It always irks me when I hear this. Tolkienis bad? I guess if Tolkien is hard to read then Dickens must be impossible to read. Heck, all Victorians are right out. And before that? Well, anything earlier than that may as well be hieroglyphics. Even though I don’t consider myself a part of the “geek” subculture, or whatever you’d like to call it, it’s always irksome to encounter these attitudes in people identifying as belonging to a subculture which ostensibly has higher intellectual standards than pop culture. I guess the bar has sunk so low where something that requires even the modest intellectual effort of reading is too much to ask.

It’s not like this is purely a matter of time either. Looking to George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Fire and Ice series will show a series of fantasy books with a tremendous amount of attention to description of things like heraldry, armor, and lineages. These are pretty common elements in fantasy literature that’s any good. It strikes me that objecting to the very methods by which authors craft their fantasy worlds for their reader is about as sensible as objecting to science fiction for having too much science in it.

I once knew a woman who loved Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, but thought Tolkien was dull. Wheel of Time is cool! It’s got a hip, tormented hero (who has like 5 women fawning over him)! Tolkien is dull, it’s got a hobbit. Wheel of Time has exciting battles where its main hero uses Goku’s Kamehameha technique to wipe out entire armies! Tolkien just has some helpless hobbits, guys with swords, and so-called wizards with some knowledge of chemistry.

At some point, I think, it might be worth it to just step back and say, “You know what? I like all these derivative knock-offs more than the original model. Maybe I don’t like what the original was trying to do at all.” And, hey, that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with popcorn entertainment like DragonBall Z or Wheel of Time. It’d be better for everyone if we were clear about our tastes instead of paying lip service to things we don’t like.

The trouble, as the author of the article points out, is endorsing bad poetry for what is perceived as good policy. Which makes it particularly hard to endorse this article, given that it’s largely told as a working through of craft in which the author gradually refines a small section of verse from,

I was not your destination
Only a step on your path

To the far inferior,

I was never your city,
Just a stretch of your road.

Although the process itself the author uses to reach the latter seems very sound, it’s obvious to me from the comparison of the two products that both are bad. But at least one has a directness and verve and clarity of purpose that’s conducive to the message that’s trying to be versified.

I suppose in the spirit of not justifying bad verse with policy, we shouldn’t discount the policy because of the bad verse? Oh well. At least the comments provided a link to these clever little anecdotes.

I hasten to note that no one could possibly consider An Almost Pure Empty Walking a major work. In fact, it is unusually bad. But it is not atypically bad. And its badness has a kind of Platonic simplicity to it – an almost pure empty badness – that will help us, I feel, in the ugly work of diagnosis that lies ahead.

The real meat here is looking at everything that surrounds the poetry — Looking at the incestuous ponzi schemes that have poisoned “the Arts” in general or Poetry specifically and led to the creation of an artistically-stagnant, in-bred crowd of self-proclaimed elites.

I am reminded of something I overheard someone saying many years ago while discussing Greek playwrights. I forget the exact words, but the gist of it was this: “Isn’t it reassuring that even thousands of years ago all of these great creative geniuses thought like I do?”

I’m refraining from endorsing Andrea’s perspective — I honestly don’t think I’ve read enough fantasy lately to have an opinion one way or the other — but I do find her demolition of a lot of modern fantasy books interesting and entertaining. She tears into David Eddings, a writer who I haven’t read but who I’ve heard about secondhand and seems pretty mediocre from everything I’ve heard:

Edding’s is the kind of writer who would have Frodo say to Gandalf when he was safe in Minas Tirath, “You used me, you bastard. You knew I’d claim the ring, and so you told Sam to kill me and toss me in the Pit of Doom when I did. You didn’t have the balls you needed to do what you and your masters needed to do ages ago, so you arranged for a poor dumb schlub like me to take the fall for you. If it weren’t for Gollum I’d be a dead hero and nobody would be the wiser.”

If this is the impression Eddings gives his fans, he’s even worse at writing fantasy than I remember.

I find this little bit pretty interesting on a couple of levels. I’ve never really looked at what happened to Frodo in the context of Gandalf “using” him, but that’s actually a pretty valid possible interpretation. Now, we know Gandalf is a good guy, so that doesn’t work in any sensible reading of the books as a whole, but kind of curious nonetheless.

