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Toph Bei Fong
Feb 29, 2008



Just finished reading the thread. Awesome, awesome thoughts and ideas Brainworm. Thank you for doing this!


I'm interested in this also, because when I read it, I was thoroughly unimpressed. I'd loved most of Ellis' previous work (some of the short stories in The Informers I could do without, and Glamorama needed some editing to make it a stronger work), but after an awesome set of opening chapters, LP seemed to meander into a tired game of "spot the reference" before losing steam and just getting tired. Because I found it hard to care about Bret the character, it was difficult to care about his self-created problems; his wife and children were far more sympathetic, and they were shoved to the side for most of the narrative. Almost every twist and clever bit of metafiction I had seen somewhere else before, and the Hamlet references didn't add much to my experience. The Hamlet sadness was only reinforced because I had just finished Updike's Gertrude and Claudius, so I was really primed and ready for more, and they weren't delivered in what I felt was a satisfying way. That said, it seemed like such an out of character misfire for an author responsible for so many books I had really enjoyed, that I'd really like to hear what others have seen and gotten from it that I didn't. Is it much better on a 2nd read, perhaps?

Couple questions of my own:

Can you recommend a good reading guide to Spenser's The Faerie Queene? I've just finished it, and while I enjoyed it a lot, I feel like I didn't really get a lot of the poem. The end notes in the Penguin edition helped some, but I feel like in some cases I was either too distracted by translating the archaic spelling or keeping the rhyme and rhythm to get more than e.g. awesome lady knights beating the tar out of dopes convinced they'll get laid if they beat her up and thereby saving England The Redcross Knight from falling into sin, so be chaste. Spenser clearly has more going on than Robert Jordan or Terry Goodkind, but it seems too easy to just say that e.g. Archimago is the Catholics and gently caress Catholicism, and anyways you've made a really good case for "this thing is really that thing" not being the best way to read. You've mentioned throughout the thread about works falling into traditions and being read as responses to other works. Where does FQ fall onto that timeline? What inspired it, and what did it inspire?

A friend of mine just posted this to Twitter:

quote:

It occurs to me that "deus ex machina" endings get a bad rap. They were perfectly fine for hundreds of years, why did that change?

My gut feeling wants to respond with something about the importance of religion in day-to-day life now vs. then, but another part of me wants to point the finger at the greater emphasis placed on endings in today's media. I'm thinking about people who e.g. get really angry when their television show of choice has an episode that doesn't advance the season long metaplot, or novels like Sarah's Key, where the whole book hinges on the ending, and once you know it, you could probably skip reading the whole thing because the novel is just build up towards it (note that this may not be an entirely fair characterization of the novel; it was actually a pretty satisfying ending, but it was a twist. The films of M. Night Shyamalan might be a better example). Or is it simply that we're not going to judge an older work as harshly? This is all me spitballing. What do you think?

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Toph Bei Fong
Feb 29, 2008



-Blackadder- posted:

No, I think you're correct. Argument from authority sounds about right, if not close enough.

Some classic examples of what I'm talking about are:

- MLK was a Republican (therefore you should be a Republican) (this one isn't even true, not that it matters for the sake of the argument fallacy)

- Einstein believed in God (therefore you should believe in God) (this one is also a bit misconstrued)

Yeah, that's pretty much textbook Argument from Authority. It's not necessarily a fallacy, but can be when misused.


quote:

A says P about subject matter S.
A should be trusted about subject matter S.
Therefore, P is correct.

It's quite famously misused by people who don't understand context and/or that expertise in one field does not necessarily constitute expertise in all fields. (i.e. "Famous sexhaver Jenny McCarthy says that she prefers circumcised penises, therefore if you want your kid to get laid a lot by beautiful American women, get him circumcised." and "Famous sexhaver Jenny McCarthy says that vaccinations cause autism, so if you love your child and care about their future, don't trust your doctor, instead buy her book and enroll him in this course designed to help unlock your crystal child's full potential...")

Toph Bei Fong
Feb 29, 2008



Brother_Walken posted:

I find this idea interesting. I wonder if you think writers, on some level, are delusional. Or at least have to be. I'd like to write novels for a living and I've been trying for the last three years or so. I haven't done it much recently but in the periods when I wrote lots I operated generally under the impressions that my ideas were good and that I was writing well. I always later changed my mind though. And on the other hand, when I thought of myself badly I could barely write anything.

[...]

