“For example: A writer sets out to write science fiction but isn’t familiar with the genre, hasn’t read what’s been written. This is a fairly common situation, because science fiction is known to sell well but, as a subliterary genre, is not supposed to be worth study—what’s to learn?
It doesn’t occur to the novice that a genre is a genre because it has a field and focus of its own; its appropriate and particular tools, rules, and techniques for handling the material; its traditions; and its experienced, appreciative readers—that it is, in fact, a literature. Ignoring all this, our novice is just about to reinvent the wheel, the space ship, the space alien, and the mad scientist, with cries of innocent wonder. The cries will not be echoed by the readers.
Readers familiar with that genre have met the space ship, the alien, and the mad scientist before. They know more about them than the writer does. In the same way, critics who set out to talk about a fantasy novel without having read any fantasy since they were eight, and in ignorance of the history and extensive theory of fantasy literature, will make fools of themselves because they don’t know how to read the book. They have no contextual information to tell them what its tradition is, where it’s coming from, what it’s trying to do, what it does.
This was liberally proved when the first Harry Potter book came out and a lot of literary reviewers ran around shrieking about the incredible originality of the book. This originality was an artifact of the reviewers’ blank ignorance of its genres (children’s fantasy and the British boarding-school story), plus the fact that they hadn’t read a fantasy since they were eight. It was pitiful. It was like watching some TV gourmet chef eat a piece of buttered toast and squeal, ‘But this is delicious! Unheard of! Where has it been all my life?’”
Another Ursula K. LeGuin banger:
“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”
can't be a communist unless you're hitting something with a big hammer 20 hours a day
or using a sickle that's why they are both in the flag it's prescriptive
It's not a dialectical opinion anyway. Material conditions are basal, and shape ideology and culture and art, but the way people shape those within the conditions is what changes the material conditions.
Or you know, there'd be no point to being a communist, it'd either be inevitable or impossible.
Of course art can be a vehicle for ideas and change!
Yes! But I think the usual pushback comes from conflict with libs that start from the extreme opposite end of the argument and who believe no organization, no theory is necessary, all you need is CIVIL DISCOURSE, throw in some controversial piece of art and then go on to unironically believe that alone is enough to change people's mind or even leave a lasting impression, you know in complete contradiction with the treat based society where any media older than 6-18 months is "ancient" and therefore irrelevant.
TL;DR leftist art is sometimes appropriated by shit libs with civil discourse syndrome and that sometimes leads to bad argumentation etc.
That's the beauty of the MCU. It fetishizes the status quo and throws cascading fistfuls of slop so milquetoast that it redefines art.
To be fair, a British person would probably be shocked to eat buttered toast
I remember a British treat defender being very mad here on Hexbear that I said that their cuisine plundered the world and did a remarkable job of not learning that many meaningful lessons about how to prepare or serve what they plundered.
I think its dumb to shit on a cuisine like that and you are small-minded for doing so. Someone on here did the same with French food, seen it online about Slavic food, Philipines, Cuban, etc. Same energy. Like fuck off, its a whole country. You think they don't have nice things to eat in a whole country? Who are you, the food critic from the rat movie? Snob. Food is delicious everywhere at any price point. Not every single place is good, but everywhere has good food I mean. Have you ever even been to the UK or are you just copying internet slogans again?
I mean there are actual, historic reasons that "British food" is bad and bland (tl;dr: war rationing annihilating older recipes and leaving a generation with stunted tastes) and has been partially supplanted by food from immigrant cultures. For most of their history European foods would have been heavily limited in available ingredients but people work out how to make do and get flavor out of what grows locally, but capitalism and the wars of the 20th century destroyed a whole lot of that.
I have a theory that the same is true of American food in a similar way to how it's true of American beers, which had their traditional recipes and production methods destroyed by first Prohibition and then both a corporate stranglehold and war rationing leading to the better part of a century where more or less all the beer being produced and consumed in the US was just the absolute worst garbage. Capitalist normalization of specific shelf-stable and easily mass-produced foods fucked the tastes of multiple generations, along with obscenely cheap meat and dairy products and the glut of corn syrup meaning all the knowledge and traditions and skills involved in cooking were wiped away, rendered unnecessary by frozen packs of cured meats surrounded by flavorless over-steamed shelf-stable/machine-harvest-durable vegetable bits and noodles swimming in sugar sauce being sold to people rendered too exhausted by the demands of capitalism to put more than the minimum of effort into food prep.
