We Need A Revolution In Literature!

[JCamilo]

That description is also very similar to surrealism ideal, Breton, Bataile and others...

Please! Stop now, before you make yourself look more and more foolish. What do you know of the costs incurred by a painter? What do I need to be a poet? A pencil and a notebook... perhaps a computer in the corner of a tiny apartment somewhere. How much does it cost to rent the studio space and pay for the utilities needed in order to have a place to paint? How much do canvases and stretchers coast? Of course I can get around these costs if I have a woodshop and the proper tools. But still the wood and canvas and primer add up. And how expensive is oil paint? Go price some cadmium red on the internet. And what of frames? And then all I gotta do is sell the work... but how do I meet those wealthy patrons who can afford to buy a painting... and how much do I actually need to sell in order to make anything approaching a decent income from a day job?

Now, now Stlukes, while his idea is illogical and again he mistakes the editorial market for the world of literature (seems to not understand the academic world is not very keen to the best-sellers, but thinks they work to together to make us read J.k.Rowling and Shakespeare at the sametime), the cost of a product has little to do with how much a painter must waste with canvas and pretty colors and the poet with clouds. It is simple an old rule of market: if you can have 2000 books for 2000 buyers, it will be cheaper if you have as single canva for 2000 buyers who will lift the price up in attempt to collect it.

However, it is to note, that a painter that have only one buyer - his loving mother - will get 15 cents, a cake and a kiss for his art, so, the vallue of an painting increases with the public that has interest on buying it just like a writer.

And of course, there is many painters (and lets here add anyone who works with visual arts and illustrations) receive money like writers, as their are part of the industrial process: book illustrators, comic book artists, animation illustradors, video game illustradors, etc.

But the main question is why who you sell and to whom you work have anything to do with who will be reading you in 100 years? Canonization never gave a cent about popularity, fame or personal success, even because the form of mainstream market changes with economical models, so back in Dante days, he had less public than however painted the chappel and of course, which artist have wider audience than the archictetes?

[WolfLarsen]

There are posters who appear to misunderstand what I have said. When did I say I invented stream of consciousness? I never said that.

One poster even took issue with posters (like myself) disagreeing with his comments on the works of others. I don't have the right to my opinion according to him.

I have the right to have my own opinion and express it, or perhaps I am naive enough to believe so. I'm still not convinced that everyone in the canon is great.

Last night I came across the works of two different writers whose work was far more interesting than ANYTHING I read in my years of formal education. Of course, I only have a BA in English literature so there are others with more advanced degrees who know more than I do about the canon. All I'm saying is that it is not uncommon for me to come across very un-famous writers on the Internet whose writing is far more creative than anything I read during 16 years of formal education.

It seems to me that we are living in a very exciting time for literature. Generations of public schooling has made the general population more literate than ever, and some of those individuals are very talented. The Internet makes their work available.

God forbid you should argue that there are unknown contemporary writers on the Internet who are better than Shakespeare. There are those who will form a lynch mob and nail you to the cross.

[hillwalker]

One poster even took issue with posters (like myself) disagreeing with his comments on the works of others. I don't have the right to my opinion according to him.

That's me of course, but the gist of your statement is untrue and you know it. If you read my responses on these forums you will see I uphold the right of everyone to share their opinions on here (WolfLarson included).

What I took issue with was your childish line by line dismissal of every comment I had made in one particular posting, negating each and every comment I made, If that's your unsubtle way of disagreeing with my opinions by trolling then yes, I'll take issue with it. Grow up.

H

[cafolini]

Haha stlukesguild, you have it all wrapped up in celophane. Put a bow on it and deliver to the wing of packaged gifts.

[stlukesguild]

I have read Wolf's To the Light House and I read repeatedly and I found them unappealing though she wrote to experiment with something innovative. She skipped over the traditionalist way and yet she complicated the literary style more and making her books unreadable and more academic that could be just the text book type for some literary critics to work on or pride over their pedantic knowledge. And why not literature simple and why philosophy, art should be within the grab of the few pedants only. I have tried to read Ulysses like hell and finally I gave up.

osho- I will argue that neither Woolf nor Joyce engaged in mere experimentation for the sake of being new. There were larger goals, and certainly both writers were more than aware and skillful in the use of traditional approaches to writing. Hermann Hesse (I believe it was in an introduction to The Steppenwolf) suggested that as an artist one must write in the vocabulary of the time. He admits he would have preferred to have continued in the path of the great 19th century novelists such as Dostoevsky, but he recognized that he could not. He needed to write in the vocabulary of the time... however debased that vocabulary was. Imagine early Modernism... a period when the old truths were coming apart at the seams: religion, aristocracy... science and industry were pushing forward at a hitherto unknown rate.