Isn’t writing which tries to honestly self-reflect and reveal yourself really romanticising yourself by becoming this sought after authentic person and isn’t it therefore fundamentally dishonest and self-serving in intention? Doesn’t trying to be straight-forward and honest in this way actually fail, even when done well, to be honest? Would you say it’s actually delusion in that damaging way you wrote about? I guess it depends on how well it's done.

I think there's a distinction to be made here between self-delusion and self-confidence. The latter is 100% necessary for any writer -- if you don't think what you're writing is something that someone else would like to read, it's not something that's going to get published. Nothing wrong with writing for self enjoyment, or for an audience of one (stories for friends, etc.), but any sort of commercial fiction needs to have some sort of authorial confidence behind it. You'll see this in a lot of query letter advice: Do not grovel, do not beg, do not explain why you're so lucky that someone is giving you a chance. Tell them about your story and why they would enjoy reading it. And yes, even literary fiction is still commercial, in a sense, just targeting a different audience. Tom Pynchon isn't published out of charity; he's published because he sells.

On the other hand, there's the strange bubble that some people seem to live in, especially characters in certain types of fiction, where their refusal to engage with the world is seen as endearing or precious, and that we can't pop their bubble and sully them with the dirtiness of the "Real World". Lars and the Real Girl is a perfect example of this, with everyone in the town going on the journey and playing along. Which, lets face it, is a pretty hard pill to swallow. His family, sure. But the entire town? Not to mention the audience, who are supposed to see his delusion as endearing rather than creepy. There are no consequences to anything. It's difficult to figure out why Margo has fallen in love with him for any but plot reasons. I didn't hate it as much as Brainworm, but I can easily see flaws in the script and story, and can see it as part of a long tradition of "girl helps guy grow into himself" films.

Anyways, this sort of confidence is fundamentally self-serving on an authorial level because, yeah, you do need some swagger and balls to say "Yes, this poo poo I wrote, you should spend 100+ hours of company time on it, then print a few thousand copies of it, so thousands of people across the country can spend hours and hours pouring over it". Nothing wrong with that. James loving Patterson does it four or more times a year with books he didn't even write. Make sure you (the general you, not you specifically) can take criticism, can handle editing, can deal with rejection slips without pulling a John Kennedy Toole, don't end up like Henry Darger, don't start talking about how you're better than Shakespeare without having published a single thing, and have a reliable source of income until you're writing novels regularly and seeing paychecks come in. You want to be able to take stock of yourself and understand who you are and where you're coming from, and what options exist realistically for you. This isn't necessarily some depressive thing, but sometimes it does lead to realizing that you've made a huge mistake somewhere along the line and that you need to do something about it.

When it comes to holding up delusional characters without eventually puncturing their bubble or showing off the real horror that comes alongside, to pick extreme examples, schizophrenia or paranoia? It romanticizes the condition in the same way that consumption was romanticized in the 1800s: "Oh, I have to go live by the sea. Oh, I'll cough up some blood discreetly. Oh, I must finish my work before I perish. How romantic!" while leaving out how lovely is it to be unable to lift yourself out of bed or keep down solid food. It's inauthentic because it doesn't honestly display what's happening. You don't want to be saying "Oh, it's so wonderful, don't you wish you had my problems?" basically.

It's not that you can't write about purely good people; Harper Lee's To Kill a Mocking Bird is a perfect example of this. The only bad thing about Atticus Finch is that he doesn't win the trial, and the book is better for it. He's not a secret alcoholic or hiding some incident of racism in his past that he's been working all his life to make up for. The book would be worse if he was. He's just a good guy doing his best in a lovely situation because it's the right thing to do. Finch winning the trial and ending racism forever in the town would be just as bad. As would him being some sort of legal superman who'd never picked up a law book before his best friend was accused of rape, and he needed to Do The Right Thing and Save Him. The point is to write it in such a way that it doesn't feel contrived, forced, or silly. One doesn't have to over share to do that, though folks like Bukowski and Updike managed to write many good books doing just that.

