Patrick Rothfuss: Technical Difficulties

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ChickenWing: Jul 22, 2010

I'm gonna be pedantic and say that being poor != being impoverished. Talking to Chronicler, who was likely born upper-middle class, it's an apt description - to someone who has always had money, those things are important. It also fits with the environment - poor people don't go to the University, so things like that would absolutely stand out (in the wrong way). Kvothe is trying his absolute damndest to not look like a charity case to his landed friends, and that's hard when you look like a walking ragbag and are that guy that goes to a restaurant and orders the cheapest dish on the menu and a water every time.

It's definitely jarring when you think about it in relation to Kvothe in Tarbean, but I'm sorta willing to let it slide because the University is about Kvothe trying to leave behind his street urchin past. Maybe a more relatable example - it's like going to public school in a nice area and being the one kid with dirty secondhand kmart clothes while all your friends have brand new name brand clothing.

# ? May 5, 2016 21:25

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# ? May 23, 2024 16:07

Oxxidation: Jul 22, 2007

I like to think I'm pretty sensitive to rhythm and syncopation in prose for an amateur, and yeah, Rothfuss' stuff really is just like hitting Middle "C" for paragraphs at a time.

I've always pointed to Blake Butler as a great example of harsh "burnt tongue" prose but the guy's also kind of unpleasant and vanished totally up his own rear end after his first book ("Scorch Atlas," if anyone's interested). The last section of his short story "We Witnessed the Advent of a New Apocalypse During an Episode of Friends" was one of the more haunting passages I read that year.

ChickenWing posted:

I'm gonna be pedantic and say that being poor != being impoverished.

The text refers to this situation as being "truly poor." This has nothing to do with pedantry and everything to do with Rothfuss having no clue what poverty is like.

# ? May 5, 2016 21:26

Grenrow: Apr 11, 2016

TheIncredulousHulk posted:

Setting aside how laughable Kvothe's theme park account of poverty is in comparison to real world poverty, it doesn't even make sense when compared to Kvothe's own experiences. Dude lived homeless on the streets of brick-smashing and rape, but now suddenly real poverty is bumming drinks off your friends when you go to a restaurant and feeling embarrassed because you can afford to repair your clothes, just not in the specific color you'd want. It's like it's not even the same character talking

It's a very specific level of poverty. Kvothe isn't poor enough that he can't go out, but he can't buy salt.

Patrick Rothfuss posted:

First, I was driven. Other students could afford to stroll through their studies. Their parents or patrons would cover the expense. I, on the other hand, needed to climb the ranks in the Fishery quickly so I could earn money working on my own projects. Tuition wasn�t even my first priority anymore, Devi was.

I also don't buy that everyone else is just a dilettante aristocrat who can afford to spend forever getting their degree at Magic University. Surely the people paying for this education are pushing the students to get done reasonably quickly to reduce expenses? I'm sure some students gently caress around, but wouldn't many feel a sense of obligation to finish on time? Especially if they're being sponsored by a patron, in which case the patron would presumably be looking for a return on their investment in the student.

# ? May 5, 2016 21:42

Evil Fluffy: Jul 13, 2009; Scholars are some of the most pompous and pedantic people I've ever had the joy of meeting.

Grenrow posted:

The salt bit in that last quote is kind of weird. I think you'd be more worried about having food to begin with rather than flavoring. Salt's not even a particularly expensive commodity. I think Rothfuss heard somewhere that back in Ye Olden Days, salt was "valuable," but he never bothered to read any proper history, so he doesn't understand why. Salt was valuable because it was a great trade good: you could gather it in bulk relatively easily, you can move it around fairly easily, and you can sell it practically anywhere. But it wasn't usually something expensive or considered a luxury. If you can afford meals at all, you can probably afford salt, barring environmental constraints (I think some parts of west/central Africa had really high prices for salt in the 18th century?). Besides, Kvothe is presumably not buying salt in massive quantities so he can use it for preparing food for winter or salting his daily catch of fish. He's just cooking with it and maybe adding some to his regular meals. This is a really pedantic point to be going on about, but it's just such a dumb, bullshit detail.

Much like music, I don't think Rothfuss actually has any experience with living in poverty. If Kvothe hadn't spent years living as a loving beggar the Harry Poverty poo poo might be slightly less awful.

# ? May 5, 2016 21:55

BravestOfTheLamps: Oct 12, 2012; by FactsAreUseless; Lipstick Apathy

Do you people just read the end of the posts :argh:

# ? May 5, 2016 21:58

Strom Cuzewon: Jul 1, 2010

Oxxidation and BotL - I'm an uncultured barbarian who thinks hating WoT makes him an intellectual - can you point me to some prose with a good rhythm for comparison? Or a link to an earlier post if I missed you talking about it.

# ? May 5, 2016 22:11

Oxxidation: Jul 22, 2007

Strom Cuzewon posted:

Oxxidation and BotL - I'm an uncultured barbarian who thinks hating WoT makes him an intellectual - can you point me to some prose with a good rhythm for comparison? Or a link to an earlier post if I missed you talking about it.

I namedropped Blake Butler in my last post, though I dunno if I'd call him "good" so much as "excessively weird." An excerpt from his short "The Disappeared":

quote:

Before prison, Dad had sat at night with his cell phone on his knee on vibrate, waiting to feel the pulse shoot up his leg and hear her on the other end, alive. His skin would flex at any tremor. The phone rang through the night. The loan folks wanted back their money. Taxes. Electricity. They would not accept Visa or good will. Dad developed a tic and cursed with no control. He believed my mother's return in his heart. His list of sightings riddled the whole map. He thought he'd heard her once in the men's room at the movies. Once he'd seen her standing at the edge of a tobacco billboard, pointing down. He wanted me to keep tabs on all these places. As well, he wanted farther acres combed. Mom had been appearing in his sleep. She would not be hard to find if he truly loved her, he said she whispered. You should already know by now. On his skin, while in his cell bed, he made lists of the places where he should have looked: that spot in the ocean where he'd first kissed her; the small plot where they'd meant one day to be buried side by side; behind the moon where they joked they'd live forever; in places no one else can name. He wanted a full handwritten report of each location.

