BF2S Forums BF3s Book Club

I've commented before on the relevance of self-appointed elites.
LOL to them.

I hereby appoint myself the leading international arbiter on the quality of women's buttcheeks.
Only my opinion is valid, I shall only review the rightness of my views with people who agree with me already, namely FEOS.

I demand government funding to continue my research, in return I will be prepared to supervise some PhDs and swan around plush campuses drinking coffee and partying with hot undergraduates.

Last edited by Dilbert_X (2011-02-24 14:45:52)

Uzique wrote:

FEOS wrote:

Uzique wrote:

tl;dr

my debts are my own

literature and art has to have a good and a bad, and a necessary elite that preserve and judge those opinions

art doesn't progress without distinction

read a real fucking book and stop spending your life crying for 5 paragraphs about why you read toilet fiction

For you to think I'm crying about what I read shows that high-falutin' education mommy and daddy are paying for in "lit'rahtoor" isn't working out so well for you, Uzique. Your reading comprehension skillz ain't as tight as you thought, yo.

enjoy glen's challenging and intricate prose. retard.

Pretty sure I never described it as either of those things.

And fuck your use of the word retard.

i never said sci-fi was junk because of the prose style... where are you getting that from? i said 99% of it is trash... because it is. and a lot of that comes down to the cliche and the recycling of the very ideas, analysis and argument. sci-fi has been doing the same shit for a long time and the genre is stagnant. i never once mentioned prose style in sci-fi.

and feos you did mention how beck's book was well written and engaging. that's why i called you out in the first place. that's why i denounced the style after only 10 pages of reading-- because it wasn't the idea i was trying to grasp (because of course you can't in the first 10 pages), it was the STYLE and writing. hence why i did feel entitled to pass at least a first-impression of an opinion after 10 pages. because as i said, unless it's a post-modern masterpiece, the chances are the prose style isn't going to change much after the 10 pages.

yeah... i wasn't trying to say anything groundbreaking. it was a throwaway comment... incidental as it came up in the casual convo.

you're not telling me anything i don't know.

Uzique wrote:

i never said sci-fi was junk because of the prose style... where are you getting that from? i said 99% of it is trash... because it is. and a lot of that comes down to the cliche and the recycling of the very ideas, analysis and argument. sci-fi has been doing the same shit for a long time and the genre is stagnant. i never once mentioned prose style in sci-fi.

[Also,] most people read sci-fi/fantasy for simple escapism rather than to immerse themselves in intricately-woven prose. I wouldn't call 99% of them complete trash, but you could probably only ascribe higher meaning to <1%.

Uzique wrote:

and feos you did mention how beck's book was well written and engaging. that's why i called you out in the first place. that's why i denounced the style after only 10 pages of reading-- because it wasn't the idea i was trying to grasp (because of course you can't in the first 10 pages), it was the STYLE and writing. hence why i did feel entitled to pass at least a first-impression of an opinion after 10 pages. because as i said, unless it's a post-modern masterpiece, the chances are the prose style isn't going to change much after the 10 pages.

You REALLY need to work on your reading comprehension. Go back and re-read my OP on the fucking book, Uzique.

Enjoy crow.

Uzique, this man is a professional.





A professional.

if i'm going for mass-available paperbacks then i'll go for a routledge or a faber & faber





really nice printing. penguin modern classics are another standard go-to series that are decent throughout... not counting the critical intros.

rofl you're being more than a little conveniently reductionist.

you spoke positively about the 'message', hence the book is implicitly engaging. you spoke positively about the descriptive language, hence the implicitly complimentary style comments. this really isn't complicated. i can criticise someone's prose style after the first 10 pages. where are you getting confused, exactly?

Last edited by Uzique (2011-02-28 05:45:29)

Uzique wrote:

i never said sci-fi was junk because of the prose style... where are you getting that from? i said 99% of it is trash... because it is. and a lot of that comes down to the cliche and the recycling of the very ideas, analysis and argument. sci-fi has been doing the same shit for a long time and the genre is stagnant. i never once mentioned prose style in sci-fi.

are you guys having trouble identifying what literary 'style' is? it's the method of communication and the conduit of the real material. i have never attacked the 'style' of sci-fi. how has this caught out two supposedly intelligent posters in quick succession? my posts are hardly ambiguously worded on the matter.

no professors aren't still exclusively wetting themselves over the wonders of dickens and hardy

and professors that do specialize in historical periods don't do so for any notion of 'progressivism', no.

honestly are you guys constantly hellbent on this sado-masochistic drive to humiliate yourselves by talking utter bollocks about stuff you know nothing about? how many times do i have to make the analogy to me stubbornly arguing a point about engineering in a thread about bridges? i don't know shit about it so i'm not going to get all arrogant and try and make a real 'point', as if i'm capable.

and it's nice that you mention 'making money out of it'... that's fine. sci-fi being trash and stagnant as a genre of artistic expression has little to do with the commercial market 'value' of the genre. im sure that sci-fi and fantasy are still making tons of cash for avid sci-fi and fantasy geeks the world over... that's fine. all i'm saying is that the genre isn't progressing much since, say, J.G. Ballard (who even then engaged with the genre as a dead and rather uninspired set of fiction).

next

why are you drawing a distinction between sci-fi and literature? sci-fi IS literature. literature is EVERYTHING. all genres; all types. sci-fi is just an example of a genre that hasn't done anything new in a while-- that's not to say it's doomed forever... just that it's in a rut. this is nothing new: creativity and culture comes in waves. detective fiction didn't really progress much for a while after sherlock holmes. the victorian social novel struggled to make a real fresh point after dickens/thackeray. the modernist experimental mode really had nothing new to say after james joyce stuffed it all into ulysses/finnegan's wake.

i'm not saying anything elitist or snobby about sci-fi, here. you just don't get it and you're using it as an excuse to spout some of the same-old tiring 'art is snobby!' bullshit. yawn.