July 16th, 2010 / 6:43 pm
Snippets
Snippets
Lily Hoang—
I ask this question with all sincerity: Why would people actively choose to read Twilight over any other good book of fiction? Psychologically, wtf are they thinking?
My use of “other” was meant for the word “book.” I don’t mean to say that Twilight is also a good book of fiction. Poor wording on my part. Apologies.
Not sure. I’d rather read Vampire in Brooklyn (if it were a book).
Some people like reading Twilight more than other fiction books, so they choose to read Twilight instead of other fiction books.
Seems like an easy question.
easy. it’s easy. it’s escapist, it requires little to no thought, it moves through plot and scene and emotion all like a hollywood film. but more than that, it’s popular, it’s marketed, and most ‘good fiction’ isn’t marketed like twilight is.
i read twilight. i don’t think anyone is too good for twilight. you have to understand what it is, accept that it isn’t going to change, then fucking read the thing. i assume you haven’t read it, which is probably why you have to ask.
Marshall: But why? Why pick up that one particular series of books rather than say, Crime and Punishment or Pride and Prejudice or Infinite Jest?
Drew: I haven’t read it, and I’m certainly not above reading it. But why do I have to understand what it is and what is “it”? What am I accepting isn’t going to change? That people read Twilight? For the record, I have no problem with people reading Twilight. I’m a simpleton who believes people reading anything is a good thing, but I want to know why. What motivates that choice? If Book A is a vampire book and Book B is a “classic” or something like that, what makes a person choose Book A?
What would being too good for reading Twilight involve?
Maybe a lot of people don’t know what those books are or that they exist. In 2010, Twilight is a much more popular book than any of those. Most readers are probably “casual readers” by definition.
classics are “school books” to a lot of people. why read a school book if I’m not in school anymore? a person might think to theirself. why read a school book if I don’t have to? a student might think.
They’re probably thinking about how many times they’ve heard about it or how prominently it’s displayed in the bookstore and, well, let’s buy the thing and give it a go. Why not, right? It’s like buying a candy bar. Except it’s a book. Nothing wrong with that, I guess, if that’s the kind of experience you’re looking for. A shame though that there are so many other books out there getting steamrollered.
it isn’t literary fiction, which is what i understood you meant by ‘good fiction’
twilight’s way easier to read than classic shit
Also, things like ‘Crime and Punishment’ are popularly considered to be Major Tomes, the reading of which constitutes a Great Exertion and is probably advisable only for people of Staggering Intellect.
There are whole swathes of society in which a mention of having read things like that is met either with a hushed silence or with plain disbelief. A lot of people, as far as I can understand, perceive fiction like that as being somehow (actively) not meant for them.
There’s also the idea that anything that isn’t a ‘pageturner’ in the purest, most easily-scannable sense will be a lot of work to read, and that it can therefore never be a source of enjoyment, or relaxation, or some difficult to define but apparently commonly-desired concept/outcome.
The visibility / promotability factor is obviously hugely significant, too, but the two sides — marketing and public — clearly feed into each other, and the influence goes ways.
I think it’s mostly the result of poor teaching, especially in the realm of pre-college English Literature education. A lot of people seem to see intellectual exertion as something which, by its very nature, cannot be enjoyable or relaxing, and also unquestionably associate certain types of literature — probably most literature — with negative memories of unbearably dull hours passed grindingly in the presence of inept or uninspired English teachers.
(goes both ways*)
With all of that said, though, I think it’s worth remembering that trash can be enjoyable. I watch a lot of trashy TV, for example, and often even at the expense of time that could have been spent with something of actual quality. I’m yet to get around to watching the Red Riding trilogy.
I tend not to watch trashy films or plays, or read trashy fiction. Those are all media in which I would love to be able to work, however. I think I have more of an incentive to seek out the real quality films, books, etc. because they represent (to a significant enough degree) a potentially useful education in what makes those good things good.
Mostly, I watch shitty TV because it’s more readily available. There’s more of it, spread over more channels. I could make the effort only ever to seek out the toppest-notch, cream-of-the-crop material, but the same incentive isn’t really there.
really rambling and badly written, sorry. I’m taking a break from packing for a plane I’m catching tomorrow morning, so I’m kind of rushing.
A friend of mine read them and gave the only decent ‘defense’ of them I’ve heard so far: she couldn’t stop reading because she wanted to read about the main characters having sex with each other, and they don’t have sex with each other until the end.
They’re 13-year-old girls or wanna be 13-year-old girls?
a lot of people treat entertainment as a means of ingratiating themselves with society. if you’re in line at a starbucks theres a good chance someone in that line has read twilight also, so now you can have a conversation with a stranger about something. this is my one reason i always have in my head that i should read more things other people tend to read so that when im in a situation talking to a new person and i say ‘well, i read a lot’ and they say, ‘oh, have you read the davinci code?’ i say ‘no i haven’t read that’ and i feel kind of bad then because i actually want to talk to this person about something.
And then the whole act is described using an ellipses. Talk about disappointing.
“The Mysteries of Paris” by Eugene Sue was the bestselling book of the 19thh-century in France, followed so closely in its weekly installments that it was publicly read on street-corners so that the illiterate could follow the story. The heroine, Fleur-de-Marie, had been sold into prostitution as a child, then rescued. Now a noble youth was in love with her, but she was tormented by the certainty that if they married this would ruin him. Many who were enthralled by this story were no doubt enthralled precisely because of its lascivious elements.
In England, G.W.R. Reynolds published “The Mysteries of London” in order to cash in on Sue’s reputation, and he went much further in exploiting the possibilities of such material. Reynolds vastly outsold Dickens, who loathed him and found Reynolds’ material offensive.
Novels which have made their authors wealthy in America on the basis of sex appeal which perhaps were soon forgottenn include “Forever Amber,” “The Carpetbaggers,” “Peyton Place,” “Naked Came the Stranger” and “Valley of the Dolls.” That’s not even mentioning the hugely-selling sadistically sexy crime novels of Mickey Spillane, hugely popular in the 1950s, followed in the 1960s by Ian Fleming’s novels featuring James Bond.
I’m focusing here on just one aspect of popular appeal, but “Madame Bovary” was banned for a while in its day and benefitted greatly so far as public interest was concerned by an obscenity trial. The promise that the adultery of its heroine might be sexy resulted in its being much more widely read — almost as popular as “Mademoiselle de Maupin” by Theophile Gautier. Likewise, later on, “Ulysses” by James Joyce, “Lady Chatterly’s Lover” by D.H. Lawrence and in time “Naked Lunch” by William Burroughs all gained greatly in public appeal because of being banned for a time here or there.
The public seldom turns en masse to high art in the pseudo-religious manner of intellectuals. But maybe I’ve misunderstood the question, or the subject… Why would anyone read “Twilight”? To be entertained, diverted, and turned on. In the same spirit, others have turned in their day to Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, John Updike, Bret Easton Ellis, Mary Gaitskill, and Susan Minot (her breakthrough book of stories was entitled “Lust.”)
The vampire myth speaks to the sort of unconditional surrender that many find what is most alluring and/or frightening about sex. It’s unwholesome and mysterious. It involves “bad girls” and “bad boys.”
The sex appeal of wholesome young Mormons doing aerobics is a topic for another time.
what’s a good book of fiction?
On paper the book is sort of compelling: hundreds of pages of sexual tension/expectation expressed as a vampire themed Mormon morality tale.