Or how about curry is good and also french fries (British food) are also good? How about yummy food tastes good in my tummy and who gives a shit about the world wars. American beer is terrible now? Comrade, a pbr can costs a dollar fifty at the bar and the second one tastes better than the first one, I promise!
Honestly, I do understand that there is a very high ceiling for how good food can be (less so for beer but also). I've had the good stuff! It was great. Its just, my relationship with food is a loving one, I don't understand the relentless hate! That country made the munchie box, gregg's, etc. Lovely! Bourbons, chocolate digestives with tea, scones with jam and cream! All that bland wartime hard-tack food, give it to me please! Snobs are rotten. Oh you don't like Britney Spears. Lady Gaga sucks huh? Good for you! Shut up!
Or how about curry is good
I did say that food from immigrant cultures has partially filled in the void left by the annihilation of traditional recipes. Like you look at old British recipes and they're often going to be more flavorful than mid-to-late 20th century recipes, and there are material reasons for that. I can't speak to the state of things in the UK now, but in the US it seems like there's a sort of renaissance of people trying to relearn how to actually cook (in a similar fashion to how breweries started producing better beers and rediscovering how to do better than just making pre-skunked slop by the ton) and a lot of more flavorful adaptations from other cultures are becoming standard foods to edge in on 20th century American food which is also having to innovate a bit and start to be made better.
Comrade, a pbr can costs a dollar fifty at the bar
That is an awful deal. You can get an actually good beer for that much a bottle in a six pack from the grocery store, and you can get cheap garbage beers for like 50 cents a can or bottle sometimes. Bottom shelf vodka and store-brand soda is even better, working out to like a quarter per drink.
I do understand that there is a very high ceiling for how good food can be (less so for beer but also). I’ve had the good stuff!
I want to stress that there's a difference between good food and expensive food. Even the cheapest ingredients can easily be turned into amazing food, and expensive foods are often lazy garbage that's just trying to rest on the decadence of its ingredients. Which sort of circles back around to my point, that people when limited in their options innovate and find methods of cooking what they have available in a way that makes it good, while the glut of cheap "decadent" ingredients combined with the push for shelf-stability over quality has had the exact opposite effect, where instead of learning methods to make something good people just slap something expensive (or something that should be expensive given the material costs its production has) in a pan and settle for that.
You are massively condescending! When I say good food I mean good food! Don't assume I mean expensive. When I say at the bar I mean at the bar, like with a bartender involved! Its actually more expensive than that because you have to tip. Take your shitty vodka and faygo back to middle school, that is actually disgusting and worth being a snob to avoid!
I already know all that shit, don't talk to me like a child! Did you just learn all this or something, that you need so much to lecture about it? Are you writing a paper? You are repeating yourself needlessly, you were perfectly clear originally. And correct but I don't care! I like ploughman's lunch and shephard's pie. I like a cornish pasty. I mean, I'm vegan now but I liked them plenty before I was. These are bad food? Categorically? What a sad life to be such a hater!
:downbear:
When I say at the bar I mean at the bar, like with a bartender involved!
"I want to pay top-shelf prices to have a beleaguered food service worker hand me a can of bottom shelf slop, for some reason. I really have a pressing need to feel power over someone, so I can clap and squeal with glee as I throw money around to make them take a can out of a box for me."
Not everyone can afford to pay a 300% markup on slop for the "fun" of being waited on.
Take your shitty vodka and faygo back to middle school, that is actually disgusting and worth being a snob to avoid!
Vodka and tap water is better than any cheap beer, at a tenth the cost. It's awful, but it doesn't taste like cheerios, sugar, and metal with an undercurrent of rot the way the absolute worst beers do. Bad beers just really have no place: they're way too expensive for how bad they are, and they're not meaningfully cheaper than much better beers. Beer of all fermented drinks has such a cheap practical ceiling on quality that you hit it around the point where you start getting into the price range of bottom shelf wines (which also have no place because they're as bad as bottom shelf beer but cost way more). For bad cheap drinks nothing beats liquor, and for good cheap drinks good beer is still affordable enough to justify over bad beer.
“I want to pay top-shelf prices to have a beleaguered food service worker hand me a can of bottom shelf slop, for some reason. I really have a pressing need to feel power over someone, so I can clap and squeal with glee as I throw money around to make them take a can out of a box for me.” basically yes you have got me exactly, except there is often also loud music and the clapping and squealing is sort of along to the beat.
