Posted on 04/21/2011 2:43:04 PM PDT by Borges
It’s not about the “bodily fiction” it’s about the child molesting pervert flasher. Just not the kind of topic that should be in a story, unless maybe there’s some sort of Conan-esque hero coming in to kill them horribly later. Ulyses isn’t a tightly constructed anything, it’s the ramblings of an alcoholic.
Problem is you’re in a tunnel. Yes without Joyce you’re missing all that other 20th stuff that only the literati care about. Much like without James Blish you probably don’t a bunch of the Star Trek novels. Outside of that tunnel though it just doesn’t matter.
All the literati thumb their nose at SF. That’s why so little SF is taught in schools, the place where the literati are completely and totally in charge ignores SF completely. There’s a WHOLE lot of SF beyond Frankenstein and Wells, and frankly even those are only taught in maybe 10% of the schools.
Literati is no more snotty a word that trekkie or Jedi. It’s a group of people that obsess on so called literature. English classes should teach books that are enjoyable to read for non-obsessed people, and they should probably focus on easier language. One of the reason most people hate to read is that through most of their schooling reading consisted of books with stilted language that weren’t enjoyable. The English department needs to understand that they’re nerds and instead of inflicting the nerdy stuff on the students (ie the stuff they really like) scroll it back a little. High comp-sci classes don’t start with .Net because the comp-sci guys know that’s something you have to build to. English teachers need to learn the same thing, you go throwing Joyce and Shakespeare at high school kids they get bogged down in the language and the subject matter and they hate it, and then they hate reading, and then we have an illiterate populace. Letting them read the best sellers isn’t necessarily a bad idea, one thing you know for sure about a best seller is that it has approachable language, and their parents might have read it, give them something to talk about.
The thing the literati in charge of school curricula miss is that they’re nerds and what they do simply isn’t for everybody. I understand full well that I’m a nerd (though never obsessive enough for uber status), I understand full well that people can and DO lead full and complete lives without ever reading a word of books that I like, hearing a note of music that I like, or seeing a frame of movies that I like. I know that what I like isn’t for everybody. The literati need to understand the same thing, the fact is the vast majority of the populace will NEVER voluntarily read a word of Joyce (Shakespeare, Wolfe, Pinchon, all the rest of the list) and they’ll be fine, they’ll laugh, they’ll cry, they’ll love, they’ll die, and go to whatever is next happy. Because just because you like it, just because it’s made your life a better place, doesn’t mean that holds true for any other person anywhere any time.
That very well might be. But sometimes it’s not worth putting up with. It’s like Spinal Tap, the Tap did brilliant spoofing of heavy metal, but if you don’t like heavy metal you won’t like Tap. In order to aptly spoof something you need to be able to aptly create it, and in order for your audience to be able to enjoy the spoof they need to be able to enjoy what’s being spoofed at least a little. I can’t enjoy picking apart every letter of a poem, not even to make fun of people that pick apart every letter of a poem, it’s just too annoying for me.
Thankfully he didn’t write sentences like that. When PKD wrote he was trying to tell a story, and maybe a bit of a parable about life, he wasn’t trying to impress people with his ability to make words bounce up and down. He used words to tell really great stories, that’s interesting. That’s one of the big disconnects the literati have with the general population, you actually think obtuse sentence structures are a good thing, for the rest of us they’re just annoying. We’re not reading to say “ooh look how he cleverly put together these words into a sentence that you have to read three times to understand what the hell he’s saying”, we’re reading to say “that was a good story”.
“Just not the kind of topic that should be in a story, unless maybe there’s some sort of Conan-esque hero coming in to kill them horribly later.”
Dude, that’s just a complete non-sequitir. Anything is fodder for literary subject matter as long as you deal with it artfully. (Lolita comes to mind). The difference between Joyce and Blish is that the former was an literary innovator. AGain please quote a Blish sentence that makes you go ‘Wow’. Of course there’s a lot of SF out there but just being SF doesn’t mean anything. Genre has nothing to do with quality. If anything Postmodernism has pushed “fablulists” like Pynchon and Samuel Delany into the curriccula. Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Orwell’s dystopias, Kafka. There’s plenty of speculative fiction that’s taught.
