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Jerry Cotton posted:I'm fairly certain Spillane was a nutter. Sure, he once played Mike Hammer himself. He and Ayn Rand were fans of each other's work.
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# ? Sep 6, 2017 21:28 |
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# ? Jun 8, 2024 06:30 |
I am not at all surprised to learn Ayn Rand was a Mickey Spillane fan, and only moderately surprised to learn the converse was also true.
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# ? Sep 7, 2017 01:07 |
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neongrey posted:Oh, no, I know of this book. Yep, that was the exact excerpt I was thinking of. Well, it and one other scene...
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# ? Sep 7, 2017 01:53 |
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Reading people making fun of this back in the day was how I learned what female circumcision was.
The Vosgian Beast has a new favorite as of 02:24 on Sep 7, 2017 |
# ? Sep 7, 2017 02:16 |
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The Vosgian Beast posted:Reading people making fun of this back in the day was how I learned what female castration was.
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# ? Sep 7, 2017 02:23 |
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Sham bam bamina! posted:Female circumcision. Female castration would be, I don't know, a hysterectomy. Fixed
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# ? Sep 7, 2017 02:24 |
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# ? Sep 7, 2017 02:56 |
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# ? Sep 7, 2017 03:04 |
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I would like to nominate the Dinosaur Lords by Battletech Emeritus author Victor Milan. The cover is a Goddamn masterpiece and GRR Martin sang it's praises. It was hyped a year before it was released, and then... It was poo poo. Dinosaur poo poo. Literally Dinosaurs farting and making GBS threads and dying to puny humans. Victor Milan created a new milieu of the world Paradise and he filled it with nothing but methane and poo poo. This cover deserved a better story. Sorry, there was alot of poo poo.
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# ? Sep 7, 2017 03:56 |
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Last time I was in Chapters I saw that book and laughed. Then I saw World War Moo and it had a better cover.
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# ? Sep 7, 2017 05:17 |
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Jerry Cotton posted:dick fic historian Mmmods
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# ? Sep 8, 2017 12:09 |
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When I'm having an especially bad time of it, I like to re-read pretty much anything by Mrs Alex McVeigh Miller.quote:https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/articles/1790 - Novelist Mittie Frances Clarke Point (April 30, 1850-December 26, 1937) wrote as Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller, the name of her second husband. The author of 80 dime novels published from 1881 to 1915, she was one of the best-known romance writers of her age. Her fiction brought her wealth and fame. Someone is always screaming, shrieking, wailing, fainting, weeping, sobbing, raging, menacing, being menaced going insane, driving someone insane, murdering, or being murdered. And the writing-- my god, the writing: quote:http://www.gutenberg.org/files/42100/42100-h/42100-h.htm - Her meditations were suddenly interrupted by a horrible sound. It was the far-off clank of a heavy chain mingled with the anguished wail of an unearthly voice. It broke so suddenly on the stillness that Lily started in affright, the very hairs on her head seeming to stand erect in her over-mastering horror. You can finish off one in a couple of hours, at most.
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# ? Sep 8, 2017 19:50 |
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For the time period that's a pretty typical style.
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# ? Sep 8, 2017 20:30 |
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It's true, there were no good writers from 1881 to 1915.
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# ? Sep 8, 2017 20:33 |
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A really terrible writer from that era would be someone like Amanda McKittrick Ros.
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# ? Sep 8, 2017 20:43 |
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# ? Sep 8, 2017 21:29 |
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Dabir posted:It's true, there were no good writers from 1881 to 1915. The novel in its modern form was only just invented in the 1700s. It is natural to assume that people have gotten better at writing them over the years.
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# ? Sep 9, 2017 01:53 |
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Tunicate posted:The novel in its modern form was only just invented in the 1700s. It is natural to assume that people have gotten better at writing them over the years. p much false though, in fact. Techniques evolve and change (more elaborate, less elaborate, etc), but art doesn't "progress" in the manner of, say, physics. Everyone sets out to do the best one they can by the standards of the day.