Just flippin it on you, I don't actually hate vodka. I pretty much like anything. Except malt liquor
You are massively condescending
impossible to be condescending to a brit. they are bog humans lacking a capacity to understand insults
french fries (British food)
those are very famously french. There is good British food but listing French food somewhat misses the point
part of the issue also is Americans don't think about the fact a lot of recipes they regularly make and eat are British. Apple pie for example
developed by the English chef Heston Blumenthal.
The perfect chip is British. There may be a lot wrong with our food culture but not deep fried potatoes.
Every other post I have made was but not this one. I am not the crazy one for thinking it is closed-minded and rude to just say "food from x country is bad". They have great boxed sandwiches for example
Funny because "I think all the food that comes from a foriegn country is bad" strikes me as exactly the sort of thing a nasty British person would say and I am saying the exact opposite!
Oui mate, may I call you bruv? I swear from the gates above I'll bust open your gums fore taking shite on beans on toast ya.
The thing is a presumed Yankee candle dickless dangle like yourself cannot appreciate the subtle flavour of syrupy canned beans on some damp, yet dry rectangle wheat.
the English eat boiled bog eels and make pudding out of blood lol
I've never had English eels but unagi is one of my favorite fish for sushi, same thing but raw! An eel is just a fish. And blood pudding is good and no weirder or more gross than any other sausage (the family it belongs in, despite the name). Which is pretty gross tbf, sausage is gross, hot dogs are gross. But yummy for me to eat yum!
That said, and with your username I am sure you agree. A full English is just a ruinous decision internally
A full English is just a ruinous decision internally
We fully agree on this. I have IBS.
I remember seeing a thread of 4chan about how white people's taste buds have evolved and become too advanced to the point where spices and seasoning are obsolete, and that's why they prefer bland food unlike the coloreds who still need salt and pepper
No one copes and seethes like the chanlords that claim everyone else is coping and seething. :wojak-nooo:
When you take the red pill, you have to eat the soggy cornflake sludge that they ate after leaving the Matrix
Indian food heavily uses tomatoes and chilies these days but that was stolen from South America.
Tea grows in India because a dude (Robert Fortune ) smuggled it out of China in the 1800s funnily enough
Chicken Tikka Masala is Scottish. There's really no winning this one for Britain.
the br*tish attempt at curries are embarrassing and a step away from ketchup
Indians love ketchup. We put ketchup in our instant noodles (Maagi is the most common brand) and pizza
Ketchup is great. Curry is even better. Engl*sh people serving you bastardized ketchup they claim is curry is not great.
Genuinely why is it not great? I think bastardization is good. Indo-Chinese food is excellent but it bears little resemblance to actual Chinese food.
Actually think about how much maslsa chai is a bastardization of of Chinese tea! It was smuggled out of their country and then we added milk, sugar, ginger, sometimes cardamom, cloves, black pepper.
Haven't actually tasted the dish myself so maybe it sucks
Yeah, I’ve basically never eaten food from a brit*sh restaurant that wasn’t massively under seasoned.
I’m all for remixing and bastardizing and combining food to make something new, It just has to be done well.
Engl*sh colonialism created an arrogance towards other cultures that has resulted in the majority of their cuisine being a boring mess.
Scotland is not like India they came in as full partners, the royal family post union was even the Scottish king.
The Scottish agreed to join in a union and let the new British empire use their larger army in return for the English providing Scottish aristocrats access to the slave trade. They were England's partners in crime not the victim and Scotland being poorer than England now is simply a natural consequence of Scotland in comparison to England being rural and sparsely populated.
The reason Montana has less money moving through it than New York is not due to New York colonially occupying Montana
I'm Indian and I agree with this. If a Desi person moves to the UK or America and then lives the majority of their life there then I think it's ok to call them British or American or from wherever they now are.
Britain =/= England, it's the word for all 3 countries. You are mistaking it for England
:british-maw: ya meen ya kin poot things wut ain't beans ohn toast?
Alright it's time to let something by Ursula K. LeGuin jump my reading order line.
On a similar note to what Ursula K LeGuin said, I'll never stop being irate that Eragon was so lucrative and popular when it was extremely derivative trash that did to literature action scenes what Rob Liefield did to comic book anatomy. :guts-rage:
They were terrible books, but I've never had any reason to dislike Chris Paolini personally. It's okay for people to like terrible books, even if they're heavily influenced by marketing. I think even Paolini has expressed embarrassment about Eragon in recent years.