As for school curricula being simplified...there are entry level works for just about any grade level. By high school a person should be able to read Shakespeare and understand it at an appropirate level. I read ‘Romeo and Juliet’ my freshman year and the class understood it just fine. Not everyone liked it but they understood what was going on and could discuss it on some level. A good teacher helps too obviously. Dumbing things down is the LAST thing this country needs these days. Kids can read best sellers on their own. And if Twlight and Harry Potter are any gauge...they do. Whether people read Shakespeare or not they still words he coined, and a language he more or less invented (Burgess claimed WS invented Modern English).
PS Thomas Wolfe isn’t really taught anymore.
I’ve found PKD a bit of a chore to read. As great as his ideas were he couldn’t make them sing on the page. Again he’s a writer where Cliff Notes really wouldn’t be much of a loss. The ideas are what matter with PKD not the writing itself. Did you like Blade Runner? I love it but its very different from his novel. It’s probably a greater work of Art too.
I don’t like Metal and I like Spinal Tap. The analysis of the poem takes on such a life of its own and departs so much from actual literary anlysis (again part of the joke) that it really stops being just an interpretation of a poem. It’s difficult to read for other reasons. It’s very layered and intricate.
It’s not a non-sequitor, it’s the only reason I believe a pervert should ever appear in a story: to be killed. I don’t want perverts to be dealt with artfully, not in reality and not in fiction, I want them to go away.
But without Blish the whole Star Trek novel (and really the whole media novel) industry is at the very least delayed. Doesn’t matter if Blish never wrote a sentence that made anybody say “wow”, he helped spawn one of the most lucrative sections of the publishing industry.
Heck I read Macbeth for fun in jr high, I was kind of odd, but I understand that for the majority of high school kids that language is just dense and confusing, maybe it shouldn’t be but it is. And by forcing them to read this stuff that they won’t enjoy the language of, they won’t identify with the characters, and they won’t care about the story we turn reading into punishment. It’s sadly funny that the people that complain the most about how little the general populace reads are the same people that are WHY the general populace doesn’t read. The advantage of kids reading Twilight and Potter over Shakespeare is that after they’re done reading Twilight and Potter they’ve enjoyed themselves and WANT to read more, after they’ve been forced to slog their way through a play they didn’t understand they’re just hoping to pass the test and never have to read anything like that (which rapidly turns into anything at all) again. If we teach them to LIKE reading in high school they might actually go find Shakespeare on their own, we’ve learned that force feeding them Shakespeare in high school causes the majority of them to avoid the written word for the rest of their lives.
I’ve got a nephew that in the process of proving that. Never read anything he didn’t absolutely have to. Then he went and saw DaVinci Code, and found out it was based on a book, and read the book. Now personally I think Dan Brown is one of the biggest hacks on the planet, I’d rather read Joyce, but the kid loved it, turned around and bought every book Brown ever wrote, read them all, started exploring other like him. Yeah he’s reading junk, but the first word of that is “reading” something he wasn’t doing after being forced to read the stuff the literati push on high school kids. And maybe someday he’ll discover books that don’t suck, or maybe not, but that possibility never existed with the stuff he was taught in school, that possibility didn’t exist until he picked up a lame ass best seller.
So the question really is what’s the point of the reading portion English class? Is it to make kids read books that some people think are important? Or is it to teach them about the world of books and reading? I vote the later.
I discovered PKD when I was still a very slow reader, all reading was a chore, and his books did exactly the “singing” I wanted. He presented the story, without flowery junk, and the story was good. That’s all the singing I want. Cliff Notes would miss a lot, there’s a lot of set and setting (yes I’m very deliberately referring to to Tim Leary’s drug discussions) in his books, the Cliff Notes wouldn’t maintain the doom of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. While none of the sentences “sing”, all of the sentences make sure you know that the story is taking place in a world that’s on the way out, there’s a sense of pointlessness in PKDs story that the Notes would never convey. Android is a story about people finding an orderly way to get to the end of the world, and that’s in the language, not in a way that would make a Joyce fan say “wow” but it’s definitely a part of the language. Love Blade Runner, turned me onto PKD, and onto Ridley Scott. It is vastly different, but it does a good job of being vastly different.