I do see Andrea’s point in rejecting that interpretation as being valid for “Fantasy” — Gandalf isn’t a character who inhabits a grey moral area. He’s white. He’s good. That’s all quite clear without needing any explanation. If we had a Frodo that came back to us after the events on Mt. Doom embittered with Gandalf for being “used” then we’d feel very confused indeed, because the majority of three books would have been cast in doubt with such a turn.

On the other hand, I’m not entirely convinced that Fantasy must inhabit a world of stark moral choice between good and evil. The one fantasy series I have been reading recently, A Song of Fire and Ice by George R. R. Martin, is pretty much the opposite of this. One could argue that the lines of moral choice haven’t been drawn yet — There seems to be a gathering storm in Martin’s universe, but it’s not quite clear what the sides will look like or who will be on what side. I’m not even convinced that the series will have a fulfilling ending, as the series does give the impression it could go on in a soap-operatic neverending series.

Now, even though I’m sort of vacillating between agreement and disagreement, I do think Andrea’s observation on the end result of all this is spot on:

I could go on and on. (In fact, I have.) But I’ll end with the effect all of this downgrading, flattening out, and fluffing has on the fantasy story: it breaks the wall. It jolts the reader awake from the dream. It reveals the gold and scarlet gems to be tinsel and plastic.

A lot of modern fantasy does really give me a cheap feeling. I read about a page or two of Eragon before I had to put it down. Any modern game or videogame in a fantasy setting is pretty much just an excuse to collect hundreds of magical items and get caught up in gee-whiz spell effects. I like spectacle, but I need substance as well. The last fantasy series I tried to read, Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time, gave me the same feeling. I enjoyed Dragonball Z in a sort of guilty pleasure sort of way, but I find it depressing that Rand, Jordan’s main character, kept giving me flashbacks to Goku as I was reading. It seems ridiculous to look at the Mary Sue/ power trip nature of a lot of this sort of writing with any sort of objectivity.

(I suppose one might argue for a distinction between Fantasy as a thematic genre, and Fantasy / pseudo-Medievalism as a setting. But that’d probably be pointless, as people in general aren’t going to bother making that distinction.)

I mentioned awhile ago that I’d been meaning to go back to Tolkein and give him a re-read. Shamus‘ web-comic has been a constant dose of exposure, and it’s made me really want to revisit that world.

So the past week or so I’ve been spending my downtime going through The Hobbit. I’m about halfway through right now and enjoying it, though I’m struck by a couple of things.

1. How self-conscious the writing is. Well, perhaps self-conscious isn’t the right term for it, as it strikes me at once as self-conscious, but also naturalistic. The style seems to be that you’d encounter from an oral storyteller, interjecting himself, observations, and references to the world outside of the story into the tale.
2. How episodic a structure the story has. It kind of makes me want to start drafting up my own plot outlines, given the easiness which Tolkein seems to display in filling out a segment of the plot, then moving on to the next event. This is kind of expected, as reading something good always makes me want to write. Unfortunately, I don’t have the time to pick up more writing these days.
3. Style. These days I can’t help but notice style, though I suppose this dovetails with #1. It’s odd to me to see sentence fragments, internal dialogue, and all sorts of things. In my own writing I’m constantly analyzing whether I want to use these techniques (and usually saying no, for the prototypical writer’s advice being “Show, don’t tell”). A lot of people have criticised Tolkein’s writing for being stodgy, but I really don’t see any of that here.
4. Prevalence of magic. Trolls turning to stone at sunlight, Gandalf’s voices, magical swords, … It’s a lot more prevalent than I remember. Of course, half of what we see is only apparent magic. Gandalf fries some goblins and wolves with, presumably, magic… But one could make a convincing argument that he was using chemical fires as well. The character of the Elves in Rivendell in particular, was very much “faerie” elf and not what I expect from Tolkein Elves. I’m not a Tolkein-ologist, so I can’t say how developed Middle Earth was at the time he wrote The Hobbit, but it seems like he altered much by the time he sat down to write the Lord of the Rings.
5. Characters. The only real characters in the book so far seem to be Bilbo, and maybe Gandalf. Since the thought of a Peter Jackson Hobbit movie is lingering in the back of my mind, I wonder how a film would handle a travelling party as big as Thorin & Company, most of whom are Dwarves and probably indistinguishable except for clothing. Tolkein hasn’t really given any of the Dwarves a big part yet, they’re pretty much along for the ride acting as foils to show Bilbo’s growth in courage and confidence.