This thread is why I want to read Twilight.
on top of seeking out Entertainment, people like to feel like they belong to something great than themselves
What Polanyi offers is a way of understanding not only why the economy and society are part of the same set of processes, but also why we erroneously believe that market and society are separate. The culture of profit-driven markets, what Polanyi calls the myth of the self-regulating market, turns out to need society far more than it pretends to–but the myth that economy and society are two distinct realms needs to be widely propagated if the self-regulating market is to spread further. We generally think it unwise for one conjoined twin to operate on another, but what the market myth fosters is the belief not only that the twins are separated, but that one is the doctor and one the patient.
Crowd behavior. Herd mentality. Not that I have a problem with people reading Twilight, but it’s like those damn Girl Who books…you see one on the subway, the next day you see fifty. I think it started with Harry Potter: people want to be reading the “it” book, if you will. But I think that’s partially the fault of major booksellers like Barnes and Noble, who make it practically impossible to go into bookstore and NOT buy whatever THE bestseller is.
My use of “other” was meant for the word “book.” I don’t mean to say that Twilight is also a good book of fiction. Poor wording on my part. Apologies.
Not sure. I’d rather read Vampire in Brooklyn (if it were a book).
Some people like reading Twilight more than other fiction books, so they choose to read Twilight instead of other fiction books.
Seems like an easy question.
easy. it’s easy. it’s escapist, it requires little to no thought, it moves through plot and scene and emotion all like a hollywood film. but more than that, it’s popular, it’s marketed, and most ‘good fiction’ isn’t marketed like twilight is.
i read twilight. i don’t think anyone is too good for twilight. you have to understand what it is, accept that it isn’t going to change, then fucking read the thing. i assume you haven’t read it, which is probably why you have to ask.
Marshall: But why? Why pick up that one particular series of books rather than say, Crime and Punishment or Pride and Prejudice or Infinite Jest?
Drew: I haven’t read it, and I’m certainly not above reading it. But why do I have to understand what it is and what is “it”? What am I accepting isn’t going to change? That people read Twilight? For the record, I have no problem with people reading Twilight. I’m a simpleton who believes people reading anything is a good thing, but I want to know why. What motivates that choice? If Book A is a vampire book and Book B is a “classic” or something like that, what makes a person choose Book A?
What would being too good for reading Twilight involve?
Maybe a lot of people don’t know what those books are or that they exist. In 2010, Twilight is a much more popular book than any of those. Most readers are probably “casual readers” by definition.
classics are “school books” to a lot of people. why read a school book if I’m not in school anymore? a person might think to theirself. why read a school book if I don’t have to? a student might think.
They’re probably thinking about how many times they’ve heard about it or how prominently it’s displayed in the bookstore and, well, let’s buy the thing and give it a go. Why not, right? It’s like buying a candy bar. Except it’s a book. Nothing wrong with that, I guess, if that’s the kind of experience you’re looking for. A shame though that there are so many other books out there getting steamrollered.
it isn’t literary fiction, which is what i understood you meant by ‘good fiction’
twilight’s way easier to read than classic shit
Also, things like ‘Crime and Punishment’ are popularly considered to be Major Tomes, the reading of which constitutes a Great Exertion and is probably advisable only for people of Staggering Intellect.
There are whole swathes of society in which a mention of having read things like that is met either with a hushed silence or with plain disbelief. A lot of people, as far as I can understand, perceive fiction like that as being somehow (actively) not meant for them.
There’s also the idea that anything that isn’t a ‘pageturner’ in the purest, most easily-scannable sense will be a lot of work to read, and that it can therefore never be a source of enjoyment, or relaxation, or some difficult to define but apparently commonly-desired concept/outcome.
The visibility / promotability factor is obviously hugely significant, too, but the two sides — marketing and public — clearly feed into each other, and the influence goes ways.
I think it’s mostly the result of poor teaching, especially in the realm of pre-college English Literature education. A lot of people seem to see intellectual exertion as something which, by its very nature, cannot be enjoyable or relaxing, and also unquestionably associate certain types of literature — probably most literature — with negative memories of unbearably dull hours passed grindingly in the presence of inept or uninspired English teachers.
(goes both ways*)
With all of that said, though, I think it’s worth remembering that trash can be enjoyable. I watch a lot of trashy TV, for example, and often even at the expense of time that could have been spent with something of actual quality. I’m yet to get around to watching the Red Riding trilogy.
I tend not to watch trashy films or plays, or read trashy fiction. Those are all media in which I would love to be able to work, however. I think I have more of an incentive to seek out the real quality films, books, etc. because they represent (to a significant enough degree) a potentially useful education in what makes those good things good.
Mostly, I watch shitty TV because it’s more readily available. There’s more of it, spread over more channels. I could make the effort only ever to seek out the toppest-notch, cream-of-the-crop material, but the same incentive isn’t really there.
really rambling and badly written, sorry. I’m taking a break from packing for a plane I’m catching tomorrow morning, so I’m kind of rushing.
A friend of mine read them and gave the only decent ‘defense’ of them I’ve heard so far: she couldn’t stop reading because she wanted to read about the main characters having sex with each other, and they don’t have sex with each other until the end.
lol elitism
They’re 13-year-old girls or wanna be 13-year-old girls?
a lot of people treat entertainment as a means of ingratiating themselves with society. if you’re in line at a starbucks theres a good chance someone in that line has read twilight also, so now you can have a conversation with a stranger about something. this is my one reason i always have in my head that i should read more things other people tend to read so that when im in a situation talking to a new person and i say ‘well, i read a lot’ and they say, ‘oh, have you read the davinci code?’ i say ‘no i haven’t read that’ and i feel kind of bad then because i actually want to talk to this person about something.
And then the whole act is described using an ellipses. Talk about disappointing.
“The Mysteries of Paris” by Eugene Sue was the bestselling book of the 19thh-century in France, followed so closely in its weekly installments that it was publicly read on street-corners so that the illiterate could follow the story. The heroine, Fleur-de-Marie, had been sold into prostitution as a child, then rescued. Now a noble youth was in love with her, but she was tormented by the certainty that if they married this would ruin him. Many who were enthralled by this story were no doubt enthralled precisely because of its lascivious elements.
In England, G.W.R. Reynolds published “The Mysteries of London” in order to cash in on Sue’s reputation, and he went much further in exploiting the possibilities of such material. Reynolds vastly outsold Dickens, who loathed him and found Reynolds’ material offensive.
Novels which have made their authors wealthy in America on the basis of sex appeal which perhaps were soon forgottenn include “Forever Amber,” “The Carpetbaggers,” “Peyton Place,” “Naked Came the Stranger” and “Valley of the Dolls.” That’s not even mentioning the hugely-selling sadistically sexy crime novels of Mickey Spillane, hugely popular in the 1950s, followed in the 1960s by Ian Fleming’s novels featuring James Bond.
I’m focusing here on just one aspect of popular appeal, but “Madame Bovary” was banned for a while in its day and benefitted greatly so far as public interest was concerned by an obscenity trial. The promise that the adultery of its heroine might be sexy resulted in its being much more widely read — almost as popular as “Mademoiselle de Maupin” by Theophile Gautier. Likewise, later on, “Ulysses” by James Joyce, “Lady Chatterly’s Lover” by D.H. Lawrence and in time “Naked Lunch” by William Burroughs all gained greatly in public appeal because of being banned for a time here or there.
The public seldom turns en masse to high art in the pseudo-religious manner of intellectuals. But maybe I’ve misunderstood the question, or the subject… Why would anyone read “Twilight”? To be entertained, diverted, and turned on. In the same spirit, others have turned in their day to Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, John Updike, Bret Easton Ellis, Mary Gaitskill, and Susan Minot (her breakthrough book of stories was entitled “Lust.”)
