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HIJK posted:I had an ex boyfriend who recommended the Rothfuss books to me and he got genuinely angry when I told him I wasn't very enthused about the story because the prose was bad. He was convinced Rothfuss was a fantastic writer and he was absolutely furious when I didn't agree.
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Sep 13, 2017 03:36
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the old ceremony posted:good call imo He cited Rothfuss as one of the reasons he was breaking up with me. I haven't lost any sleep over him.
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Sep 13, 2017 04:00
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HIJK posted:He cited Rothfuss as one of the reasons he was breaking up with me. I haven't lost any sleep over him. sounds like he really just wanted to date kvothe all along
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Sep 13, 2017 04:09
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mystes posted:In Brandon Sanderson's books, the magic systems literally *are* the plot, because all of his books are mysteries where the mystery is "how does the magic system work?" I was going to make this exact post. The character development doesn't really matter. If the characters took a different route to solving the mystery, the mystery would still be solved and the baddy defeated. I admit I find some of the puzzles interesting, but this is also one of the reasons why the middle of his books are infamous slogs. It's all irrelevant and it's just leading to the eureka moment when the characters finally figure out how to save the day, again irrelevant of anything that has happened to the characters in the meantime.
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Sep 13, 2017 04:47
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HIJK posted:He cited Rothfuss as one of the reasons he was breaking up with me.
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Sep 13, 2017 06:04
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HIJK posted:He cited Rothfuss as one of the reasons he was breaking up with me. I haven't lost any sleep over him. did you tell him you could tell he was wroth but didn't know what all the fuss was about
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Sep 13, 2017 06:39
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just another posted:did you tell him you could tell he was wroth but didn't know what all the fuss was about oh christ, I'm an idiot I didn't
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Sep 13, 2017 06:40
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just another posted:did you tell him you could tell he was wroth but didn't know what all the fuss was about You're all- right.
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Sep 13, 2017 06:54
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I'm reminded of when my sister was dating a guy. He brought over his Firefly DVDs to watch them with her, then "forgot" to bring them with when he left. He spent the next several weeks pestering her about if she had continued to watch the series on her own from where they had left off. They're no longer dating.
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Sep 13, 2017 06:57
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Atlas Hugged posted:At no point have I ever said you can't like a thing. This idea that your tastes somehow shield something you like from criticism is bonkers. Your criticism may be relevant, insightful, and accurate (and honestly probably is, there is so much bad TG). This does not oblige them to care, though. uberkeyzer posted:The last two Hugo winners were written by a woman who is also a person of color, and are about many of the things you talk about in your first paragraph, such as feminism, the exploitation of the female body, the exploitation of the black body, overcoming societal programming and self-actualization, and the way this is passed down from mother to daughter. But don't let me interrupt you, you're on quite a roll. Leckie had some pretty interesting things to say about imperialism via her Imperial Radch series, but even more interesting she used the conceit of using female pronouns instead of male as the 'default' combined with strategically vague character descriptions to play with the gender assumptions the reader makes. It's rather subtle and the story is made more interesting because of it. Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 09:16 on Sep 13, 2017 |
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Sep 13, 2017 08:59
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uberkeyzer posted:Sorry that you can't ignore real problems in society like you used to be able to. How does it feel being like everyone else? that's a pretty uncharitable reading of that quote
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Sep 13, 2017 09:50
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The comments about how Branderson's writing uses fantasy plots as a frame to present a mystery and a logical puzzle puts me in mind of say the 'death game' genre from Japanese fiction. A central part of the appeal of Kaiji, Liar Game etc. is to present a set of rules and then show how they can be manipulated. But it seems wrong to say that characterisation is irrelevant to those stories, so maybe Branderson just can't tell a story that feels well embedded in the game he sets up. But I mean, I haven't read him and I likely never will.