More later, probably. I’m just barely getting into the meat of it.

I’d forgotten entirely about Mercedes Lackey, but once I heard that name I immediately, no exaggeration, paused the podcast and opened up a new browser window just to write this rant in.

I picked up three Mercedes Lackey books about five or so years ago. Two of my good friends had gotten into Mercedes Lackey and had been raving about some of her novels — I don’t know if I’m remembering correctly, but I believe the novels that were getting ravers were Brightly Burning and the Magic’s Pawn/Promise/Price series. I went to a local bookstore with the intention of picking up some of these books, but they didn’t have any of the specific ones I was looking for. I bought the bullet and picked up another series of her books that was there, the Vows and Honor series.

This has got to be one of the worst series of books I’ve ever read. My strongest memory of the books has been thinking that this is the kind of book someone might take to the beach because you wouldn’t care if you ruined the pages with lotion. Considering how much of a perfectionist I am about all of my books, trying to keep them all in pristine condition, I consider that extremely damning. Probably the highest praise I’d be willing to give to Mercedes Lackey is to say that she can put enough words down on a page to fill up a book.

The series I read, Vows and Honor, is about two female characters Tarma and Kethry. [I'm refreshing my memory from the back of the books right now, as the only thing that wasn't forgettable about them was how horrible they were.] One of them is some Native American style swordswoman, the other is an ex-noblewoman turned Mage. Both are servants of “the Goddess,” which should be a pretty big indicator of where this series begins and ends. Another indicator comes in browsing the preface of one of these books, Mercedes Lackey begins talking about the state of the genre of fantasy fiction and talks about Conan by saying “C*n*n.” Who does that?

The big question in my mind is how someone like Mercedes Lackey, who’s, from all the signs I’ve seen, a no-talent hack, able to become a name of sorts in the fantasy genre. It really boggles my mind, I didn’t think the genre was that barren. Guess I was wrong

The other day I was browsing on YouTube and came across this video. I’ve been sort of simmering on the idea of using video with poetry to try and make interesting readings/experiences for the past couple of months — And though this isn’t exactly along those lines, it’s in the general spirit of using the popular medium of YouTube to try and reinvigorate poetry as a medium.

Watching this video I’m rather torn between whether I think this sort of thing is helpful or not. Watch the video, I think it’s pretty compelling. The performer, in this case Taylor Mali, seems adept at playing the audience. It’s an entertaining performance, I’ll grant that, and it’s got a good social message too (assuming that matters).

The question, I think, is whether it’s appropriate to endorse this sort of venue, a “Poetry Slam” — Whatever that means — and this sort of craftsmanship — Which is, very little. I’ll admit I have absolutely no knowledge of what a “Poetry Slam” is, but by the format of this video, and ones like it, I can gather that it’s some sort of competitive poetry reading. And who needs that? Is getting the biggest rise out of your audience by pandering to their lowest common denominator tastes something that should be encouraged, or is the benefit in popularization worth the theoretical downsides?

And on craftsmanship: What we see in the video is a good oratory — But is it a good poem? Being rather more of a traditionalist I’d say no. What is here to say, “This is poetry”?

Reading down the transcription
Of what he says, it’s more like a sentence broken
Up with line breaks than meticulously thought out
Stanzas, accorded meter and rhyme and rhythm

Try as I might, I can’t find myself accepting that this is in any way representative of “good” poetry, or even worthy of that title at all. Good oratory? Sure. But writing down one’s thoughts in prose and adding in line breaks has never struck me as valid craftsmanship.

I’d like to know what you might think on the matter. Are poetry slams good? Is popularization of poetry good? Should we insist on standards of craftsmanship, or play it loose with terminology, since it’s all constructed categories anyway? If not, where’s the line? And am I just being a snob?