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# ? Sep 9, 2017 02:03 |
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This is a steampunk anthology I got as a gift one year. I'm not sure if I still have it or not, but out of like fifteen stories, only two were anywhere near good, and one of those two was a public domain story from the 1800's. Amazon posted:In this tome, the third installment of the Penny Dread Tales series, we explore not only the darker side of steampunk but also the black, sullied underbelly of the human condition. The nightmare of Jack the Ripper stalks these pages… drenching them in blood… twice. Slavery, the murder of the weak and helpless, dire choices of life and death: these tragedies and more become fodder for the mind, where the possessed and dispossessed steal men’s lives, and in some cases, their souls. This volume is rich with shadowy settings shrouded in fog, and the ensuing brutality is glimpsed piecemeal through windows of moonlight where dark shadows hide nefarious villains plotting murder and mayhem upon unsuspecting victims. PDT3 carries the reader to the four corners of the Earth and beyond. It traverses the centuries, from the Victorian era all the way into a future 40,000 years distant. It is an exploration of mankind’s darkest dreams and nightmares, and in its reading you too may experience nightmares where might In Darkness Clockwork Shine. Bolding is mine, because the editor for this book got two Jack the Ripper stories, and went "gosh these are both so good I can't just pick one!" If I recall, one of them was Jack killing people to power a blood piano and the other was Jack as a vampire or something, I dunno. I hate steampunk thanks to this book.
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# ? Sep 9, 2017 02:18 |
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divabot posted:p much false though, in fact. Techniques evolve and change (more elaborate, less elaborate, etc), but art doesn't "progress" in the manner of, say, physics. Everyone sets out to do the best one they can by the standards of the day. I disagree. I think it's entirely possible to improve the quality of your artistic works by examining the successes and failures of others operating in the same medium.
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# ? Sep 9, 2017 02:56 |
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Djeser posted:
"I've invented the piano." "Jack, the piano has existed for almost two hundred years." "No, wait, hear me out."
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# ? Sep 9, 2017 03:00 |
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neongrey posted:Oh, no, I know of this book. quote:The Djimbi loved feeding children to hatchlings. They did it to tame the hatchlings, see and to accustom them to the Djimbi scent. quote:Her old hemp tunic fell away from her body and slithered to the fur as if made of silk. She wore no bark-cloth leggings, must have shucked them prior to all this, and she stood there magnificently naked. Short version; she's getting horny watching an old nun get licked out by a dragon, while attempting to flick the bean. This is after she's loving horrifically mutilated by FGM.
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# ? Sep 9, 2017 03:02 |
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Djeser posted:
If it wasn't that one it could be almost any other one. The best of the subgenre is probably Pullman, and even his stuff is just moderately good.
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# ? Sep 9, 2017 03:02 |
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Tunicate posted:I disagree. I think it's entirely possible to improve the quality of your artistic works by examining the successes and failures of others operating in the same medium.
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# ? Sep 9, 2017 03:27 |
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divabot posted:p much false though, in fact. Techniques evolve and change (more elaborate, less elaborate, etc), but art doesn't "progress" in the manner of, say, physics. Everyone sets out to do the best one they can by the standards of the day. There's progression to visual art with stuff like anatomy, color theory, chiaroscuro, and linear perspective, but we figured out all the stuff and now everyone's into weird abstract stuff again. A lot of it is weird abstract stuff using those things as a guide, so it's still stuff that wasn't possible before we had that knowledge. Dunno if there's anything like that for books.
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# ? Sep 9, 2017 03:43 |
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ThePlague-Daemon posted:Dunno if there's anything like that for books. Sham bam bamina! has a new favorite as of 04:16 on Sep 9, 2017 |
# ? Sep 9, 2017 04:11 |
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Sham bam bamina! posted:Those are techniques for simulating the world's physical properties. There are more and less accurate ways to draw a refraction in a sphere because are objective mathematical standards to measure against. There is no mathematical standard for the actual subject of the painting; the artist has to imagine that for themselves. Books are like that. just give me the loving numbers to plug in for my book to be good, goddamnit
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# ? Sep 9, 2017 04:14 |
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Of course, the use of those visual techniques (or throwing them away and creating entirely new ones!) is entirely a matter of personal choice in the first place, just as with literary techniques or the techniques of any medium. Even in a medium that can conceivably appeal to an external standard of quality, Tunicate's idea that artistic expression has somehow been refined like scientific knowledge over centuries of trial and error is completely meaningless.
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# ? Sep 9, 2017 04:25 |
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When a new medium emerges, there is a period of experimentation as people figure out the grammar of that new medium. It happened most recently with videogames, and a little less recently with television and film. I don't know if a novel is enough of a change from previous modes of literature to actually require that learning period though. I'm not a literary history buff.