Do you like Spinal Tap the movie or Spinal Tap the band? Non-metal fans can enjoy the movie, but very few non-metal fans own and listen to the soundtrack, and fewer still bought the second album. The movie spoofs more than just heavy metal, it spoofs documentaries, and the insular self important world of bands as well. Really the only time the movie spoofs metal itself is in the music, once the soundtrack ends its back onto other things. But the music actually stands well on its own, one of the reasons metal fans like it is that most of the songs are actually good metal songs which then got tweaked to be silly, but you could untweak most of them and stick them on albums of the “big” names of metal and nobody would question it.
I’d never get to the point where it takes on a life of its own. I’d get annoyed in the part that reminded me of freshman English and walk away.
I’d like murderers to go away but that doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of them in various fictions. Reading Shakespeare isn’t really that hard. If you take it slowly at first any teenager that has a degree of literacy commensurate with their age should be able to get through it. Most kids will only get exposed to great lit in school. Most of the time their parents don’t have the background to do so. That’s the place to do it. Of course not all of them will like but some who may not have read it on their own will and those few are worth getting to. I don’t know how much reading pop fiction will take you elsewhere. A recurring refrain of hard core Stephen King fans is “I don’t like to read but I like Stephen King.” These are adults. They have never moved on and probably never will.
The purpose of English class is to read books that ARE important. Just like the point of math class is to teach real math not math that the kids might like. There’s less subjectivity to this than you might think.
Cliff Notes would always miss something but PKD is still a writer who conveys the “facts” of the story through the medium of the text as opposed to making the text and the story inspeerable. BTW another good SF writer who is taught would be John Wyndham. Ever read Day of the Triffids?
There’s levels though, and part of the problem is that An Encounter has no point other than having 2 kids run into a pervert that jerks of at them. It is quite simply a story that never needed to be told. Shakespeare is pretty tough reading for young people, even when the language is plain for its day the language has changed so much it’s vastly different than what they speak, plus it’s plays which are written differently than books which they’re used to. And of course they don’t have time to take it slow, this English class is one of six they’re taking at the same time each with an hour of session and an expected hour of homework and they’re probably going to drive their way through the play in 2 or 3 weeks. The problem is that not only will most of them NOT like it, many of them will decide to never like reading, that method of teaching is alienating more than it’s reaching.
Those people that say that are exactly the people I’m talking about. They were forced to read stuff they didn’t like in school so they think they don’t like reading, somehow or another they stumbled upon a writer they actually like. But they still have the bitterness from school, so they still think they don’t like reading, so they have no reason to explore further, because the literati have already taught them they won’t like it.
Problem with that kind of thinking is it’s self destructive. Forcing kids to read “important” books that they don’t like doesn’t teach them anything. Look at this whole Dubliners thing. I was forced to read a chunk of that in sophomore English, the only story I remember anything about is An Encounter, I know we read The Dead but I don’t remember anything about it, I know we read more stories than that but I don’t remember how many or what they were about. All I was “taught” with that assignment was that Joyce was a drunken sot who wrote annoying prose I don’t like and one of the stories was about kids running into a pervert. No purpose was served. And the same holds for math, if you don’t teach kids to at least appreciate the usefulness of math then they’ll never use it and by the time they need what they were taught they’ll have forgotten. Remember the evils of the word problems, every student hated word problems, the punchline of it all is that the word problems were the time when we were being taught the most useful math skill of translating real world issues into math formulas. But rather than focusing on word problems as practical application they were just “the hard part”. If you want to see just how badly we fail at teaching math hit a construction site, construction guys probably use the math they were taught in high school more than anybody else, they’re the people constantly having to do algebra and pre-algebra calculations to figure out how much supplies to buy and bring, but if you ask them they are the guys that are most likely to say high school math didn’t teach them anything they use. Because of course it didn’t, because they weren’t taught to like math they didn’t use it when they got out of class, and forgot it all before they got their first job, and had to re-learn everything they were taught in school to do that job.
