jriggenbach

To be literarily respectable, a fiction writer must display unusual skill at both writing and storytelling. The so-called "Big Four" whom Phil believes are "generally considered the four greatest among s-f aficionados" are not particularly good writers. Heinlein at his best is pretty good. Ditto Clarke. And neither of them is at his best very often. Asimov and Niven are mediocre at best. It is, by the way, an extremely dubious claim that these four writers enjoy the stature among "s-f aficionados" that Phil apparently believes they do. Heinlein does. But the others? When Locus, the trade magazine of the science fiction field, polled its readership in 1998 on the best SF novels published before 1990, for example, Heinlein had two titles in the top ten and three titles in the top twenty-five; the other three writers in Phil's "Big Four" managed only one title apiece in the top twenty-five - Asimov's and Clarke's were at least in the top ten, but Niven barely finished in the top twenty-five at all, in a tie for twenty-fifth place. Meanwhile, such writers as Ursula LeGuin and Alfred Bester did far better; each placed one title in the top ten and another farther down in the top twenty-five. Meanwhile, William Gibson, Philip K. Dick, Theodore Sturgeon, Walter M. Miller, Jr., Dan Simmons, and Ray Bradbury all did better than Niven, with one title each in the top twenty-five, all more highly placed therein than Niven's. http://www.locusmag.com/SFAwards/Db/LocusAT1998.html Nor are Phil's "Big Four" anything to write home about when it comes to storytelling skill. Each has his strengths and weaknesses, but on average, they're all mediocre - which is fine if all you're concerned about is selling books and winning the applause of a basically ignorant (literarily ignorant) readership. If, however, you want to be taken seriously by people who know and care about literature as an art, mediocre is not good enough. JR

No difference: in both cases, the belief that tigers are there is an article of religious faith. JR

The late Alexander King had a friend who ended every visit to King’s house by stopping in the doorway, lowering his eyes, folding his hands and saying, “May this house be safe from tigers.” King finally asked him what was the meaning of “this idiot prayer?” His friend responded with a hurt look and a question. “How long have I been saying it?” About three years, King replied. “Three years,” the friend said. “Well — been bothered by any tigers lately?” JR

The dict. says it's a pale, dry Spanish sherry. So I guess sherry is generally--wet? Sherry is generally sweet - sickeningly sweet, to be exact. JR

Precisely. This was my feeling when I read both the Iliad and the Odyssey in college. It was sufficient to cause me to lend considerable weight to theories that the two works were not even in fact by the same author. I don't know who these unnamed, unquoted "critics" are, and I have certainly never received the impression that the conventional wisdom among academics strongly and clearly favors the Iliad. It's true that most literature professors (which appears to be what Phil means by the phrase "the critics") prefer Huckleberry Finn to Tom Sawyer and Shakespeare's tragedies to his comedies. I agree with them. Since no specific Poe stories are named, the last item in this list is impossible to respond to. My own view is that Poe's verse and his critical writing are much more important than any of his fiction - which, with a tiny handful of exceptions, is of primarily historical interest. I long ago concluded that it is. I think you're on to something here. JR

Of course not. He was too busy playing "Gotcha" - a game he bitterly dislikes when anyone else plays it. JR

Subject: self-awareness and self-pity I wonder if someone who is "trying to learn more [about a subject] and interact on the subject" is likely to conduct himself in such a way that his readers (as Brant puts it) "get the impression [he is] demanding some people here conform to a teacher/student paradigm with [him] as the teacher. The teacher talks up a topic and asks for class participation and feedback." Tends to puncture the idea of that individual's being a humble, mistreated seeker after knowledge, acutely aware of his need for greater understanding, and victimized by the malevolence of his readers. JR

It is difficult to escape the suspicion that one is being toyed with. Surely such a question cannot be asked in good faith by anyone born earlier than a few days ago? Nevertheless, I shall answer the question just as though it had been asked in good faith. (1) There is a phrase, "politically correct." It is, like such equally mysterious and ambiguous phrases as "fried chicken" and "abject stupidity," widely in use. To say that some idea or other is "politically correct" is to say that it is regarded as indisputably, unquestionably true by the members of some particular group or subculture - a group or subculture which is known for its stern intolerance of any deviation from the ideas and ideals its members regard as indisputably, unquestionably true. (2) The phrase "politically incorrect," unsurprisingly, refers to persons who dispute or question what members of the "politically correct" group regard as indisputable and unquestionable. It refers also to the ideas promoted by these disputers and questioners. Some writers and speakers, eager to let it be known that they don't give a shit what members of the "politically correct" group think, proudly apply the label "politically incorrect" to themselves. (3) Certain of these proudly "politically incorrect" types tend to take enormous pride in holding the exact opposite of whatever view(s) the members of the "politically correct" group hold on any subject. In this way, they unwittingly create a new strain of "political correctness" which characterizes their own group. (4) Now, to the context at hand. I'm writing on a discussion forum run by Objectivists for the use of Objectivists. Objectivists make up a subculture which is extremely intolerant of any deviation from the ideas and ideals its members regard as indisputably, unquestionably true. Among Objectivists (with a handful of exceptions) the ideas of Kant and Hume are "philosophically incorrect." Have you got the hang of it yet? Or do I need to be even more explicit? JR

