surviving plays, among them "the
Merry Wives of Windsor", ... but we only knew from records that he had a
play called Hamlet, which nobody had ever seen, but was famed for being
very good.
The Mahabharata is very long, but only a small part of it (aka the
Bhagvad Gita) is widely read.
> merit to it still existing, or at least considerable resources dedicated
> to perpetuating it.
Or to innovating over it.
Hasan
smw
Jette Goldie wrote:
And thinking back to your no doubt thorough studies of the matter, you
would still like to maintain that Marx saw nothing wrong with religion
but that his remark under discussionw as a critique of the masses.
francis muir
> The American myth is that the US is a democracy. The Iraqi war
> wasn't mythologized as "an individual against the world," but as
> "democracy against tyranny."
You misunderstand American English.
The "Dem" in Democracy is the Dem
in "Dem" against "Us".
Hasdrubal Hamilcar
You are being so tendentious. She is analyzing his remark, not his
entire philosophy.
But for some that small remark might be a tidy little substitute for his
entire philosophy.
Hasan
Eric Jarvis
> On Thu, 19 Jun 2003 20:23:46 +0100, Eric Jarvis <w...@ericjarvis.co.uk>
> carved onto a tablet of ether:
>
> >actually he has a point...he overplays the hand...but
> >there is a lot of fantasy that would be improved if the
> >authors took time out to read the Kalevala, the
> >Mahabharata, the Mabinogion etc
>
> There's a surprise - Sturgeon's Law, remember? "Ninety percent of
> anything is crap." The only difference between mondern fantasy and
> myth is that most of the really bad myth is lost to us.
>
I dunno...I've read some pretty lousy modern versions of
the Bible, and ISTR a number of somewhat iffy Hollywood
takes on the Ancient Greek myths...I'm sure we still make
plenty of really bad myth
--
eric
www.ericjarvis.co.uk
"Hey Lord don't ask me questions
There ain't no answer in me"
Eric Jarvis
>
> One might well argue Japanese culture is most refined, but there are some
> definite signs of sickness.
>
> snip
>
> World's highest suicide rate.
>
actually the Baltic states are significantly higher
according to the WHO figures...IIRC Lithuania is
currently top/bottom of the "league"...though since a
number of nations refuse to keep figures [1] there isn't
a definitive highest
[1] as in "Nobody in XXXia has ever committed suicide, it
isn't part of our culture. Yes, we do seem to have a
particularly high rate of accidental death, I wonder why
that is?"
Christopher J. Henrich
<more...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> "Rupert Boleyn" <rbo...@paradise.net.nz> kirjoitti
> viestissä:euh4fvk4mqo02t92m...@4ax.com...
> > On Thu, 19 Jun 2003 20:23:46 +0100, Eric Jarvis <w...@ericjarvis.co.uk>
> > carved onto a tablet of ether:
> >
> > >actually he has a point...he overplays the hand...but
> > >there is a lot of fantasy that would be improved if the
> > >authors took time out to read the Kalevala, the
> > >Mahabharata, the Mabinogion etc
> >
> > There's a surprise - Sturgeon's Law, remember? "Ninety percent of
> > anything is crap." The only difference between mondern fantasy and
> > myth is that most of the really bad myth is lost to us.
>
> I think it's more that anything old enough
> is automatically considered to be 'good'...
>
Something which has had time to get forgotten, and is still being read
and enjoyed, has a better chance of being good. There's lots and lots
of old stuff that rests in well-earned oblivion.
Michael Korda recently wrote _Making The List_, about the books on the
best-seller list during most of the twentieth century. Some of them
are important; others will make you think, "Who? What's that??"
And then there's Max Beerbohm. He was a drama critic and occasional
caricaturist who flourished in the period from 1890 to 1914. He was in
the top literary circles of London, and he drew amusing caricatures of
many of his pals there. you can see them, for instance, in the
biography of him by David Cecil. Leading novelists of the time, who
now survive only in these cartoons.
--
Chris Henrich
"DAVID! Stop reading that book! You're here to ENJOY yourself!"
James Burbidge
<rkLIa.152006$3Sm....@news01.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Hasdrubal
Hamilcar wrote:
> Donald Shepherd wrote:
>> On Fri, 20 Jun 2003 02:51:35 +0300, Morgil <more...@hotmail.com>
>> alleged...
