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FactsAreUseless posted:Does anyone have some examples of genre fiction that does a good job with descriptive language? I've always been frustrated by the inability of a lot of authors to describe these worlds they're trying to create. It's especially bad in fantasy - I see too many authors rely on either suggestion or some Lovecraft-style "the thing was too horrible to describe but hoo boy, believe me when I say it sucked" prose - but I know there have to be some that are decent at it. I remember Bradbury's prose being strong but it's been so long since I read any of his work that I can't say whether or not it actually was. Mervyn Peake is basically exactly what you want, botl had a good writeup in the other thread. Jack Vance’s Dying Earth stories as well, though his “descriptive language” works less to describe an exact world than it does to spark your imagination. Also a writeup in the other thread.
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Mar 16, 2019 15:09
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Doctor Faustine posted:I prefer the term “pulp” to mean “thing bad” and “literary” to mean “thing good,” where either can be applied to any genre. So within fantasy you’d have pulp fantasy (Sanderson, Gurm, Rothfuss, honestly most fantasy because most fantasy sucks rear end) and literary fantasy (LeGuin, Peake). And naturally some poo poo that’s kind of in the middle. Pulp fantasy absolutely includes Robert Howard, Lieber, and Jack Vance, though, all of who may have disputable literary value but aren't "thing bad"
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Mar 17, 2019 16:24
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The_White_Crane posted:See, that's interesting to me, because I'd argue that many works of art in fields like painting and sculpture absolutely don't serve that purpose. If you look at, for example, something by Jackson Pollock, how on Earth can you use this
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Mar 19, 2019 15:27
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Bilirubin posted:
It's an issue in that painting and sculpture have an inherently physical component, and looking at a 3" by 4" digital reproduction on your screen eliminates the impact from that component entirely. In some ways it's like understanding a novel by reading the wikipedia synopsis. You look at Rothko on your screen and go "ho hum it's just some orange and blue stuff whatever man" but standing in front of a giant wall of orange massed over washes of blue is an emotional experience.
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Mar 19, 2019 15:42
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what's wrong with keys I ask?
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Sure. Humans ascribe meaning to almost anything. But in Pollock's case particularly, what seems to be happening is that viewers subconsciously recognize the fractal patterns as pleasurable (or not), then those viewers ascribe meanings of their own to that response. It's the artistic equivalent of throwing a grenade into a pond to see how everyone reacts. It's "artistic" because it takes a lot of skill to evoke responses in the way Pollock did it (via subconsciously-recognized fractal patterns).
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Mar 19, 2019 19:36
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The_White_Crane posted:Firstly, it only can be considered a rejection of the idea that art must be representational if you accept that it is art. Now I do, as it happens, but if someone's starting from the premise that art must be representational, then this painting is ergo not art but something else, and fails to say anything about art.
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Mar 19, 2019 20:33
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The_White_Crane posted:I think the problem I'm having here is that from my perspective, if you have to look for meaning in something, that's not what I'd call "self-evident". Edit: The_White_Crane posted:I truly don't mean to sound like a dismissive rear end in a top hat when I say this, so I apologise if that's how it comes off, but I'd contend that you didn't find meaning in the painting so much as you invented a narrative about it. idiotsavant fucked around with this message at 20:49 on Mar 19, 2019 |
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Mar 19, 2019 20:44
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The concept I have of death of the author is basically that the primary relationship is between the viewer and the work, and as such the author has no say in how a viewer relates to that work. If the viewer comes up with some off-the-wall interpretation the author doesn’t get to say, “no, you’re wrong because this is what I actually intended.”
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Mar 19, 2019 21:48
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Really obvious example: dude in college sculpture class carves a rough human figure out of a 4’ tall redwood block, chars half of the figure with a blowtorch and gets worked up in the group critique when people see a burnt boy. Sorry dude, doesn’t matter what you intended the piece to be about - you don’t get to decide that people are wrong for seeing burnt boy.
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Mar 19, 2019 21:56
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Gnoman posted:He didn't try to correct how people see it - he took the criticism, decided that those two jokes probably were not good, and resolved to avoid the subject in the future. From what I gather in the Barthes essay he’s saying that given all the possible conscious and unconscious influences on the author, the stuff, and the viewer, it’s impossible to have a concrete definition of intent; because there is no concrete definition of intent there is no One True Way to interpret a work; because there is no One True Way to interpret a work the primary relationship is then not the author to the work or the author to the reader, but of the reader to the work.
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Mar 19, 2019 22:31
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Georgia O’Keefe said it a thousand times, they’re just flowers you loving perverts
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Mar 19, 2019 22:36
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ShinsoBEAM! posted:My friend I was thinking about with using Death of an Author as a bludgeon, they went from magic isn't real in fantasy, to fiction isn't even a real genre and all books are just the way you could see reality. 
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Mar 19, 2019 23:11
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Sampatrick posted:Well, the reason why they're not called shapeshifters, you see, is because calling them shapeshifters would be boring. Note that no culture in history calls something a shapeshifter, they have names for the things that do the act of shapeshifting. D'ivers is absolutely a stupid name but calling them shapeshifters would have been just as stupid.
