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Hey there.
I should be doing More Important Things now, but I've been absent from LJ for so long, and it feels so good to be back that I will indulge myself for a moment (as I so often do) and post some shallow random thoughts.
*Random thought no. 1: what's so bad about arcane vocabulary?*
I just read a reader's review on amazon.com about 'The Shadow of the Torturer', the first volume of Gene Wolfe's 'Book of the New Sun', that accuses the author of indulging himself too much by using arcane and obscure vocabulary. Well, it is undeniable that that book contains the greatest agglomeration of archaic, unusual or downright fantastic vocabulary I've ever seen, and I freely admit that there are sentences that leave me completely baffled. (This sentence from the seventh chapter says it all, really: “He mispronounced quite common words: urticate, salpinx, bordereau.”) Still, I do not see what the above quoted reader's problem is. I don't need to understand every word of a given text to get the gist of it. In fact, *not* understanding certain words (but tasting them, testing them on your tongue) can contribute just as much to your *subconscious* understanding of a story. (I'm sure Tolkien would agree...) It is not really important to know what exactly armigers, matrosses or a barbican are. It is not essential to the narrative. The sound of those words, though, is. They suggest certain periods, certain cultures, a depth of time... they are as crucial to the atmosphere of the book as Wolfe's descriptions of decaying Nessus are.
I've heard readers complain about unusual vocabulary before, claiming that it made a book or story difficult to read, or to understand. And I just don't get it. What is their problem? Haven't they learned to accept that it is impossible to understand everything, anyway? I think this kind of intolerance to the unknown is a dangerous attitude, because it inhibits learning. If you always stay within the safe confines of that which you know, you'll never learn anything new. I don't understand how these people even learned how to read. When I think back on my first years of reading, I remember not understanding a *lot*. And yet it never kept me from keeping on reading. I just filled in the blanks, and sometimes I was right, and sometimes I was wrong. It didn't matter. It didn't take anything away from the experience of reading. In fact, filling in the blanks was part of the fun. A text always remained part mystery, and I *liked* that.
Then, years later, when I started reading English books, it was the same again. Lots and lots of blanks to fill in, in the first few years, until my knowledge of the language grew extensive enough not to leave that many blanks anymore. And nowadays, when I read a book like 'The Shadow of the Torturer', at least half of whose strange vocabulary, I'd be willing to bet, is probably invented anyway, I just do the same: I fill in the blanks, extrapolate from what I understand, and when that doesn't work, I simply ignore.
I didn't realise that not everybody is able to do that. Maybe it is school that spoils reading for those people – maybe it impresses on them, at an early age, that you always need to understand everything or you will be found out. Maybe they learn to think of reading a new text as a test because in school, it often *is* treated as a test.
So, to defend Gene Wolfe, I don't think he's indulging himself at all. (Yet if he were, would that be such a great sin? The same reviewer also accused Wolfe of having written the book for himself instead of for the readers. I say: good on him! I don't want authors to write what they think I would like to read, I want them to write what they feel they have to write, what comes from deep inside, and what they feel fulfills their own standards for a good story, a good novel. Because that is the only reliable standard there is when you're writing: your own. The same is true for all arts, I suppose. You have to believe in what you're doing. You have to do what you believe in.) So, to conclude, he's not indulging himself, he's not just showing off his huge vocabulary and his impressive command of the English language, but he is trying to create an impression of antiquity; of cultural relics from the ancient past preserved in the language of a latter day. And for me, he succeeds marvellously at that.
Stephen R. Donaldson, on the other hand, tries for a similar effect sometimes, but fails. (I still love the books, Dashan, don't worry! They're high, high up in my top ten list for fantasy!) Why is that? I think because he has a less perfect grasp of the language. Firstly, he has some favourite 'strange words' that he uses all over the place, until it's becoming almost ridiculous, and secondly, it seems to me that at least some of the more obscure words he uses may be used in a slightly wrong context.
*Random thought no. 2: I'm a shallow reader who doesn't like shallow books.*
I don't really think much about what I read. Ha, ha. No, really. Despite the evidence above, I don't usually think a lot about the books I read. I mean, I do think about them, but I don't try to interpret or analyse them. Same for television or movies that I enjoy, really. I just lean back and enjoy the ride, most of the time. Which makes me a very uninteresting LJ writer, from a fannish perspective, I guess. Fandom, at least in the LJ community, is to a large degree interpreting and analysing the material you love. Well, I'm afraid I have neither the time nor the mind for that. I just... enjoy. I read and watch and judge by gut feeling, not by intellect.