Is it not then surprising that so many major artists sought out an art form that employed the use of fragmentation: the fragmentation of Cubism, the fragmentation of the narrative in Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Faulkner, etc..., the fragmentation of collage and assemblage, the fragmentation of Eisenstein's montages in film or Murnau's fractured forms, the fragmentation of traditional tonality... the loss of a home base (the key) in the music of Schoenberg and Berg, and Webern? This has nothing to do with novelty or innovation for the mere sake of innovation. Of course there were similar iconoclasts. The Italian painter, Marinetti called for the destruction of all the museums and the destruction of the old order through the "cleansing" power of warfare. How many remember Marinetti? The architect, Adolf Loos declared that ornament was crime in his attack upon Gustav Klimt. Klimt's Kiss remains the single most reproduced painting in the history of art and he remains the single most beloved Austrian painter and one of the most beloved of the whole of Modernism... and who is Loos?

I have a choice and I can enjoy some lighter stuffs and even Tolstoy is simple, Dostoevsky is not that tough. These few weirdo think they are above and beyond the reach of the common reader like myself. I hate to wrack my mind with their trashy ideas and this thread starter has something to share, some revolutionary ideas that lays before me endless possibilities and I enjoy reading such stuffs and indeed we live not in a classical age and we have different values, many things to do with a very little time at hand.

Again, I don't think Joyce and Woolf were writing with the idea of being above or looking down upon the common reader. Have you read Woolf's essays? The Common Reader is beautifully written and highly accessible... and suggests that she is not seeking out some elite audience but rather an audience of the well-informed or experienced common reader. Woolf and Joyce undoubtedly were writing for an audience like themselves as most artists create for an audience that they imagine as being like themselves. The problem with later writers and artists of the avant-garde is that they imagine themselves as some elite above or beyond the masses, and as such they may end in creating art in which the only dialog they are having is with other artists within their academic clique.

Picasso suggested that one avoids stagnation and produces of of real merit (and innovation) in the same way as the Renaissance princes produced heirs: a merger of the aristocratic and the peasant... a merger of the inherited tradition of high art and the "low" or popular culture around one.

[Darcy88]

The Dionysian is complimented by the Apollonian. The wise know the difference between freedom and chaos.

[cafolini]

stlukesguild. I don't think you have an idea of how pedantic and flatulent your stuff is.
If you want to be a historical collector, be my guest. There is a lot to benefit from that. But your idea of knowledge cannot be based on a museum's basement.

[JCamilo]

Wolf,
the only person that is upset because his own opinion (or your own experience, as it seems you are very lucky to find genius of literature every day) is refused is you. Any argument others presented you dismiss as snobs or because they have been culturally dominated, or because they are an elite and you go and repeat some good-hearted incoherences.

You may think you are respecting other people opinions, but the right to have opinions do not make it right and is in fact a bit of disrespectuful if you just consider irrelevant all others say. There is nothing revolutionary in what you say, it is pure idealistic romanticism and like hillwalker pointed, you didnt invent anything, you are just repeating something old.

I am sure you will find another two genius before your next reply, but do not bother, i am sure if you were alive in XVI century, we would have discovered at least more 12 better writers than Shakespeare.

[OrphanPip]

Darcy posted a poem which appeared to have a strong element of homosexual desire. I stayed with that theme. Homoerotic sexuality is not crude. Homoerotic sexuality is beautiful! It's too bad we can't celebrated it more openly!

Your reaction, which is all too common, proves exactly one of my points that the literary world is extremely uptight, puritanical, and often engages in censorship. This is not a personal attack on you Darcy, it is an indictment of the powers that be in the literary world, and the powers that be in the literary world are tremendous obstacles to the creativeness of writers.

Perhaps your reaction is not much different than the reaction that many had to Lady Chatterley's Lover, Lolita, and many other books that were banned.

Again, I am not indicting you Darcy, I am indicting the literary world.

Ugh, please don't try and pass that off as an example of your open-mindedness to differing sexualities.

Besides there is an entire academic discipline (Queer Theory, which itself built out of sexuality studies from the 80s) dedicated to looking at the representation of sexuality and difference in literature.

Canons are relative to an extent, in that they depend on certain spheres of reference: a Western Canon needs to be built while looking at the influence within a Western context. This is why we can legitimately build genre canons, and there are established gay and lesbian literary canons that may or may not overlap with the mainstream English language canon.

Take a gay writer like Edmund White, who holds a faculty post at Princeton. His novels are explicitly sexual, and his personal views on sexuality would be fringe even for the gay community. Yet his books get reviewed in the New York Times, and one of his novels was included on Bloom's canon. Certainly, the sexual content of White's novels will keep him from being a mainstream best seller, but it hasn't stopped him from being a successful writer.