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Sep 13, 2017 11:11
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Liquid Communism posted:Your criticism may be relevant, insightful, and accurate (and honestly probably is, there is so much bad TG). This does not oblige them to care, though. Sure, I can't make anyone care, but I can't make anyone care about anything. So rather than giving in to nihilism, I'd rather look at the motivation of the people involved. When you have someone like BoTL go into a thread dedicated to discussing an author and recommending similar books, and he spends all his effort in trashing that author and calling out fans of the books, those posters don't owe him anything and aren't compelled to care. But when those people go into a thread dedicated to criticism, one set up specifically for the purpose of keeping the criticism in its own place, and then declare that such criticism isn't possible or is irrelevant, that tells me two things. 1) They absolutely do care, and almost certainly for the reasons I've outlined (social pressure, identity, regional popularity). 2) They're acting in bad faith. Peel posted:The comments about how Branderson's writing uses fantasy plots as a frame to present a mystery and a logical puzzle puts me in mind of say the 'death game' genre from Japanese fiction. A central part of the appeal of Kaiji, Liar Game etc. is to present a set of rules and then show how they can be manipulated. But it seems wrong to say that characterisation is irrelevant to those stories, so maybe Branderson just can't tell a story that feels well embedded in the game he sets up. If you're being generous, then you'd say that the events of the plot lead to the eureka moment the characters need either to exploit the rules or to solve the mystery. The problem though is that the journey to solving that mystery isn't necessarily interesting and it's certainly not necessary. The characters could have arrived at the solution any number of ways, so you end up feeling like you're waiting just to get the book over. The other issue is that he's written a stupid amount of content dedicated to characters sitting around doing research. Part of the answer is almost always hidden in ancient texts, so queue dozens of pages of characters reading fictional books by made-up authors. And Sanderson isn't a particularly witty or clever man. He can construct a puzzle and present a novel solution, one that's well foreshadowed in the text, but what he is miserable at is writing good passages or excerpts to his fake texts and he's poo poo at naming them. Atlas Hugged fucked around with this message at 11:25 on Sep 13, 2017 |
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Sep 13, 2017 11:20
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Atlas Hugged posted:But when those people go into a thread dedicated to criticism, one set up specifically for the purpose of keeping the criticism in its own place, and then declare that such criticism isn't possible or is irrelevant, that tells me two things. 1) They absolutely do care, and almost certainly for the reasons I've outlined (social pressure, identity, regional popularity). 2) They're acting in bad faith
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Sep 13, 2017 16:29
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just another posted:Nobody here is getting too lovely with each other or angry or anything like that. There are disagreements, sure, but not all arguments are conducted in bad faith. This thread is fine so far. I was just explaining how in another thread, a similar argument about criticism through objective criteria was frequently rejected and how frustrating that was.
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Sep 13, 2017 16:36
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Atlas Hugged posted:This thread is fine so far. I was just explaining how in another thread, a similar argument about criticism through objective criteria was frequently rejected and how frustrating that was. objective has no place in literary criticism however everything is just signs, signifiers, and signification endlessly looping on itself
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Sep 13, 2017 16:41
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Mel Mudkiper posted:objective has no place in literary criticism however That is in itself an objective claim.