>>
>>>"Rupert Boleyn" <rbo...@paradise.net.nz> kirjoitti
>>>viestissä:euh4fvk4mqo02t92m...@4ax.com...
>>>
>>>>On Thu, 19 Jun 2003 20:23:46 +0100, Eric Jarvis <w...@ericjarvis.co.uk>
>>>>carved onto a tablet of ether:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>actually he has a point...he overplays the hand...but
>>>>>there is a lot of fantasy that would be improved if the
>>>>>authors took time out to read the Kalevala, the
>>>>>Mahabharata, the Mabinogion etc
>>>>
>>>>There's a surprise - Sturgeon's Law, remember? "Ninety percent of
>>>>anything is crap." The only difference between mondern fantasy and
>>>>myth is that most of the really bad myth is lost to us.
>>>
>>>I think it's more that anything old enough
>>>is automatically considered to be 'good'...
>>
>>
>> Well, if it has survived that long, then presumably there may be some
>> merit to it still existing, or at least considerable resources dedicated
>> to perpetuating it.
>
> Apparently Sophocles had many more plays to his name, in the library of
> Alexandria. Many of them were lost.
>
However, we probably have the best ones.
The plays of Sophocles that we have are derived from the texts used to
teach Greek "grammar" in the the late Roman Empire, which were
selected on the usual basis ("the Best of ...").
The same is true of some of the plays of Euripides; however, there's
one source which seems to be descended from one volume of an alphabetically
organized "Complete Plays of..."; so in addition to (for example) the
_Bacchae_ and the _Medea_, we also have nine which are relatively
random, such as _Helen_, _Electra_, and __Heracles_.
The really disppointing thing is the great writers of whom we have
nothing, or almost nothing, such as Agathon.
> Carl Sagan wrote in "Cosmos" that (imagine if) we knew about one Will
> Shakespeare and we had several of his surviving plays, among them "the
> Merry Wives of Windsor", ... but we only knew from records that he had a
> play called Hamlet, which nobody had ever seen, but was famed for being
> very good.
>
We almost have this situation, but for the so-called Ur-Hamlet (not
Shakespearean): we have bits of description of it (a ghost "crying
like a fishwife, "Hamlet, Revenge!", and we have another important
play by the author (_The Spanish Tragedy_). But speculation about the
play itself is largely speculation.
On the other side, there's the dreck and mediocre work that does
survive. We still have _lots_ of inferior Middle and New English
works, but nobody bothers to publish them, except occasionally for
linguistic or historical interest. _Amadis of Gaul_ and _Palmerin of
England_ are a better parallel to SF than Shakespeare ...
--
#include <disclaimer.h>
Eric Jarvis
>
> Would you care to list some 5000-year-old institutions?
>
<http://www.google.com/search?q=founded+in+2002&sourceid=
opera&num=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8>
Searched the web for founded in 2002.
Results 1 - 10 of about 3,610,000. Search took 0.23
seconds
there you go
HTH
Eric Jarvis
> On 19 Jun 2003 09:43:43 -0700, grea...@123mail.org (Mauk) wrote:
>
>
> Re: Is Fantasy the opium of the ignorant and the indolent ?
>
> Nope.
>
ubggre...so I've got to go back on the horse then?
Eric Jarvis
> Steve Holland:
>
> > I get enjoyment out of watching people overanalyse the Matrix
> > movies. :-)
>
> I say that every analysis of the Matrix is an overanalysis.
>
there is no analysis
Brandon Blackmoor
>
> I say that every analysis of the Matrix is an overanalysis.
The problem with Matrix Reloaded is that all of the boring, pretentious
things people *said* about The Matrix are actually *in* Matrix Reloaded.
Yawn. It wasn't scary and weird, like The Matrix. If there's ever a
movie that didn;t need a sequel (much less two), it's The Matrix.
Cerberus AOD
>
>
> Jette Goldie wrote:
>
> > <tomca...@yaNOSPAMhoo.com> wrote in message
> > news:bcvb7i$s69$1...@news1.radix.net...
> >
> >>In rec.arts.books Mauk <grea...@123mail.org> wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >>>The BBC has announced a search for "Britain's Greatest Book". We can
> >>>guess the result. The public will vote for The Lord of the Rings,
> >>>which has already topped most polls and is now reaching new audiences,
> >>>impelled by the impact of the blockbuster movie series, the second
> >>>episode of which opens today in cinemas.