Take, for example, the part in Bukowski's Post Office where he rapes the woman who accuses him of rape, figuring that he might as well since she's already screaming rape accusations at him. Is it true? Almost certainly not. But it sounds like the sort of story that a guy like that would tell, and it further gives you an impression of him as an rear end in a top hat that you probably won't want to spend much time around, even if they're somewhat interesting to listen to at a distance. Couple that with, say, the anecdote about how there's a specific number of minutes that each bucket is supposed to take to sort and they'll be punished if they aren't sorted quick enough, and the argument he gets into with his supervisor -- can he run down to the cafeteria and have a slice of pie if he finishes two minutes faster than par? -- and you start to get a very complete picture of someone who seems like someone you'd know. Someone who could be real, despite being a fictional caricature of the real Bukowski. It feels authentic, even if it isn't factually honest, because it isn't asking anything of you, there's no "Okay, I need you to buy that XYZ just happens" without any sort of credibility being established. But then again there's an entire contingent of people who really dislike Bukowski precisely because he puts on the Henry Chinaski persona to write with; they don't want to read about a sexist rear end in a top hat being a sexist rear end in a top hat, authentic or not, or they think his yarns are just too out there to be credible, and/or that his faux conversational writing style sucks, and to an extent I can understand where they're coming from.

The trap is to do the DFW thing, where you're anxious about your anxiety over being anxious. Of course, he wrote some great stories about that, too: the Depressed Person, in particular, is a perfect tear down of that style of writing, as well as of Prozac Nation author Elizabeth Wurtzel, whom he'd been in relationship with. If you haven't read this one, I'd check it out. It spirals in on itself multiple times, with digression after digression, apology after apology, for not being interesting enough, taking up too much time, talking too much about feelings, worrying about worrying, almost to the point where I'd think it was parody if I hadn't read his biography and wasn't very familiar with his other work. He similarly goes on at length in Infinite Jest about how much he dislikes the dismissals of the AA slogans like One Day at a Time, because most people dismissing them really haven't actually taken the time to think about what it would mean, for example, for someone to really only be able to think about getting through the next 24 hours, and how laughing it off as a dumb self-help thing that you're too cool for really prevents actual growth and problem solving. Wallace was also an alcoholic and regular AA attendee, and much of those sections were written based on his experiences in a half-way house, so I suspect he had a personal axe to grind there.

You've probably noticed that in all three example, I've used authors who've fictionalized their own lives. They didn't write these pieces as biographies, nor did they tell the whole truth. But they told something like it, they used their feeling and experiences to craft something that felt like the truth, and that's what brought them success. It doesn't have to be The Truth. One of the best books I've ever read about Vietnam is Joe Haldeman's The Forever War, a sci fi novel about space war and time dilation, but the feelings of the soldiers he captures in prose and the sense of being out of place in the world are just as good as, say, Full Metal Jacket or MASH.

Toph Bei Fong fucked around with this message at 06:34 on Jul 8, 2015

Toph Bei Fong
Feb 29, 2008



This is part of an ongoing and very interesting discussion about the difference between written and spoken language. If I had to take a crack at explaining it, I'd say it's because we do so much non-verbal communication these days, and we can't read the emotions of the writer. Because English doesn't have an "official" formal or literary tense, we tend to waffle on the emotion conveyed by punctuation.

Take, for example, how different a texts reading: "I'll do it" which will be received differently from "I'll do it!" or "I'll do it..." or "I'll do it :)" will be received by the reader.

Seinfeld has a great bit about this in the episode "The Sniffing Accountant" where Elane gets terribly upset because her boyfriend didn't put an exclamation point on a note he left.

quote:

Elaine: Well, I was just curious why you didn't use an exclamation point?

Jake: What are you talking about?

Elaine: See, right here you wrote "Myra had the baby", but you didn't use an exclamation point.

Jake: So?

Elaine: So, it's nothing. Forget it, forget it, I just find it curious.

Jake: What's so curious about it?

Elaine: Well, I mean if one of your close friends had a baby and I left you a message about it, I would use an exclamation point.

Jake: Well, maybe I don't use my exclamation points as haphazardly as you do.

Elaine: You don't think that someone having a baby warrants an exclamation point.

Jake: Hey, I just chalked down the message. I didn't know I was required to capture the mood of each caller.

Elaine: I just thought you would be a little more excited about a friend of mine having a baby.

Jake: Ok, I'm excited. I just don't happen to like exclamation points.

Elaine: Well, you know Jake, you should learn to use them. Like the way I'm talking right now, I would put an exclamation points at the end of all these sentences! On this one! And on that one!

Jake: Well, you can put one on this one: I'm leaving!

---------------------------------------------------

5A. Jerry and Elaine

Jerry: You're out of your mind you know that.

Elaine: What?

Jerry: It's an exclamation point! It's a line with a dot under it.

