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The Gardenator posted:I liked the last thread for the most part. Can this thread have NWS images tagged properly, or do I have to keep certain users on ignore? If you see a NWS image, use the report function or send me a PM.
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Mar 16, 2019 00:24
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 07:37 |
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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. Just the examples I have in the forefront of my brain, but you often find great prose in mystery fiction, especially noir-based mystery. Tolkien's descriptions are often quite good despite being non-concrete. LeGuin. Actually yeah let me toss out Idle Days on the Yann as the perennial example of Good Fantasy Writing: quote:So I came down through the wood to the bank of Yann and found, as had been prophesied, the ship Bird of the River about to loose her cable. Read the whole story, it's short and one of Dunsany's best: http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/dun/swld/swld09.htm Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 12:52 on Mar 16, 2019 |
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Mar 16, 2019 12:43
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Ccs posted:Link the old thread in the OP so all the old reviews are easily accessible. done
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Mar 16, 2019 17:06
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We have a good mystery thread that's just getting rolling -- the knox's rules one. At the moment my plan for next months BotM is to pick a genre mystery to help that thread get.kickstarted -- it has great potential but almost went to archives.
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Mar 16, 2019 22:31
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Flesnolk posted:Good genre fiction is an oxymoron. The term in itself means it's not good enough to be real fiction. The word "genre" only has so much meaning. It's either a critical term or a marketing one. It doesn't really have much use as a marker of merit or quality because for any genre you can almost always find a work of fiction that has literary merit and fits the markers of the genre (e.g., fantasy : Tolkien (or The Tempest), mystery : Maltese Falcon, etc.)
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Mar 16, 2019 23:24
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Flesnolk posted:Then explain the term literary fiction and how it is always contrasted with genre "Literary fiction" is a marketing genre aimed at people who read The New Yorker. FactsAreUseless posted:Genre fiction is always going to be held back by the fact that publishers want to publish works that tightly fit the genre's formula. Sure. I'd even go a little farther -- most current marketing genres have been jumpstarted by one or two seminal works that created and set the genre's formula (sherlock holmes, tolkien, etc.) It's the ciiiiirrrrcllleeee, the cir-cle of boooooooooks Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 01:30 on Mar 17, 2019 |
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Mar 17, 2019 01:26
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I've been a huge John D. McDonald fan since I found a bunch of his sci-fi stuff when I was a kid. The Travis McGee books would be a great post in the mystery thread -- they do the same trick that Nero Wolfe does, one book a year in the same setting and after a while suddenly it's historical fiction.
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Mar 17, 2019 01:32
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Antivehicular posted:I think it's something that a lot of people can hold grudges about, but it's always kind of odd/sad to me that literature (and possibly the arts in general?) is the one where people take this "one bad teacher" grudge to mean the entire endeavor is stupid and worthless. I had a pretty lovely physics teacher in high school and never really pursued the field afterwards, but that didn't turn me into a geocentrist. I think it's partly that it's a more subjective field, partly that it tends to be a refuge for poor and underqualified teachers. Lord knows the ability to read and think critically is not common. In many schools the people supposedly teaching literature can't do it, so you end up with a spectacle equivalent to someone who can't count on their fingers being asked to teach math. The kids realize they're being conned, even if they don't know precisely how, and welp
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Mar 17, 2019 12:23
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Mel Mudkiper posted:
Then Finnegan's Wake isn't art, bam (also, as above, Pollock, etc.) I find myself more and more leaning towards art as performance rather than as meaning. I'm not sure meaning is necessary, so long as there's a sufficient demonstration of technical skill involved. Also Pollock is kindof a bad example because his popularity was literally a CIA plot to fake the Russians out by making incomprehensible poo poo popular. More interestingly about Pollock, there are actually really neat fractal patterns in his paintings, which are likely what people are responding to when they like it. quote:A skeptic might suggest that the effect is coincidental. But Pollock clearly knew what he was after: The later the painting, the richer and more complex its patterns, and the higher its fractal dimension. Blue Poles, one of Pollock's last drip paintings, now valued at more than $30 million, was painted over a period of six months and boasts the highest fractal dimension of any Pollock painting Taylor tested: 1.72. Pollock was apparently testing the limits of what the human eye would find aesthetically pleasing. People who like Pollock generally aren't responding to him interpretatively; they're responding intuitively to fractal patterns they're not even consciously aware of. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 15:30 on Mar 19, 2019 |
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Mar 19, 2019 15:24
