Quote:
Originally Posted by SlowRain
Actually, instead of substituting "I" for "everyone," we should substitute "most people" for "everyone." The statement was pretty bang on. I think you're just going to have to admit your method is not how most people do it, and it's merely your opinion that it's the best way. Most people do let subject matter govern their decision making.
|
The "statement" was no more "bang on" than the straw man analogy regarding blindness. "Most people" are definitively not "everyone" (indeed are usually the projection of induction), but using the word "I" to indicate what you yourself happen to do is almost always fair. Wasn't the latter part of the twentieth century sufficient reminder not to marginalize other people on the basis of normative assumptions?
This should be a discussion about Philip Roth, but the breadth of your assumptions compels me to ask: Why exactly is it important to insist that "most people" choose books exactly as you do? Why do you apparently find it maddening that other systems of preference exist at all?
Here's your most telling remark: "I think you're just going to have to admit your method is not how most people do it, and it's merely your opinion that it's the best way."
Funny thing is, I never suggested that my way was "the best way." I never made it a contest: You and rhadin did. The whole digression began with the insistence that I and others I know couldn't possibly select books based on style and execution alone, and that craft and creative integrity by themselves aren't reason enough to value a book.
The digression then proceeded with the idea I must not be expressing myself clearly. It concluded with the idea I must be fundamentally dishonest. And through the din of this ad populum barking, the phrase "most people" kept looping and looping like alternating orchestral stabs in a day-long mix from the moo-hanking Love Parade. It's if the phrase
itself made the counter-argument right -- as if common preferences were the only kind worth having.
No one's threatening your method of choosing books, SlowRain. All I did was point out that yours isn't the only method and certainly shouldn't be the criterion for judging the worth of a writer's decade-spanning output. "He wrote about pigeons, which is utterly banal and deplorable. I'm resigning as a judge because I believe the award should go to someone who writes about ducks and pheasants as well."
Please. The judge resigned because she considers Roth's subject matter vulgar. The complaint at its root is about vulgarity, not repetition, which comes through in the ex-judge's comment that Roth was effectively "sitting on her face." It's the same complaint that was made of William Burroughs and Joyce before him because conditional decency, too, is preferred by "most people."
Nor would I stop the list of reading selection criteria at yours and mine. There are clearly more, and those are valid as well.