It's admittedly been... uh... probably like 15 or 20 years since I read them, but I don't remember Eragon being as perniciously mean spirited and shitty as Harry Potter. It had a lot of problems, but those were mostly problems of a young, very inexperienced writer rather than anything actively or passively malicious.
That was the novelty. Then again how many other 15 year olds get that privilege?
IIRC that was kind of a marketting thing. He was like 15 when he started but he did the bulk of the writing when he was older (albeit still a teen, I'm pretty sure)
This is LeGuin's point though. Not that Harry Potter is un-PC or 'perniciously mean spirited and shitty' (funny thing to say about a book for children sorry), but that they are basic and derrivative, and in that Eragon was a far worse offender
I mean she did also call it that in another quote, linked upthread
good fare for its age group, but stylistically ordinary, imaginatively derivative, and ethically rather mean-spirited.
And I don't think that's a weird claim? HP does this thing where, when a character's bad, it becomes ok just say absolutely viscious things about them, usually about their weight or about how "mannish" they are
Oh true yeah Crab and Goyle and all that. Pretty rotten treatment. Eragon is sooo bad though is my thing
Eragon is derivative crap, but it's not actively offensive. Like, Rita Skeeter alone as a veiled stereotype is so much worse than anything in Eragon
Who was Skeeter supposed to be a stereotype of besides British tabloid reporters? Haven't read them since I was a baby, barely remember her
She was frequently described as mannish, with large hands. And she lies about an aspect of her identity so she can spy on children.
Given what we now know about Rowling, take a guess
Oh yeah the movies ironed out a LOT of this stuff. Like, the entire "Hermione discovers that there are house elves enslaved at Hogwarts and gets made fun of for trying to free them" subplot was basically removed from the movies entirely, and also the fact that werewolves are explicitly an AIDS allegory and most werewolves target children. It's disgusting garbage all the way down. Hollywood did SO much to launder Rowling's reptuation
....i like eragon. i remember trying to levitate rocks and shit with those spells lol. also arya+eragon OTP.
No shame in it. Back before social media destroyed my attention span, I read anything I could get my hands on and enjoyed all of it. Oh how I loved Ready Player One in middle school! I still use it for my username, the horror!
yeah, i found RP1 enjoyable, though to be honest, i've tried to reread it a couple times and it comes off as worse each time
honestly though respect for the grift, if I could become a millionaire just by copypasting literally every single story beat of Star Wars with a fantasy paint-job, I wouldn't fuckin hesitate
Huh? LeGuin isn't dunking on Harry Potter, she's criticizing its literary reviewers for being ignorant of its genres.
She has criticized Harry Potter before, more directly.
https://www.the-leaky-cauldron.org/2004/02/10/le-guin-no-fan-of-jkr/
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/feb/09/sciencefictionfantasyandhorror.ursulakleguin
In an online Q&A, author Ursula Le Guin was asked for her opinion on JK Rowling’s writing style. Quote: “I have no great opinion of it. When so many adult critics were carrying on about the “incredible originality” of the first Harry Potter book, I read it to find out what the fuss was about, and remained somewhat puzzled; it seemed a lively kid’s fantasy crossed with a “school novel”, good fare for its age group, but stylistically ordinary, imaginatively derivative, and ethically rather mean-spirited.”
Also, you may have missed this part of the previous link, or just didn't want to see it that way:
This was liberally proved when the first Harry Potter book came out and a lot of literary reviewers ran around shrieking about the incredible originality of the book. This originality was an artifact of the reviewers’ blank ignorance of its genres (children’s fantasy and the British boarding-school story), plus the fact that they hadn’t read a fantasy since they were eight. It was pitiful. It was like watching some TV gourmet chef eat a piece of buttered toast and squeal, ‘But this is delicious! Unheard of! Where has it been all my life?’”
She chose the comparison to the excessive praising of buttered toast deliberately, especially with her prior commentary on Harry Potter in mind.
I always thought the first few books were good precisely because they called back to classic fantasy of the 70s/80s with a bit of modern spin.
Philosopher's Stone could easily have been written by Raold Dahl.
Later books had a much more modern vibe. They read like a D&D adventure module.
lmfao at the br*tish in the comments pissed off about eating boiled bog eels.
Who is British? Not me, I just have eaten foods from a bunch of different places. I like to do so!