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Bilirubin posted:Surely it can be multifaceted? Like, there is the perfect execution of a skill, which another practitioner of the skill can appreciate in elevated terms, and also a poorly technically executed thing done with emotion (*insert favourite garage rock band here*) can be transcendent to the right listener? Sure. Ultimately all art appreciation is a matter of personal, individual preference. There is no final arbiter. idiotsavant posted:Uhhhh... maybe if you completely ignore any and all context or history or basically anything other than "hey it's tyool 2019 and there's paint on a canvas" then maybe you can try to claim that Pollock's work isn't meaningful? Even then, just standing in front of one of his works for a few minutes provokes emotions, thoughts, questions. "Abstract art isn't meaningful" isn't a great claim to make, and trying to make it through Pollock is even less great. 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). Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 15:36 on Mar 19, 2019 |
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Mar 19, 2019 15:32
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Mel Mudkiper posted:You seem to be asserting a biological essentialism to a multiplicity of meaning. Yes fractals may be visually pleasing, but to suggest the meaning of the image is primarily biological is essentializing it in a way I dont much find valid. I don't think I asserted that the meaning of the image is primarily biological. The image evokes a biological response; the meaning assigned to that response is subjective, intellectual, emotional -- individual. Those two things -- the biological response, and the assignment of meaning to the response -- are distinct. If I hit you in the face with a two-by-four, you would first have a biological response -- OW! -- and then would assign meaning to that response -- perhaps "Hieronymous is an rear end in a top hat," perhaps "Ok, I deserved that," perhaps something else. Two distinct phases. Net result, human beings will assign meaning to anything that sufficiently catches their attention. What catches that attention in the first place? That seems like the more interesting question. The_White_Crane posted:Why has your version of criticality adopted a use of a word which runs entirely contrary to every other use of it? That sort of thing is pretty standard for lit-crit. There are lots of terms of art. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 16:36 on Mar 19, 2019 |
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Mar 19, 2019 16:22
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Well yeah, but that is literally all art. Its the whole "This is not a pipe" thing. All art has a biological component that is essentially our brain constructing significance from the signals it receives. You seemed to be suggesting that somehow this habit was higher or more relevant in Pollock than it was in other artists, and I do not think that is true. I mean, look at how many Renaissance paintings use the golden ratio. Given the article posted above I think it's a big part of Pollock's appeal, yeah. It's by no means unique to him, sure. But a lot of the other things you'd see in more classical art -- chiaroscuro shading! -- aren't present in Pollock, so the elements that remain present gain more primacy.
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Mar 19, 2019 16:57
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Mel Mudkiper posted:
Very skillful jangling of keys! It's amazing that the dude managed to intuitively figure out that fractal trick without using computers or mathematics! End of the day we're all just monkeys. If we want to be sufficiently reductionist we can reduce everything to the jangling of keys. But that would be silly, because it would be reducing away the very things that make art Art: ars, artis; skill, craft The amazing, brilliant thing about Pollock and the other abstract expressionists is that they figured out ways to tingle that lizard brain with pure craft, so dramatically that their work demands we assign it meaning. That's skill; that's craft. That's art.
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Mar 19, 2019 17:19
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Gnoman posted:I've seen similar analyses made with more traditional works and authors (Arthur Conan Doyle - for example, based on some lines in "The Adventure of The Yellow Face"), but I chose an example where the author has made very clear intent -and apologies-, and one where there is supporting evidence to support the claim that it was unintended - among other things, the rules he wrote for his forum classified transphobia as hate speech when the issue wasn't a matter of widespread public debate. Doesn't really matter. The example that tends to sell the concept to the Kids These Days is Rowling's post-everything announcement that Dumbledore was secretly gay the whole time. No he wasn't, because there's nothing at all in the text to indicate it. What Rowling's subjective personal authorial intent was is irr-elephant. If you, as a reader, want to do a gay reading of Harry Potter, you can, and you can talk about Gay Dumbledore in that context if you want to, but you don't have to, because Gay Dumbledore isn't a part of the text and can thus be ignored. Similarly, in the above example with cross-gender lizard boobs or whatever, if people were offended, then they were offended; full stop. "If someone says you hurt them, you don't get to decide you didn't." Intent and effect are distinct, and so are the writer and the reader. Innocent intent can still harm. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 22:33 on Mar 19, 2019 |
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Mar 19, 2019 22:30
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Kefahuchi_son!!! posted:So besides Roland Barthes what works should someone with no formal training in literature be looking at in order to develop some understanding about literature criticism? Hieronymous Alloy posted:I generally recommend Terry Eagleton's Literary Theory as the intro to lit crit, for two reasons: Hieronymous Alloy posted:Ayup. But yeah, Barthes' Camera Lucida is as good a place to start as any
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Mar 20, 2019 14:23
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Mel Mudkiper posted:I think my biggest issue with Eagleton is he does some very effective anaylsis of the inherent weaknesses of different critical lens but then doesn't do it for Marxism That's left as an exercise for the reader (you counter-revolutionary)
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Mar 20, 2019 15:50
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Mel Mudkiper posted:no it isnt Now who's hidebound by authorial intent, hrm?