Elaine: Well, I felt a call for one.

Jerry: A call for one, you know I thought I've heard everything. I've never heard a relationship being affected by a punctuation.

Elaine: I found it very troubling that he didn't use one.

On the other hand, there's a social dynamic as well. This African architecture PhD student who wrote their entire dissertation without punctuation, instead using spacing and word emphasis to convey the pauses and breaks.

quote:

pre:
“in my defense     my style of writing is not laziness or lack of knowledge of proper usage of the english 
language     it is a form of grammatical resistance as a deconstructionist     in the manner of many writers     especially 
american poet ee cummings     he graduated with a master degree in english from harvard university 
and they called him experimental and innovative     not words likely to be used to describe an indigenous 
writer who breaks all the rules of writing (the behavioural ethics board at the university of british columbia
 suggested that i hire an editor as it appeared that i did not know the english language)     times 
though     they are changing”

(Edit: BBcode won't preserve the spacing correctly, the true version is in the article below)


http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/ubc-student-writes-52438-word-architecture-dissertation-with-no-punctuation-not-everyone-loved-it

He did receive his PhD.

Toph Bei Fong fucked around with this message at 18:15 on Feb 5, 2016

Toph Bei Fong
Feb 29, 2008



the JJ posted:

There's a shitfit going on in the Book Barn over a stupid fantasy book. Lamps here is doing pretty good close reading but following up with what amounts to 'my opinion is objectively correct, you should feel bad for enjoying this thing you enjoy.' Other poo poo posters are poo poo posting in response. It's a glorious clusterfuck.

Link?

Toph Bei Fong
Feb 29, 2008



Mortley posted:

"Would you please elaborate on this?" is what I decided to write, instead of trying to find the barfing smilie barfing smilies.

I remember when I was in high school, the principal read it over the PA system, and the ending really bummed me out. I had no idea why he wanted to tell a few thousand students that these "virtues" were somehow restricted to men and not for women. As I got older and learned about Kipling intellectualizing British colonialism, I figured the bias I had when I was younger was pretty well-justified.

So what does that poem mean for you? Why do you like it unironically?

Here's a version of the poem, slightly rewritten, by Joni Mitchell:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m78cSts3tJw

Stripped of some of its outdated language, it works quite well as a "Keep your poo poo together, don't treat anyone like poo poo yourself, do your work, don't make excuses, you can get through this, you're strong enough, gently caress anyone who says otherwise" type inspirational message and code of conduct. It's nowhere near as bad as "White Man's Burden".

The poem also has a great deal in common with Polonious' speech to Laetres from Hamlet.

Toph Bei Fong
Feb 29, 2008



Wallet posted:

One of the things that really blew my mind taking literature courses in college was that the same preoccupations that high school English teachers have with cataloguing the features of literature instead of actually analysing what how they work and what they accomplish persists into higher education.

There were a few delightful exceptions, but even at a university with a solid English department I feel confident that three quarters of the professors would feed you some nonsense about "the eternal affirmation of the spirit of man in literature" if you asked them why it's worth studying.

I think some of this is that a lot of them are just gatekeeping nerds begging to be taken seriously. You can see the same sort of behavior in comic book fans.

For example, Ulysses is a lot of dick jokes, written by a guy who loved loving the farts out of his wife. It's a funny book about a cuckold getting himself out of the house so his wife can continue her affair. And a lot of this is framed in the most deadly serious way, but at the core, it's a series of funny set pieces: a silly teacher gets bullied because he's such a dramatic loser compared to his Chad med school roommate, a guy jacks off to a pretty girl while watching fireworks, the teacher and his buddies have an argument over whether Shakespeare is the greatest author who ever wrote, or the greatest great author who ever lived... The dissonance between the subject matter and the tone is the point. Gravity's Rainbow is a paranoid fantasy about a Harvard doofus who gets caught up in shenanigans because the map of girls he's hosed happens to sync up with a map of rocket bombs dropped on London, which They are convinced means something, even though their math specialist keeps telling them that no, it's just a stupid coincidence. It features, among other things, one of the villains hiding out in a pig costume to escape capture, only to be captured and castrated because They are so incompetent that they're mistaken him for the hero...