After school, before the sun dunked, I carried the map around my mother's streets in search. Sometimes, as my dad had, I felt my mother's hair against my neck. I smelled her sweet sweat somehow pervading even in the heady rush of highway fumes. I heard her whistle no clear tune, the way she had with me inside her and when I was small enough to carry. I used the hours between school's end and draining light. I trolled the grocery, hiked the turnpike, stalked the dressing rooms of several local department stores. I felt that if I focused my effort to the right degree I could bring an end to all this sinking. I'd find her somewhere, lost and listless, lead her home, reteach her name. Newly aligned, she'd argue dad's innocence in court to vast amends, and then there'd be the three of us forever, fixed in the only home we'd ever known.

I did not find her at the creek bed where she'd taught me how to swim via immersion.

I spend several hopeful evenings outside the dry cleaners where she'd always taken all our clothes.

There were always small pockets of buzzed air where I could feel her just behind me, or inside.

My uncle did not go home. He'd taken over my parents' bed and wore Dad's clothing. Through the night he snored so loud you could hear it throughout the house. You could hear as well the insects crawling: their tiny wings and writhing sensors. You could hear the wreathes of spore and fungus. The slither in the ground. It was all over, not just my house. Neighborhood trees hung thick with buzz. House roofs collapsed under heavy weight. Everyone had knives. They ran photo essays in the independent papers. The list of disappeared grew to include news anchors, journalists, and liberal pundits. I stayed awake and kept my hair combed. I tried not to walk in sludge.

I received an email from my father: SHE SAYS THERE'S NOTM UCH TIME [sic].

Note how much of the passage is chopped into short, declarative sentences, with a lot of hard consonant sounds to make sure every statement snaps cleanly off from the next. There are very few participles, too (-ing words, basically), which lends finality to every action. As the search becomes more futile, the paragraphs themselves grow choppier, and the vocabulary begins to degrade into burnt-tongue strangeness ("thick with buzz," "wreathes of spore"). A similar thing is done with that passage of "Shalimar the Clown" i linked earlier, which uses shorter sentences to simultaneously detach and emphasize brutal actions and longer, more florid ones to uplift the tone in the end. Cormac McCarthy's another popular choice for effective, unusual syncopation, often going for breathless and lengthy sentences without commas or other participles that gives his prose an almost Biblical inevitability even when he's talking about dudes illicitly loving melons.

Structure tells story just as much as the words themselves. From what I'm seeing, Rothfuss gives very little thought to that - it's all just "and this happened, then this happened, and this happened while I'm doing this" for pages on end.

# ? May 5, 2016 22:32

Number Ten Cocks: Feb 25, 2016; by zen death robot

BravestOfTheLamps posted:

Do you people just read the end of the posts

Unironically yes.

# ? May 5, 2016 22:32

BravestOfTheLamps: Oct 12, 2012; by FactsAreUseless; Lipstick Apathy

Strom Cuzewon posted:

Oxxidation and BotL - I'm an uncultured barbarian who thinks hating WoT makes him an intellectual - can you point me to some prose with a good rhythm for comparison? Or a link to an earlier post if I missed you talking about it.

Well that's kind of a broad question, because any competently written novel should have good rhythm to its prose. It's a pretty loose concept in itself, but prose should be "paced" to match the desired effect.

The closest novel in reach is Barry Lyndon by William Thackeray. I'll grab that and open page 193:

quote:

How were times changed with me now! I had left my country a poor penniless boy�a private soldier in a miserable marching regiment. I returned an accomplished man, with property to the amount of five thousand guineas in my possession, with a splendid wardrobe and jewel-case worth two thousand more; having mingled in all the scenes of life a not undistinguished actor in them; having shared in war and in love; having by my own genius and energy won my way from poverty and obscurity to competence and splendour. As I looked out from my chariot windows as it rolled along over the bleak bare roads, by the miserable cabins of the peasantry, who came out in their rags to stare as the splendid equipage passed, and huzza'd for his Lordship's honour as they saw the magnificent stranger in the superb gilded vehicle, my huge body-servant Fritz lolling behind with curling moustaches and long queue, his green livery barred with silver lace, I could not help thinking of myself with considerable complacency, and thanking my stars that had endowed me with so many good qualities.

It's nothing exceptional, but it's good at illustrating that the narrator is a complete tosser. Like any self-respecting 19th century author, Thackery writes in long, interminable sentences that convey stateliness and complexity of thought. What Thackery does is express the pretensions of his hero - every phrase is both pointed and deflating.

"A poor penniless boy�a private soldier in a miserable marching regiment" is as arduous as the story it tells, long and full of harsh sounds.

"I returned an accomplished man" is a great counterpoint, because despite all its puffed-up pride, it's a rather meager statement, like everything that follows it.

"As I looked out from my chariot windows at is rolled along over the bleak bare roads, by the miserable cabins of the peasantry..." - The sentence follows Barry Lyndon's train of thought neatly while characterising him: he observes the ridiculous reality of poverty, completely unlike the "humble" beginnings of his self-mythologized past, and then retreats into his luxuries and finally returns to circle his ego.

BravestOfTheLamps fucked around with this message at 11:36 on May 6, 2016

# ? May 5, 2016 22:53

AngusPodgorny: Jun 3, 2004; Please to be restful, it is only a puffin that has from the puffin place outbroken.

This thread reminded me to read some more Umberto Eco, so I checked out Baudolino, and it's surprising how many parallels there are. Except for sympathy, but that was already in This Island of the Day Before. The major difference is that Rothfuss writes like a precocious teenager who thinks he knows everything, while Eco writes like a history professor who's spent his life learning things. It doesn't make Eco the easiest to read since he'll casually introduce an argument between a half dozen different religious philosophies on a page, but his details never seems off the way that Rothfuss's details tend to.