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Sep 13, 2017 17:09
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Humanity’s Groan quote:Let us then return, for the last time, to our central image: something mechanical encrusted on something living. Here, the living being under discussion was a human being, a person. A mechanical arrangement, on the other hand, is a thing. What, therefore, incited laughter was the momentary transformation of a person into a thing, if one considers the image from this standpoint. Let us then pass from the exact idea of a machine to the vaguer one of a thing in general. We shall have a fresh series of laughable images which will be obtained by taking a blurred impression, so to speak, of the outlines of the former and will bring us to this new law: we laugh every time a person gives us the impression of being a thing. - Henri Bergson, Laughter Titus Groan is the first novel in the de facto Gormenghast Trilogy, the greatest sequence of modern fantasy yet written and unlikely to be surpassed. Titus Groan introduces the crumbling glory of Gormenghast, a castle resembling a city-state, ruled by tradition and ritual rather than its Earl, and whose inhabitants have been reduced to living mechanisms of their bleakly majestic home. They do not truly know themselves or each other beyond their positions, and seemingly content to continue their life of dehumanizing duty and drudgery. Two events disturb everything: the birth of the title character, heir to the ruler of Gormenghast, and the rise of Steerpike, a malevolent and power-hungry kitchen boy who alone seems cognizant and free – more the pity. While that may sound serious, Titus Groan is really a splendid comedy. There is no attempt to justify or explain the dream-world of Gormenghast, let alone expound on its doubtful logistics. We might guess that the weight of history and ritual has reduced the castle it to mechanical solipsism, but it’s doubtful if time was ever not out of joint in Gormenghast, whose class system has a metaphysical quality. The castle is isolated in sparsely populated wilderness, with no connection to any land or culture we know. There’s a Dickensian air about things, but this is not England (even if Peake’s idiom, with its natural sliding from Anglo-Saxon to Latinate and Greek and back, could probably only come from a public school). Gormenghast is not a Tolkienic “secondary world,” but a dream or nightmare. quote:The walls of the vast room which were streaming with calid moisture, were built with grey slabs of stone and were the personal concern of a company of eighteen men known as the "Grey Scrubbers". It had been their privilege on reaching adolescence to discover that, being the sons of their fathers, their careers had been arranged for them and that stretching ahead of them lay their identical lives consisting of an unimaginative if praiseworthy duty. This was to restore, each morning, to the great grey floor and the lofty walls of the kitchen a stainless complexion. On every day of the year from three hours before daybreak until about eleven o'clock, when the scaffolding and ladders became a hindrance to the cooks, the Grey Scrubbers fulfilled their hereditary calling. Through the character of their trade, their arms had become unusually powerful, and when they let their huge hands hang loosely at their sides, there was more than an echo of the simian. Coarse as these men appeared, they were an integral part of the Great Kitchen. Without the Grey Scrubbers something very earthy, very heavy, very real would be missing to any sociologist searching in that steaming room, for the completion of a circle of temperaments, a gamut of the lower human values. Peake is a writer who delights in language for language’s sake, and anyone expecting careful composition or concise storytelling will likely be bowled over by Peake’s riotous but coolly masterful prose. The beauty of Titus Groan is in every stray detail, every neurotic repetition of its characters, every overwrought development, and every digression; in other words, every brick by which Gormenghast is built. Reading Titus Groan is somewhat like reading an endlessly unfolding picture-book in words; Peake was an accomplished illustrator as well as an author, and his visual acuity is matched by his singularly unique prose. Peake writes with a great caricaturist’s tremendously unsubtle yet scathing wit. One may quickly tire of the motifs of decay and empty ritual, if Peake's imaginative force was not inexhaustible. Genre authors seem to be very much visually-oriented writers because they to appear to mimic the pacing of movies and television. Peake’s imagination is plastic instead of audiovisual: he sketches and paints his scenes, while too many authors are wont to merely “record” them. To enjoy and appreciate Titus Groan (or any art, really) one must first understand that true beauty in art lies in its form, not merely in the content. In terms of plot, the novel is thin, and it’s not where the book’s strengths lie. Beside, Peake can accomplish much with little happening. The events of the novel consists of the trials and intrigues of the Gormenghastians, foremost among them Steerpike’s ruthless manipulations. Titus Groan is one of those rare works of literature that is truly architectural: the building of the story’s sets constitutes in itself much of its action, as ultimately insubstantial and shifting as they are. quote:The table is raised upon a dais, and from where he sits he can gaze down the length of the grey refectory. On either side