Quote:
Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze
I think what's annoying to readers like me is the idea that books by people like Proust and Thomas Bernhard need to be disparaged and their audiences called snobbish just because certain twits enjoy making obnoxious pubic pronouncements about the supposed collective deterioration of the human race.
Twits like to use biased and simplistic readings of popular taste to justify their conclusion that ordinary people are stupid and shallow. Twits have been doing this since popular artists first smeared bison likenesses on cave walls. There's actually an Ancient Greek pessimist who insisted that, in his lifetime, people were getting smaller, animals less meaty and fruit trees less fecund. Genre fiction is simply a later example of this kind of superficiality's many targets.
I can understand why a person who reads SF or horror (let alone DH Lawrence with extra sex and ripped clothing) might be irritated at the twentieth article that dismissed them as dolts whose only means of creative expression was dressing their cats as butlers.
But genre enthusiasts should also understand why a reader like me, who honestly prefers indecorous experimental and literary fiction -- the stuff that doesn't get invited into drawing rooms or adapted by PBS or the BBC -- to most genre fiction would object to the idea of being considered snobbish by definition.
First, a number of strange and important books were originally conceived as genre novels (at least in terms of their audience). The distinction between these and novels initially conceived as experimental and/or absurdist is frequently arbitrary. Yes, J.L. Borges and Juan Goytisolo were fans of the detective novel, but their stories don't actually read like Raymond Chandler. Whereas J.G. Ballard really does read like William Burroughs and John Hawkes (even though he was as original as they) but was consigned for most of his life to being a genre writer peering at mainstream and even avant garde acceptance from science fiction's "golden ghetto" (William Gibson's phrase).
We're all listening to the echoes of the report of reactionary gunfire.
The worst thing you can say about literary vs. genre fans (if you even believe in such arbitrary distinctions) is some of us have trouble being understood when talking to the other side about the things that excite us most.
But it isn't true that a genre reader always reads to repeat the same experience with the same sort of book -- that they're literate Pavlovian lab rats (which is what that description suggests to me).
It isn't a question of the ratio of "convention to invention," as someone said before. It's a question of different readers having different ways of expressing their sense of a book's value no matter what kind of book it happens to be.
§§§§
Throwing a punch at someone here for something obnoxious said elsewhere seems a bit unjustified.
No need for us to devolve into intellectual or anti-intellectual snobs. Our love of eReaders and books has brought us together. Let's not allow some conventional-minded ass's disdain to get in the way.
The Mobile Read library, after all, contains many different sorts of books. There's something in it to appeal to every one of us. |
Well said.
If some one says to me "let's do the Chinese restaurant," or "let's do this Mexican restaurant," or "that Korean restaurant" or the like, I will usually ask what else is available. The truth is I am not certain about those foods, which dishes I like, what I want at that restaurant. If there is not a choice because of who is suggesting the place, I will try to find a dish close to American, usually chicken.
But if someone says "let's do the Chinese buffet" or "the Mexican buffet" or "the Korean buffet," I will say "Great!"
I know then that I can taste and sample and there will be something I like. There always is. I used to love a restaurant in a town nearby that was a buffet of three foods, Mexican, Chinese, and American. I would take visitors from out of town there, relatives like my mother, my sister, friends, business associates. The food wasn't the "top of the cuisine line" but it was good and more important "varied" and if you tasted something that looked good or interesting and it wasn't up to your expectation, then simply put it down and move on. For my picky brother in law and a few others, I would throw in some wine and he was a happy camper.
I am willing to try anything and judge it on the spot, but I don't like to be stuck with what is a bad choice for my tastes. I try to give others that same kind of opportunity of choice.
(More Karma will be coming your way as soon as I get more powder and balls for my small Karma cannon.)