There also was a "Most Under Rated Author" thread, but that didn't have as much staying power as this one. I guess it is the power of negativity.Quote:
Originally Posted by mia wallace
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There also was a "Most Under Rated Author" thread, but that didn't have as much staying power as this one. I guess it is the power of negativity.Quote:
Originally Posted by mia wallace
And enormous presumption.Quote:
Originally Posted by PeterL
So, whom should we trash next?
There's nothing wrong with well directed negativity! Good God - there can hardly be progress if we just all nod our heads and agree can there?Quote:
Originally Posted by PeterL
Thesis+Antithesis = Synthesis
Those who would inhibit intellectual progress, namely the 'dogmatic', would inhibit negativity, under the guise (or illussion) that it is 'destructive' or 'bad'. It is exactly the opposite; it is necessary in order to make intellectual progress.
We could trash anyone.Quote:
Originally Posted by The Unnamable
How about James Joyce. He had so poor a command of the English language that he had to make up words, play with sound, and be obscure. By some definitions "Finnegans Wake" isn't literature, because it is so difficult to understand. "Ulysses" is scarcely better. Obviously "Ulysses was written for only the upper crust of academic types. Plebes could never hope to appreciate it.
Or maybe we could trash Nabokov. Not only was he into pedophilia, but he was egomanical about it. He should have kept to learned papers about butterflies.
Hemingway is also an easy target, too easy. Simple sentences are for simple thoughts, so, clearly, Hemmingway had mostly simple thoughts, either that or he was targetting an audience that couldn't comprehend complicated thoughts.
Satre is another easy target. He was an egomaniac, and he admitted it. Who else would care what he wrote?
Faulkner would be easy also, but I haven't read enough of his works to make any truly broad slams.
Thesis+Antithesis = the Thesis being thrown out, disproven.Quote:
Originally Posted by Bandini
"Those who would inhibit intellectual progress, namely the 'dogmatic'," usually show a great deal of negativity toward ideas that they don't like. Disagreement is a wonderful thing, when it is expressed well and without ad hominems. Criticizing something in a way that is not a personal attack is rather difficult. Most people consider attacks on their basic beliefs to be personal attacks, regardless of how diplomatically the criticism is expressed.
PeterL,
You do realise that I was agreeing with you that this is a rather mean spirited thread (insofar as we take it seriously, which I don’t really think we are supposed to)? All the writers you mention are great and I hope you don’t think that I actually wanted people to name more authors we could trash.
Yes, I realized that, and I was joking, or trying to, that's why I mentioned only great writers. If someone wants to trash an author, any excuse will do.Quote:
Originally Posted by The Unnamable
If you doubt Twain's position among the greats of literature, read "The Mysterious Stranger." Not many people know it, but it's amazing and in my opinion far better than Huck Finn. The story takes place in Austria in 1590 when a group of young boys meet an angel who performs miracles. When they ask him what his name is, he casually responds that it's Satan, but not that Satan. He's his nephew, and cannot sin because he is an angel and doesn't know how to. However, pretty soon it starts becoming apparent that there's something sinister about Satan. Here's a great excerpt:
Quote:
"That is human life. A child's first act knocks over the initial brick, and the rest will follow inexorably. If you could see into the future, as I can, you would see everything that was going to happen to that creature; for nothing can change the order of its life after the first event has determined it. That is, nothing will change it, because each act unfailingly begets an act, that act begets another, and so on to the end, and the seer can look forward down the line and see just when each act is to have birth, from cradle to grave."
"Does God order the career?"
"Foreordain it? No. The man's circumstances and environment order it. His first act determines the second and all that follow after. But suppose, for argument's sake, that the man should skip one of these acts; an apparently trifling one, for instance; suppose that it had been appointed that on a certain day, at a certain hour and minute and second and fraction of a second he should go to the well, and he didn't go. That man's career would change utterly, from that moment; thence to the grave it would be wholly different from the career which his first act as a child had arranged for him. Indeed, it might be that if he had gone to the well he would have ended his career on a throne, and that omitting to do it would set him upon a career that would lead to beggary and a pauper's grave. For instance: if at any time - say in boyhood - Columbus had skipped the triflingest little link in the chain of acts projected and made inevitable by his first childish act, it would have changed his whole subsequent life, and he would have become a priest and died obscure in an Italian village, and America would not have been discovered for two centuries afterward. I know this. To skip any one of the billion acts in Columbus's chain would have wholly changed his life. I have examined his billion of possible careers, and in only one of them occurs the discovery of America. You people do not suspect that all of your acts are of one size and importance, but it is true; to snatch at an appointed fly is as big with fate for you as is any other appointed act - "
"As the conquering of a continent, for instance?"
"Yes. Now, then, no man ever does drop a link - the thing has never happened! Even when he is trying to make up his mind as to whether he will do a thing or not, that itself is a link, an act, and has its proper place in his chain; and when he finally decides an act, that also was the thing which he was absolutely certain to do. You see, now, that a man will never drop a link in his chain. He cannot. If he made up his mind to try, that project would itself be an unavoidable link a thought bound to occur to him at that precise moment, and made certain by the first act of his babyhood."