Such books can be genuinely fun to read because of the jokes, gags, and other silliness. And sometimes they do have something serious to say (Pynchon is very concerned about the combination and overreach of government and corporate power, for example). But when you need them to mean something so that folks can't make fun of you, well, then you have to talk about how cool Batman is and how dark and serious and unlike the Adam West version his stories are. It's a way of obscuring the piece in such a way that it cannot be criticized, and therefore your liking it is secure from ridicule. It's easier to defend "It's an ineffable testament to the human spirit" compared to "There's a lot of funny dick jokes." This isn't to say that good literature can't be serious or deal with serious topics, but trying to make a work into something it isn't just because you want it to have some greater meaning is a pretty common problem among critics.

Richard Rorty, a famed American philosopher, spoke about this in an essay called Trotsky and the Wild Orchids. Growing up in a Marxist household, he was constantly wracked with guilt over his enjoyment of studying and looking at wild flowers.

quote:

I was not quite sure why those orchids were so important, but I was convinced that they were. I was sure that our noble, pure, chaste, North American wild orchids were morally superior to the showy, hybridized, tropical orchids displayed in florists' shops. I was also convinced that there was a deep significance in the fact that the orchids are the latest and most complex plants to have been developed in the course of evolution. Looking back, I suspect that there was a lot of sublimated sexuality involved (orchids being a notoriously sexy sort of flower), and that my desire to learn all there was to know about orchids was linked to my desire to understand all the hard words in Krafit-Ebing.

I was uneasily aware, however, that there was something a bit dubious about this esotericism – this interest in socially useless flowers. I had read (in the vast amount of spare time given to a clever, snotty, nerdy only child) bits of Marius the Epicurean and also bits of Marxist criticisms of Pater's aestheticism. I was afraid that Trotsky (whose Literature and Revolution I had nibbled at) would not have approved of my interest in orchids.

He eventually comes to the conclusion that flowers and Marxism have nothing to do with one another, and that this is okay. One can enjoy something without tying it to a particular ideology.

quote:

It is the attempt to see yourself as an incarnation of something larger than yourself (the Movement, Reason, the Good, the Holy) rather than accepting your finitude. The latter means, among other things, accepting that what matters most to you may well be something that may never matter much to most people. Your equivalent of my orchids may always seem merely weird, merely idiosyncratic, to practically everybody else. But that is no reason to be ashamed of, or downgrade, or try to slough off, your Wordsworthian moments, your lover, your family, your pet, your favourite lines of verse, or your quaint religious faith. There is nothing sacred about universality which makes the shared automatically better than the unshared. There is no automatic privilege of what you can get everybody to agree to (the universal) over what you cannot (the idiosyncratic).

[...]

I take this near unanimity among my critics to show that most people – even a lot of purportedly liberated postmodernists – still hanker for something like what I wanted when I was 15: a way of holding reality and justice in a single vision. More specifically, they want to unite their sense of moral and political responsibility with a grasp of the ultimate determinants of our fate. They want to see love, power and justice as coming together deep down in the nature of things, or in the human soul, or in the structure of language, or somewhere. They want some sort of guarantee that their intellectual acuity, and those special ecstatic moments which that acuity sometimes affords, are of some relevance to their moral convictions. They still think that virtue and knowledge are somehow linked – that being right about philosophical matters is important for right action. I think this is important only occasionally and incidentally.

Toph Bei Fong
Feb 29, 2008



Eugene V. Dubstep posted:

This is basically right but can we at least be clear that, crude humor notwithstanding, Ulysses is a formally difficult novel. You're not likely to pick it up for the first time and understand what's going on, and for that matter the plot isn't even the reason the book is so widely admired and studied. Literature professors are positioned well to guide students to an understanding of it that they would never achieve without a much broader and more involved independent reading of the whole canon before Joyce, not to mention Irish history.

Same goes for GR.

Absolutely, and that formal difficulty is definitely part of the point of the book. See here for what Ulysses looks like not written well.

But at the same time, when put "I like fart jokes written with difficult words and complex sentence structure", it's easy to see why one could get defensive about one's enjoyment of that. Some people are going to find that fun, while others find it tedious, and no amount of convincing is going to make a piece of art beyond criticism.

And I think that can lead into an interesting discussion about form vs content, and whether a book/movie/play/whatever that can be enjoyed just as much by reading the plot summary on Wikipedia is as good as one where the words/images/dialogue/whatever are necessary and the point.

Toph Bei Fong
Feb 29, 2008



FPyat posted:

On a writing forum I often encounter the sentiment that there are no new ideas in fiction, that in thousands of years of human existence all possible stories have already already been imagined, told, and written. It's usually accompanied by a pithy quoting of Ecclesiastes. People will say things along the lines of, for example:


I don't know what to make of this sort of belief. My instincts strongly rebel against it. Would you concur with it?