and running the entire length, great pillars prop the painted ceiling where cherubs pursue each other across a waste of flaking sky. There must be about a thousand of them all told, interweaving among the clouds, their fat limbs for ever on the move and yet never moving, for they are imperfectly articulated. The colours, once garish, have faded and peeled away and the ceiling is now a very subtle shade of grey and lichen green, old rose and silver. For all its immediate ornateness, Titus Groan is not a challenging novel. Structurally speaking, there is little complexity to the narrative, at most a chapter devoted to sections of stream-of-consciousness. There are no experiments in chronology, save for passing mentions that some events are taking place in parallel, and by the end, the narrative has proceeded through a definite period without any fuss. The most drastic shift in location involves the adventures of Titus’ wetnurse in the indefinite country beyond the castle. Intertextually, Peake’s prose is necessarily austere by the device of the milieu: we are more likely to find allusive sentiments than direct allusions, as Gormenghast has no connection the lands we know. To acknowledge reality would perhaps undermine the effect of Gormenghast’s dream-world. There is a library in Gormenghast, but no literature we recognize. At times the narrator seems to ‘slip up,' as when Peake compares the futility of an action to attempting to “Christianize a vulture”. Even the most baroque flourishes of Peake’s prose are hardly obscure in the message they convey, yet everything in Gormenghast seems imbued with some ineffable significance no matter how simple its meaning may be. Characters, things, places, and events seem possessed of mythic or mock-mythic quality which defies easy summary. All things are simultaneously sacred and profane. Even the most bleak and shambling thing in Gormenghast seems to possess revelatory richness to it. For example, we may call a certain character melancholic, but we cannot describe this condition like Peake: quote:The many duties, which to another might have become irksome and appeared fatuous, were to his Lordship a relief and a relative escape from himself. He knew that he was past all hope a victim of chronic melancholia, and were he to have had each day to himself he would have had to resort constantly to those drugs that even now were undermining his constitution. A simile such as the “black craft” of Sepulchrave’s mind does not strike one as absurd because all of Titus Groan is absurd, even if it draws attention. His is an idiom that draws attention to itself (one needs only to read Patrick Rothfuss, he of the silence as deep and broad as autumn’s ending, to see how it might go wrong). He hardly ever seems to use a common phrase, and almost every sentence seems to have been expressed in a way only Peake could. We are conscious of his language as a thing in itself instead of merely a medium for meaning. The omniscient narrator, who we may easily read as a representation of the author, moves freely, and along with the caricatured nature of the cast, keeps us at a certain distance from the characters while divulging all there is to know about them. We are aware of them too as things. We do no truly identify with anyone of them, but we are conscious observers of a strange tribe. Much like its castle, the novel is possessed by the spectre of tradition, which we recognize in its characters (one is always tempted to declare Gormenghast itself to be the novel’s most important character, but it is too all-encompassing, too omnipresent to truly possess a character). They are unique, yet we have met them before with Chaucer, Shakespeare, Jonson, Thackeray, Dickens, O’Toole, Carroll, and others – Kafka and Beckett can certainly be glimpsed in Gormenghast too. Peake does not write realistic figures. Especially in this first novel, his characters are caricatured and driven by some nearly all-consuming and debilitating passion: Flay’s rigid propriety, Steerpike’s Satanic ambition, Fuchsia’s spirit of romance, Nanny Slagg’s desperate familial love, Sepulchrave’s melancholy, Prunesquallor’s intellectualism, etc. This makes the Gormenghast series something of a comedy of humours, but the richness of these “humours” can only summarized (again) blandly. This kind of writing is of course impossible for modern genre fiction - they'd be laughed out for being too absurd compared to wealth of flat baddies and goodies. The books cannot be simply called Shakespearean, Swiftian, or Carrollian. They can only be classified as Peake. All the various elements of Gormenghast could only come together under his style: variously architectural, darkly farcical, gothic parody, a picture-book in words, humane, existential, theatrical, a fairy-tale, a comedy of humours, and so on and so on. The humours, in particular, of the Gormenghastians seem like their desperate instincts to assert themselves in a divinely uncaring world. When characters speak, they almost never truly communicate or connect with each other, as if they vocalized for the sake of sound rather than meaning. They are seemingly hollow things inside whom emotions and thoughts float and billow like clouds, or rage like storms, or freeze like winter, or simply roll forward with the eternal certainty of waves. When describing the Gormenghast sequence as a whole, words like “stagnation” and “paralysis” may used too easily. The story and world of Titus Groan is really one of desperate motion, somewhat like the tragicomedy of a frog leg in an electric