More below…

Lately we seem to have entered a heightened news cycle. One of the first things I’ll note is the extreme amount of political ads that I am being subjected to, osmotically, in the months before the elections. In some ways I am looking forward to McCain-Feingold’s uncostitutional restriction on political advertising because it means I won’t have to see some grinning gladhand on TV trying to manipulate me without providing any substantive information.

On the other hand, I’m particularly irked about the unconstitutionality of McCain-Feingold in response to general changes perceived in the news media. As little as five years ago one could make a compelling case for, if not the illusion of objectivity then at least a fair-minded presentation of the news. What happens when we enter the pre-elections blackout on political advertisement — But the single biggest piece of political propaganda, the nightly news, continues to run? No doubt if the national media weren’t explicitly counting on that, they would’ve raised a huge cry against McCain-Feingold. I think in a lot of ways the media views the abridgement of first amendment rights, with an exception for themselves, as beneficial. Although not explicit, it implicitly creates a privileged class that only they inhabit, and that, in-turn, enables them to be more openly partisan in news coverage.

Why is Mark Foley news? Who the hell cares? The only things even remotely interesting about the personal improprieties of a politician are how the news media wants to present itself as some kind of superior entity when its own actions in covering up this issue until a politically opportune time clearly compromise it, and the utterly insane reaction of the hard left. The fake blog that broke the story is almost certainly an arm either of the newsmedia or some other leftist organization that wanted to use this as a smear without getting their own hands dirty.

Regarding the insanity of the hard left, sometime ago on Digg I found a link to this urban dictionary listing for “Republican pedophiles.” It’s amazing to me that some people can be so brain-damaged by the party politics in this country that they jump on clearly false and immoral bandwagons like this one. Pedophilia is not directed towards sixteen year olds, nor is a sixteen year old boy some kind of mindless baa-ing sheep to be led around blindly by authority figures. It’s most likely not a good idea to put someone who is sexually interested in those boys in a position of authority over them, but I think it’s pretty obvious that this is a situation of political opportunism triumphing over principle. All you need to do is look at the behavior regarding, say, Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues, the Boy Scouts fiasco, or gay marriage in general to realize that this is so. According to this article, articles like this Republican pedophiles listing are being pushed to the top of Digg via a concerted effort by the “ThinkProgress” community (how progressive), and, particularly objectionably, paid employees dedicated to promoting ThinkProgress via Digg.

But the news media is never going to implicate itself in the Foley issue, and the hard left seems to be out of control these days. In either case it seems like Foley has more people riled up than, say, Iranian or North Korean nuclear weapons. For certain these immediate threats of nuclear destruction seem to take on less importance in the public discourse than, say, whether McDonalds should be prosecuted for selling food that people glut themselves on. It’s like the entire system of mental discrimination and triage in crises has been turned upside down where relatively unimportant problems (for one reason or another) are made into systemic world problems and important world issues, such as nuclearization of hostile and unstable foreign powers is something to ignore, or, at best, delegate to those philosopher-king paragons of virtue at the United Nations.

I look at these attitudes and wonder if it’s all connected somehow. Here’s a “poem” by Eve Ensler, a talentless hack, ideologue, and hatemonger:

Since GEORGE BUSH really got in power by corporate take over and not election. Since he has behaved like a CEO of a huge corporation called U.S.A. supporting profit in all cases over human interests, we should treat him the way they would treat him in any corporation and

FIRE HIS ASS

When you start with a major surplus and end up with a huge huge deficit they

FIRE YOUR ASS

When you fail to move a company forward, they

FIRE YOUR ASS

When you are lazy and take vacations at a time of peril, they

FIRE YOUR LAZY ASS

When you don’t prepare for terrible outcomes and then lose thousands of lives and insane amounts of money they

FIRE YOUR ASS

When you lie to your stockholders and board and then spend nearly 1.3 trillion dollars and kill hundreds of thousands of people for no reason that makes sense to anyone, they

FIRE YOUR ASS

Sometimes they even put you in prison.

When you openly practice racist policies whether they want to or not, they

FIRE YOUR ASS

When you openly break the law, order torture and get caught they

FIRE YOUR ASS

When you hire people who are ignorant and incompetent, they

FIRE YOUR ASS

When you destroy the brand of a company
and alienate potential buyers all over the world, they

FIRE YOUR ASS

We are the shareholders of the U.S.A.
Bush has bankrupted our company, our pocketbooks,
but mainly our soul.
We need to remove this president and his staff
and we need to do it now.