If you abstract things badly, sure, there aren't any new plots. as John Gardner didn't say, "There are only two plots: A stranger rides into town, and A man goes on a journey."

The problem being, of course, that if you summed up all of Wu Cheng'en's Journey to the West as "A man goes on a journey", while you're technically right, you're also so completely wrong that one would wonder if you'd even read the book. And that novel is very different from The Odyssey or Alice's Adventures in Wonderland or Back to the Future, even though they're all "Man goes on a journey" type stories.

For an even more blatant example, check out E.L. Doctorow's novel Ragtime. It's a straight up rewriting of Heinrich von Kleist's 1811 novella Michael Kohlhaas, and Doctorow has publicly stated that Kleist's work was the inspiration for his novel. Except that, well, it's not. The story of Coalhouse Walker in Ragtime is only one of many, is very different in detail from the original plot (Coalhouse Walker is black, for example), and the idea that one could get everything out of Doctorow's novel by reading Kleist's instead is laughable.

And this, unfortunately, gets to the real heart of the problem: if just knowing the plot is enough to know the work, then it probably isn't worth reading. If I can get as much from the Wikipedia summary as I can from reading the actual novel, the author hosed up big time. As interesting as things like the Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index are, and as useful as they are for drawing comparisons between works, they generally aren't a substitute for actually engaging with the text itself.

In my experience, this sort of dismissive criticism is generally an attempt to mollify the poster's own feelings and inadequacies (i.e. "Shakespeare isn't so great, he just wrote other people's stories, therefore I don't have to put in the work or be creative either"). The inability to see that, to use their example, that while the scene where Bowman is trying to remove HAL's processors is similar to the changing of the words on the golem's forehead from "emet" to "met" to kill him, the entire story surrounding this scene is vastly different and had very different things to say about the nature of humanity, is just, frankly, lazy. HAL is not the creation of defensive hubris coming back to attack his creator; he is a new lifeform lashing out at those who think he's dangerous, and, interestingly, displays far vaster ranger of emotions than his pretty robotic human counterparts. (Frankenstein is obviously the better comparison, but I'm guessing that the poster read that Frankenstein was just a rip-off of the golem, too.)

This video is talking about art, but I think it applies to literature as well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67EKAIY43kg

If Hamlet is just an easy play dashed off as a copy of some tribal guy's work, go ahead and write one. Many people have: Infinite Jest, Gertrude and Claudius, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Rosencrantz and Guildernstern are Dead, The Dead Father's Club, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, Nutshell, The Black Prince...

Toph Bei Fong fucked around with this message at 20:33 on Feb 28, 2021

Toph Bei Fong
Feb 29, 2008



Brainworm posted:

...how difficult these moments make it to produce Romeo and Juliet with student and apprentice actors (who are often surprised by them).

Are there any other Shakespeare plays (or famous works in general) where the reputation and/or image in popular culture is so different from the actual text that it gets remarked upon by folks in the field?

Toph Bei Fong
Feb 29, 2008



Silver2195 posted:

Also, people sometimes have odd impressions of Midsummer Night's Dream. Because it's a comedy with fairies in it it gets softened in popular memory; this was probably more true in Victorian times than now, but even in 2011, the dreadful anti-Stratfordian film Anonymous had Oxford writing Midsummer Night's Dream as a fairly young child.

Yeah, that is really egregious, and a great way to tell someone that you've never actually read Midsummer, nor studied the theory very well, since Oxford would have been about 45 when Midsummer was written circa 1595.

The whole play is stuffed full of double entendres, crude jokes, and other things that a kid probably wouldn't understand as well as Shakespeare does.

Like, this bit in Act 5, which only works when you remember that the Wall is an actual character being played by a guy.

quote:

PYRAMUS
O kiss me through the hole of this vile wall!

THISBE
I kiss the wall's hole, not your lips at all.

or in Act 2, where Helena begs to be Demetrius' submissive bitch (and there's all sorts of other things going on in this exchange, depending on how you read it...)

quote:

DEMETRIUS
Do I entice you? Do I speak you fair?
Or rather, do I not in plainest truth
Tell you I do not, nor I cannot, love you?