And then in the mainstream, you have an author like Michael Cunningham, who is a best seller and is gay. And then there is plenty of garbage produced merely for the consumption of the general gay readership, which is just as bad as heterosexual pulp romances.

It's like you're arguing against the 1950s.

[Darcy88]

stlukesguild. I don't think you have an idea of how pedantic and flatulent your stuff is.
If you want to be a historical collector, be my guest. There is a lot to benefit from that. But your idea of knowledge cannot be based on a museum's basement.

Please spare us Cafolini. SLG went paragraph by paragraph highlighting the many specific flaws in Wolf's essay. I was hoping someone with a fuller knoweldge of art than I possess would do precisely that.

Talk about flatulence. Lay off the beans Caf. Your comment that Shakespeare is not one of the greats was a fart for the ages.

[cafolini]

Please spare us Cafolini. SLG went paragraph by paragraph highlighting the many specific flaws in Wolf's essay. I was hoping someone with a fuller knoweldge of art than I possess would do precisely that.

Talk about flatulence. Lay off the beans Caf. Your comment that Shakespeare is not one of the greats was a fart for the ages.

Understood, Darcy. But "us," who is "us?" Speak for yourself.
I have a lot of knowledge of art that I don't need to use as a show of flaws of anyone. A man does not need a lot of knowledge of art to argue against a petition for postmodern art. And the man doesn't know that this is a world for the common man, who has little concern for things of the past or canons of the past. Marketting is the fine arts of today and it doesn't attend to any elite or aristocracy that led to the situations prior to 1945. Wolflarsen is only a little shortsighted as to the fact that the revolution he asks for has already happened and that modernism is already in a museum to never come back as canon. Not even the NeoThis or Neothat are coming back. Rennaissant modernism kicked the bucket.
The only danger in Wolflarsen words is that he praises individualism while it is no longer possible. The current is going more and more toward teamwork in every sphere.
Shakespeare to Venice, to cry nostalgia.

[Aspirational]

Oh, and somebody submitted a rather decent poem by Shakespeare for review:



I had some fun with that poem for ten minutes and this is what I came up with:

When we fly like disgrace through each other's eyes,
I all alone weep like falling nuclear missiles,
And trouble falls up to heaven like some skyscraper’s orgasm,
I look upon all the thousands of hallucinations of myself, and curse my brains,
Wishing me to be rich with millions of huge vaginas,
Featured like millions of McDonald's hamburgers rolling into Shakespeare's mouth,
Desiring this man's correct grammatical structure around my penis,
With what I most enjoy like a NASA rocket blasting through my brains
Yet in whose thoughts I feel the despisement of millions of pigeons,
Happy I think on his penis & anus & smile like a bisexual euphoria,
Like 365 days arising & crashing & breaking open,
From a sullen earth that sings all its billions of cadavers at Heaven's Gate,
For my sweet semen in a man's mouth is the greatest wealth of all things,
And let's lynch all the kings

Anybody else want to kick around some Shakespeare?

Can you really expect anyone to take you seriously after this? You've just demonstrated:

1. A complete lack of talent
2. A complete lack of understanding
3. A complete lack of respect (for someone clearly far beyond your ability to comprehend, much less match in writing)
4. A desire to pretend that you're furthering your own argument by demonstrating the above 3

It's almost as if you're not taking yourself seriously.

[Darcy88]

And the man doesn't know that this is a world for the common man, who has little concern for things of the past or canons of the past.

Say what?

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

Understood, Darcy. But "us," who is "us?" Speak for yourself.

I'll throw my hat in with Darcy, so her use of "us" is completely valid.

I have a lot of knowledge of art that I don't need to use as a show of flaws of anyone. A man does not need a lot of knowledge of art to argue against a petition for postmodern art. And the man doesn't know that this is a world for the common man, who has little concern for things of the past or canons of the past. Marketting is the fine arts of today and it doesn't attend to any elite or aristocracy that led to the situations prior to 1945. Wolflarsen is only a little shortsighted as to the fact that the revolution he asks for has already happened and that modernism is already in a museum to never come back as canon. Not even the NeoThis or Neothat are coming back. Rennaissant modernism kicked the bucket.
The only danger in Wolflarsen words is that he praises individualism while it is no longer possible. The current is going more and more toward teamwork in every sphere.
Shakespeare to Venice, to cry nostalgia.

You know, StLuke's posts may be a little lengthy at times, but at least he's coherent.

[Darcy88]

I'll throw my hat in with Darcy, so her use of "us" is completely valid.

You know, StLuke's posts may be a little lengthy at times, but at least he's coherent.

I'm a guy. Thanks though, and I agree with what you insinuate at the end there.