The vampire myth speaks to the sort of unconditional surrender that many find what is most alluring and/or frightening about sex. It’s unwholesome and mysterious. It involves “bad girls” and “bad boys.”
The sex appeal of wholesome young Mormons doing aerobics is a topic for another time.
Polyani was funded by the Ford Foundation.
*greater
what’s a good book of fiction?
On paper the book is sort of compelling: hundreds of pages of sexual tension/expectation expressed as a vampire themed Mormon morality tale.
This thread is why I want to read Twilight.
You might not know many readers who aren’t writers. Readers who aren’t writers think they’re engaging deeply and profoundly with a text if they see it in a bookstore, remember that someone (anyone) else in their lives has mentioned, and buy it and enjoy it on some level.
That average reader suffers not from a callous that insulates from stronger literature, but rather from a lack of even knowing such a callous might exist, or what it might insulate from.
When I was a kid, I read the new Crichtons and Kings and as far as I knew, those books represented the avant garde of literature. I was in the great bulk of book buyers, with no knowledge that any sort of more nuanced lit existed, or that almost any of the online journals or print journals existed. All I knew was that the world at large considered Jurassic Park a strong novel, and so it must be artful.
That’s what I assume is going on with people who pick up Twilight. They’re not making a weak decision. They’re not making any decision at all.
And as far as artfulness goes, I know this was covered recently in posts about that new vampire book by the lit guy, but man, as a writer, I wish I had some exploitable idea that would pull in masses. As is, I can’t even pull in segments. Even if I don’t consider money, I’d still rather think of some fun and attractive idea to pull in readers than yet another artful and heavy idea that pulls in nothing but a growing gut of rejections.
Any acid in this post can be seen as intended for . . . what? I don’t know. The world in general. I agree that the popularity of Twilight is disheartening, but I wish I could capture it for better use.
This question bothers me. It implies a dichotomy of us (good readers) versus them (bad readers) that isn’t fair. Reading is reading and taste is personal. I haven’t been able to get through the Twilight books yet but I own them and from what I’ve read of the first book, yes, the writing is not great but the story is pretty damn good in that “this is ludicrous and awesome” way. What are “they” thinking? They’re thinking, I want to be entertained, or I want to see why these books are so popular, or I love vampires, or I love romance. They (we) choose Twilight for the same reason you might choose to read Witz.
What Polanyi offers is a way of understanding not only why the economy and society are part of the same set of processes, but also why we erroneously believe that market and society are separate. The culture of profit-driven markets, what Polanyi calls the myth of the self-regulating market, turns out to need society far more than it pretends to–but the myth that economy and society are two distinct realms needs to be widely propagated if the self-regulating market is to spread further. We generally think it unwise for one conjoined twin to operate on another, but what the market myth fosters is the belief not only that the twins are separated, but that one is the doctor and one the patient.
Crowd behavior. Herd mentality. Not that I have a problem with people reading Twilight, but it’s like those damn Girl Who books…you see one on the subway, the next day you see fifty. I think it started with Harry Potter: people want to be reading the “it” book, if you will. But I think that’s partially the fault of major booksellers like Barnes and Noble, who make it practically impossible to go into bookstore and NOT buy whatever THE bestseller is.
I think this is right. And I think that people who read Twilight tend to first know at least one other trusted person who loves Twilight, and that the possibility of loving something is a strong argument in its favor. Which is why I think projects like Vouched Books are awesome–I have to assume the greater proportion of readers just aren’t hearing how much we love The Wavering Knife or Infinite Jest.
lol elitism
Well, it all started when they heard about Tin House’s new submission policy from this sanctimonious, posturing blog that asks questions like, “why would a person ever debase himself by reading genre fiction over Tao Lin or Justin Cohen,” alongside, “have you purchased a book lately to help save a pitiful, starving indie bookstore”? After becoming aware of the plight of indie bookstores from this blog, they decided to do their part by purchasing Twilight from an indie bookstore in Brooklyn, knowing that the store makes most of its money off genre fiction anyway–not Tao Lin, Justin Cohen, Gordon Lish, or the latest flash-fiction chapbook that’s 20 pages with a 10 copy print run. Oh, and they also attached the Twilight receipt to their Tin House submission.
All the reason to dismiss his analysis. You left out that he was married to a communist.
Polyani was funded by the Ford Foundation.
I read them all last summer as part of a larger pop culture experiment. They had their moments — not really enough to justify over two thousand pages of material — but enough that I could see just how very much I would have loved them as a twelve-year-old girl (especially in the sixth grade half of being twelve when I was in a major unicorn phase and thus really susceptible to fantasy stories). But mostly because I know exactly how much I loved Sweet Valley High as a twelve-year-old girl and Twilight has about the same literary/intellectual merit as my beloved Wakefield twins.
All bookstores display bestsellers prominently. I’ve worked at three indie stores and the primary purpose was to make money, not to change the world. Also,all three of the indie stores I worked at held special Harry Potter release events. There was never a midnight event for Crime & Punishment or Emma. Sorry, folks.
Just think about this the next time some of you get on your high horses about indie bookstores–the bread and butter for these stores is the bestseller stuff derided on this thread.
Why do some people read Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close instead of Underworld? I shit on their (by-me-perceived) utter lack of taste at the same time those readers may well be shitting on the tastes of consumers of Twilight. If you must have a hierarchy, remember that it’s not a simple binary. Someone somewhere is feeling superior to you, too.
maybe because they like it
I read about 3/4 of the first one. It really baffled me. There was no conflict. As far as I can tell from having seen the movie, some people get killed and there’s a big fight at the end. But *none* of that had been introduced most of the way through the book! It was fucking boring. (Also, the writing was shit.) As opposed to, say, the delightful Hunger Games series… where I often winced at the writing on a sentence by sentence level but was totally engaged by, and zooming through, the story. Or The Knife of Never Letting Go, which had its pacing problems and a really contrived delayed-release-of-information conceit, but was still pretty propulsive.
You might not know many readers who aren’t writers. Readers who aren’t writers think they’re engaging deeply and profoundly with a text if they see it in a bookstore, remember that someone (anyone) else in their lives has mentioned, and buy it and enjoy it on some level.
That average reader suffers not from a callous that insulates from stronger literature, but rather from a lack of even knowing such a callous might exist, or what it might insulate from.
When I was a kid, I read the new Crichtons and Kings and as far as I knew, those books represented the avant garde of literature. I was in the great bulk of book buyers, with no knowledge that any sort of more nuanced lit existed, or that almost any of the online journals or print journals existed. All I knew was that the world at large considered Jurassic Park a strong novel, and so it must be artful.
That’s what I assume is going on with people who pick up Twilight. They’re not making a weak decision. They’re not making any decision at all.
And as far as artfulness goes, I know this was covered recently in posts about that new vampire book by the lit guy, but man, as a writer, I wish I had some exploitable idea that would pull in masses. As is, I can’t even pull in segments. Even if I don’t consider money, I’d still rather think of some fun and attractive idea to pull in readers than yet another artful and heavy idea that pulls in nothing but a growing gut of rejections.
Any acid in this post can be seen as intended for . . . what? I don’t know. The world in general. I agree that the popularity of Twilight is disheartening, but I wish I could capture it for better use.