FIRE HIS ASS.

Is the inability to discriminate between importance and unimportance, moral and immoral, politics and partisan insanity, also the cause of an inability to discriminate between good and bad? I despair to see things, or people, like this, presented as art or artists. To me, that speaks of an inverted universe, where hate and deceit and destruction and all the blackness of the human heart is celebrated over what is beautiful, true, and good.

At Columbia University we have a group of smug college students convinced of their own moral superiority rushing the stage of a speaker, disrupting the event, engaging in a brawl, and generally acting like the thugs they consistently try to paint their opponents as. Even Jon Stewart criticizes the students. A blow to their self-esteem, no doubt, but unfortunately, like Sauron, the withering eye of Jon Stewart does not often look into his own borders. Things like the Columbia incident occur every day, this one was only remarkable because the video clearly exposed and dispelled the partisan spin the students were attempting to generate. Their narrative never had a chance to take root and assert itself as “true,” but elsewhere in the absence of the sunlight of video, it grows unabated. Steven wrote a post over on Chicago Boyz about how there seems to be an increasing reliance upon fantasy and alternate reality conspiracy theory among these sorts of people.

On a related note to Iran and North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, we also have a series of shootings in schools. First the Colorado shooting, then shortly after the Amish shooting. I was engaged in a discussion on these events with one of my female friends and she was distraught, rightfully so, but not only merely over the events but also at the suggestion that part of the blame lies on the shoulders of those who left. And, though I hate to put blame on those people, seeing a gun pointed at you by some dishevelled madman being a situation I have never encountered… The fact that no one attempted to disable the attacker, in either circumstance, demonstrates a serious problem with our culture. The stronger members of our society, and yes, that does mean sixteen year old boys when in a classroom half-filled with sixteen year old girls, have a responsibility to help those who are weaker or less able.

I find it amazing that many people still have not absorbed the understanding that cooperating with someone who is deranged and armed is like signing your own death certificate. At least if you fight you have a chance to survive. Unconvincing as I may find the fatalism, we must all die and a death to protect another, or in a struggle, is more honorable than a death in which one was complicit. And, I think, in a larger sense the concept also holds to dealing with places like Iran or North Korea. I don’t know, in particular, how my friend feels about our foreign policy towards these two countries, but I expect there’s more than a casual relationship between the attitude that one should cooperate with criminals and the attitude towards spending years in negotiations with megalomaniacal dictators.

For a little over a month now Jeff Goldstein has been largely absent from Protein Wisdom, but in his stead many people have been guest posting. Matoko Kusanagi, known on Protein Wisdom as Nishizono, proposed an interesting theory of looking at jihaadis as participants in a modern ghost dance. Although interesting I’m not convinced it’s a useful way to think about our current conflict, as it elides the real problem of the “ghost dancers” being suicidally driven and enabled by modern technology to carry out large scale destruction with a minimum of organization and personnel.

Now, a few months ago I read another post by Steven on Chicago Boyz, this one was about lack of unity in the United States. And one of the interesting things that came about from that was this particular comment by Shannon Love about a hammer-and-nail problem. That is to say, that our society rewards a certain type of conflict resolution (nonviolent, consensus-building) and the way that this psychologically impacts our relationships with countries that have no similar tradition of arbitration. A few months ago I had the opportunity to hear a talk by the infamous philosopher Peter Singer, and one of the things in particular that struck me at the time was the ways in which his proposals for real-life change rewarded a so-called academic mindset. I think that is well-and-good for civil situations, but in the modern international climate of bloody dictators and unbelievable corruption it’s fantastic, to say the least.

Also found by the comments on Steven’s post, I found a link to this essay by “Gagdad Bob” / Robert Godwin. The essay is on what Godwin perceives as a “ghost dance” by the left side of the political spectrum. It’s a little strange to me to go from “never” hearing about the ghost dance to hearing about it applied to two trends of the modern world within the space of a few weeks. Either way, Godwin is one of my new favorite bloggers. Via Godwin’s blog, One Cosmos, I found this link to Dr. Sanity discussing the Columbia stage-rushing event. Here is another Dr. Sanity article on Victor Davis Hanson on the surrender of liberal values in the face of multiculturalism(ie, tribalism).