Just to throw more good prose out there, two random selections from authors commonly acclaimed for prose and rhythm, since I think if a writer is actually good you should be able to just open a book to any page:

Vladimir Nabokov in Lolita posted:

I think I had better describe her right away, to get it over with. The poor lady was in her middle thirties, she had a shiny forehead, plucked eyebrows and quite simple but not unattractive features of a type that may be defined as a weak solution of Marlene Dietrich. Patting her bronze-brown bun, she led me into the parlor and we talked for a minute about the McCoo fire and the privilege of living in Ramsdale. Her very wide-set sea-green eyes had a funny way of traveling all over you, carefully avoiding your own eyes. Her smile was but a quizzical jerk of one eyebrow; and uncoiling herself from the sofa as she talked, she kept making spasmodic dashes at three ashtrays and the near fender (where lay the brown core of an apple); whereupon she would sink back again, one leg folded under her. She was, obviously, one of those women whose polished words may reflect a book club or bridge club, or any other deadly conventionality, but never her soul; women who are completely devoid of humor; women utterly indifferent at heart to the dozen or so possible subjects of a parlor conversation, but very particular about the rules of such conversations, through the sunny cellophane of which not very appetizing frustrations can be readily distinguished. I was perfectly aware that if by any wild chance I became her lodger, she would methodically proceed to do in regard to me what taking a lodger probably meant to her all along, and I would again be enmeshed in one of those tedious affairs I knew so well.

Cormac McCarthy in Blood Meridian posted:

They crested the mountain at sunset and they could see for miles. An immense lake lay below them with the distant blue mountains standing in the windless span of water and the shape of a soaring hawk and trees that shimmered in the heat and a distant city very white against the blue and shaded hills. They sat and watched. They saw the sun drop under the jagged rim of the earth to the west and they saw it flare behind the mountains and they saw the face of the lake darken and the shape of the city dissolve upon it. They slept among the rocks face up like dead men and in the morning when they rose there was no city and no trees and no lake only a barren dusty plain.
Sproule groaned and collapsed back among the rocks. The kid looked at him. There were blisters along his lower lip and his arm through the ripped shirt was swollen and something foul had seeped through among the darker bloodstains. He turned back and looked out over the valley.
Yonder comes somebody, he said.

By contrast, Rothfuss's prose seems simple and workmanlike. I flipped through Name of the Wind for a while and the most complex sentence I saw occurred in the paragraph: "It was true. Instead of lighting the whole room, as was typical, my lamp revealed a narrow slice of the room: the corner of the worktable and half of the large black slate that stood against the wall. The rest of the room remained dark." Even then, the sentence has a single discrete idea.

Some people praise Rothfuss's prose, but I suspect it's because he sometimes decides to be clever with analogies, dissonant adjectives, or insights on life. (I find them all those things the most annoying part of his books, but who am I to judge). His simple writing also makes it easier to read much faster, which is a benefit because he writes so many words.

Incidentally both Humbert Humbert and the kid are thoroughly unlikeable protagonists, but unlike Kvothe, they manage to be compelling despite it.

# ? May 5, 2016 23:26

Atlas Hugged: Mar 12, 2007; Put your arms around me,
fiddly digits, itchy britches
I love you all

Talking about structure, William Gibson's "The Peripheral" has over 100 chapters and it rules.

# ? May 6, 2016 04:26

BravestOfTheLamps: Oct 12, 2012; by FactsAreUseless; Lipstick Apathy

LET'S READ THE KINGKILLER CHRONICLE CRITICALLY

Interlude - Umberto Eco's Comic Portrait of Life in a Pre-Modern University

quote:

Mostly the students played ball, true, but they also brawled with the people of the Abbey of Saint Germain, or among students of different origin, Picards against Normans, for example, and they traded insults in Latin, so that anyone could understand you were offending him. These were all things frowned upon by the Great Provost, who sent his bowmen to arrest the most unruly. Obviously, at this point the students forgot their differences and all together fell to exchanging blows with the bowmen.

No men in the world were more easily corrupted than the bowmen of the provost. So if a student was arrested, they all had to dig into their purses to persuade the bowmen to set him free. This made the pleasures of Paris even more costly.

Second, a student who has no amorous affairs is derided by his fellows. Unfortunately, the most inaccessible thing for the students was women. There were very few female students to be seen, and there were legends still circulated about the beautiful H�lo�se, who had cost her lover the cutting off of his pudenda, even if it was one thing to be a student, hence by definition ill-famed and yet tolerated, and another to be a professor, like the great and unhappy Ab�lard. Mercenary love was expensive, and so they had to rely on the occasional tavern wench or some common woman of the neighborhood, but in that quarter there were always more students than females.

Unless they managed to assume an idle air and ribald look while strolling on the Ile de la Cit�, and thus succeed in seducing ladies of higher station. Much desired were the wives of the butchers of La Gr�ve, who, after an honored career in their trade, no longer slaughtered cattle but governed the meat market, behaving like gentlemen. With a husband born quartering oxen, who had achieved comfort late in life, the wives were alert to the fascination of the more handsome students. But these ladies wore sumptuous dresses decorated with fur, and silver and bejeweled belts, which made it difficult at first sight to distinguish them from grand prostitutes who, though the laws forbade it, usually dressed in the same fashion. This exposed the students to some unfortunate misunderstandings, for which they were all the more derided by their friends.

If a student succeeded in winning a real lady, or indeed a virtuous maiden, sooner or later husbands and fathers would find out, and there would be a fight, sometimes with weapons; and someone died or was wounded, almost always the husband or father, and then there was more brawling with the bowmen of the provost. Baudolino hadn't killed anyone, and in general he also stayed well away from brawls, but with one husband (and butcher) he had had to deal. Ardent in love but cautious in matters of war, when he saw the husband enter the room, swinging one of those hooks used to hang slaughtered animals, Baudolino immediately tried to jump out the window. But, as he was judiciously calculating the distance before making the leap, he had had time to receive a slash on the cheek, thus decorating forever his face with a scar worthy of a man-at-arms.

On the other hand, even winning working-class women was not an everyday occurrence and demanded long sieges (at the expense of lessons), and whole days spent observing from the window, which generated boredom. Then dreams of seduction were abandoned, and the youths threw water down on the passersby, or they used the women as targets, firing peas with a slingshot, or they even taunted teachers who went past below, and if these grew angry, the students would follow them, in a body, to their house, throwing stones at the windows because, after all, it was the students who paid them and thus had earned some rights.