This question bothers me. It implies a dichotomy of us (good readers) versus them (bad readers) that isn’t fair. Reading is reading and taste is personal. I haven’t been able to get through the Twilight books yet but I own them and from what I’ve read of the first book, yes, the writing is not great but the story is pretty damn good in that “this is ludicrous and awesome” way. What are “they” thinking? They’re thinking, I want to be entertained, or I want to see why these books are so popular, or I love vampires, or I love romance. They (we) choose Twilight for the same reason you might choose to read Witz.
i used to read a bunch of ‘bad’ teen fiction in high school, before i knew there was a thing called literature. i still really like having read those books; they affected me positively the way that, say, james joyce did when i was older. there was a book called ‘my big fat summer’ about a guy who was fat and had to mow lawns for money. it was touching. i was skinny but loathed myself like a fat kid. i bet ‘twilight’ makes some people really happy, the way that those b-bastards barth, barthes, barthelme make smart snobs happy (no offense, i like that bro-triad). art’s most profound act is to make humans happy, through very complicated, almost inverse, ways. art cleans up this world, and judgement of art dirtys it. i’m sure i’d hate ‘twilight,’ but the point isn’t what i hate, but what others love.
I think this is right. And I think that people who read Twilight tend to first know at least one other trusted person who loves Twilight, and that the possibility of loving something is a strong argument in its favor. Which is why I think projects like Vouched Books are awesome–I have to assume the greater proportion of readers just aren’t hearing how much we love The Wavering Knife or Infinite Jest.
“art’s most profound act is to make humans happy, through very complicated…”
Agreed: complicated; too few people understand/appreciate the kind of “happy” that isn’t fun. My favorite folksy way of expressing the diff between “Entertainment” and “Art” is that the former is like the friend who always tells you what you want to hear, and the latter is the friend who doesn’t.
i like twilight. i read all of the books in succession over 3 days and felt warm. it seems weird to post saying ‘oh why would anyone read this shitty YA book that i havent read’.
oh why the fuck does anyone eat squid. seriously squid tastes like shit. why do people eat squid. oh what. people like different things. but squid tastes like shit. no, i dont see how someone could like squid. i know people are different but squid tastes like shit. it tastes like shit okay. serious what are people thinking eating squid. what oh no i havent tried squid. but you know, it looks not so nice, and it smells funny. dont know how people could ever eat it.
Well, it all started when they heard about Tin House’s new submission policy from this sanctimonious, posturing blog that asks questions like, “why would a person ever debase himself by reading genre fiction over Tao Lin or Justin Cohen,” alongside, “have you purchased a book lately to help save a pitiful, starving indie bookstore”? After becoming aware of the plight of indie bookstores from this blog, they decided to do their part by purchasing Twilight from an indie bookstore in Brooklyn, knowing that the store makes most of its money off genre fiction anyway–not Tao Lin, Justin Cohen, Gordon Lish, or the latest flash-fiction chapbook that’s 20 pages with a 10 copy print run. Oh, and they also attached the Twilight receipt to their Tin House submission.
All the reason to dismiss his analysis. You left out that he was married to a communist.
Roxane, I tried to clarify my question, which was poorly worded, in my comments above. I meant to ask why it is that people gravitate towards reading one book versus another. I want to understand the cultural phenomenon of it. Why have people en masse chosen this one series of books over say, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars Trilogy? Red Mars also offers a great deal of entertainment, though not nearly as many saucy intense looks as Belle & Edward exchange. I’m not saying people who read Twilight aren’t good readers, nor that I am a better reader than they are. I don’t think my taste is “better” than theirs either. At all.
I haven’t read Twilight. If I ever have the time, I probably will. I’ve read Harry Potter. I liked it. I read the whole series. Every word.
Furthermore, I have no basis for any elitism on my part. I watch and enjoy romantic comedies. I’ve watched and enjoyed Twilight, though I have to admit, the lack of plot in the second movie kind of bothered me. Did anything actually happen in the movie?
I read them all last summer as part of a larger pop culture experiment. They had their moments — not really enough to justify over two thousand pages of material — but enough that I could see just how very much I would have loved them as a twelve-year-old girl (especially in the sixth grade half of being twelve when I was in a major unicorn phase and thus really susceptible to fantasy stories). But mostly because I know exactly how much I loved Sweet Valley High as a twelve-year-old girl and Twilight has about the same literary/intellectual merit as my beloved Wakefield twins.
All bookstores display bestsellers prominently. I’ve worked at three indie stores and the primary purpose was to make money, not to change the world. Also,all three of the indie stores I worked at held special Harry Potter release events. There was never a midnight event for Crime & Punishment or Emma. Sorry, folks.
Just think about this the next time some of you get on your high horses about indie bookstores–the bread and butter for these stores is the bestseller stuff derided on this thread.
Why do some people read Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close instead of Underworld? I shit on their (by-me-perceived) utter lack of taste at the same time those readers may well be shitting on the tastes of consumers of Twilight. If you must have a hierarchy, remember that it’s not a simple binary. Someone somewhere is feeling superior to you, too.
maybe because they like it
because different people like different things…
I read about 3/4 of the first one. It really baffled me. There was no conflict. As far as I can tell from having seen the movie, some people get killed and there’s a big fight at the end. But *none* of that had been introduced most of the way through the book! It was fucking boring. (Also, the writing was shit.) As opposed to, say, the delightful Hunger Games series… where I often winced at the writing on a sentence by sentence level but was totally engaged by, and zooming through, the story. Or The Knife of Never Letting Go, which had its pacing problems and a really contrived delayed-release-of-information conceit, but was still pretty propulsive.
Lily, I think it was the “wtf are they thinking?” that threw people.
If you want to conduct further research within a historical framework that doesn’t involve vampires, I recommend Babysitter’s Club. You get female bonding, beach makeouts and Juvenile Diabetes.
marketing.
I’m not deriding any books at all, or the people who read them. I read all the Harry Potter books and thought they were pretty good (though nowhere near as good as anything by Diana Wynne Jones) and I have a lot of friends who pretty much only read bestsellers and I have no problem with that. I understand that bookstores don’t do a whole lot of traffic in Joshua Cohen’s books, and bestsellers have always been prominently displayed. But I am troubled by the “event” phenomenon that bestsellers have become. I’m divided on this–one part of me thinks, who cares, people are reading, but the other part worries because it’s self-perpetuating–for even a best-seller to really sell today, it has to be an event. It’s like people will only buy a book if it’s an event, and are they even reading the book half the time? I know a lot of people–smart people–who probably the only books they’ve read in the last ten yeas were Harry Potter, DaVinci Code, and Twilight. That’s fine, but if they had instead read War and Peace or Scorch Atlas or Fugue State or something instead, would they maybe have enjoyed the experience more or found it more fulfilling–found it a reason to buy and read more books and even maybe support indie lit?
WHOA WHOA WHOA
THERE WASN’T A MIDNIGHT RELEASE PARTY FOR “EMMA”??? WHY NOT???
JURASSIC PARK IS STILL A STRONG NOVEL. ALONG WITH “SPHERE” IT IS ONE OF HIS BETTER ONES.
i used to read a bunch of ‘bad’ teen fiction in high school, before i knew there was a thing called literature. i still really like having read those books; they affected me positively the way that, say, james joyce did when i was older. there was a book called ‘my big fat summer’ about a guy who was fat and had to mow lawns for money. it was touching. i was skinny but loathed myself like a fat kid. i bet ‘twilight’ makes some people really happy, the way that those b-bastards barth, barthes, barthelme make smart snobs happy (no offense, i like that bro-triad). art’s most profound act is to make humans happy, through very complicated, almost inverse, ways. art cleans up this world, and judgement of art dirtys it. i’m sure i’d hate ‘twilight,’ but the point isn’t what i hate, but what others love.