Found via Gene Expression, I see this Financial Times article on research by Robert Putnam on [tribalism's] negative effects on society. Is this any surprise to anyone? How about the angry protests to Jack Straw’s suggestion that Muslim women take off their veils when they go to see him? Is it really unreasonable to ask a person who is sitting five feet away from you to take off clothing that masks their face from you?

I have so much despair in hearing these things. It seems like we need to expand beyond this planet if sensible, pragmatic, and humane values are to be preserved. I don’t know if I can articulate the connection at this point, but I also found these Steve Sailer posts: one, two, three, to be involved in my perception of a lost culture.

This did give me a small glimmer of optimism, but it is not enough. I do not know if anything is enough. I think the only hope this society may have is in Science’s iconoclasm, that the elaborate mythologies that are attacking Knowledge and Beauty and Good will be smashed to bits by it. Will that happen? I think, eventually, but who knows if Science itself will remain steady enough to do so.

Quoth Michael:

… despite its intending-to-awe name — “literary fiction” represents nothing more than another shelf in your local bookstore’s Fiction section. It’s one menu option among many, and nothing more.

This is a pretty common but very important realization. It’s rare for me to encounter people outside of my close circle who really enjoy reading frequently — But when I do it’s even rarer to find someone who sees through the cloud of marketing to realize the fiction world’s tastemakers are just glorified advertisers, selling books in a genre whose sole purpose is to be exclusive club. If you’re the right sort of person with the right aesthetic sensibilities, the right opinions, and the right connections you too could join the club.

More Michael:

There’s a problem with thinking of lit fic as a legitimate genre. It’s this: Real fiction-genres arise out of something alive. They’re the result of an informal collaboration between audiences, publishers, and writers. They’re based in live tastes, live markets, live creative urges, and live audience enthusiasm.

They arise semi-naturally, in a word. “Literary fiction” has no such organic basis. It’s a willed creation, one that has been given form from the intellect on down. Its audience is largely made up of students, educated people who attend creative writing classes themselves, and people who are still young and credulous enough to read what the magazines tell them is important. … Lit fic is an artificial world, without any vitality or pulse of its own, and in need of ever-renewed artificial respiration. Which is also to say that it’s constantly on the verge of collapse and annihilation.

There’s some insightful comments to the post itself. A commenter named BTM has this to add:

Now you bookish types know what we painters have had to deal with for the last 100 years. Don’t think for a minute that this artificial distinction will disappear. On the contrary, it will only grow, and the “highbrow” types will continue to heap praise, major prizes, and media coverage on those “serious” writers, at the expense of their far more talented, readable, prolific, and “middle-to-low brow” peers.

I find it a fascinating, and apt, parallel to draw. It goes to show that the same sort of rot that has set in the art world has pervaded literature as well. BTM writes another comment on how the status quo came to be:

A lot of it revolves around money. In the painting world, there is a system of influential galleries, critics, high money collectors and museums, government-funded academics, and so on. Since painting really isn’t popular anymore, public input doesn’t act as a corrective influence. So the insiders tend to pick out who they want to become a big shot, buy the early work, rave it up, award the new big shot prizes, and then sell the early work later for big money. Its really kind of corrupt. Of course, there is always a market for the smaller collectors who really love stuff. But the art market is manipulated to a degree by insiders, like any other. And they use the same modern advertising techniques to get money out of moneyed, but ignorant collectors-the appeal to celebrity, obsessive concern with the “new and improved”, the appeal to supposed “authority”, etc. I don’t think its a coincidence that so-called “modern” art sprang up at around the same time the Industrial Revolution was taking off. Modern advertising was developed to distinguish and sell the surplus goods that were available from mass production. Now the cultural world has the same problem of tons of product, with relatively fewer buyers.

The real question is how to solve this issue. How can it be that we’ve let a country club of self-promoters become the premier cultural authorities for art and literature, and how can we fix it? I’m hoping the internet’s worldwide advertisement will serve as the advertising and distribution mechanism for artists of all stripes, but it strikes me that we’ll never rid ourselves of this art-elite subculture, even if they decline in relevance even further than they already have.