Baudolino, in fact, was telling Niketas what he had not told Beatrice, namely, that he was becoming one of those clerics who studied the liberal arts in Paris, or jurisprudence in Bologna, or medicine in Salerno, or sorcery in Toledo, but in no place learned good behavior. Niketas did not know whether to be shocked, amazed, or amused. In Byzantium there were only private schools for the sons of well-to-do families, where, from their earliest years, they learned grammar and read pious works and the masterpieces of classical culture; after the age of eleven they studied poetry and rhetoric, they learned to compose on the literary models of the ancients; and the rarer the terms they used, and the more complex their syntactical constructions, the more readily they were considered for a bright future in the imperial administration. But afterwards, either they became sages in a monastery or they studied things such as law or astronomy from private masters. Still, they studied seriously, whereas it seemed that in Paris the students did everything except study.

Baudolino corrected him. "In Paris we worked very hard. For example, after the first years, we were already taking part in debates, and in debate you learn to posit objections and to move on to the determination, that is, to the final solution of a question. And you mustn't think that the lessons are the most important things for a student, or that the tavern is only a place where they waste time. The good thing about the studium is that you learn from your teachers, true, but even more from your fellows, especially those older than you, when they tell you what they have read, and you discover that the world must be full of wondrous things and to know them all�since a lifetime will not be enough for you to travel through the whole world�you can only read all the books."

- Umberto Eco, Baudolino

BravestOfTheLamps fucked around with this message at 17:02 on May 6, 2016

# ? May 6, 2016 11:44

ChickenWing: Jul 22, 2010

While I can see that the prose is definitely elevated a couple levels beyond Rothfuss's, it seems almost stuffy to me, to the point that I'm not sure I'd actually enjoy reading an entire book of it. Hell, my eyes glossed over a couple times in just those paragraphs.

It's one thing to be able to put words together nicely, it's another entirely to make them captivating.

# ? May 6, 2016 14:08

Oxxidation: Jul 22, 2007

ChickenWing posted:

While I can see that the prose is definitely elevated a couple levels beyond Rothfuss's, it seems almost stuffy to me, to the point that I'm not sure I'd actually enjoy reading an entire book of it. Hell, my eyes glossed over a couple times in just those paragraphs.

It's one thing to be able to put words together nicely, it's another entirely to make them captivating.

Eco is a semiotics professor first and a novelist second, so yes, his writing does tend to sound like an academic essay.

I think one of the most important things to take from that passage in comparison to Rothfuss is that Niketas is openly incredulous when Baudolino goes into all the shenanigans he got up to during his university years, leaving Baudolino to defend himself and lend further depth to his passage, unlike Kvothe, who just spits out a petulant "you don't know what it's like" and gets back to aggrandizing himself. Unlike the Chronicler, who's pretty much just a sounding board for Kvothe's bullshit (he's not even given the decency of a name), Niketas is much more interrogatory for the initial bits of Baudolino's story, and doesn't even let him wriggle away from accusations that he's making it all up. At one point Baudolino does the whole "oh I'm not really all that important, just in the background of major events, that's how I like it" thing and Niketas immediately (and rightly) calls out his false modesty as further evidence of his hubris.

# ? May 6, 2016 14:14

ChickenWing: Jul 22, 2010

Oxxidation posted:

Eco is a semiotics professor first and a novelist second, so yes, his writing does tend to sound like an academic essay.

I think one of the most important things to take from that passage in comparison to Rothfuss is that Niketas is openly incredulous when Baudolino goes into all the shenanigans he got up to during his university years, leaving Baudolino to defend himself and lend further depth to his passage, unlike Kvothe, who just spits out a petulant "you don't know what it's like" and gets back to aggrandizing himself. Unlike the Chronicler, who's pretty much just a sounding board for Kvothe's bullshit (he's not even given the decency of a name), Niketas is much more interrogatory for the initial bits of Baudolino's story, and doesn't even let him wriggle away from accusations that he's making it all up. At one point Baudolino does the whole "oh I'm not really all that important, just in the background of major events, that's how I like it" thing and Niketas immediately (and rightly) calls out his false modesty as further evidence of his hubris.

Chronicler actually does have a name, but unfortunately it's remaining firmly stuck to the tip of my tongue. (e: Devon Lochees)

I can see what you mean regarding Chronicler's lack of input, but I'm not convinced it would necessarily make things better. Perhaps that's just because I'm comfortable with the book as-is, but I feel like more interjections would be jarring and break the flow (which I feel the book has in earnest).

# ? May 6, 2016 14:42

Oxxidation: Jul 22, 2007

ChickenWing posted:

Chronicler actually does have a name, but unfortunately it's remaining firmly stuck to the tip of my tongue. (e: Devon Lochees)

I can see what you mean regarding Chronicler's lack of input, but I'm not convinced it would necessarily make things better. Perhaps that's just because I'm comfortable with the book as-is, but I feel like more interjections would be jarring and break the flow (which I feel the book has in earnest).

The flow consists of Kvothe jacking himself off without cessation or interruption so I'd be pretty okay with that being broken.

I seriously can't get over what a repellent little poo poo he is, and all the more because everything about the story suggests we're supposed to root for him. Conversely, Baudolino's glory is spread out over a whole cast of characters, and he makes it clear from the start that his only really noteworthy skill is lying his rear end off (which immediately makes his whole story suspect, of course).

# ? May 6, 2016 15:03

BravestOfTheLamps: Oct 12, 2012; by FactsAreUseless; Lipstick Apathy

Oxxidation posted:

The flow consists of Kvothe jacking himself off without cessation or interruption

You know nothing Jon Snow

At least until the next entry.

# ? May 7, 2016 11:25

BravestOfTheLamps: Oct 12, 2012; by FactsAreUseless; Lipstick Apathy

LET�S READ THE KINGKILLER CHRONICLE CRITICALLY

Part 23: �Slowly, I realized that none of this mattered.�

Before we discuss the story, let�s work through some huge blocks of text. Chapter 53, �Slow Circles,� opens with narration that once again serves as a good example of the unimaginative evenness of the tone. It has everything already mentioned: the stretched-out limpness of thelim sentences, the overtly smooth flow of sentences, and the flat note to conclude things.

quote:

There were a lot of places you could go in Imre to listen to music. In fact, nearly every inn, tavern, and boarding house had some manner of musician strumming, singing, or piping in the background. But the Eolian was different. It hosted the best musicians in the city. If you knew good music from bad, you knew the Eolian had the best.