A lot of people–I would guess most people–don’t get very much out of being alone in what they enjoy or appreciate. I don’t know how Meyer’s publishers managed to market the books to the point that they didn’t need to anymore, that as soon as popular magazines or papers got wind of any news about the series they’d write about it because it would sell their magazines, not because they were paid to run an advert. But however it all happened, Twilight is immensely popular, and that’s one of the best things about a book or a movie for a lot of people. This isn’t bad, it’s actually immensely optimistic, that once someone puts a book down they want to be able to talk about it with someone else, and most people (in the States at least, I can’t vouch for anywhere else in the world) know someone who has read and enjoyed Twilight. Very few people want to read in vacuums, but I don’t think this proclivity is limited to books–one of the things that make lovable but obscure movies so lovable is that they are incredibly easy to share, given that movies take no energy to watch and very little time, too. I mean, most of us probably don’t know too many people who read small press releases–at least no one whom we haven’t met in one way or another for the very reason that they’re involved in small presses in some way–so we come online to talk about things. When you find an unheard-of book that you love in a store somewhere, do you keep it for yourself, hidden behind other, more recognizable items on your bookshelf? Or do you tell someone about it, even if it’s only one person, two people? I could never enjoy books if everyone stopped reading them–I wouldn’t care. The best part of art, even as a reader or audience, is the sharing of something, and sometimes that’s no more than the sharing of the art or the appreciation of it or its entertainment value. A lot of people just like people more than books, and I can’t blame them. I would add that, relatively speaking, there are probably very few people who have even heard of Infinite Jest. Few of my (liberal arts college) friends have, and if they have it’s because they read an article about DFW when he died–they wouldn’t know it if he was still alive. Crime and Punishment they’ve heard of depending on what high school they went to, but high school classes are not where most people went for social value and for talking about things that meant anything to them.
See, but this is an attitude I see all too often here at HTML and in the indie lit world at large: “we have to assume the greater proportion of readers aren’t interested…” No! We don’t! I give away copies of Dear Everybody all the time, and every single friend (and non-writer) loves loves loves it. I’ve introduced lots of people to Scorch Atlas. My husband used to read Tom Clancy and Dean R Koontz (a LONG time ago, before we met) and when we became friends I introduced him to literary fiction and now he reads all the same shit I read and buys all of your books and helps support this community. How many of your friends and family might read other stuff if you stopped assuming they wouldn’t like it? How do you know until you’ve tried?
Tracy, I am an idiot. I totally misread your comment, and you and I are in total agreement. I still stand by what I said, but not in response to your statement, which reflects my own exactly. Oops and mentally hanging my head in shame.
“art’s most profound act is to make humans happy, through very complicated…”
Agreed: complicated; too few people understand/appreciate the kind of “happy” that isn’t fun. My favorite folksy way of expressing the diff between “Entertainment” and “Art” is that the former is like the friend who always tells you what you want to hear, and the latter is the friend who doesn’t.
I would add this about the enjoyment of movies: you can watch them with someone else, with an entire group of people, all at the same time. Everyone will laugh at the same time because they all get to the joke, or the delivery, at the same exact time. Reading Twilight now, like reading Harry Potter for the past decade, is probably the closest thing a book can come to being so communal. Escapism is better when you’re doing it with someone else.
i like twilight. i read all of the books in succession over 3 days and felt warm. it seems weird to post saying ‘oh why would anyone read this shitty YA book that i havent read’.
oh why the fuck does anyone eat squid. seriously squid tastes like shit. why do people eat squid. oh what. people like different things. but squid tastes like shit. no, i dont see how someone could like squid. i know people are different but squid tastes like shit. it tastes like shit okay. serious what are people thinking eating squid. what oh no i havent tried squid. but you know, it looks not so nice, and it smells funny. dont know how people could ever eat it.
I like yr conception of communal reading. my question is answered. thank you, strikes.
Do you think this same experience of communal reading occurs in the classroom, where texts are forced to be read and discussed communally? I ask fully understanding that the hierarchal structure of the classroom prevent a truly communal experience.
1. The point you offer, supposedly taken from Polyani, is not exactly news to anyone who’s read a few pages of Marx.
2. It takes someone who comes from a left background to produce a “left” anti-communist critique of capitalism as an alternative to Marxism.
3. Which is what the Ford Foundation was paying for, and they got it.
4. What humanity needs is not the regulation of the profit system but its abolition.
Roxane, I tried to clarify my question, which was poorly worded, in my comments above. I meant to ask why it is that people gravitate towards reading one book versus another. I want to understand the cultural phenomenon of it. Why have people en masse chosen this one series of books over say, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars Trilogy? Red Mars also offers a great deal of entertainment, though not nearly as many saucy intense looks as Belle & Edward exchange. I’m not saying people who read Twilight aren’t good readers, nor that I am a better reader than they are. I don’t think my taste is “better” than theirs either. At all.
I haven’t read Twilight. If I ever have the time, I probably will. I’ve read Harry Potter. I liked it. I read the whole series. Every word.
Furthermore, I have no basis for any elitism on my part. I watch and enjoy romantic comedies. I’ve watched and enjoyed Twilight, though I have to admit, the lack of plot in the second movie kind of bothered me. Did anything actually happen in the movie?
I liked Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. I am also currently enjoying Underworld.
Reading!
because different people like different things…
Lily, I think it was the “wtf are they thinking?” that threw people.
If you want to conduct further research within a historical framework that doesn’t involve vampires, I recommend Babysitter’s Club. You get female bonding, beach makeouts and Juvenile Diabetes.
marketing.
It is okay! I am glad we agree. I give my mom stuff to read all the time that I think she’ll like (stuff not Daphne DuMaurier, which, you know, she’s free to read and enjoy, but I’d like her to have reading material more rewarding if she wants it) and she usually loves it. And sometimes she doesn’t, but an earnest, eager recommendation can do a lot, I think.
I’m not deriding any books at all, or the people who read them. I read all the Harry Potter books and thought they were pretty good (though nowhere near as good as anything by Diana Wynne Jones) and I have a lot of friends who pretty much only read bestsellers and I have no problem with that. I understand that bookstores don’t do a whole lot of traffic in Joshua Cohen’s books, and bestsellers have always been prominently displayed. But I am troubled by the “event” phenomenon that bestsellers have become. I’m divided on this–one part of me thinks, who cares, people are reading, but the other part worries because it’s self-perpetuating–for even a best-seller to really sell today, it has to be an event. It’s like people will only buy a book if it’s an event, and are they even reading the book half the time? I know a lot of people–smart people–who probably the only books they’ve read in the last ten yeas were Harry Potter, DaVinci Code, and Twilight. That’s fine, but if they had instead read War and Peace or Scorch Atlas or Fugue State or something instead, would they maybe have enjoyed the experience more or found it more fulfilling–found it a reason to buy and read more books and even maybe support indie lit?