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Mar 20, 2019 15:53
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Pacho posted:I've finished reading The Left Hand of Darkness a week ago; it was my first LeGuin book and I liked it a lot, then, for something completely different, I've strated reading the Shattered Sea series, by Abercrombie and to my surprise it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be after the first couple of pages. The experience of reading that book after LHoD made me think about how a lot of elements of contemporary fantasy can be traced to older genre writers. Yarvi's journey in Half a King strongly reminisces Wintrow's turn as a slave in the Liveship Traders series and Genly crossing the Ice in LHoD, but those books are better written https://twitter.com/nkjemisin/status/955935985199714304
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Apr 8, 2019 21:30
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Strategic Tea posted:The worst element of Malazan is the name Malazan. It is the essence of artless fantasy gobbledygook naming. It's so flat, it sounds like an American D&D player who has read lots of fanfic and zero history had five seconds to think something up the spot. When I added an extra apostrophe to the Malazan thread title, it took several months for anyone to even notice.
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Apr 13, 2019 16:06
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The Vosgian Beast posted:There is legit, honestly, something really wrong with people who [fill in the blank] is always a true statement regardless of the content of the blank so, yeah
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May 1, 2019 03:54
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Antivehicular posted:Yeah, I feel kind of the same about Wolfe; people I like and respect dig him, but every quoted passage I see just doesn't click at all. It probably doesn't help that the Book of the New Sun gets recommended constantly and every quote from that book I've ever seen makes me not want to spend hundreds of pages in the narrator's head. His prose style is kinda ehh but he's really, really, really good with unreliable narrator tricks. He's more an *interesting* writer than a *good* writer
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May 6, 2019 23:46
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:gas this thread please I don't get why this thread is suddenly contentious but if you don't like a thread, vote 1 and move on and read something else? quote:Low Content Posts: Please do not make posts containing no content (ie, "first post," "hello, I'm new here," etc.). These just litter up the forums and with over 100,000 registered users, we need to eliminate these as much as possible. If you do not like a thread, then just vote it a "1" and move on; replies consisting solely of trolling fall into this category. As a general rule, write as if you were speaking in real life to another human being. Do not use any catchphrases, memes, internet slang, or any other crap that makes you look like a 12-year old.
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May 15, 2019 14:41
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:this thread can do better than 'hey guys, power rangers and dragonball z? not the best at their plots, right? haha, anyway, check out what this guy said somewhere else on the forums' Then -- poo poo, you know this, you've got a 2006 regdate -- be the change you want to see on the forums et cetera. If you think the thread should have better content in it then post that better content. Mel Mudkiper posted:so gently caress off Also, don't do this I'm going to have to pull this car RIGHT over aren't I >_<
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May 15, 2019 15:55
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can I delete my own post? time to find out
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May 15, 2019 16:47
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Jaxyon posted:Wait can we still talk DBZ? Joke answer: only the manga or printed spin-off matter, not the show. Books only! real answer: as long as you're talking about a work of media and not other posters it's probbly fine
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May 15, 2019 22:57
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https://twitter.com/GerryMcBride/status/1129318920064786432
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May 17, 2019 20:42
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Thranguy posted:Would Moby Dick still have been a great work of Melville had gotten fundamental aspects of the whaling experience dead wrong? I get where you're going with this but he actually did make a lot of errors. They weren't errors then, just science has advanced. This path leads to a lot of "pierre menard, author of the Moby Dick" jokes at the end of it tho
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Jun 30, 2019 20:27
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Please discuss only books in this thread, not other posters, current or former.
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Aug 7, 2019 00:22
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 07:37 |
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One of the really amazing things to me about litrpgs is that people could, theoretically, just write gamebooks like then the reader could actually play the game and it might even be fun I spent a whole weekend working through https://www.projectaon.org/en/Main/Books just a few years ago but no they have to even take the joy of actually playing a game away from the reader, all that's left is the empty fantasy of succeeding at a game instead i mean they're writing out the game rules and everything just print a character sheet on the first page folks!
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Aug 15, 2019 21:14
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