> >>>
> >>If Tolkein was trying to invent a British mythology, it looked like he
> >>succeeded. America is still waiting for hers. I see Kevin Costner is
> >>coming out with a new cowboy movie - the problem is that cowboys are
> >>lone individuals, we need a group myth.
> >>
> >
> >
> > But the American *myth* IS the "individual against the world"
> > myth. The cowboy fits so well with that.
>
>
> No. The American myth is that the US is a democracy.
That's more a religious belief. Most people believe that the U.S. is a
democracy. As such it isn't quite a myth yet, is it?
> The Iraqi war
> wasn't mythologized as "an individual against the world," but as
> "democracy against tyranny."
And WMDs. Can't forget about the WMDs--can you?
Jordan179
> Opinion
>
> Fantasy is the opium of the ignorant and the indolent
>
> Felipe Fernandez-Armesto
>
>
>
> The popularity of The Lord of the Rings signifies our cultural
> impoverishment
>
>
> world's most bankable form of fiction, the genre of our times --
> star-warring its way through cinemas, boldly going across video
> screens, building Diskworlds,
I'm surprised Fernandez-Armestro knows about the Discworld, though he
mis-spelled the name.
> colonising imaginations with all the
> tenacity of the Evil Empire. Superheroes win ratings wars against real
> heroes: they have "special powers". Their magic is more potent than
> mere myth.
By definitions, "mythical" heroes aren't real.
> The BBC has announced a search for "Britain's Greatest Book". We can
> guess the result. The public will vote for The Lord of the Rings,
> which has already topped most polls and is now reaching new audiences,
> impelled by the impact of the blockbuster movie series, the second
> episode of which opens today in cinemas.
Given that Tolkien almost single-handedly created a whole new genre
AND a whole new myth with that book, that's not surprising. What other
British author of the 20th century achieved anything of such
magnitude?
> Yet the rise of fantasy is puzzling, even to those of us who relish
> its thrills. It defies common wisdom. Truth is supposed to be
> stranger, stronger than fiction, for ours is the strangest of all
> possible worlds: Middle Earth seems morally simple by comparison,
In that?
> while the world beyond Harry Potter's railway platform is childishly
> predictable.
In that?
> Realism is unbeatably interesting: that is why social
> observation is the foundation of all the world's best books.
It is also part of the foundation of both _Lord of the Rings_ and
_Harry Potter_.
> When there is so much reality to go round, it is hard to understand how
> audiences can fall for fantasy.
Because "audiences" have bigger imaginations than you do?
> For fantasy is self-doomed to be implausible. It is hard to feel
> involved when the author can whistle up a wizard to get the hero out
> of a fix. Magic, like madness, is no way to contrive a denouement: in
> worlds where anything can happen, the tension of the plot -- which
> depends on characters trapped in the constrictions of reality --
> dissolves.
Be it noted that Fernandez-Armestro has, without realizing it,
confessed his ignorance of how the worlds of fantasy are constructed.
Basically, in a good fantasy novel, the author has a clear concept of
what the capabilities and limitations of magic (and magical creatures
are), and keeps his writing internally consistent with this concept.
In _Lord of the Rings_, Tolkien's concept was not only specific but
elaborate. He wrote mountains of material on the various orders of
beings and their capabilities. His magic was mostly song- and rune-
and name-based, and while he (as far as I know) never wrote a specific
essay on its limitations and capabilities, he's very consistent about
them throughout his works.
I'm not an expert on J. K. Rowlings, but from what I've read of the
_Harry Potter_ books, she seems to be very knowledgable on a lot of
mythologies and has done a very good job of integrating them into a
Secret Magic urban fantasy kind of world. It's possible that someday
she will publish her notebooks, as Tolkien's son published his, and
then we'll see the details of her own concept of magic beyond what she
chose to write in the novels.
> Art demands discipline, and there are no disciplines
> tighter than those of the real world. History and myth have the best
> stories and the best images: fantasy-authors ransack them to get their
> ideas. Why warp myths when they are wonderful unwarped?