There’s a lot more subjectivity than you think. If you can’t teach them to like or at least appreciate the usefulness of what they’re taught they forget it and in the long run you teach them nothing. I took 2 years of Latin and 6 years of German, 20 odd years later I remember more of the Latin because that teacher focused on English roots in Latin. By teaching me its practical application he made Latin an ongoing part of my life in an English speaking country, that Latin is still there to back me up when I run into a word I don’t know. Living in the Southwest German really isn’t useful to me, so it’s pretty much gone from my brain. Stuff learned but not used is unlearned, stuff they don’t like doesn’t get used.
Not, perhaps, "great literature" on the level of, say, Tolstoy -- but Rowling was not writing for adults. (Although this adult greatly enjoys the books, to the point of having re-read them.)
She does, however, succeed in several very important ways.
First, she is among the best authors I've ever come across, in her ability to create a scene with just a few words. One can comfortably "move around" in her world, because one can imagine it in very good detail. That's a big part of her appeal, but not the only thing.
Second, she deals with Large Questions in ways that make the reader think. The books deal with the rise of evil in a society, and the characters respond to that in various ways (realistically). None of the characters is perfect (which is good); but they carry on even as the going gets difficult. (I think Rowling drew a lot of her story line from 1930's Britain...)
And, although she's not blatant about it, she is a Christian, and her theme is essentially Christian as well. In an interview several years ago, she hinted that anyone who knows the Bible, knows how the story will turn out. And a discerning reader has absolutely no difficulty in seeing her what she means by that.
Finally, you care about her characters: you like the ones you're supposed to like; dislike the ones you should; and there are the ones who surprise you, for reasons that matter.
So as young people's literature goes, I think the Potter series will endure for quite a while. They'd be on the same level as Narnia, Oz, and perhaps a few others.
And as for you .... you might try them out. They're a lot of fun.
I disagree. Again it’s his creation of set and setting. He might not do it with flowery text that makes you go wow, but the text is inseparable from the story. Again look at the constant doom in Androids, it’s some of his most joyless language, nobody in the book even comprehends happiness and that’s in the language of the book. For some really good examples of this look at Eye in the Sky or Confessions of a Crap Artist, these are two of his really heavy subjective reality stories, and as the point of view changes in the stories the language changes too. The story and the text very much tied together. What the “problem” is for a Joyce fan is that the text has no life on its own, the text is ENTIRELY a part of the story, as you said there are no “wow” sentences, they aren’t there to be loved alone, they’re there to be part of, an inseparable part of, the story.
The lanugage in Joyce is also tied to the story. I can’t imagine changing the Dubliners stories by one jot or Portrait for that matter. The early parts of Portrait are written in a “immature” style to convey the subjective experience of a young Stephen Dedalus.
Maybe, but that’s the part that stuck with me. You should be happy, if it wasn’t for the pervert Encounter would be in the ash heap of my memory along with every other story in Dubliners I got stuck reading. I had an epiphany alright, Joyce isn’t worth my time.
Sorry wrong again. Most folks didn’t like the Shakespeare they read in school. You can tell because they never read any when they get out of school, never go to productions of the plays, don’t go to the movies (although given how horrible the movie adaptations of Shakespeare tend to be I think even a lot of the people that like him avoid them), and just generally live their life without Shakespeare in it.
Shakespeare might have mass appeal if people were allowed to discover him on their own. But they’re not, he’s forced down their throats at a time when they’re not ready. Of course he sells a lot, but when every high school kid in the country has to read 3 or 4 of your plays to graduate it’s really good for sales figures.
But it’s also filled with those “wow” sentences (or the “WTF” sentences as I read them) that you like without the story.
Most of my friends did actually. Do a poll here and see. Shakespeare has mass appeal all over the world. Constantly performed, constantly adapted, constantly quoted.
Story or plot isn’t the be-all and end-all (another Shakespeare quote). ‘The Great Gatsby’ is virtually plotless until the very end for example. It’s like saying melody is the most important part of music.
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