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Apr 10, 2019 21:18
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Still reading Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino and it is absolutely explicit in the unreliability, the un-reality even, of its characters, story, everything. He disguises nothing with voice or prose, and yet disguises everything. I find it far more interesting and exciting to read than Gene Wolfe’s Totally Unreliable Narrator Torture Guy books, where it felt like I had to closely read a dullard’s description of his passive life to see if the boring details all jived. Marco Polo describes a city made of memories, imaginations, future memories, outright lies, and in two pages of straightforward writing my brain gets loving lit up - what does authenticity actually mean; does our remembered experience create meaning and reality even though none of the memories are real; what is reality anyways? anyways in conclusion cities are dragons
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Apr 10, 2019 21:49
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Sham bam bamina! posted:Appropriate that Donaldson creams himself over it: “And he does so in lucid prose as seamless as oil.” what even is that sentence. its so bad
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Apr 10, 2019 21:54
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I’m confused. Were-wolf = man-wolf is not using common language to describe a human being that changes into a wolf? And the argument that naming things plainly in fantasy books is boring writing isn’t silly and wrong? Is it Opposite Day again?
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Apr 10, 2019 23:57
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not as boring as dragons, though
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Apr 11, 2019 01:47
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Bringing it back to genre, I've been thinking of the contrast between Lieber & Rothfuss, where Qvothe skips over a bunch of his history sailing around with pirates and doing what sounds like a bunch of potentially interesting poo poo. It ends up sticking out like a sore thumb because he's supposed to be this amazing heroic guy, and lots of pirate adventure stuff sounds like it would have some Story Reasons for him being hero man, and wait, we don't get to hear any of it and suddenly hes a boring student. Whoops actually none of the stuff he has cool fantasy names for has happened yet. It was all just Rothfuss going, "Dude, what if your year before college was like, a pirate adventure??" before he took another big bong rip and passed it to his editor. If I remember it correctly Fafhrd & the Mouser sail clear across the world and then out of it into the land of Death, and between Newhon and Death Lieber makes it clear that the two had all kinds of interesting adventures and scrapes. The omission doesn't bother me at all, though, and just serves to enhance the story - the two men did all sorts of stuff I want to know about, but that isn't as important as entering the land of DEATH and staring him down face-to-face to try and win back their lives and souls. The serial nature of Lieber's work helps a little, because hey, maybe I'll get to hear some of those stories another time, but I suppose that there's no reason that can't apply to qvothes neverending story as well. anyways Fritz Lieber is cool and good no milkshake duck plz
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Apr 11, 2019 06:12
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Jaxyon posted:weeeelll there is that character in book 9 who's not treated so good. how the gently caress do you get to book 9 i think i got to a book 9 in the original dragonlance series in like 7th grade and the only book 9 ive managed since then was reading Patrick O’Brian on vacation. still wasn’t worth it
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Apr 29, 2019 19:57
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nankeen posted:what about the holy bible? Talk about purple prose
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Apr 29, 2019 23:42
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BoTNS just feels like such a boring chore to read. Any questions that come up all seem to be about nerdy fandom stuff that requires painful close reading to find answers that don’t mean anything. There’s dense, meaty writing that’s an absolute joy to read bit by bit, over and over, and there’s writing that provokes big, open questions and meditations, but botns doesn’t do either for me. Is Severian a dullard, or a dullard from the future??! Who loving cares
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May 6, 2019 23:27
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what if the acorn was a dragon in titty armor
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May 14, 2019 20:50
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the dragon was part of us all along (the extremely busty titty + voluptuous rear end part)
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May 14, 2019 21:32
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distributing my feeble literary seed to every corner of the globe, my plentiful writerly failsons will carry on my legacy of extremely sub-par writings. ganbare
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Jun 20, 2019 16:21
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Titus Groan is an absolute pleasure to read. I think the closest genre gets to it might be Jack Vance's Dying Earth (also conveniently previously critiqued by BotL). Vance's writing carries the baroque flavor of Titus but takes it in a lighter, more playful direction vs the dense meatiness of Peake. I guess you could say Gene Wolfe, too, but Book of the New Sun just feels tedious and obfuscatory.TheGreatEvilKing posted:and she's allowed to be a major character in the sequel.
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Jul 6, 2019 17:44
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VictualSquid posted:I am saying that stat-blocks work well in games, work OK in visual novels and are absolutely terrible in actual novels/literature. bring back botl with the stipulation that they can only harass and shame people with these kind of opinions tia
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Jul 23, 2019 19:35
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In the context of the original purpose of this thread and its predecessor, all of it
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Jul 23, 2019 22:25
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“Let’s use critical literary analysis to examine sci-fi and other genre fiction and discuss if genre can have true value as literature” “well the japanese number story games are cool when they have numbers and sometimes the numbers are cool in comic books too bleep bloop boop”
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Jul 23, 2019 22:43
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nankeen posted:we have come to the death of the mind
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Jul 29, 2019 23:13
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chernobyl kinsman posted:yeah its like moby dick in that its long and old but its unlike moby dick in that, as noted above, most of the civilian population of paris gets drowned in piss, and also in every other way Herman Melville actually loved piss now let me just deconstruct Moby Dick through my critical piss-lense
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Aug 8, 2019 20:38
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firstly, the name of the book Moby dick
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Aug 8, 2019 20:38
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:The good is that this book is well written and the prose actually works with what the book is trying to do. lol
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Sep 1, 2019 03:36
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would you like to read my magnum opus on the nature of man and his struggle: "Raped in the Butt By African Space Hyenas" you see i will make it extremely graphic and real such that the reader can truly understand and empathize, especially about the african space hyena part
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Sep 1, 2019 03:42
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Sampatrick posted:There are some weird racist undertones in your post that I really don't feel like unpacking edit: whoops i was totally confused and read "r scott bakker" as the author the whole time which puts a leeeetle different spin on it idiotsavant fucked around with this message at 04:59 on Sep 2, 2019 |
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Sep 2, 2019 04:52
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