ts big dogs 2014 edition #1: dostoyevsky vs austen

well this is easy

is it?????

sad man in him room

impossible

I am more attuned to Austen's mind and style than to Fyodor, who is constantly wringing his characters out like wet washcloths. Austen allows her people to be humanly flawed and challenged on a gentler, easier scale. But I would have to vote for Fyodor as the one whose ambitions covered a far greater breadth of material and ideas and whose body of work is the more impressive because of it.

austen is much more in control of her instrument, less reliant on cliche and caricature, more attentive to the details of other people's experience, and so much better at structure and symmetry and patterning "better" isn't even really the word. but if you like dusty he is bigger than all that: bigger than skill. it's not that he has Ideas it's that his characters do, and i can't think of a lot of artists who better explore (in so many different directions) the feeling of being in an ideological grip. (austen superfans welcome to insert here remarks on the concept of prejudice, which as the engine of outwardly perverse behavior is maybe not totally dissimilar to possession; maybe she is better, subtler, at this too.) his books are so alive to the feelings of thinking and talking (and questioning), to the details of the voices that pass through the head. (notes from underground in particular points forward to modernism and "stream-of-consciousness" and petersburg, doesn't it?) but i voted jane.

we're gonna need someone to note that if you can't read the russian then stfu

if dlh (<3) won't do it, then maybe sharivari? might well be true tho

thinking more abt this i don't mean to set up some kind of intricate-female-craftswoman/chaotic-male-genius dichotomy here; if the metric is "ideas" or ethical/ontological inquiry i think the omniscient moral consciousness of jane's authorial voice is absolutely alongside the christian agape the last 150 pages of every dostoevsky book remind you to pursue. (one thing i like about demons is that it troubles this vision the most--it does feature a home-stretch religious epiphany but there is much less of a sense that it has any power or that its recipient has really achieved awareness than there is with raskolnikov kissing the earth or alyosha walking down the hill or whatever.) i picked up emma just now cuz it's the one i haven't read, and on page literally 1:

The real evils indeed of Emma's situation were the power of having rather too much her own way and a disposition to think a little too well of herself; these were the disadvantages which threatened alloy to her many enjoyments. The danger, however, was at present so unperceived that they did not by any means rank as misfortunes with her.

the precise but totally unprim definition here of an evil or a vice--a quality that, as time passes, is going to corrupt and corrode your enjoyment of life--is very good. and you can hear shakespeare in "the disadvantages which threatened alloy to her many enjoyments". obv you can hear shakespeare everywhere, that's why they call it shakespeare, but that kind of metaphorical precision coupled with total rhythmic expertise puts her closer to him than most. plus the second sentence made me lol a little.

rather ftw

haha yeah i loved that! such a frowned-upon word by prose snobs (whole section on it in strunk and white) deployed so expertly, for a lol. and then a little right after! she wrote on the edge.

dlh doing great work on this thread so far but "i can't think of a lot of artists who better explore the feeling of being in an ideological grip" doesn't do much for me as a description of fyodor but totally works as one of jane

Notes from Underground is probably my decider here. the funniest, the truest.

Brothers Karamazov is the highpoint of mankinds cultural history. So fyodor.

"i can't think of a lot of artists who better explore the feeling of being in an ideological grip" doesn't do much for me as a description of fyodor but totally works as one of jane

ha yes. but yknow, in dostoevsky: all these characters consumed by obsessions. hostaged by thoughts. of gambling or guilt or revolution or nietzschian supremacy, or whatever the underground man's deal is--toxic narcissism, i guess. the possessed is a title for the whole career. but yeah austen's characters exist obv in a rly specific and constrained society and their friction against the convictions and expectations of their world is a big part of what is happening. this is a different kinda thing tho cuz all the characters are living in regency england together at the same time, whereas even in the meeting of the revolutionaries in demons the joke is that everyone's consumed by a different thing. (if ever a joke held up...) but there are other things in austen that are more personal i guess: fanny price's dissonance re class is her own fucked-up perception-filter and comes from her particular circumstances. and pride and prejudice, tho they're both reactions to regency society by alienated smart people, become in darcy+liz private demons; they distort and compel the way obsessions do in dusty. still obv the tone is way different, i mean everyone in dostoevsky is a madman.

voted. man I hated both of these when I was a teenager

too hard

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

ultima iv vs 868-hack

too hard

^

I think in the end I prefer the outlandishness of D's personalities. there is a direct savagery to the play of them that I like. they are wild and atomic, and immensely destructive.