It seemed so dismal!
"He is a prisoner for life." I said sorrowfully, "and cannot get free."
"No, of himself he cannot get away from the consequences of his first childish act. But I can free him."
I looked up wistfully.
"I have changed the careers of a number of your villagers."
I tried to thank him, but found it difficult, and let it drop.
"I shall make some other changes. You know that little Lisa Brandt?!
"Oh yes, everybody does. My mother says she is so sweet and so lovely that she is not like any other child. She says she will be the pride of the village when she grows up; and its idol, too, just as she is now."
"I shall change her future."
"Make it better?" I asked.
"Yes. And I will change the future of Nikolaus."
I was glad, this time, and said, "I don't need to ask about his case; you will be sure to do generously by him."
"It is my intention."
Straight off I was building that great future of Nicky's in my imagination, and had already made a renowned general of him and hofmeister at the court, when I noticed that Satan was waiting for me to get ready to listen again. I was ashamed of having exposed my cheap imaginings to him, and was expecting some sarcasms, but it did not happen. He proceeded with his subject:
"Nicky's appointed life is sixty-two years."
"That's grand!" I said.
"Lisa's, thirty-six. But, as I told you, I shall change their lives and those ages. Two minutes and a quarter from now Nikolaus will wake out of his sleep and find the rain blowing in. It was appointed that he should turn over and go to sleep again. But I have appointed that he shall get up and close the window first. That trifle will change his career entirely. He will rise in the morning two minutes later than the chain of his life had appointed him to rise. By consequence, thenceforth nothing will ever happen to him in accordance with the details of the old chain." He took out his watch and sat looking at it a few moments, then said: "Nikolaus has risen to close the window. His life is changed, his new career has begun. There will be consequences."
It made me feel creepy; it was uncanny.
"But for this change certain things would happen twelve days from now. For instance, Nikolaus would save Lisa from drowning. He would arrive on the scene at exactly the right moment - four minutes past ten, the long-ago appointed instant of time - and the water would be shoal, the achievement easy and certain. But he will arrive some seconds too late, now; Lisa will have struggled into deeper water. He will do his best, but both will drown."
"Oh, Satan! oh, dear Satan!" I cried, with the tears rising in my eyes,"save them! Don't let it happen. I can't bear to lose Nikolaus, he is my loving playmate and friend; and think of Lisa's poor mother!"
I clung to him and begged and pleaded. but he was not moved. He made me sit down again, and told me I must hear him out.
"I have changed Nikolaus's life, and this has changed Lisa's. If I had not done this, Nikolaus would save Lisa, then he would catch cold from his drenching: one of your race's fantastic and desolating scarlet fevers would follow, with pathetic after-effects; for forty-six years he would lie in his bed a paralytic log, deaf, dumb, blind, and praying night and day for the blessed relief of death. Shall I change his life back?"
"Oh no! Oh, not for the world! In charity and pity leave it as it is."
"It is best so. I could not have changed any other link in his life and done so good a service. He had a billion possible careers, but not one of them worth living; they were charged full with miseries and disasters. But for my intervention he would do his brave deed twelve days from now - a deed begun and ended in six minutes - and get for all reward those forty-six years of sorrow and suffering I told you of. It is one of the cases I was thinking of awhile ago when I said that sometimes an act which brings the actor an hour's happiness and self-satisfaction is paid for - or punished - by years of suffering."
I wondered what poor little Lisa's early death would save her from. He answered the thought:
"From ten years of pain and slow recovery from an accident, and then from nineteen years' pollution, shame, depravity, crime, ending with death at the hands of the executioner. Twelve days hence she will die; her mother would save her life if she could.- Am I not kinder than her mother?"
"Yes, indeed yes; and wiser."
Walt Whittman... I think he was just an American propaganda machine during a time when the US needed someone to make everyone want to be American
I'll second that. Although I realize that he did a huge amount of self-promotion, I don't understand how the promotion overcame the fact that his poetry was pretty bad. No, not "pretty bad", just bad.Quote:
Originally Posted by rabid reader
Agree and disagree with darnay. Atwood does have Talent. Very much so. her older works, not so much. her newer pieces, oh so very much.
I've read it and it's very interesting although I somehow found it not Twainlike if you want- it was so dark and pessimistic.Quote:
Originally Posted by superunknown
Hermann Broch
Right, as if Virgil also thought in dactylic hexameter. What a crock of thermoneuclear, stuck to my shoe, glow in the dark...shtuff and nonsense.
mmm
i have to say Shakespeare....yeah...to be or not be thingy, he said man delights not me, and the world seemed to him a sterile promontory and im just talking crap here. i just wanted to put him here
hes the man!although i can never say someone is the greatest at ANYTHING cuz its all so subjective, after all everyhting is!? isnt it?
I have no means to justify this other than my taste in literature, but I can't get through anything Kerouac has written without falling asleep or my mind wandering. Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not one who's in need of constant action and dramatic stimulation to enjoy something, but this man somehow manages to numb my brain. Does anyone else find him just as boring?