Phil, I get the impression you are demanding some people here conform to a teacher/student paradigm with you as the teacher. The teacher talks up a topic and asks for class participation and feedback. This is somewhat off-putting. As for me I really couldn't give you much if any feedback because when the time was ripe my Mother broke her arm and I suddenly had no time. Six hours in the ER plus the extra attention she requires does that sort of thing. Regardless, you would have considerably helped your case if you had stated the price you expected to collect from the get go. Phil wants feedback would have stuck in my mind. I had merely indicated my desire to read it. I didn't tell you why I wanted to read it or that I would then have a conversation with you over the various content. Speaking more broadly and importantly, you seem to be constantly setting yourself up for victim-hood because people don't behave to your expectations. You never ask yourself if just maybe, Willy aside, your understanding of Objectivism for instance is some decades old, obsolete and stale. Orthodox Objectivism is just a way of keeping Leonard Peikoff in business. You, in a sense, are trying to compete with him, but that whole thing is a dead end. What really needs to be talked about is the Objectivist ethics versus human ethics generally as the latter now exist addressing the insufficiencies of both. --Brant People who know a little, but not a great deal, about a given subject often wish strongly to be acknowledged as more expert, more knowledgeable, in that subject area than they actually are. JR

What exactly is meant by "Philosophically Incorrect"? If I could figure out what's ambiguous or mysterious about it, I could possibly help you. But I don't know what you need to have explained. The meaning seems obvious to me. JR

It's not Hairspray; it's Shampoo. JR

LOL - too funny, your comparison about finding free Shakespeare back then 'about as appealing as free broccoli'. Broccoli is my favorite vegetable. JR

"This post has been edited by Philip Coates." You could have fooled me. JR

She isn't very widely appreciated. You might try reading Jane Austen first. She has a good many more fans and is probably therefore more accessible and more easily appreciated. Helpfully, JR

Yes - the difference between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. JR

So there were hundreds of thousands instead of tens of thousands of hypocritical Republicans who thought Big Government was fine when George W. Bush was running it but are now outraged because Barack Obama is running it? BFD. JR

My wife (hereinafter "Suzanne") grew up in Central Florida - Titusville, just across the Indian River from Cape Canaveral. Her father worked for the space program. So did she, some years later, in the 1970s. Suzanne's high school also drew widely and seems to have been pretty advanced in scientific and technological subject areas. I suspect its proximity to NASA may have tempted it to stress science, math, and technology and downplay the humanities. Marston? Tourneur? Jeffrey, we are getting into seriously obscure names here. We risk seeing our readers' eyes glaze over and watching them fall over onto their sides. But surely you didn't mean to omit Ben Jonson? Or Beaumont & Fletcher? JR

One other brief note on my early Shakespeare experience. During my college years (1964-1971), a number of more-or-less celebrated Shakespearean films were released, perhaps most notably the 1967 production of The Taming of the Shrew starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo & Juliet (1968), and Roman Polanski's Macbeth (1971). Then, when I reached Los Angeles (the major difference between me and Phil is that he went to the Big Apple after college, while I went to the Big Orange), I too had access to free Shakespeare in the park. I'm not sure if it was the summer of 1972 or the summer of 1973 when I saw Patrecia Branden as Lady Macbeth in a free production of Macbeth staged in MacArthur Park. JR