Austen is astonishing tho. and I wd happily argue that in the social and personal interrelations, and the relation between internal thought, and authorial or character expression, there is no less a corseted savagery.

it's very possible that ultimately it's a form of exoticism that has me going for D.

Voted for Austen rather easily.

are you trying to kill me

what have I ever done to you thomp

I can't think of any novelists with the guile to position recessive and almost plodding characters as the loci of intelligence, and with the talent to create narrators who can both inhabit these recessive characters but step away at fraught moments so that as readers we can see them unmediated.

Is that what Austen's doing with Fanny Price, do you think? I've never been clear whether that character was intended by Austen as an admirable type, who simply fails to appeal to current sensibilities. All of her other heroines are vastly more likeable.

oh def I had Fanny and Anne Elliot in mind.

lol that Trilling essay alluded to in Metropolitan is actually very good on Mansfield Park; the would-be Fourierist gets the summary wrong.

maaan I thought you were talking about raskolnikov

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

If ever I needed a reminder why I don't actually post/read much on ILB, this result is the exact kind of reason why. :-/

because three quarters of the population express a marginal preference for dostoyevsky over Austen?

i did feel bad about reinforcing patriarchy when i voted for the gloomy fucker

And then the knee-jerk assumption that my objection is based purely on gender rather than aesthetics (I'm not your cartoon, Daphnis) is really the other part.

sorry, poor joke, marginally true as it happens

from my end i mean uggh ignore me

most of the voters in this thread expressed how hard a choice it was tho, the result is hardly a ringing manifesto of one over the other

good result

I abstained but ftr I'm a fan of this read the results ignore the thread approach to polls

I gotta say if the idea of having a conversation w ppl who do not share yr exact aesthetic preferences but are open minded to them is such anathema 2 u u shd probably admit to urself u have some important things to learn about human charity

u shd read the brothers karamazov

I didn't vote. I didn't want to have to pick. These two caught my heart at very different points in my life (D as a teenager, A a lot more recently). I don't even know how Brothers Karamazov would read now. I did read Pevear and Volokhonsky's The Adolescent a few years ago, and had that hard-to-verify suspicion that maybe translation wasn't doing it justice.

should have voted

tbh even though i agree that people posted very thoughtful things to this thread, i had a pretty negative "of course" reaction to the results. so many conversations about austen with dismissive men my whole life, can't help it.

and Dostoevsky was one of my first literary loves, right around the same time as Austen

Feel like Tolstoy would have been a more appropriate comparison? Idk

i like how different they are, though! it's a good comparison, even though it ruined my life

yeah all arguments aside i had a good long think about "what does this choice say about me?" before i clicked on Dostoyevsky and in the end it really came down to how important Notes from Underground is for me

Yeah, I also liked this choice because it made me question my asumption that D was just objectively so much better. But come on! He is! Had Jane Austen had, like, thirty more years to add to her ouvre, perhaps it would have been more equal, but as it is, it's a bit like comparing Wagner with Bizet.

is there going to be more of these or is that "#1" a tease? enjoying the high brow rumination on this thread.

petition to include non-literary big dogs as well (Picasso, Nietzsche, etc.)

Yeah, I also liked this choice because it made me question my asumption that D was just objectively so much better. But come on! He is!

you hate spinsters too

objective, such a joke word

dostoevsky wouldn't have been capable of the subtlety of mansfield park, which is almost as devastating in its own way as notes from underground.

Hadn't read enough of either to vote I fear, but Mansfield Park is probably the single book I've unsuccessfully started most times - five at least - it seems to be about so much of what I'm interested in, and so many people I admire esteem it so highly? But I can never get past page ten or so, I don't know know why?

When I read Underground it was a bit like Larkin to me in that it just seemed a reasonable person discussing the reasonable concerns of real life, things I had thought in basically the same words, and it made me wonder why no-one else had tried this before and so rarely since.