I think a lot of it depends on the specifics of a particular classroom and the students who are there. I only have anecdotal evidence or whatever you’d call it, and I’m just 22 years old, so most of what I say comes from my own (very limited) experiences and some undisciplined thought about it. I had a fantastic English class my last year of high school. There were about a dozen kids, and three or four of us were genuinely interested in reading the kinds of books and poems that end up in high school English classes. The rest, luckily, were open enough to trying things out, and even if you could tell they’d rather be talking about something else, they seemed to get something out of the class (admittedly, sometimes it was mostly just making fun of Raskolnikov or wondering how lonely Joseph Conrad was, but they still obviously read the books rather than the SparkNotes, and sharing any experience isn’t necessarily about loving it–going back to a movies analogy, there are always B movie cult classics, for example). All the same, we all were dying to get out of there, or I was at least and I loved the class. There’s something about the imposition of a structure that made me, and I think probably makes a lot of kids, feel somewhat claustrophobic or maybe just bored and pissed off that we’re a little at the mercy of the structure. But one of the things that I think gets in the way of having a “shared reading experience” in the classrooms we have right now is that thinking about what you read and analyzing it often seem to be disparate things, and analytical thought is what is practiced in the classroom. I only distinguish between the two in how they are presented, and to a greater extent in how they are perceived–analytical thought has its own, cold vocabulary and a goal, and (in classroom settings) seems to be a measurable thing, quantifiable to a degree, no matter whether the teacher says that they’re assigning grades based on a sense of real effort and thought, etc. What’s more, even if the best English teachers don’t intend it to do so, it seems to follow a pretty linear path of acquiring a skill set. (I would argue that this describes, with some degree of accuracy at least, the structure of studying literary criticism and gaining acceptance in the field, which is related but not completely relevant to this discussion.) Reading is no longer experiential, but one half of an accomplishment, the other half of which is often miserably attempted in a classroom in a building where most kids who are fortunate enough to have safe havens elsewhere don’t want to be. The reason I enjoyed my class was that the kids who were into it didn’t seem to be trying to accomplish anything, but sincerely wanted to talk about what they liked or didn’t like in the books or poems. The insights they had and gave were incidental to the experience of having arrived at them. But this, I think, is rare or at least uncommon, and I’m not sure that kids who have trouble talking about books in that kind of critical way see these “accomplishments” in the same light that I did (as incidental to enjoyment). In a classroom–as opposed, I guess, to a book club, or just a group of friends–those insights look pretty much like the desired end result, and one to work (work, not strive) toward. They are an imposition layered on top of what reading had started out as, which is something that I think is probably different for a lot of people, but for many or most does not have a lot to do with words like “synesthesia” or (maybe more appropriate if we’re talking about most high school classes) “allusion.” It probably has more to do with words like “oh man!” and “shit!” and “fuck!” It’s how I talk about things I like, anyway. I only appreciate things like synesthesia and malapropisms because I write, and one part of what makes art interesting for me is the craft itself rather than the way that you “feel” your way through creating it, even if in the end that’s what your left with, feeling your way around the only ways you know how.
I’m sorry this reply isn’t too structured–it’s not something I’ve thought enough about really to have gotten any structure around my thoughts, and in a way I’m trying to figure out just what they are as I write. I don’t know if this will be helpful or confusing, but I’m reminded of a lot of writers that many kids get into in high school–guys like Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut’s great for a lot of kids (I was one of them, and I pretty much still am) because he is thought-provoking but also very direct about it–his only tricks weren’t puzzles or obscurations* of thought, but were as a crafts- or tradesman, so to speak, were storytelling tricks that he picked up writing in pulps and popular short story publications. He might have had a lot of shortcomings in his writing, but he was easy to read without being mindless (he wasn’t “just a page turner,” so to speak), and is the perfect guy to get a lot of sixteen-year-olds to start looking around themselves, and not only that but to start talking about what they see, too. Or I guess he’s the perfect guy to connect these things to the act of reading and writing. The metaphors or allegories he had were too obvious to even bother discussing or thinking very hard about, so there wasn’t any “analytical” work to do, really–you just walk away from it with a thought that began almost as a feeling, or a feeling that arose from a thought, rather than a thought that led to a hard conclusion that can be expressed in a thesis statement**. (It helps that, except for some schools that I’ve heard read Cat’s Cradle or Slaugherhouse-Five, almost everyone seems to encounter him outside of the classroom, so there’s nothing to accomplish when you pick him up. Maybe I’d think differently about Cat’s Cradle if I’d had to read it for class in tenth grade, though–I don’t know.) What’s more, he was writing in a vernacular that sounds more like our own, in a culture that’s about as close to ours as you can get without adding iPads to it. The closer you get to someone’s gut, so to speak, the more likely they are to respond to it***.
* – Just a note: “obscurations” is another word that I only mean to reflect how things are perceived, not necessarily how they are. With some exceptions–I’m looking at you, Eliot****–I think the most difficult parts of a good book to decipher are the very ideas which the author him- or herself is struggling to arrive at a conclusion on, or is merely posing questions about.
** – This is also about perceptions. I have a feeling that a lot of people would care more about what they read in high school classes if they didn’t have something else (what they’re going to say about it) on their minds at the time of reading. Sometimes I felt like people came in with prepared statements, which is not how you go about being “communal,” to go back to that word, unless it’s ritualistic and everyone has the script.
*** – There’s probably a lot more going on here than just this, because I don’t think you can get any closer to our “culture” than DFW or DeLillo, or some of what Pynchon has been doing more recently. I do think that Vonnegut’s and others’ voices or writing styles are more recognizably conversational, however, and even if he is politically pretty far to side, he seems more like the kind of person you expect to run into on a normal day.
**** – Also, because I don’t want to start any arguments here, I think there’s something to say for works in which everything is not handed to you by the author’s own intention, even if none of them make it to my personal list of favorites. I’ll keep my thoughts on modernists / American modernists to myself, which are not all derisive, and are very often flattering.
No conclusions, just thoughts.
Also, looking over some of this, I’m not completely sure I answered your question, at least not head on. I’m also not sure I remember what it was. We were talking about vampires, right?
I guess my response would have been better stated like this: if you get kids who are actually reading and participating, there is that sense where everyone’s experiencing the same thing at the same time, but there are a lot of things that can get in the way of the enjoyment that a communal experience of a thing can often bring. There’s no obstacle to reading Twilight and sharing the reading experience, except maybe for Meyer’s writing style. (Okay I’ve been really kind to her, I had to get one word in.)
WHOA WHOA WHOA
THERE WASN’T A MIDNIGHT RELEASE PARTY FOR “EMMA”??? WHY NOT???
JURASSIC PARK IS STILL A STRONG NOVEL. ALONG WITH “SPHERE” IT IS ONE OF HIS BETTER ONES.
A lot of people–I would guess most people–don’t get very much out of being alone in what they enjoy or appreciate. I don’t know how Meyer’s publishers managed to market the books to the point that they didn’t need to anymore, that as soon as popular magazines or papers got wind of any news about the series they’d write about it because it would sell their magazines, not because they were paid to run an advert. But however it all happened, Twilight is immensely popular, and that’s one of the best things about a book or a movie for a lot of people. This isn’t bad, it’s actually immensely optimistic, that once someone puts a book down they want to be able to talk about it with someone else, and most people (in the States at least, I can’t vouch for anywhere else in the world) know someone who has read and enjoyed Twilight. Very few people want to read in vacuums, but I don’t think this proclivity is limited to books–one of the things that make lovable but obscure movies so lovable is that they are incredibly easy to share, given that movies take no energy to watch and very little time, too. I mean, most of us probably don’t know too many people who read small press releases–at least no one whom we haven’t met in one way or another for the very reason that they’re involved in small presses in some way–so we come online to talk about things. When you find an unheard-of book that you love in a store somewhere, do you keep it for yourself, hidden behind other, more recognizable items on your bookshelf? Or do you tell someone about it, even if it’s only one person, two people? I could never enjoy books if everyone stopped reading them–I wouldn’t care. The best part of art, even as a reader or audience, is the sharing of something, and sometimes that’s no more than the sharing of the art or the appreciation of it or its entertainment value. A lot of people just like people more than books, and I can’t blame them. I would add that, relatively speaking, there are probably very few people who have even heard of Infinite Jest. Few of my (liberal arts college) friends have, and if they have it’s because they read an article about DFW when he died–they wouldn’t know it if he was still alive. Crime and Punishment they’ve heard of depending on what high school they went to, but high school classes are not where most people went for social value and for talking about things that meant anything to them.