current. quote:Mrs. Slagg was so agitated at the sight of an outlandish youth in the company of her Fuchsia that it was several minutes before she had recovered sufficiently to listen to anything in the way of an explanation. Her eyes would dart to and fro from Fuchsia to the features of the intruder. She stood for so long a time, plucking nervously at her lower lip, that Fuchsia realised it was useless to continue with her explanation and was wondering what to do next when Steerpike's voice broke in. Their “humours” are what makes the demented freaks of Titus Groan such intense, sympathetic figures, even if “sympathetic” is too soft a word: Peake uses his characters to explore the will-to-live and will-to-power at the core of humanity, which is part of what makes his tragicomedy profound. Even Steerpike’s cold hatred has an attractive quality to it. This is where Lord of the Rings fails, because Tolkien’s literary imagination is sanitized. His writing is just too cosy to truly grapple with all the uncomfortable and darker sides of the human experience, even when his forebears could. The temptation of the One Ring is too sterile, and Tolkien’s antagonists are always disappointing figures who stick to the margins of the story, save for Gollum. Peake goes farther than Tolkien ever did; everyone in Gormenghast is a Gollum. BravestOfTheLamps fucked around with this message at 20:26 on Mar 29, 2018 |
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Sep 13, 2017 17:33
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Aww, I saw it was Ghormenghast and I thought you were gonna savage it and I was all "finally I actually disagree with BoL's appraisal and not just the technicalities of his approach" and then you liked it and we agree again Curses I like Peake because I have to actually look up words sometimes when reading him Disagree partially about Tolkien comparison but the response would be beyond the scope of a phone post over lunch. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 17:58 on Sep 13, 2017 |
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Sep 13, 2017 17:54
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:That is in itself an objective claim. Exactly, which means it is flawed pillar of assumptions like all thought
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Sep 13, 2017 18:10
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please do one hundred years of solitude please please please whether you like it or not, if you don't like it then you and i will engage in a battle to the death
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Sep 14, 2017 00:15
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Is the BBC Ghormenghast show any good? I stumbled on it a while ago but the first episode was a bit too weird for me. It definitely is otherwordly, it feels like a dream.
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Sep 14, 2017 01:12
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we're not talking about tv shows we're talking about literature you absolute lunatic. one hundred years of solitude made me fall in love with the noble piano accordion. at the time i was a teenager and unable to afford one of my own so i asked my grandmother to get me one for my birthday and she squawked in outrage and said all in one breath, as if she'd been rehearsing (and i quote) "you are not playing the piano accordion, only disgustingly jolly fat women in red stretched satin blouses at the polish culture club play the piano accordion!" i now have an accordion and am teaching myself to play it much to the dismay of my neighbours because it is deafeningly loud and i am deafeningly untalented, anyway that's my story
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Sep 14, 2017 03:07
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my confession is i've never read any peake, which is why i'm talking about one hundred years of solitude, but i have just bought the illustrated gormenghast trilogy (with a foreword by china mieville!) just because of this thread actually can you cover mieville next, there's a chance some goons have read his stuff unlike garcia marquez the old ceremony fucked around with this message at 03:10 on Sep 14, 2017 |
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Sep 14, 2017 03:08
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Ive made it through about 100 pages of Titus Groan in about a year, intentionally. Its the kinda thing you wanna savooorrrrr for a long time.
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Sep 14, 2017 03:26
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Disappointed that nobody has pointed out the hidden clevin.
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Sep 15, 2017 16:59
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Nevermind that "literature" nonsense, do a Drizzt novel. 
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Sep 15, 2017 17:19
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:Disappointed that nobody has pointed out the hidden clevin. What's a clevin?
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Sep 15, 2017 17:19
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the old ceremony posted:please do one hundred years of solitude please please please In the genre thread?  Can't wait for LoTR review.
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Sep 15, 2017 20:43
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Liquid Communism posted:Leckie had some pretty interesting things to say about imperialism via her Imperial Radch series, Such as?