I have never been able to finish a Dostoyevsky book! Not even Notes From Underground, which, IIRC, was only 100 pages long and not one of the endless OMG will this man never shut up this is as endless as a Russian winter ones. It's just mystifying to me, how so many people could choose this turgid pile of poo over the greatest novelist the English language has ever produced.

(I can understand horseshoe's reaction to the results, but to be honest, I genuinely was expecting it to be more evenly split.)

((I also suspect my reaction to D is coloured by negative experiences with the ~types of people~ who repped for him.))

When I read Underground it was a bit like Larkin to me in that it just seemed a reasonable person discussing the reasonable concerns of real life

this is not how i would describe that book

the greatest novelist the English language has ever produced

ime outside of ilx the only straight men who will cop to this view are university professors

i love both dostoevsky and austen. i think austen is more invested in the integrity of the novel as a form and her books are elegant total constructions. dostoevsky was interested in the novel as a vehicle for ideas. i think bakhtin said that dostoevsky recognized the novel was an "open system" that allowed writers to do basically whatever they wanted, and what dostoevsky wanted to do was present a vision of the human psyche under extreme duress in order to, ultimately, reveal its fragility and convince readers of the necessity of religion. austen has points to make too but they never overwhelm the works, or never really seem to be the sole guiding purpose of her novels.

Austen was kind of inventing the novel as form as she was writing it tbf. i don't know much about the history of the Russian novel, don't know if Dostoevsky had as formative a role?

this is not how i would describe that book

Haha so obviously that was phrased deliberately challopsily but what sticks most for me from NftU is the bit about who gives way to whom on the promenade, and like every thought and action and decision mentioned was like an actual thing I'd thought or done re: the question of who gives way to whom on a promenade?

my attitude towards the narrator of NfU veers around like my attitude to myself: should we laugh with him or at him? is he pitiful or pathetic? isn't everything he says about the world he inhabits a kind of truth? i'm convinced that the book is bitterly funny throughout, but the uncertainty of who is laughing at who is, well, like life really.

my computer autocorrects dostoevsky to Dostoevsky but not austen. !!!!!!

xp yeah but for the underground man, all those little things are reasons to despise the world. even if he is right about a lot of his observations his reactions are incredibly maladaptive. and as you see in the end, the false sense of nobility or superiotity that is -- even at its best -- cold comfort for a guy like that who thinks he is living in a world of hypocrites is worse than worthless. he is the one who is cruel to the woman. as bad as he thinks the world is, he makes it a worse place. so like, "reasonable", idk. he is the ultimate fool.

i can see why dostoevsky is important for the kind of people given to grandiose self-pity or whatever and what he says to those people is often good advice; he doesn't flatter them. however, i sort of think austen is like, a more mature intelligence than dostoevsky. existentialist despair is an adolescent trap. dostoevsky understands this obviously but he thinks the way out has to be some sort of extreme revelation, christian humility or something. for austen and other sublime observers of human beings, the central thing to realize is that life goes on with or without you, and that there are plenty of things to feel and see and know without finding capital A answers.

have we had a discussion about the pantheon of russian writers? i sort of think that dostoevsky should be placed in a different, lower tier than chekhov, gogol, pushkin, and tolstoy but clearly i am not in the majority here.

i don't agree that extravagant emotions are solely adolescent nor that Austen's characters don't experience extravagant emotions, which i feel like you're implying there

Austen was kind of inventing the novel as form as she was writing it tbf
Austen was kind of inventing the novel as form as she was writing it tbf
Austen was kind of inventing the novel as form as she was writing it tbf
Austen was kind of inventing the novel as form as she was writing it tbf

^^^so much this!

"existentialist despair" is more specific than "extravagant emotions." it means raskolnikov thinking he is either a great man, beyond good and evil, or nothing; the he needs to redefine the coordinates of reality in order to survive.

also the thing is that dostoevsky has a more narrow range of personality types he is able to make interesting than someone like austen. the non-megalomaniacs in dostoevsky novels are often caricatures, in my view.

that's not what i take "existential despair" to mean, also i think i think Dostoyevsky is funnier and meaner than you seem to. Raskolnikov is a buffoon.