See, but this is an attitude I see all too often here at HTML and in the indie lit world at large: “we have to assume the greater proportion of readers aren’t interested…” No! We don’t! I give away copies of Dear Everybody all the time, and every single friend (and non-writer) loves loves loves it. I’ve introduced lots of people to Scorch Atlas. My husband used to read Tom Clancy and Dean R Koontz (a LONG time ago, before we met) and when we became friends I introduced him to literary fiction and now he reads all the same shit I read and buys all of your books and helps support this community. How many of your friends and family might read other stuff if you stopped assuming they wouldn’t like it? How do you know until you’ve tried?
Tracy, I am an idiot. I totally misread your comment, and you and I are in total agreement. I still stand by what I said, but not in response to your statement, which reflects my own exactly. Oops and mentally hanging my head in shame.
I would add this about the enjoyment of movies: you can watch them with someone else, with an entire group of people, all at the same time. Everyone will laugh at the same time because they all get to the joke, or the delivery, at the same exact time. Reading Twilight now, like reading Harry Potter for the past decade, is probably the closest thing a book can come to being so communal. Escapism is better when you’re doing it with someone else.
No. I don’t consider this an issue because most readers throughout history have favored genre fiction (or more “popular” fiction) over literature. Look at the bestseller lists from the first half of the 20th C when everyone was supposedly reading Hemingway on the beach (they weren’t).
God creates dinosaurs.
God destroys dinosaurs.
God creates man.
Man destroys God.
Man creates dinosaurs.
Dinosaurs eat man.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9uuPza41Uw
I like yr conception of communal reading. my question is answered. thank you, strikes.
Do you think this same experience of communal reading occurs in the classroom, where texts are forced to be read and discussed communally? I ask fully understanding that the hierarchal structure of the classroom prevent a truly communal experience.
Polanyi, sorry, don’t know why I keep doing that.
“I don’t consider this an issue because most readers throughout history have favored genre fiction (or more “popular” fiction) over literature.”
Bullshit. Historically, the novel has been what we would consider experimental, or new. Populist crap mirroring dumb versions of the lives people want, or which reads like tv shows people want to watch, is a rather recent thing. I know not every reader in 1925 spent their time obsessing over Ulysess, but no reader in 95 AD was totally unaware of the Satyricon. ‘Throughout history’ is a bold claim.
Agreed.
1. The point you offer, supposedly taken from Polyani, is not exactly news to anyone who’s read a few pages of Marx.
2. It takes someone who comes from a left background to produce a “left” anti-communist critique of capitalism as an alternative to Marxism.
3. Which is what the Ford Foundation was paying for, and they got it.
4. What humanity needs is not the regulation of the profit system but its abolition.
I liked Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. I am also currently enjoying Underworld.
Reading!
Well, I’m pretty sure novels weren’t around in 95 AD.
Have fun on your soap box. Only insecure writers and readers go out of their way to degrade the reading choices of others. The world’s a pretty big place.
By the way, you contradict yourself here:
“Bullshit. Historically, the novel has been what we would consider experimental, or new. Populist crap mirroring dumb versions of the lives people want, or which reads like tv shows people want to watch, is a rather recent thing.”
It is okay! I am glad we agree. I give my mom stuff to read all the time that I think she’ll like (stuff not Daphne DuMaurier, which, you know, she’s free to read and enjoy, but I’d like her to have reading material more rewarding if she wants it) and she usually loves it. And sometimes she doesn’t, but an earnest, eager recommendation can do a lot, I think.
I think a lot of it depends on the specifics of a particular classroom and the students who are there. I only have anecdotal evidence or whatever you’d call it, and I’m just 22 years old, so most of what I say comes from my own (very limited) experiences and some undisciplined thought about it. I had a fantastic English class my last year of high school. There were about a dozen kids, and three or four of us were genuinely interested in reading the kinds of books and poems that end up in high school English classes. The rest, luckily, were open enough to trying things out, and even if you could tell they’d rather be talking about something else, they seemed to get something out of the class (admittedly, sometimes it was mostly just making fun of Raskolnikov or wondering how lonely Joseph Conrad was, but they still obviously read the books rather than the SparkNotes, and sharing any experience isn’t necessarily about loving it–going back to a movies analogy, there are always B movie cult classics, for example). All the same, we all were dying to get out of there, or I was at least and I loved the class. There’s something about the imposition of a structure that made me, and I think probably makes a lot of kids, feel somewhat claustrophobic or maybe just bored and pissed off that we’re a little at the mercy of the structure. But one of the things that I think gets in the way of having a “shared reading experience” in the classrooms we have right now is that thinking about what you read and analyzing it often seem to be disparate things, and analytical thought is what is practiced in the classroom. I only distinguish between the two in how they are presented, and to a greater extent in how they are perceived–analytical thought has its own, cold vocabulary and a goal, and (in classroom settings) seems to be a measurable thing, quantifiable to a degree, no matter whether the teacher says that they’re assigning grades based on a sense of real effort and thought, etc. What’s more, even if the best English teachers don’t intend it to do so, it seems to follow a pretty linear path of acquiring a skill set. (I would argue that this describes, with some degree of accuracy at least, the structure of studying literary criticism and gaining acceptance in the field, which is related but not completely relevant to this discussion.) Reading is no longer experiential, but one half of an accomplishment, the other half of which is often miserably attempted in a classroom in a building where most kids who are fortunate enough to have safe havens elsewhere don’t want to be. The reason I enjoyed my class was that the kids who were into it didn’t seem to be trying to accomplish anything, but sincerely wanted to talk about what they liked or didn’t like in the books or poems. The insights they had and gave were incidental to the experience of having arrived at them. But this, I think, is rare or at least uncommon, and I’m not sure that kids who have trouble talking about books in that kind of critical way see these “accomplishments” in the same light that I did (as incidental to enjoyment). In a classroom–as opposed, I guess, to a book club, or just a group of friends–those insights look pretty much like the desired end result, and one to work (work, not strive) toward. They are an imposition layered on top of what reading had started out as, which is something that I think is probably different for a lot of people, but for many or most does not have a lot to do with words like “synesthesia” or (maybe more appropriate if we’re talking about most high school classes) “allusion.” It probably has more to do with words like “oh man!” and “shit!” and “fuck!” It’s how I talk about things I like, anyway. I only appreciate things like synesthesia and malapropisms because I write, and one part of what makes art interesting for me is the craft itself rather than the way that you “feel” your way through creating it, even if in the end that’s what your left with, feeling your way around the only ways you know how.
I’m sorry this reply isn’t too structured–it’s not something I’ve thought enough about really to have gotten any structure around my thoughts, and in a way I’m trying to figure out just what they are as I write. I don’t know if this will be helpful or confusing, but I’m reminded of a lot of writers that many kids get into in high school–guys like Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut’s great for a lot of kids (I was one of them, and I pretty much still am) because he is thought-provoking but also very direct about it–his only tricks weren’t puzzles or obscurations* of thought, but were as a crafts- or tradesman, so to speak, were storytelling tricks that he picked up writing in pulps and popular short story publications. He might have had a lot of shortcomings in his writing, but he was easy to read without being mindless (he wasn’t “just a page turner,” so to speak), and is the perfect guy to get a lot of sixteen-year-olds to start looking around themselves, and not only that but to start talking about what they see, too. Or I guess he’s the perfect guy to connect these things to the act of reading and writing. The metaphors or allegories he had were too obvious to even bother discussing or thinking very hard about, so there wasn’t any “analytical” work to do, really–you just walk away from it with a thought that began almost as a feeling, or a feeling that arose from a thought, rather than a thought that led to a hard conclusion that can be expressed in a thesis statement**. (It helps that, except for some schools that I’ve heard read Cat’s Cradle or Slaugherhouse-Five, almost everyone seems to encounter him outside of the classroom, so there’s nothing to accomplish when you pick him up. Maybe I’d think differently about Cat’s Cradle if I’d had to read it for class in tenth grade, though–I don’t know.) What’s more, he was writing in a vernacular that sounds more like our own, in a culture that’s about as close to ours as you can get without adding iPads to it. The closer you get to someone’s gut, so to speak, the more likely they are to respond to it***.