Because they are NOT "unwarped." Myths had to be invented, and the
myths that we have in the form that we have them represent
much-"warped" versions of the original tales, which in many cases have
been lost. Fernandez-Armestro is apparently unaware of the fact that
we do not have "the myths" in some sort of "canonical" form (even in
the case of the Judeo-Christian myths) -- instead, what we have are a
number of the most popular versions (often edited a final time to suit
popular tastes, in the 18th or 19th centuries).
> Fantasy-writers do not generate myths; they make cut-and-paste
> confections from the myths of the world.
This is exactly what myth-makers do, too. Or do you imagine that Ovid,
or even Hesiod or Homer, was telling the FIRST version of those
stories? I've done extensive research into the relationship between
the myths of various Old World peoples, and I've come to the
conclusion that the oldest parts of Greek myths (those dealing with
Kronos and Ouranos) actually derive from pre-Hellenic times and that
the name "Ouranus" is probably derived from the eponym of the "Aran"
(or whatever they called themselves) Proto-Indo-European (because it
is repeated in both Western and Eastern Indo-European mythoi).
God, or Ouranos, only knows what the ORIGINAL version of the
Ouranos-myth was! I'm pretty sure that it had a properly subservient
Kronos and the Titans, though, and none of this nonsense about Zeus or
the Olympians in it. :)
> Star Wars imagery drew on the Ancient Maya and feudal Japan.
> Tolkien's world evokes the Anglo-Saxons
> and the Norse, as if in a distorting mirror. J. K.Rowling flits
> between classical, medieval and Hindu myths.
Actually, each author has _syncretized_ multiple myths into new forms,
and made them mutually consistent. This is not as easy, trivial, or
harmful a work as you imagine ...
> Of course, clever
> literary pirates have always plundered legends to appropriate their
> power. Ovid pillaged ancient repositories for his Metamorphoses. Homer
> and the Arthurian bards wrenched Bronze Age tales into works of art.
>
> But unreconstructed myths are usually better.
Um, in the case of the Greek and Arthurian myths, we don't HAVE the
"unreconstructed" myths to compare them to. And from the fragments we
do have, I'd say that Homer and Ovid did a better job than most of the
temple inscriptions.
> They spring from
> collective effort, from folk memory and from a shared subconscious.
"Collective", "folk", and "shared" each mean "a lot of people." Why
can't this "lot of people" include geniuses like Homer, Ovid, Mallory,
Tolkien, or Lucas?
> Reading them gives you satisfactions no fantasy can supply: contact
> with other cultures, insights into the past. They enhance your life by
> stimulating your understanding, for the arts of every civilisation are
> rooted in its myths.
Why can't the art of a fantasy be rooted in ITS myths? Tolkien created
myths for the Elves, for instance, to create the specific effect whose
absence is being bemoaned here.
> You cannot understand Renaissance painting
> without knowing the myths of Greece and Rome.
Oh, you mean the ones created by those "pirates" Homer, Hesiod, and
Ovid? Not to mention that well-known freebooter Virgil?
> You cannot fully
> appreciate the stories carved on Buddhist temple façades without
> perusing the Jatakas composed to honour early Boddhisatvas.
>
> Peter Brook shunned the fakery of fantasy-pastiche to film the 100,000
> verses of the Mahabharata -- the world's greatest epic, composed over
> 800 years, culminating more than 1,500 years ago.
You do realize, don't you, that the _Mahabarata_ is itself a Sanskrit
reworking of parts of the _Rig Veda_, and the form in which we have
the _Rig Veda_ was finalized CENTURIES after the events which it is
describing? Or, furthermore, that Peter Brook must have re-interpreted
it to make it work on film, making him one of those "pirates" you are
complaining about?
> With a Hollywood
> budget, it could barge Lord of the Rings out of the box office.
Probably not. _LOTR_ is a lot more coherent and entertaining. I'll
note that _LOTR_ has been competing with the _Mahabarata_ and many
other mythical epics for decades, and has been outselling them.
> One of
> the best cartoon versions of a mythic story is a cheaply made
> Guatemalan film of the Popol Vuh -- the magical tale of the underworld
> trials and triumphs of Mayan hero-twins. The Icelandic Edda or the
> tales of the Sumerian gods could be dazzlingly cinematic and more
> exciting than any fantasy game. But the video-geeks, playing Harry
> Potter games, are too nerdy-eyed to notice.
Again, why is it NOT ok to make up new myths?
As for "the video-geeks," they naturally prefer something in
contemporary style and language. Present the old myths in updated
forms, and they'll love them.