I think we have to distinguish between 'prose' and 'the novel', in a way. Bakhtin's claim was kinda that Dostoevsky is the prosiest prosaist ever, since, yeah, prose is an 'open system' (it's 'centrifugal', so more like 'opening system') The 'elegant constructions' of Austen is thereby kinda anti-ethical to what prose is, which is instead chaotic (and polyphonic and carnevalesque, etc) It would be very true to point out, that Dostoevsky's characters aren't really that strong, but again, it would miss the point, in that they are constructions in relations and in flux, they are constantly dialogical, rather than monological, and can hardly exist on their own. Which - SPOILER WARNING - they seldom manage to do.

I get why people would dismiss Dostoevsky as a person, as well as his characters. He seems to have been a creep, and his characters are creeps. Kinda like with Wagner. But D is still one of the greatest artists of all time. Come on, everybody, re-read The Grand Inquisitor, and tell me that ain't the highpoint of 18th century literature. Anywhere.

Or, you know, 19th century...

If ever I needed a reminder why I don't actually post/read much on ILB, this result is the exact kind of reason why. :-/

If ILB were the equivalent of gazing at myself in a mirror or listening to my own opinions echoed back to me, I would stop reading it or posting to it. Instead, ILB is diverse and therefore interesting.

His characters mostly seemed to just be a certain type. A certain type that just really, really strongly appealed to, or was related to by certain kinds of bookish dudes that congregated in liberal arts universities or bookish dude congregating places... like ILB.

the greatest novelist the English language has ever produced

ime outside of ilx the only straight men who will cop to this view are university professors

― horseshoe, Sunday, July 20, 2014 9:16 AM (59 minutes ago)

aka bookish dudes that congregate in liberal arts universities

I think very few ILB or bookish dudes feel any sort of kinship with Demitri Karamazov or Smerdyakov...

And on the other hand, ask this question on a forum that isn't english language, and you'd get even more lopsided results...

i think it has to do with the fact that dostoevsky's books, even in translation, are really viscerally powerful. you finish them with a sense that you have "endured" something and this often feels like a mark of greatness. and it is, in a way, but it's not the most important one.

A poll like this is set up to create an artificial opposition that does not mean anything in itself and bears only a tenuous relationship to any reality, and the result of such a poll is equally meaningless and unreal. The utility of it is to start conversation, which it has done.

what dostoevsky novel is that from?

The Idiot?

It's Dickens, right?

His characters mostly seemed to just be a certain type. A certain type that just really, really strongly appealed to, or was related to by certain kinds of bookish dudes that congregated in liberal arts universities or bookish dude congregating places

The only Dostoevsky I've read is The Idiot but I'm struggling to relate this to Prince Mishkin or Lizaveta Prokofyevna fwiw.

Hippolyte maybe, admittedly.

i think a lot of people read notes from underground and see themselves in the protagonist. usually, i hope, the reaction is "oh shit! my misanthropic superiority complex is ridiculous and promises to bring nothing but misery to myself and those around me."

in this sense, the book is an enormous boon to the world.

Except it's not a conversation. It's a bunch of college-educated witedudes FOR WHOM THE WHOLE LITERARY WORLD IS A MIRROR, congratulating themselves all "ooh, I wouldn't want a conversation that was just like a mirror!" in a room full of college-educated witedudes.

Yes, because a 19th century Russian Christian fundamentalist is obviously just like all of us...

tell us again how yr objections aren't about gender

is it a conversation yet

silly to deny that more boys are crazy about dusty and more girls about jane i guess (i guess?) and that these results do in part reflect ILB demographics but acting like this poll was "ts: hot wheels vs polly pocket" and consisted of nothing but smugly unchallenged paeans to hot wheels is idk it's just not v accurate

returning from a wedding last Memorial Day weekend I read P&P for the first time on the plane, laughing every few pages. At one point the dude in the aisle sea one row and left of me turned around, saw what I was reading, and looked at me as if I were Karl Marx in business class.

lol. i remember a conversation i had about austen with a dude in college. he was a friend; i got the impression he had always admired my taste *up to this point.* when he found out i liked austen he was so crestfallen like he had really thought i was the one smart girl and i had let him down. i remember him wrinkling his nose and mentioning that a girl he had known had really liked austen and that she was Mormon. he said Mormon like it was a species of insect. i remember thinking it would have been nice if he had considered why austen might appeal to a girl with a Mormon upbringing instead of just reacting with disgust.

i realize everything i've posted in this thread has been about the politics of taste but i love both of these writers a lot and don't know what to say about their work really.