For what little it may be worth, I find this of interest. JR

We all seem to have started some sort of study of Shakespeare in our freshman year of public high school - 9th grade. I wonder if we're all of similar age. I know Phil and I are no more than about a year and a half apart. I'm 62 - turning 63 in January. I bring this age issue up, because my wife is nine years younger than I, and she never had to read or witness a single Shakespearean play in four years of public high school in Florida. Nor did she ever have to read any of the miscellaneous poetry - the sonnets, for example. In 9th grade in Texas (greater Houston), we read Julius Caesar, then watched a screening of the 1953 film version of the play, with John Gielgud as Cassius, James Mason as Brutus, and Marlon Brando as Mark Antony. In 10th grade, after reading Hamlet and discussing Freud's reactions to it, we went as a class to see a local production of the play by the Alley Theatre, a professional repertory company. Oddly, I remember very little about that production of Hamlet - what I remember most vividly is talking about George Orwell with my English teacher's husband in the car on the way to the theatre. He was the first person I'd ever met who had actually read Orwell and knew something about him. I was just reading Nineteen Eighty-four at that time and had been swept away by it. Nevertheless, by the time I got to college three years later, I knew that I wanted to undertake more in-depth study of Shakespeare. Shakespeare's language had never posed that much of a problem for me. He wrote in Early Modern English; his language is not all that different from the language we use today, except for a handful of easily learned archaic words. A bigger problem is the poetic license he takes with word order and syntax in order to sustain his commitment to iambic pentameter. (As an aside, I've learned to my sorrow that even people my age, who did have some exposure to Shakespeare in high school, were apparently not taught by even minimally competent teachers and often don't know such basic items of information as that the plays are written, by and large, in blank verse. A very erudite friend of mine once referred in a manuscript to reading Shakespeare as "plowing through Elizabethan prose." Had I not pointed out his error pre-publication, he would probably have gone into print with that howler and publicly embarrassed himself.) But I liked poetry quite a lot in those days and I took this poetic license hurdle in stride as well. After all, if you want to learn to read any of the more important British poets and versifiers of the centuries since Shakespeare, including especially Milton and Browning, you have to be able to deal with such poetic license. And the majesty Shakespeare achieved in his use of language at times - in Macbeth's soliloquy beginning "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow," for example - was so stunning, so absolutely astonishingly brilliant, that I could hardly avoid further exposure to his works if I considered myself serious about wanting to be a writer and literary critic. So I took a two-semester course called Shakespeare, in which we read the complete works. One last bit relating to Shakespeare. The novel Nothing Like the Sun by the 20th Century English writer Anthony Burgess (one of the few English writers of the 20th Century who had a mastery of language even remotely approaching Shakespeare's own) is an amazing portrayal of the circumstances of Shakespeare's life and the reality of English life in the late 16th and early 17th Centuries, as well as a fascinating speculation as to the sources of "the Dark Lady" and "Mr. W.H." in the sonnets. JR

Thanks for the kind words about the recording. I have wondered for years whether any were ever sold, whether anyone ever actually listened to it. At the time I was making the recording, I wondered whether there would be any market for such a product. JR

Is Ekaterina about sex? Because Lolita is not about sex. There isn't a single sex scene in it. Lolita is about attempting to recapture the past. JR

Having read a few of Ann Coulter's articles, I have spared myself her books. Having listened to Limbaugh's entire show a few times and having read quoted passages from his radio gruntings in newspapers and on the Internet, I've spared myself the experience of listening to him for at least five days in a row. Why would I want to do that, anyway? I'm not a masochist. JR Jeff: It would depend on where your interests lie as to why you should read one of her books. I do not read her columns unless a rare one catches my eye. It would be the difference between reading one of Tom Paine's polemical and inflammatory pamphlets and reading his well reasoned Common Sense. Or, reading a short Objectivist Newsletter piece written by Ayn and reading Anthem. What extorted service do you perform to put bread on your table? Adam At the risk of belaboring the obvious, "Common Sense" is "one of Tom Paine's polemical and inflammatory pamphlets." One does not read an article and pretend that it is a substitute for reading a novel or other work of fiction. (Well, maybe Phil Coates does, but that's another thread.) So far as I know, none of the rightwing hacks we're talking about write fiction. I write (mostly books). I do freelance editorial work (though less of it as I get older; progressively, it bores me). I produce and narrate audiobooks and other kinds of mostly "straight voice" educational audio projects. Sometimes I teach (though I haven't done any of that in ten years now, and am beginning to wonder whether I'll ever return to it). JR

Having read a few of Ann Coulter's articles, I have spared myself her books. Having listened to Limbaugh's entire show a few times and having read quoted passages from his radio gruntings in newspapers and on the Internet, I've spared myself the experience of listening to him for at least five days in a row. Why would I want to do that, anyway? I'm not a masochist. JR

Oh? So you think all the fools who have been voting for Republicans all these years, under the impression that the GOP's empty rhetoric actually indicated support for a free market, will live to regret their stupidity? I certainly hope so. JR