To get in the front door of the Eolian cost you a whole copper jot. Once you were inside you could stay as long as you wished, and listen to as much music as you liked.

But paying at the door did not give a musician the right to play at the Eolian. A musician who wished to set foot upon the Eolian�s stage had to pay for the privilege: one silver talent. That�s right, folk paid to play at the Eolian, not the other way around.

[...] If your performance impressed the audience and the owners enough, you were given a token: a tiny set of silver pipes that could be mounted on a pin or necklace. Talent pipes were recognized as clear marks of distinction at most sizable inns within two hundred miles of Imre.

If you had your set of talent pipes, you were admitted to the Eolian for free and could play whenever the fancy took you.

The only responsibility the talent pipes carried was that of performance. If you had earned your pipes, you could be called upon to play. This was usually not a heavy burden, as the nobility who frequented the Eolian usually gave money or gifts to performers who pleased them. It was the upper class version of buying drinks for the fiddler.

Some musicians played with little hope of actually gaining their pipes. They paid to play because you never knew who might be in the Eolian that night, listening. A good performance of a single song might not get you your pipes, but it might earn you a wealthy patron instead.

A patron.

Just for some variety, look at how Eco introduces an outlandish character in the transition from the framing story to the main narrative:

Baudolino posted:

Baudolino had been able to read many books with Otto, but he hadn't realized that there could exist as many in the world as there were in Paris. They were not at everyone's disposal, but through good luck, or, rather, through good attendance at his lessons, he had come to know Abdul.

"To explain the connection between Abdul and the libraries, I have to go back a little, Master Niketas. While I was following a lesson, always blowing on my fingers to warm them, and with my bottom freezing, because the straw didn't offer much protection against that floor, icy like all of Paris on those winter days, one morning I noticed a boy near me who, by the color of his face, seemed a Saracen, except that he also had red hair, which you don't find among Moors. I don't know if he was following the lesson or pursuing his own thoughts, but he was staring into space. Every so often he would shiver and pull his clothing around him, then he would return to looking into the air, and at times he would scratch something on his tablet. I craned my neck, and I realized that half of what he wrote looked like those fly droppings that are the Arabs' alphabet, and for the rest he wrote in a language that seemed Latin but wasn't, and it even reminded me of the dialects of my land. Anyway, when the lesson was over, I struck up a conversation; he reacted politely, as if he had been wanting for some time to find a person to talk with; we made friends, we went walking along the river, and he told me his story."

***

The boy's name was Abdul, a Moor's name, in fact, but he was born of a mother who came from Hibernia, and this explained the red hair, because all those who come from that remote island are like that, and according to report, they are bizarre, dreamers. His father was Proven�al, of a family that had settled overseas after the conquest of Jerusalem, fifty some years before. As Abdul tried to explain, those Frankish nobles had adopted the customs of the peoples they had conquered. They wore turbans and indulged in other Turkeries, they spoke the language of their enemies, and were within an inch of following the precepts of the Koran. For which reason a half-Hibernian, with red hair, could be called Abdul and could have a face burned by the sun of Syria, where he was born. He thought in Arabic, and in Proven�al he told the ancient sagas of the frozen seas of the north, which he had heard from his mother.

Baudolino immediately asked him if he was in Paris to become a good Christian again and speak as one should, namely, in proper Latin. As to his reasons for coming to Paris, Abdul remained fairly reticent. He spoke of a thing that had happened to him, something fairly upsetting apparently, a kind of terrible ordeal to which he had been subjected while still a boy, so that his noble parents had decided to send him to Paris to save him from some unknown vendetta. Speaking of this, Abdul turned grim, blushing as much as a Moor can blush, his hands trembling, and Baudolino decided to change the subject.

Notice how unique this character is despite being nominally mundane. Just some food for thought.

As for the rest of the chapter, Kvothe has also found an audience for his practice. This is Auri, a child-like young woman who hides in the abandoned depths of the university. She and Kvothe struck up a correspondence off the page. She�s a fairly significant character, too, so this is more important than for the sheer dreadfulness of it all. She lives somewhere beneath the University, which will be more important later.

quote:

I headed to my bunk and retrieved my lute from the trunk at the foot of the bed. Then, given the rumors Sim had mentioned, I took one of the trickier ways onto the roof of Mains, shimmying up a series of drainpipes in a sheltered box alley. I didn�t want to draw any extra attention to my nighttime activities there.

It was fully dark by the time I made it to the isolated courtyard with the apple tree. All the windows were dark. I looked down from the edge of the roof, seeing nothing but shadows.

�Auri,� I called. �Are you there?�

�You�re late,� came the vaguely petulant reply.

�I�m sorry,� I said. �Do you want to come up tonight?�

A slight pause. �No. Come down.�

�There�s not much moon tonight,� I said in my best encouraging tones. �Are you sure you don�t want to come up?�

I heard a rustle from the hedges below and then saw Auri scamper up the tree like a squirrel. She ran around the edge of the roof, then pulled up short a few dozen feet away.

At my best guess, Auri was only a few years older than me, certainly no more than twenty. She dressed in tattered clothes that left her arms and legs bare, was shorter than me by almost a foot. She was thin. Part of this was simply her tiny frame, but there was more to it than that. Her cheeks were hollow and her bare arms waifishly narrow. Her long hair was so fine that it trailed her, floating in the air like a cloud.

It had taken me a long while to draw her out of hiding. I�d suspected someone was listening to me practice from the courtyard, but it had been nearly two span before I caught a glimpse of her. Seeing that she was half-starved, I began bringing whatever food I could carry away from the Mess and leaving it for her. Even so, it was another span before she had joined me on the roof as I practiced my lute.

[...]

I guessed she was some student who had gone cracked and run underground before she could be confined to Haven. I hadn�t learned much about her, as she was still shy and skittish. When I�d asked her name, she bolted back underground and didn�t return for days.

So I picked a name for her, Auri. Though in my heart I thought of her as my little moon-fey.