Ah, but then the presenter would, necessarily, be a "pirate."
> The current supremacy of fantasy in the cinema relies, like most
> conquests, on superior technology, building the empire of special
> effects.
Ah, unlike Greek myths? Have you ever actually READ Homer's
battle-scenes in the _Iliad_? Sam Peckinpah couldn't have done better
than these.
> Fantasy commands the timeless appeal of nonsense: plots which
> make no sense, characters bereft of conviction and events untouched by
> reason spare the reader or viewer the effort to think.
Such as?
> Indeed, if you
> subject the film version of The Lord of the Rings to critical
> scrutiny, you cease to enjoy it.
In that?
> For the intellectuals in the
> audience, the only pleasure lies in observing a world created by
> cannibalising exotic cultures and eluding rational limitations. A
> pterodactyl joins the battlers in The Lord of the Rings:
It's not a "pterodactyl," and it hardly comes from nowhere. Read the
books.
> In other movies, on a single field, warriors wield flaming
> swords and inter-ballistic missiles without incongruity. It increases
> the spectacle. It does not, however, enhance the art.
The author seems to only be aware of fantasy _films_ (which are far
weaker on logic than fantasy NOVELS). Incidentally, the complaint he
just made is also applicable to _Mahabarata_.
> Our fantasy fixation is worrying. Fantasy doesn't just feed on the
> imagination: it drains it. Virtuality erodes reality. Students who
> sweat over Elvish and Klingon will never dream in Chinese or Greek.
Right, because the knowledge of Elvish or Klingon destroys one's
ability to learn Chinese or Greek? In that ... ?
> Kids know more about the battles of Aragorn than of Alexander, the
> life of Harry Potter than the life of Harry VIII.
Some kids do. Actually, interests in fantasy and in history tend to
_correlate_, rather than be exclusive.
> Fantasy endangers
> history, some say: realism is on the way to extinction, shrinking from
> the syllabus, extruded from bookshops, de-accessioned from libraries.
I completely fail to see why more interest in fantasy means less
interest in history, especially since most fantasy draws very strongly
on history.
> Fears like these, however, misrepresent the rise of fantasy. The
> demise of history and the retreat of realism are not the results of
> fantasy's popularity, but its causes. Unmindful of our real roots, we
> reconstruct an imperfectly imagined antiquity. The fault lies with
> historians, who have done their best to make the true past boring.
> Similarly, writers of realistic fiction increasingly address each
> other, or the prize-awarding committees, instead of the public.
>
> Meanwhile, we recoil from history because we are afraid of its
> lessons: it teaches us that we have made no moral or intellectual
> progress for thousands of years and have grown most in our capacity to
> do ill. We flee to fantasy in recoil from truth. We are suckered by
> make-believe because we have lost touch with the majesty of myth.
> Instead of the past, we fall for pastiche. For those who forget the
> past, it seems, are condemned to reinvent it.
Then what is the problem with fantasy?
Sincerely Yours,
Jordan
Jordan179
> >
> > Fantasy is the opium of the ignorant and the indolent
> >
> > Felipe Fernandez-Armesto
<major snippage>
> > For fantasy is self-doomed to be implausible. It is hard to feel
> > involved when the author can whistle up a wizard to get the hero out
> > of a fix. Magic, like madness, is no way to contrive a denouement: in
> > worlds where anything can happen, the tension of the plot -- which
> > depends on characters trapped in the constrictions of reality --
> > dissolves. Art demands discipline, and there are no disciplines
> > tighter than those of the real world. History and myth have the best
> > stories and the best images: fantasy-authors ransack them to get their
> > ideas. Why warp myths when they are wonderful unwarped?
>
> Of course, there are no deus ex machina devices in classic mythology. Jesus
> doesn't rise from the dead, the Iliad doesn't have gods protecting their
> worshippers outside the walls of Troy, Odysseus doesn't blind a giant who is
> retroactively one-eyed etc etc.
Tolkien is actually far better in terms of foreshadowing than most
myths. We know what the One Ring is and why and HOW it must be
destroyed before the end of the first third of the story; as soon as
the Lord of the Nazgul appears on the field we hear that it is said
that "no mortal MAN can destroy him," Gollum tracks Frodo all through
the epic and for a time is actually his guide, etc. etc. The one
arguable Rabbit Out Of A Hat is Gandalf's resurrection, and if you
read the _Silmarillion_ (or CAREFULLY read the Appendices to _LOTR_),
you know WHY this is possible.