HELENA
And even for that do I love you the more.
I am your spaniel. And, Demetrius,
The more you beat me, I will fawn on you.
Use me but as your spaniel—spurn me, strike me,
Neglect me, lose me. Only give me leave,
Unworthy as I am, to follow you.
What worser place can I beg in your love—
And yet a place of high respect with me—
Than to be usèd as you use your dog?

DEMETRIUS
Tempt not too much the hatred of my spirit.
For I am sick when I do look on thee.

HELENA
And I am sick when I look not on you.

Toph Bei Fong
Feb 29, 2008



Earwicker posted:

i think it's possible for something like "unintentional satire" to exist in the form of a work trying to promote a particular moral message (like a PSA) that is so badly executed or tone deaf that it becomes enjoyed ironically by large audiences and ends up having the effect of directly undermining the message it was intended to promote, and making a mockery of the original author. anti-piracy and anti-drug commercials of the 80's for example

The various attempts at attempts at rehabilitating Tommy Wiseau's The Room ("It's a parody of indie movies" "It's supposed to be bad" "It's an ironic commentary about the nature of sincerity") are another good example of this

Toph Bei Fong
Feb 29, 2008



Siivola posted:

Thank you!

Can you explain what's funny about Marneus Calgar, Chapter Master of the Ultramarines and Lord of Macragge not having a willy?

It's similar to Fight Club, a satire of hypermasculinity written by a gay man, about a guy who finds modern life so banal and alienating that he attends support meetings for men who literally have no balls and grow breasts just so he can cry ("real women" are scary, but "feminized" men are safe). He responds to his "safe place" being invaded by a "real woman" by having a schizophrenic break and literally beating himself up for the amusement of others outside a bar, and then starting a cult where, to be free, the men live in a parody of austerity and monastic discipline, regularly self-harm (the bit with the lye), and only feel truly alive when beating the poo poo out of one another. Instead of growing up and having a relationship with Marla (something his split personality does easily), the protagonist does anything he can to avoid facing the idea that a manic pixie dream woman might like him and he might enjoy doing the weird poo poo she does. He and project mayhem do a lot of the same stuff she does (scamming, stealing, grifting), but, you know, it's with the boys, so it's okay. It's pretty much the little kid "I'm going to have a big club house and all the cool kids are going to be there and it's going to be like the temple in 36th Chamber of Shaolin and we're going to do epic pranks and there's no icky girls allowed" fantasy, but played "cool" alongside Brad Pitt's self-help rhetoric.

Similarly, rather than embracing some form of positive masculinity (for example, being a good parent, supporting others around you, being dependable and capable), 40k instead says that "Real men are stoic, sexless, steroid enhanced mutants who die needlessly in service of a genocidal tyrant and are then locked into coffin tanks so they can continue to battle fruitlessly against the evil forces of violence, pestilence, lust, and intelligence for all eternity"

In both instances, I can see why people miss the parodic elements. Both "role models" are presented as so cool on the surface that its easy to overlook all the details that make them ridiculous

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Toph Bei Fong
Feb 29, 2008



Earwicker posted:

i think there's kind of a missing element here. Fight Club is a novel written by one person and it's that person's artistic expression, later adapted into a film. Warhammer is a franchise where the novels are part of a whole system of roleplaying games, strategy games, video games, novels, toys, and stores owned by the same company. it's a bit harder to read the latter as intentional satire when it's also part of a system designed to sell all of the above, and in which players literally play roles associated with the world. it's like if Fight Club started a chain of officially sanctioned "Fight Clubs" instead of just being a book/movie.

Absolutely, there is definitely a lack of control and unified vision when it comes to multi-author franchises, especially when there's no firm editorial vision or control.

This is especially a problem when it comes to the second generation of authors in a franchise who, rather than creating the thing based on other works, are basing their work on the thing itself (i.e. George Lucas being influenced by Kurosawa to make Star Wars, while JJ Abrams was influenced by Lucas to make his Star Wars). This can be especially bad in tie-in media, where, for example, while Boba Fett is a complete joke in the Star Wars movies (he looks cool, but all he manages to do on screen is accept a package, and then get shot by a blind Han Solo and fall into the Sarlacc pit, which burps after it eats him), but in the books and new TV show, he's an amazing warrior and the scion of a Proud Warrior Culture and the Most Dangerous Man alive.

As to how to reconcile the "They don't get that this was a joke, but it's making us money, so we won't tell them" aspects of 40k? No clue. I see the parody, but I also see how people miss it, and how it benefits GW to have certain people miss it.

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