This is of course a terrible storytelling choice, because her introduction is robbed of any intrigue and mystery. The focus is instead on her being a precious eccentric. This may seem a bit incongruous, but I glossed over the scene that introduced the University�s asylum and the obligatory screaming lunatics therein. Part 20, Chapter 46, if you�re curious. Auri is deranged in a beautifully damaged way that tempts the reader to search for a fitting entry on TvTropes. She�s kin to eccentrics like Elodin, who she�s seen talking with the wind on rooftops at night.

Oddly enough, despite Kvothe�s patronizing attitude towards her (contradictory given his age), theirs is one of the few relationships between equals in the book. It�s still not very good. On one hand it�s simply a given that Kvothe knows how to indulge her eccentricities, which robs it of authenticity, and on the other because it�s just so loving twee.

And remember, Kvothe is still fifteen, despite acting like he was in his twenties like the scenes imply.

quote:

She smiled and thrust her hand forward. Something gleamed in the moonlight. �A key,� she said proudly, pressing it on me.

I took it. It had a pleasing weight in my hand. �It�s very nice,� I said. �What does it unlock?�

�The moon,� she said, her expression grave.

�That should be useful,� I said, looking it over.

�That�s what I thought,� she said. �That way, if there�s a door in the moon you can open it.� She sat cross-legged on the roof and grinned up at me. �Not that I would encourage that sort of reckless behavior.�

I squatted down and opened my lute case. �I brought you some bread.� I handed her the loaf of brown barley bread wrapped in a piece of cloth. �And a bottle of water.�

�This is very nice as well,� she said graciously. The bottle seemed very large in her hands. �What�s in the water?� she asked as she pulled out the cork and peered down into it.

�Flowers,� I said. �And the part of the moon that isn�t in the sky tonight. I put that in there too.�

She looked back up. �I already said the moon,� she said with a hint of reproach.

�Just flowers then. And the shine off the back of a dragonfly. I wanted a piece of the moon, but blue-dragonfly-shine was as close as I could get.�

She tipped the bottle up and took a sip. �It�s lovely,� she said, brushing back several strands of hair that were drifting in front of her face.

quote:

While I was trying to make sense of what she�d said, Auri finished the last of her bread and clapped her hands excitedly. �Now play!� she said breathlessly. �Play! Play!�

Grinning, I pulled my lute out of its case. I couldn�t hope for a more enthusiastic audience than Auri.

We leave off with that.

Chapter 54, �A Place to Burn,� cuts to Kvothe and his interchangeable friends making their way to the Eolian. He unwittingly wins over the owner of the place, who he mistakes for a doorman. Kvothe is just one of the musicians going for �the pipes,� and he intends to play an extremely difficult and complex duet with a volunteer from the audience. While the company is drinking, Ambrose happens to enter the Eolian. Turns out he has tried performing before by reciting poetry. There�s also dialogue about drinking to waste page or two.

There are other performers, including wealthy but talentless dilettante Count Threpe. It�s finally Kvothe�s turn to play, and...

You know what�s going to happen. We�ve seen this before. Chapter 34:

quote:

Then I felt something inside me break and music began to pour out into the quiet. My fingers danced; intricate and quick they spun something gossamer and tremulous into the circle of light our fire had made. The music moved like a spiderweb stirred by a gentle breath, it changed like a leaf twisting as it falls to the ground, and it felt like three years Waterside in Tarbean, with a hollowness inside you and hands that ached from the bitter cold.

[...]

I looked up to see everyone perfectly motionless, their faces ranging from shock to amazement.

Expect overblown metaphors and similes.

Kvothe of course turns out to be mesmerizing, especially when complemented by the unknown volunteer in the audience. Mid-performance, however, a string breaks on his lute, but he powers on through. In the end, his performance is so powerful that he himself is crying.

quote:

The lights shining onto the stage made the rest of the room dim from where I sat. Looking out I saw what seemed to be a thousand eyes. Simmon and Wilem, Stanchion by the bar. Deoch by the door. I felt a vague flutter in my stomach as I saw Ambrose watching me with all the menace of a smoldering coal.

I looked away from him to see a bearded man in red, Count Threpe, an old couple holding hands, a lovely dark-eyed girl�.

My audience. I smiled at them. The smile drew them closer still, and I sang.

�Still! Sit! For though you listen long
Long would you wait without the hope of song
So sweet as this. As Illien himself set down
An age ago. Master work of a master�s life
Of Savien, and Aloine the woman he would take to wife.�

I let the wave of whisper pass through the crowd. Those who knew the song made soft exclamation to themselves, while those who didn�t asked their neighbors what the stir was about.

[...]

I was so used to practicing the song alone that I almost forgot to double the third refrain. But I remembered at the last moment in a flash of cold sweat. This time as I sang it I looked out into the audience, hoping at the end I would hear a voice answering my own.

I reached the end of the refrain before Aloine�s first stanza. I struck the first chord hard and waited as the sound of it began to fade without drawing a voice from the audience. I looked calmly out to them, waiting. Every second a greater relief vied with a greater disappointment inside me.

Then a voice drifted onto stage, gentle as a brushing feather, singing�.

[...]

She sang as Aloine, I as Savien. On the refrains her voice spun, twinning and mixing with my own. Part of me wanted to search the audience for her, to find the face of the woman I was singing with. I tried, once, but my fingers faltered as I searched for the face that could fit with the cool moonlight voice that answered mine. [...}

And we sang! Her voice like burning silver, my voice an echoing answer. Savien sang solid, powerful lines, like branches of a rock-old oak, all the while Aloine was like a nightingale, moving in darting circles around the proud limbs of it.

quote:

It was not perfect. No song as complex as �Sir Savien� can be played perfectly on six strings instead of seven. But it was whole, and as I played the audience sighed, stirred, and slowly fell back under the spell that I had made for them.

I hardly knew they were there, and after a minute I forgot them entirely. My hands danced, then ran, then blurred across the strings as I fought to keep the lute�s two voices singing with my own. Then, even as I watched them, I forgot them, I forgot everything except finishing the song.

The refrain came, and Aloine sang again. To me she was not a person, or even a voice, she was just a part of the song that was burning out of me.