So why the frell don't I read Stephen King instead of Gene Wolfe? Why do I always fall in love with books like Samuel Delany's 'Dhalgren', as cryptic and dense as 'Ulysses' (some would call it pretentious, I guess)?
I can't really explain it. Maybe it has to do something with a depth that, even if I do not try to plumb it, I still like to feel is there. Or maybe it is just that writers like Wolfe or Delany feel less obliged to conform to any, let alone the *lowest* common denominator, in *any* respect.
Or maybe it is because what I'm really looking for in the books I love is a *trip* (yeah, I use books like other people use drugs, you read that right), and for a trip to be really effective it needs to translate you to a *different* state of mind, and that is best done by slightly weird prose, and a weird, maybe even almost impenetrable narrative. Incidentally, the trip thing also explains why I don't really try to analyse the books I love. Who would analyse a trip?
Cases against: I also love quite a few more conventional books. Tolkien, Gaiman... Donaldson... just to mention a very few. Tolkien's virtue is his gift for dense description. Gaiman's his sense of a mythical reality. Donaldson's also a gift for description, coupled with Covenants stubborn disbelief that colours the reader's experience of the Land. These books are slightly less 'trippy', but still manage to capture me completely.
On the other hand, a writer to whom Neil Gaiman is being aggressively compared by his own publishers ('as good as Stephen King, or your money back!'), does nothing for me, and I *think* that has to do both with a quality of his, i.e. King's, style, as well as – possibly – his plots. To be fair, I have never managed to read a whole book by Stephen King, so maybe I am judging his plots unfairly. So, let's look at the style first. Well, actually, I find it difficult to put a finger on why I have a problem with it. I have read parts of 'The Talisman', and I have recently spent several hours browsing 'The Stand'. In both, I immediately found elements that annoyed me and that, in many cases, struck me as typical of a certain kind of writing that I have been fairly allergic to from my earliest forays into the realm of thick-spined popular page-turners. I guess what I'm talking about here is *cliché*, quite simply, coupled with a sometimes awkward, too obvious style. But then, I'm not altogether sure that that is *all* that I'm talking about. All I know is that I was annoyed in a similar way by Ken Follett and Marion Zimmer Bradley.
Hmm. Maybe I need to read a whole book by King to find out what it actually is that I object to.
As for plots... well, as I said, I browsed 'The Stand', got the gist of the plot pretty quickly, and found it pretty... unsurprising. But I reserve ultimate judgement on that until I've really read a book by King.
*Random thought no. 3: does anybody really understand Marshall McLuhan?*
Hehe. That is a rhetorical question. And it does not only apply to McLuhan, really. It applies equally to hundreds of other theorists and philosophers. It's just that I'm currently reading 'Understanding Media' (partly for uni, partly on my own motivation – have been owning the book for two years and waiting for a reason to read it), and while I get some of the main ideas, he often loses me completely on the examples. And, in fact, on whole chapters and ideas, as well. And it reminds me of my design training, back at the Zeichenakademie. Teacher talking about sleeping squares and active triangles. Because half of the time I was under the impression that no one but our teacher himself really had any idea what he was talking about, and when I asked around in class, most of the others had no idea. But then, there were one or two students, always, who would *understand*. It was as if the teacher and they were speaking another language from the rest of us that, somehow, just happened to sound like German. I would understand every word and yet not be able to make sense of it. They were *living* in a whole different framework of meaning than I did.
It also reminds me of a prof at Frankfurt uni whose thoughts are just about totally unintelligible to anyone but himself and one or two postgrads.
These people – McLuhan, my design teacher, the prof and their few miraculously comprehending disciples – always make me wonder if I am really so much more stupid than those select few who *understand*, or if there is just a fundamental difference between how we think.
*Random thought no.4: Terry Nation rules. 1970s special effects... not so much.*
Watched the rest of my Doctor Who episodes yesterday (I don't actually know how many I had, all in all, as several of them seemed to be compounded into feature-length arcs), and wasn't surprised when, after the words 'Written by Terry Nation' came up on the screen, I saw the best arc of the show that I have seen so far. The episode arc in question was 'Genesis of the Daleks', judging from its total length of 2 h 10 min. a four-parter, and it did quite a bit towards endearing the show to me. I'd rather like to see more of that particular thread of the story... and I know that there is more. Maybe I will have to contact my source...