The guys who condescend to women who only read Austen don't understand the women are making fun of them for sticking with Kerouac and sci-fi.

big dogs number three will be Kerouac vs sci fi

horseshoe i am enjoying and appreciating yr posts, i also wd find it pretty hard to say anything about the work of these two and the politics of taste stuff is part of why I picked them

i used to be v contemptuous of dostoevsky before being brought round by a devotee girlfriend, whom i never did succeed in getting into austen :(

Except it's not a conversation. It's a bunch of college-educated witedudes FOR WHOM THE WHOLE LITERARY WORLD IS A MIRROR, congratulating themselves all "ooh, I wouldn't want a conversation that was just like a mirror!" in a room full of college-educated witedudes.

If this truly reflects your opinion of ILB, then you might prefer a nice slice of pie instead.

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-OoWMMZAM6ds/Tw7wAPaTTbI/AAAAAAAAB-k/WVGNeMdiA8s/s1600/Eating+Crow+2.jpeg

returning from a wedding last Memorial Day weekend I read P&P for the first time on the plane, laughing every few pages. At one point the dude in the aisle sea one row and left of me turned around, saw what I was reading, and looked at me as if I were Karl Marx in business class.

Yeah, anybody holding up a copy of P&P on a plane and loudly LOLing every few minutes probably deserves a "look", let's be real.

...

lol policing

plane journeys with ppl laughing at their reading material is yr idea of heaven no doubt

this thread makes me feel bad for not really liking austen, tho i understand why ppl do. i've given her a try several times, and i always come away feeling the way i do after a long, tedious meeting at work. there are bits i remember fondly (the dad in 'pride and prejudice' is pretty funny) but i've never really found any of her characters that engaging or memorable. prob my fault, not hers.

frederik b is otm that dostoevsky comes from a world that's completely alien to ours in most ways, so much so that i don't think he can be blamed if pretentious college kids or whoever pretend to see themselves in his characters. anyway, the truly insufferable kids are the ones insisting they will never read dostoevsky because st. nabokov disapproved of him.

demons is my second favorite novel ever at this point but still feeling v good about my austen vote (beyond the natural pleasure of minority selfrighteousness) (i think)

halfway thru my first read of emma cuz of this thread, not embarassed to admit i keep track of characters like "oh right breckin meyer". maybe i'll try the gambler again next. found it too upsetting the first time tbh lol.

voted autism

hah clueless is the best. heckerling gets austen.

what's the best austen to start with? i actually remember liking 'emma' more than the others i tried, but ended up misplacing my copy during a move.

P&P is as good a place. Also Persuasion because it's short and so unlike the others.

persuasion is long as fuck

idk Emma or nothing sorta. Mansfield park is sort of brilliant qua minor work and has one of the most fuckable male leads in lit but you should probably read fanny burney &/or ms Radcliffe first really /:

My Penguin copy of Persuasion is just over 250 pages!

S&S is more minor than MP, I think. It lacks the tensions that make the latter so frustrating in places.

'long' has this british vernacular sense im sort of addicted to

in my head Persuasion is definitely "the long one"

felt v much ambushed by emotion at one line of wentworth's. "am I not yet so much changed?". something like that, anyway.

P&P should be your first, I think. Persuasion is really short, though; you guys are weird.

Best introduction tbh is Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009 parody)

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Pirates and Ninjas and Bacon

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41u0oA1ReQL._SY300_.jpg

has anyone read this? is it good?

Pride Prejudice and Poops

persuasion def the short one to me. mansfield park the long one.

Never given these two a proper go.

http://www.ica.org.uk/whats-on/norte-end-history

^ However I am watching this film -- 'based' on C&P -- so that might inspire me.