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# ? Sep 9, 2017 04:37 |
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Much like 'evolution', there's a lot of common misunderstanding of the idea of 'progress'. There's always been schlock, art and attempts at high art, it's a matter of success and ability. There are also often trends that people like at the time but don't age well, like turn-of-the-century prose.
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# ? Sep 9, 2017 04:46 |
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Djeser posted:When a new medium emerges, there is a period of experimentation as people figure out the grammar of that new medium. It happened most recently with videogames, and a little less recently with television and film. I don't know if a novel is enough of a change from previous modes of literature to actually require that learning period though. I'm not a literary history buff.
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# ? Sep 9, 2017 04:46 |
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You heard it here first folks: unlike every other aspect of human culture writing has not changed in 5000 years
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# ? Sep 9, 2017 04:54 |
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Nobody's saying that at all.
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# ? Sep 9, 2017 04:56 |
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Sham bam bamina! posted:Nobody's saying that at all. ah ok so the problem is just you don't know how to read
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# ? Sep 9, 2017 05:03 |
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This is about the idea that people were worse at writing a hundred years ago because they didn't know how as well as we do today. Which is ridiculous on its face, let alone under scrutiny. Edit: Because I don't need to dump yet another post on this thread, here is a basic illustration. Infinite Jest could not have been written a hundred years earlier. It's a late post-modern book built on techniques and ideas that wouldn't be established for decades in 1896. Would David Foster Wallace have made the same name for himself without those tools? Probably not. In some sense, this shows progress. On the other hand, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close couldn't have been written before post-modernism either. And whatever Jonathan Safran Foer might have written in 1905, it at the very least wouldn't be so goddamn gimmicky. (So it would probably be around three pages long.) This is a case where later technical knowledge made a book downright insufferable. The point of these examples is that tools are tools. They will be good in the hands of good writers and bad in the hands of bad writers. Bad writers today are no better at discerning good from bad than bad writers have ever been (having "the successes and failures of others" for reference is irrelevant, as bad writers don't even recognize them to begin with), and good writers are still as good as they are few. Sturgeon's Law isn't going anywhere. Sham bam bamina! has a new favorite as of 06:19 on Sep 9, 2017 |
# ? Sep 9, 2017 05:09 |
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Sham bam bamina! posted:You've never actually read a book, have you? You're the one who is arguing that it's impossible to learn anything about writing from reading other peoples' books. I suppose seeing your posts as a sort of outsider art would contextualize them, though. Sham bam bamina! posted:The ancient Greeks worked out the "grammar" of drama millennia before anyone thought to put it in prose and call it a novel, so no, not really. What works on stage, or in a novel, or on television is distinctly different. I'm surprised you didn't realize that! Different mediums require the use of different techniques, and it's entirely possible to learn from what other people did. It is, in fact, even possible to - and this may shock you - pay money, go to an institute of higher education and have a teacher (which is a kind of helpful person who has studied a medium intently) give you advice that can improve your artistic endeavors in the particular medium of their specialty. In fact, the present day makes the ability to learn how to write available to everyone - there is no point in history where it has been easier to get access to education!
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# ? Sep 9, 2017 06:27 |
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Tunicate posted:You're the one who is arguing that it's impossible to learn anything about writing from reading other peoples' books. is there a class i can take to learn how to post this insufferably
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# ? Sep 9, 2017 06:44 |
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Alaois posted:is there a class i can take to learn how to post this insufferably just read my posts you'll catch on eventually
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# ? Sep 9, 2017 06:49 |
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Tunicate posted:You're the one who is arguing that it's impossible to learn anything about writing from reading other peoples' books. Tunicate posted:In fact, the present day makes the ability to learn how to write available to everyone - there is no point in history where it has been easier to get access to education! Sham bam bamina! has a new favorite as of 06:58 on Sep 9, 2017 |
# ? Sep 9, 2017 06:56 |
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# ? Jun 8, 2024 06:30 |
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Artistic movements like postmodernism don't necessarily invent anything, what they do is open up spaces for different ideas, techniques and experiments which might not have been previously discussed or taken seriously. You can find elements of what might be called postmodernism way back in classical Greek theatre, they just didn't have the same words for it. And of course, more widespread education, literacy, and opportunity simply letting more people write, especially a more diverse range of people, allows for a far more diverse range of stories to be told, but generally people will do what they can with what's at their disposal. Education and background helps to learn to write better, but some people come up with interesting ideas all on their own in whatever time and place.
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# ? Sep 9, 2017 07:14 |