And then it was done. Raising my head to look at the room was like breaking the surface of the water for air. I came back into myself, found my hand bleeding and my body covered in sweat. Then the ending of the song struck me like a fist in my chest, as it always does, no matter where or when I listen to it.

I buried my face in my hands and wept. Not for a broken lute string and the chance of failure. Not for blood shed and a wounded hand. I did not even cry for the boy who had learned to play a lute with six strings in the forest years ago. I cried for Sir Savien and Aloine, for love lost and found and lost again, at cruel fate and man�s folly. And so, for a while, I was lost in grief and knew nothing.

As conflict, it's mechanical, and as prose, it's suffocating. What is there to be said that hasn�t been said before? Perhaps nothing more than that combined with the next two chapters, this might be the peak of Kvothe�s non-ironic self-aggrandizement. I don�t recall there being anything quite as self-absorbed as this afterwards.

Of course, this only applies to The Name of the Wind.

Chapter 55, �Flame and Thunder,� is the shortest yet, and is just an addendum to his performance. I quote it in full:

quote:

I held all of my mourning for Savien and Aloine to a few moments.

Knowing I was still on display, I gathered myself and straightened in my chair to look out at my audience. My silent audience.

Music sounds different to the one who plays it. It is the musician�s curse. Even as I sat, the ending I had improvised was fading from my memory. Then came doubt. What if it hadn�t been as whole as it had seemed? What if my ending hadn�t carried the terrible tragedy of the song to anyone but myself? What if my tears seemed to be nothing more than a child�s embarrassing reaction to his own failure?

Then, waiting, I heard the silence pouring from them. The audience held themselves quiet, tense, and tight, as if the song had burned them worse than flame. Each person held their wounded selves closely, clutching their pain as if it were a precious thing.

Then there was a murmur of sobs released and sobs escaping. A sigh of tears. A whisper of bodies slowly becoming no longer still.

Then the applause. A roar like leaping flame, like thunder after lightning.

JUST ROTHFUSS THINGS

quote:

�What?� I asked. �The thing with the doorman? Simmon, you are jittery as a teenage whore. He was friendly. I liked him. What�s the harm in offering him a drink?�

quote:

The next to try her talent was a young woman, richly dressed with golden hair. After Stanchion introduced her, she sang an aria in a voice so clear and pure that I forgot my anxiety for a while and was ensnared by her song. [...]

Then she sang a second song while accompanying herself on a half-harp. I watched her intently, and I will admit that it was not entirely for her musical ability. She had hair like ripe wheat. I could see the clear blue of her eyes from where I sat some thirty feet away. She had smooth arms and small delicate hands that were quick against the strings. And the way she held the harp between her legs made me think of�well, the things that every boy of fifteen thinks about incessantly.

BravestOfTheLamps fucked around with this message at 02:31 on Jan 16, 2017

# ? May 8, 2016 12:15

Atlas Hugged: Mar 12, 2007; Put your arms around me,
fiddly digits, itchy britches
I love you all

I believe this is where I metaphorically threw the book in the trash.

# ? May 8, 2016 16:16

Trammel: Dec 31, 2007; .

quote:

I heard a rustle from the hedges below and then saw Auri scamper up the tree like a squirrel. She ran around the edge of the roof, then pulled up short a few dozen feet away.

At my best guess, Auri was only a few years older than me, certainly no more than twenty. She dressed in tattered clothes that left her arms and legs bare, was shorter than me by almost a foot. She was thin. Part of this was simply her tiny frame, but there was more to it than that. Her cheeks were hollow and her bare arms waifishly narrow. Her long hair was so fine that it trailed her, floating in the air like a cloud.

This single sentance, injected into the narrative is interestingly at contrast to the rest of the passage. It's all descriptive of Auri, but breaks in to the authors voice, and then returns to description. In the descriptions of Auri we read; her physicality, her language and her behaviour, they are all those of a child/non-adult. But, within 2 sentances of introducting the character, Rothfuss/Kvothe feels it necessary to interject, and say, "No, no, she's totally legal, in fact, she was older than me!". I do wonder if it was the editor, or his own good sense that told him to add that line?

# ? May 9, 2016 00:04

HIJK: Nov 25, 2012; in the room where you sleep

Trammel posted:

This single sentance, injected into the narrative is interestingly at contrast to the rest of the passage. It's all descriptive of Auri, but breaks in to the authors voice, and then returns to description. In the descriptions of Auri we read; her physicality, her language and her behaviour, they are all those of a child/non-adult. But, within 2 sentances of introducting the character, Rothfuss/Kvothe feels it necessary to interject, and say, "No, no, she's totally legal, in fact, she was older than me!". I do wonder if it was the editor, or his own good sense that told him to add that line?

Rothfuss does not appear to have good sense if the legends about book 2 are true. I'm guessing editor.

# ? May 9, 2016 02:20

Nakar: Sep 2, 2002; Ultima Ratio Regum

HIJK posted:

Rothfuss does not appear to have good sense if the legends about book 2 are true. I'm guessing editor.

Legends about what, the editing process on the publisher's end? There's probably a lot of dirty laundry I'd love to hear about from publishers on a lot of things.

# ? May 9, 2016 03:50

HIJK: Nov 25, 2012; in the room where you sleep

Nakar posted:

Legends about what, the editing process on the publisher's end? There's probably a lot of dirty laundry I'd love to hear about from publishers on a lot of things.

I've never read book 2, so everything I know about the sex ninjas and the sex fairy is apocrypha/legendary. I don't have any stories about the editing process though I wish I did.

# ? May 9, 2016 03:58

ChickenWing: Jul 22, 2010

I continue to be completely and utterly confused by what you lot find unlikable.

Trammel posted:

This single sentance, injected into the narrative is interestingly at contrast to the rest of the passage. It's all descriptive of Auri, but breaks in to the authors voice, and then returns to description. In the descriptions of Auri we read; her physicality, her language and her behaviour, they are all those of a child/non-adult. But, within 2 sentances of introducting the character, Rothfuss/Kvothe feels it necessary to interject, and say, "No, no, she's totally legal, in fact, she was older than me!". I do wonder if it was the editor, or his own good sense that told him to add that line?

Huh? Why is this important? Is age not a normal part of descriptions?