In regards to Austen boyz who are into ECONOMICS are reading her: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p020wmkt

I liked this talk by the climate ethicist, Stephen Gardiner. He uses the opening chapter of S&S - where a husband and wife incrementally talk themselves out of their obligation to support the husband's mother and sisters - to analyze moral corruption around climate change.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChgJIhWXXbE

giving p&p another try. it's pretty funny!

Mr. Bennett!

Yeah, the relationship between Lizzie and her father is one of the great joys of that book--he's retreated from the foolishness of his family to the point where he's actually letting them all down, but the vibe of intellectual equality and pride he has in his one really clever (not just "book clever") daughter... It's just lovely.

making Donald Sutherland perfect casting in the otherwise meh 2005 adaptation.

"Harriet Smith was the natural daughter of somebody."

^^^

good thread let's do again

I'd probably go for Austen this time. there was what Kevin Blackwell once memorably called on some TV punditry "the width of a gnat's cock" in it the first time round.

twoagc *in it* the first time round.

it's not a particularly Janeite phrase I feel, but a buffoon in Dostoevsky certainly.

darragh do you mean a new matchup or, let's just argue about austen some more

my next one was going to be the romantic Big Four vs pound/eliot

def both thomp

'long' has this british vernacular sense im sort of addicted to

― ♛ LIL UNIT ♛ (thomp), Monday, 21 July 2014 20:16

I wanna know more about this.

Austen, of course.

it's about the same as saying smth is "mission"

a chore? an unrewarding effort?

but you can use it of anything from visiting friends in zone 4 to, like, a family member, a genre of music, the ouevre of a major novelist

I want to see which one gets cut to make a romantic Big Four.

yeah apparently for some minutes earlier i totally forgot about the existence of john keats?

well if he will write his name in water

https://medium.com/@paulmasonnews/schmausterlitz-58d005d29592#.ijei72fuu

^ reminded me of the fun we had in this thread.

in laughs, the first seventy pages of demons is giving jane a run for her money

I am finishing Karamazov and I picked Mansfield Park to re-create the um, spirit of this thread.

I’ve read Crime, Underground, Brothers, Demons, The Idiot, The Gambler/The Double. Haven’t read any in a numbers of years. I am so anti-religion these days I don’t know if I could deal with D’s nonsense now.

Haven’t read any Austen, unless I read something in high school and forgot. This thread is making me want to!

Austen captures the politely strangled reserve of her characters just as fully as Dostoevsky captures the extreme emotional volatility of his. She's great, but the tone of their respective novels could hardly be more different.

This is the top Goodreads review of Pride and Prejudice pic.twitter.com/ZXbbUh6uAj

— Nick Douglas (@toomuchnick) July 11, 2020

Feel like Tolstoy would have been a more appropriate comparison? Idk

― 龜, Sunday, 20 July 2014 bookmarkflaglink

As I finish Middlemarch wonder if Eliot would've been an even closer result with some of the "politics of taste" we got here.

This piece reminded me of this poll

Men make up just 20% of the audience for literary fiction. Please, I beg you, get over yourselves and into novelistic chitter chatter! https://t.co/R8x8ZYlFuP

— Ash Sarkar (@AyoCaesar) May 17, 2022

Broadly speaking there is a mini-genre of pieces by women writing about why men hate fiction and why, which could be worth exploring though I haven't as I'm pretty dismissive.

ime it seems to be men who don’t read who don’t read fiction, I’ve never known anyone who reads at least semi regularly who was dismissive of reading fiction.

This piece is a bit different because it goes onto talk about men who don't read fiction at all from the set-up which is more SF/genre reader Vs 'proper' canon fiction.

I wouldn't say the piece does a great job of selling literary fiction.