* – Just a note: “obscurations” is another word that I only mean to reflect how things are perceived, not necessarily how they are. With some exceptions–I’m looking at you, Eliot****–I think the most difficult parts of a good book to decipher are the very ideas which the author him- or herself is struggling to arrive at a conclusion on, or is merely posing questions about.
** – This is also about perceptions. I have a feeling that a lot of people would care more about what they read in high school classes if they didn’t have something else (what they’re going to say about it) on their minds at the time of reading. Sometimes I felt like people came in with prepared statements, which is not how you go about being “communal,” to go back to that word, unless it’s ritualistic and everyone has the script.
*** – There’s probably a lot more going on here than just this, because I don’t think you can get any closer to our “culture” than DFW or DeLillo, or some of what Pynchon has been doing more recently. I do think that Vonnegut’s and others’ voices or writing styles are more recognizably conversational, however, and even if he is politically pretty far to side, he seems more like the kind of person you expect to run into on a normal day.
**** – Also, because I don’t want to start any arguments here, I think there’s something to say for works in which everything is not handed to you by the author’s own intention, even if none of them make it to my personal list of favorites. I’ll keep my thoughts on modernists / American modernists to myself, which are not all derisive, and are very often flattering.
No conclusions, just thoughts.
Also, looking over some of this, I’m not completely sure I answered your question, at least not head on. I’m also not sure I remember what it was. We were talking about vampires, right?
I guess my response would have been better stated like this: if you get kids who are actually reading and participating, there is that sense where everyone’s experiencing the same thing at the same time, but there are a lot of things that can get in the way of the enjoyment that a communal experience of a thing can often bring. There’s no obstacle to reading Twilight and sharing the reading experience, except maybe for Meyer’s writing style. (Okay I’ve been really kind to her, I had to get one word in.)
No. I don’t consider this an issue because most readers throughout history have favored genre fiction (or more “popular” fiction) over literature. Look at the bestseller lists from the first half of the 20th C when everyone was supposedly reading Hemingway on the beach (they weren’t).
God creates dinosaurs.
God destroys dinosaurs.
God creates man.
Man destroys God.
Man creates dinosaurs.
Dinosaurs eat man.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9uuPza41Uw
Polanyi, sorry, don’t know why I keep doing that.
“I don’t consider this an issue because most readers throughout history have favored genre fiction (or more “popular” fiction) over literature.”
Bullshit. Historically, the novel has been what we would consider experimental, or new. Populist crap mirroring dumb versions of the lives people want, or which reads like tv shows people want to watch, is a rather recent thing. I know not every reader in 1925 spent their time obsessing over Ulysess, but no reader in 95 AD was totally unaware of the Satyricon. ‘Throughout history’ is a bold claim.
Agreed.
Well, I’m pretty sure novels weren’t around in 95 AD.
Have fun on your soap box. Only insecure writers and readers go out of their way to degrade the reading choices of others. The world’s a pretty big place.
By the way, you contradict yourself here:
“Bullshit. Historically, the novel has been what we would consider experimental, or new. Populist crap mirroring dumb versions of the lives people want, or which reads like tv shows people want to watch, is a rather recent thing.”
I read the Harry Potters. I read Dan Brown. I read Eat, Pray, Love. I read Pillars of the Earth. I read Hunger Games. I started Twilight, but the copy was only probably the 5th or 6th printing and Meyer, her editor(s), her proofreaders and the howevermanymillion regular readers at that point hadn’t noticed the use of ‘moats’ instead of ‘motes’ in reference to dust, and my own particular type of assholery mixed with some OCD, and I couldn’t let the fucking moat go. Had to stop. I’m assuming they’ve fixed this by now? Anyway, I’m saying I’m not totally anti- reading popular fiction. I’m anti- reading only popular fiction. In the daily reading of whatever my mom or the guys at work are reading I do keep this opinion to myself, though, as it’s pointless.
By “bullshit” I meant “not the whole story”.
I’m not saying folks shouldn’t read things I deem shit, I’m saying your assertion that people have always preferred to read what I would’ve deemed shit is half wrong- people may’ve read their era’s Twilights, but they were at least aware of their era’s Marksons. Today’s readers don’t just prefer popular, genre fiction- they largely know nothing else. This hasn’t been the case “throughout history”.
I guess I should respond to the post’s question, rather than just bitch about an aspect of your response ( but which response I basically agree with, actually): People probably read Twilight for the same reasons I watched A-Team in theaters and eat waaay too much cheese generally: great marketing or childhood trauma or some such shit
Thank god people did read Twilight, though. And Dan Brown and the Harry Potters: how gloom-and-doom would the prognosis of this industry we all obviously love be without the sales those three authors racked up in the last decade?
I read the Harry Potters. I read Dan Brown. I read Eat, Pray, Love. I read Pillars of the Earth. I read Hunger Games. I started Twilight, but the copy was only probably the 5th or 6th printing and Meyer, her editor(s), her proofreaders and the howevermanymillion regular readers at that point hadn’t noticed the use of ‘moats’ instead of ‘motes’ in reference to dust, and my own particular type of assholery mixed with some OCD, and I couldn’t let the fucking moat go. Had to stop. I’m assuming they’ve fixed this by now? Anyway, I’m saying I’m not totally anti- reading popular fiction. I’m anti- reading only popular fiction. In the daily reading of whatever my mom or the guys at work are reading I do keep this opinion to myself, though, as it’s pointless.
By “bullshit” I meant “not the whole story”.
I’m not saying folks shouldn’t read things I deem shit, I’m saying your assertion that people have always preferred to read what I would’ve deemed shit is half wrong- people may’ve read their era’s Twilights, but they were at least aware of their era’s Marksons. Today’s readers don’t just prefer popular, genre fiction- they largely know nothing else. This hasn’t been the case “throughout history”.
I guess I should respond to the post’s question, rather than just bitch about an aspect of your response ( but which response I basically agree with, actually): People probably read Twilight for the same reasons I watched A-Team in theaters and eat waaay too much cheese generally: great marketing or childhood trauma or some such shit
Thank god people did read Twilight, though. And Dan Brown and the Harry Potters: how gloom-and-doom would the prognosis of this industry we all obviously love be without the sales those three authors racked up in the last decade?
Jesus Christ…
All the snobby-snobs in this thread watch crap films. Why not ask, Why do elitist masturbatory indie snobs watch The A-Team when they’ve yet to exhaust every last frame of Bunuel, Herzog, Tarkovsky?
On some film board, people are saying, Poor elitist masturbatory indie snobs…It’s because they just can’t conceive of anything else!
Srs question, guys. Why does Lily Hoang view internets pr0n when she could be staring at Muybridge? No, rlly. I just want to know.
Jesus Christ…
All the snobby-snobs in this thread watch crap films. Why not ask, Why do elitist masturbatory indie snobs watch The A-Team when they’ve yet to exhaust every last frame of Bunuel, Herzog, Tarkovsky?
On some film board, people are saying, Poor elitist masturbatory indie snobs…It’s because they just can’t conceive of anything else!
Srs question, guys. Why does Lily Hoang view internets pr0n when she could be staring at Muybridge? No, rlly. I just want to know.