I should be doing More Important Things now, but I've been absent from LJ for so long, and it feels so good to be back that I will indulge myself for a moment (as I so often do) and post some shallow random thoughts.
*Random thought no. 1: what's so bad about arcane vocabulary?*
I just read a reader's review on amazon.com about 'The Shadow of the Torturer', the first volume of Gene Wolfe's 'Book of the New Sun', that accuses the author of indulging himself too much by using arcane and obscure vocabulary. Well, it is undeniable that that book contains the greatest agglomeration of archaic, unusual or downright fantastic vocabulary I've ever seen, and I freely admit that there are sentences that leave me completely baffled. (This sentence from the seventh chapter says it all, really: “He mispronounced quite common words: urticate, salpinx, bordereau.”) Still, I do not see what the above quoted reader's problem is. I don't need to understand every word of a given text to get the gist of it. In fact, *not* understanding certain words (but tasting them, testing them on your tongue) can contribute just as much to your *subconscious* understanding of a story. (I'm sure Tolkien would agree...) It is not really important to know what exactly armigers, matrosses or a barbican are. It is not essential to the narrative. The sound of those words, though, is. They suggest certain periods, certain cultures, a depth of time... they are as crucial to the atmosphere of the book as Wolfe's descriptions of decaying Nessus are.
I've heard readers complain about unusual vocabulary before, claiming that it made a book or story difficult to read, or to understand. And I just don't get it. What is their problem? Haven't they learned to accept that it is impossible to understand everything, anyway? I think this kind of intolerance to the unknown is a dangerous attitude, because it inhibits learning. If you always stay within the safe confines of that which you know, you'll never learn anything new. I don't understand how these people even learned how to read. When I think back on my first years of reading, I remember not understanding a *lot*. And yet it never kept me from keeping on reading. I just filled in the blanks, and sometimes I was right, and sometimes I was wrong. It didn't matter. It didn't take anything away from the experience of reading. In fact, filling in the blanks was part of the fun. A text always remained part mystery, and I *liked* that.
Then, years later, when I started reading English books, it was the same again. Lots and lots of blanks to fill in, in the first few years, until my knowledge of the language grew extensive enough not to leave that many blanks anymore. And nowadays, when I read a book like 'The Shadow of the Torturer', at least half of whose strange vocabulary, I'd be willing to bet, is probably invented anyway, I just do the same: I fill in the blanks, extrapolate from what I understand, and when that doesn't work, I simply ignore.
I didn't realise that not everybody is able to do that. Maybe it is school that spoils reading for those people – maybe it impresses on them, at an early age, that you always need to understand everything or you will be found out. Maybe they learn to think of reading a new text as a test because in school, it often *is* treated as a test.
So, to defend Gene Wolfe, I don't think he's indulging himself at all. (Yet if he were, would that be such a great sin? The same reviewer also accused Wolfe of having written the book for himself instead of for the readers. I say: good on him! I don't want authors to write what they think I would like to read, I want them to write what they feel they have to write, what comes from deep inside, and what they feel fulfills their own standards for a good story, a good novel. Because that is the only reliable standard there is when you're writing: your own. The same is true for all arts, I suppose. You have to believe in what you're doing. You have to do what you believe in.) So, to conclude, he's not indulging himself, he's not just showing off his huge vocabulary and his impressive command of the English language, but he is trying to create an impression of antiquity; of cultural relics from the ancient past preserved in the language of a latter day. And for me, he succeeds marvellously at that.
Stephen R. Donaldson, on the other hand, tries for a similar effect sometimes, but fails. (I still love the books, Dashan, don't worry! They're high, high up in my top ten list for fantasy!) Why is that? I think because he has a less perfect grasp of the language. Firstly, he has some favourite 'strange words' that he uses all over the place, until it's becoming almost ridiculous, and secondly, it seems to me that at least some of the more obscure words he uses may be used in a slightly wrong context.
*Random thought no. 2: I'm a shallow reader who doesn't like shallow books.*
I don't really think much about what I read. Ha, ha. No, really. Despite the evidence above, I don't usually think a lot about the books I read. I mean, I do think about them, but I don't try to interpret or analyse them. Same for television or movies that I enjoy, really. I just lean back and enjoy the ride, most of the time. Which makes me a very uninteresting LJ writer, from a fannish perspective, I guess. Fandom, at least in the LJ community, is to a large degree interpreting and analysing the material you love. Well, I'm afraid I have neither the time nor the mind for that. I just... enjoy. I read and watch and judge by gut feeling, not by intellect.