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Sep 15, 2017 23:15
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Bravest I've been an interested reader of your critiques without agreeing with everything you've said. Think I am more charitable in dishing out points for trying to genre authors who mostly fail at literature, and regard most books, certainly genre books, as at least partially forms of entertainment which I'm not sure you do. Anyway I was interested in your view on Vonnegut, an author that many struggle to classify. His recurring character Kilgore Trout suggests he would not be charitable to himself. A few of his novels contain more recognisable genre content than others (Sirens of Titan), others are far more literary (Mother Night), but his two most celebrated are all over the place. Like I mean what do you say about a semi-auto biographical account of the horrors of war that is either a time travel epic or a deeply personal exploration of PTSD? Zalakwe fucked around with this message at 08:17 on Sep 16, 2017 |
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Sep 16, 2017 00:06
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just another posted:Nevermind that "literature" nonsense, do a Drizzt novel. I'm told they have mediocre plots but great fight scenes, possibly from the author being a former boxer.
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Sep 16, 2017 03:37
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font color sea posted:In the genre thread?
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Sep 16, 2017 09:23
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the old ceremony posted:magic realism is fantasy, fantasy is magic realism, they are the same thing lol look at this dumb poo poo
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Sep 16, 2017 18:07
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uberkeyzer posted:Sorry that you can't ignore real problems in society like you used to be able to. How does it feel being like everyone else? i do not think you understood the quote to which you are responding
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Sep 16, 2017 18:55
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Mel Mudkiper posted:lol look at this dumb poo poo
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Sep 16, 2017 23:43
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the old ceremony posted:my idiot friend. a post is coming on the topic, but not right now, because i'm halfway through a cup of coffee and desperate to piss Oh I am pulling up a chair for this
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Sep 16, 2017 23:52
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magic realism is a genre of fantasy, it takes place in a universe where the laws of reality are different. there's no unreliable narrator in one hundred years of solitude because it's told in the omniscient, so there's no question that the weird poo poo in the book actually happens. characters really do ascend to heaven in a flutter of levitating bedsheets; a humanoid cryptid with cloven hooves and the voice of a wailing baby really is killed in a spike pit; children really are born with pigs' tails if their parents are related. none of that is less fantastical than dragons or people shooting fireballs from their hands or whatever nihilist-lite lovecraft ripoff and/or bitchass satan rothfuss's chandrian bullshit turns out to be. remedios the beauty is a much weirder character than any of rothfuss's poo poo nymphets. (sorry for overusing rothfuss, he just epitomises everything wrong with the genre to me.) the events and the people in one hundred years of solitude feel realer than any of that poo poo but that's because it's a better book, not because it's not fantasy. personally i hate the term "genre" and the whole concept of genres. it's been imposed on an artform by publishers purely for marketing reasons, because in their marketing handbooks there are separate chapters on "marketing fantasy", "marketing romance", "marketing mystery" and so on. but i can't pretend that it doesn't exist, because the fantasy that we get to read - i.e. the stuff that gets published - is what the publishers have chosen based on whether or not they think they can sell copies. that mindset is what has to change. or hopefully, even better, get devoured by alternate publishing avenues enabled by the internet.
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Sep 17, 2017 02:09
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the idea of a dichotomy between sci-fi and fantasy is weird to me too. as i understand it the idea is that in fantasy the miracles happen because of magic, and in sci-fi they happen because of technology. the border between magic and technology was always blurry especially when stuff that we can't even form a scientific consensus on got involved (like aliens or ftl travel) allowing for total freedom of speculation, but the books that got classified as sci-fi rather than fantasy were the ones that went into more detail on their imagined systems. then this started attracting an audience that liked the systems more than any other aspect of the story, and because that audience were usually computer guys and computer guys have always had plenty of disposable income, publishers catered to them. so sci-fi evolved into what they wanted, which was a long convoluted stupid instruction manual for a machine that doesn't exist with sex, cussing and some elaborate violence thrown in to keep the readers' attention and stand out from the competition. now replace "machine" with "magic" (because they were always the same thing) - does that sound like genre fantasy in the year 2017 to you?
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Sep 17, 2017 02:19
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You could have saved a lot of time and just looked up the definition to magical realism before writing all that wrong stuff Fantasy and magical realism are polar stylistic opposites.
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Sep 17, 2017 02:48
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