Sincerely Yours,
Jordan
Jordan179
>
> Some works of fiction do, some dont . Some are a metaphor, a mirror or a
> vehicle for truths. Some are just monodimensional , pure childish
> fiction. To which group do LOTR and HP belong? Easy question.
> regards
> leo
I say "vehicle for truths," especially in the case of _LOTR_, and even
in the case of _HP_.
Sincerely Yours,
Jordan
tejas
<tomca...@yaNOSPAMhoo.com> wrote in message
news:bcvb7i$s69$1...@news1.radix.net...
> In rec.arts.books Mauk <grea...@123mail.org> wrote:
>
> > guess the result. The public will vote for The Lord of the Rings,
> > which has already topped most polls and is now reaching new audiences,
> > impelled by the impact of the blockbuster movie series, the second
> > episode of which opens today in cinemas.
>
> succeeded. America is still waiting for hers. I see Kevin Costner is
> coming out with a new cowboy movie - the problem is that cowboys are
> lone individuals, we need a group myth.
Kevin Costner? Give us a break....Harry Dean Stanton, perhaps....
>
> > For fantasy is self-doomed to be implausible. It is hard to feel
> > involved when the author can whistle up a wizard to get the hero out
> > of a fix.
>
> This is my beef with Terminator-type movies. How do we know what a
> superbeing can do and can't do?
Suspension of disbelief..
>
> > Indeed, if you subject the film version of The Lord of the Rings
> > to critical scrutiny, you cease to enjoy it.
>
> But what about the Matrix trilogy? It seems that one gets more
> enjoyment out of it the more it is analyzed.
Only if you have a mental age of 16...not that that's a bad thing....
ObArthur: PK Dick
Ted
Myrnag2555
>observation is the foundation of all the world's best books
Corrupt, circular reasoning. Realism
is NOT unbeatably interesting. If it was,
then the fantasy he complains about
would not be more appealing than the
"realism" he champions. He defines books
as being "best" when they are based on
social observation, and uses that as support
for his claim that realism is better than fantasy.
>For fantasy is self-doomed to be implausible. It is hard to feel
>involved when the author can whistle up a wizard to get the hero out
>of a fix
Of course this is specious. The author can
always whistle up a character to get the hero out of a fix. The hero has a
brain tumour? The world's best neurosurgeon
can suddenly show up to fix him. The hero
can't decide between two women? A mugger can shoot one of them.
>History and myth have the best
>stories and the best images: fantasy-authors ransack them to get their
>ideas. Why warp myths when they are wonderful unwarped?
This is appallingly ignorant. Tolkien did not
ransack any myth to get the best image in Lord of the Rings, the corrupted
Silver Tower. Zelazny did not ransack a myth to get his flowing stream of
consciousness depiction of dimensional travel, and I've never seen any image in
any myth that was
better. I think this clown has never actually
read any fantasy novel save for Harry Potter.
the Robot Vegetable
> "smw" <sm...@ameritech.net> wrote in message
>
> <yawn> We did that at school.
Try this one: _The Marx Family Saga_ by Juan Goytisolo.
Craig Richardson
>Jette Goldie wrote:
>> In Marx's time you could buy your opium over the counter,
>> often without prescription. Mothers dosed their children
>> with Laudenum (morphine + alcohol) when they wouldn't
>> sleep. "Gripe water" was administered to teething babies.
>> (guess what that was? - the formula wasn't changed until
>> somewhere around the 1970s). Opiates *were* a useful
>> medicine, *not* considered a danger to most normal
>> people - of course there were always those who became
>> addicted to them, but that was considered a flaw *in those
>> people* not in the drugs themselves.
>>
>> So yes, Marx was likely saying that the problem with religion
>> lay with *the masses* rather than the religion itself.
>
>Yeah, sure. How about reading some Marx?
How about reading some Marx - without preconceptions, and with
historical perspective? Knew that damn liberal arts education would
come in handy someday...
--Craig
--
Managing the Devil Rays is something like competing on "Iron Chef",
and having Chairman Kaga reveal a huge ziggurat of lint.
Gary Huckabay, Baseball Prospectus Online, August 21, 2002