So why the frell don't I read Stephen King instead of Gene Wolfe? Why do I always fall in love with books like Samuel Delany's 'Dhalgren', as cryptic and dense as 'Ulysses' (some would call it pretentious, I guess)?
I can't really explain it. Maybe it has to do something with a depth that, even if I do not try to plumb it, I still like to feel is there. Or maybe it is just that writers like Wolfe or Delany feel less obliged to conform to any, let alone the *lowest* common denominator, in *any* respect.
Or maybe it is because what I'm really looking for in the books I love is a *trip* (yeah, I use books like other people use drugs, you read that right), and for a trip to be really effective it needs to translate you to a *different* state of mind, and that is best done by slightly weird prose, and a weird, maybe even almost impenetrable narrative. Incidentally, the trip thing also explains why I don't really try to analyse the books I love. Who would analyse a trip?
Cases against: I also love quite a few more conventional books. Tolkien, Gaiman... Donaldson... just to mention a very few. Tolkien's virtue is his gift for dense description. Gaiman's his sense of a mythical reality. Donaldson's also a gift for description, coupled with Covenants stubborn disbelief that colours the reader's experience of the Land. These books are slightly less 'trippy', but still manage to capture me completely.
On the other hand, a writer to whom Neil Gaiman is being aggressively compared by his own publishers ('as good as Stephen King, or your money back!'), does nothing for me, and I *think* that has to do both with a quality of his, i.e. King's, style, as well as – possibly – his plots. To be fair, I have never managed to read a whole book by Stephen King, so maybe I am judging his plots unfairly. So, let's look at the style first. Well, actually, I find it difficult to put a finger on why I have a problem with it. I have read parts of 'The Talisman', and I have recently spent several hours browsing 'The Stand'. In both, I immediately found elements that annoyed me and that, in many cases, struck me as typical of a certain kind of writing that I have been fairly allergic to from my earliest forays into the realm of thick-spined popular page-turners. I guess what I'm talking about here is *cliché*, quite simply, coupled with a sometimes awkward, too obvious style. But then, I'm not altogether sure that that is *all* that I'm talking about. All I know is that I was annoyed in a similar way by Ken Follett and Marion Zimmer Bradley.
Hmm. Maybe I need to read a whole book by King to find out what it actually is that I object to.
As for plots... well, as I said, I browsed 'The Stand', got the gist of the plot pretty quickly, and found it pretty... unsurprising. But I reserve ultimate judgement on that until I've really read a book by King.
*Random thought no. 3: does anybody really understand Marshall McLuhan?*
Hehe. That is a rhetorical question. And it does not only apply to McLuhan, really. It applies equally to hundreds of other theorists and philosophers. It's just that I'm currently reading 'Understanding Media' (partly for uni, partly on my own motivation – have been owning the book for two years and waiting for a reason to read it), and while I get some of the main ideas, he often loses me completely on the examples. And, in fact, on whole chapters and ideas, as well. And it reminds me of my design training, back at the Zeichenakademie. Teacher talking about sleeping squares and active triangles. Because half of the time I was under the impression that no one but our teacher himself really had any idea what he was talking about, and when I asked around in class, most of the others had no idea. But then, there were one or two students, always, who would *understand*. It was as if the teacher and they were speaking another language from the rest of us that, somehow, just happened to sound like German. I would understand every word and yet not be able to make sense of it. They were *living* in a whole different framework of meaning than I did.
It also reminds me of a prof at Frankfurt uni whose thoughts are just about totally unintelligible to anyone but himself and one or two postgrads.
These people – McLuhan, my design teacher, the prof and their few miraculously comprehending disciples – always make me wonder if I am really so much more stupid than those select few who *understand*, or if there is just a fundamental difference between how we think.
*Random thought no.4: Terry Nation rules. 1970s special effects... not so much.*
Watched the rest of my Doctor Who episodes yesterday (I don't actually know how many I had, all in all, as several of them seemed to be compounded into feature-length arcs), and wasn't surprised when, after the words 'Written by Terry Nation' came up on the screen, I saw the best arc of the show that I have seen so far. The episode arc in question was 'Genesis of the Daleks', judging from its total length of 2 h 10 min. a four-parter, and it did quite a bit towards endearing the show to me. I'd rather like to see more of that particular thread of the story... and I know that there is more. Maybe I will have to contact my source...