# ? May 9, 2016 15:00

BravestOfTheLamps: Oct 12, 2012; by FactsAreUseless; Lipstick Apathy

Yeah, it's nothing compared to

quote:

Though in my heart I thought of her as my little moon-fey.

# ? May 9, 2016 15:28

Oxxidation: Jul 22, 2007

Rothfuss has weird ideas of what it means to be a man.

# ? May 9, 2016 16:34

Dienes: Nov 4, 2009; dee
doot doot dee
doot doot doot
doot doot dee
dee doot doot
doot doot dee
dee doot doot; College Slice

ChickenWing posted:

I continue to be completely and utterly confused by what you lot find unlikable.

Huh? Why is this important? Is age not a normal part of descriptions?

Some people find it creepy to simultaneously infantalize a grown woman while also sexualizing someone who is mentally like a child.

# ? May 9, 2016 17:06

Lottery of Babylon: Apr 25, 2012; STRAIGHT TROPIN'

Auri, who is consistently written like a nine-year-old, is also implied to be a rape victim. But we're also told that that's a good thing, because being raped made her a special snowflake, so all's well that ends well.

# ? May 9, 2016 17:33

SpacePig: Apr 4, 2007; Hold that pose.
I've gotta get something.

^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^
e: (Had the reply window up for awhile.)Oh, christ, I forgot about that. Okay, yeah, that's a bit weird.

Wait, did I miss something? I don't remember Auri ever having been sexualized. Hell, I even forgot that she was supposed to be older than him.

I've always thought that he interactions with Kvothe were cute, and was expecting a lot more from Slow Regard. If you folks who like Rothfuss want to see why people might think he's a bad writer, read Slow Regard of Silent Things.

# ? May 9, 2016 17:37

ChickenWing: Jul 22, 2010

Dienes posted:

Some people find it creepy to simultaneously infantalize a grown woman while also sexualizing someone who is mentally like a child.

Yeah I never got this. There's nothing that evokes any sort of sexual feelings towards Auri at all.

Lottery of Babylon posted:

Auri, who is consistently written like a nine-year-old, is also implied to be a rape victim. But we're also told that that's a good thing, because being raped made her a special snowflake, so all's well that ends well.

Again, that's not how it came across to me at all. It's mentioned multiple times throughout the book that students sometimes have mental breaks as a result of sympathy or not washing their hands between alchemy and dinner or whatever and Auri is fairly obviously put up as an example of this.

SpacePig posted:

If you folks who like Rothfuss want to see why people might think he's a bad writer, read Slow Regard of Silent Things.

It's me I'm the goon who liked the Bad Book. I really enjoyed how it fleshed out Auri and made me enjoy her character that little bit more.

# ? May 9, 2016 19:25

Number Ten Cocks: Feb 25, 2016; by zen death robot

Ban this sick filth. Surely not even Jivjov would go this far.

# ? May 9, 2016 19:46

BravestOfTheLamps: Oct 12, 2012; by FactsAreUseless; Lipstick Apathy

Calm down, Number Ten Cocks, you're as jittery as a teenage whore.

# ? May 9, 2016 19:52

SpacePig: Apr 4, 2007; Hold that pose.
I've gotta get something.

ChickenWing posted:

It's me I'm the goon who liked the Bad Book. I really enjoyed how it fleshed out Auri and made me enjoy her character that little bit more.

I felt this way about it in the beginning, and then it just kind of kept going. It felt 3 times longer than it actually was or needed to be. Slow Regard is something that would've been better served as a standalone graphic novel or something.

# ? May 9, 2016 19:58

ChickenWing: Jul 22, 2010

SpacePig posted:

I felt this way about it in the beginning, and then it just kind of kept going. It felt 3 times longer than it actually was or needed to be. Slow Regard is something that would've been better served as a standalone graphic novel or something.

I'll admit that I didn't like it as much as NotW or WMF, but I still got really caught up in it. I dunno. Clearly my good-dar is broken.

# ? May 9, 2016 19:59

SpacePig: Apr 4, 2007; Hold that pose.
I've gotta get something.

ChickenWing posted:

I'll admit that I didn't like it as much as NotW or WMF, but I still got really caught up in it. I dunno. Clearly my good-dar is broken.

I'm not trying to tell you you're wrong for liking it or anything. Hell, I've defended jivjov here in the past. I guess I'm phrasing things a bit argumentatively lately.

# ? May 9, 2016 20:02

jivjov: Sep 13, 2007; But how does it taste? Yummy!; Dinosaur Gum

Number Ten Cocks posted:

Ban this sick filth. Surely not even Jivjov would go this far.

The leading 'j' in jivjov is not capitalized.

It's a branding thing.

# ? May 9, 2016 20:14

ChickenWing: Jul 22, 2010

SpacePig posted:

I'm not trying to tell you you're wrong for liking it or anything. Hell, I've defended jivjov here in the past. I guess I'm phrasing things a bit argumentatively lately.

No you're fine, I was joking because even in this thread most people didn't like Slow Regard.

# ? May 9, 2016 20:23

Dienes: Nov 4, 2009; dee
doot doot dee
doot doot doot
doot doot dee
dee doot doot
doot doot dee
dee doot doot; College Slice

ChickenWing posted:

No you're fine, I was joking because even in this thread most people didn't like Slow Regard.

There's only so many ways you can give quirky human traits to inanimate objects before it gets boring.

# ? May 9, 2016 20:25

Lottery of Babylon: Apr 25, 2012; STRAIGHT TROPIN'

Dienes posted:

There's only so many ways you can give quirky human traits to inanimate objects before it gets boring.

The Twelve was one of the rare changing places of the Underthing. It was wise enough to know itself, and brave enough to be itself, and wild enough to change itself while somehow staying altogether true.

# ? May 9, 2016 20:28

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ? May 23, 2024 16:07

Number Ten Cocks: Feb 25, 2016; by zen death robot

jivjov posted:

The leading 'j' in jivjov is not capitalized.

It's a branding thing.

Is brand positioning that important in the bed-wetting anime pervert space? Maybe it's more crowded than I knew.

# ? May 9, 2016 20:41

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > Patrick Rothfuss: Technical Difficulties

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