Or it seems to concede the premise that literature is basically about chitter-chatter.

conversely, it also suggests sci-fi isn't about prodding the nooks and crannies of the human heart

it then goes on to talk about changing demographics in successful literary fiction as if these same demographic shifts weren't happening as much or more in sci-fi (N K Jemisin, Ted Chiang, Ann Leckie, etc etc etc)

Or that literature will help you understand the human heart in a way that other things couldn't xp

it’s a v painful read for the reasons noted here and lots more besides. in fact considering it is dreary as comrade alfie suggests.

i mean one reason that flares up at me is that so much so-called literary fiction is terrible. a lot of genre fiction is as well ofc but the terms come with some priors (not examined here) that infer “quality” and “*meaning*”.

the male/female writers, male/female readers isn’t something to go into without a lot of consideration of both history and actual information (not considered here)

much of it seemed to be implying men don’t like feelings and women do, and feelings equate to chit chat (by which i assume is meant a novel of manners??), both of which are ludicrous implications.

in fact it’s so bad that it feels wrong to dunk on it any more, and consider instead how to approach gender in the modern novel, as subject, as audience and as author.

i had some thoughts on the latter here. V Imperfect and insufficiently accommodating of the LGTBQ reaction against and operation outside of the male canonical paradigm, rather than just seeing it through a lens of childbearing. Feel a writer like Isabel Waidner needs bringing into the mix.

Another overall point to make is that Jane Austen and George Eliot are two of the greatest literary innovators in the English canon, and the whole premise of the piece seems to go down a “women feelings, men jack reacher” which ime is total nonsense both ways. oh wait i’ve said that. terrible piece.

someone should write a thinkpiece about 'why do so many 'thinkpieces' contain such sloppy thinking?'

i should add i was lazy and unfair on ash there - it was her male friend who said “chit chat”. the implication is “what you see as chit chat is actually Important Literary Fiction”.

yeah The Last Samurai is a massive spanner in the works of that article, from which my main takeaway is that Sarkar, her boyfriend and Knausgaard are all massive normies

I’ve never known anyone who reads at least semi regularly who was dismissive of reading fiction.

oh i envy you, i definitely know people like this. mostly business/tech types who see nonfiction as "learning about the world" and all fiction as "stories for entertainment." and you're never gonna believe it, but most of them they are successful in business but very clueless & boring to hang around with & seem to have very little curiosity or self-knowledge.

_I’ve never known anyone who reads at least semi regularly who was dismissive of reading fiction._


oh i envy you, i definitely know people like this. mostly business/tech types who see nonfiction as "learning about the world" and all fiction as "stories for entertainment." and you're never gonna believe it, but most of them they are successful in business but very clueless & boring to hang around with & seem to have very little curiosity or self-knowledge.

It's probably my irrepressible elitism, but I don't consider people whose reading is confined entirely to books about how to be a better mid-level manager, how to grow richer or thinner, or how to program computers using the newest scripting language, to be "readers". It's fine to read those things, but in my prejudiced view you have to read at least one book a year that speaks to more than gratifying your ego or improving your financial interests in order to be a "real" reader.

yeah The Last Samurai is a massive spanner in the works of that article, from which my main takeaway is that Sarkar, her boyfriend and Knausgaard are all massive normies

― imago, Tuesday, 17 May 2022 bookmarkflaglink

You can talk

This is so tedious, can you not.

The caucasian Big Dogs of prestige lit can’t present themselves as the universal perspective anymore. No one needs Jonathan Franzen or Martin Amis to speak on behalf of humanity.

So who are men when they don’t get to claim the status of godlike narrator?

does Franzen do this? I thought the standard criticism of Franzen was the opposite, that he is too concerned with a narrow, white, male, middle-class etc perspective.

oh i envy you, i definitely know people like this. mostly business/tech types who see nonfiction as "learning about the world" and all fiction as "stories for entertainment." and you're never gonna believe it, but most of them they are successful in business but very clueless & boring to hang around with & seem to have very little curiosity or self-knowledge.

^^^
I know many people in law and business who read nonfiction but no fiction. And they are NOT reading self-help or Seven Habits or whatever. Plenty of biography and history because it is "real" while fiction is "just made up."

_The caucasian Big Dogs of prestige lit can’t present themselves as the universal perspective anymore. No one needs Jonathan Franzen or Martin Amis to speak on behalf of humanity.

So who are men when they don’t get to claim the status of godlike narrator?_


does Franzen do this? I thought the standard criticism of Franzen was the opposite, that he is too concerned with a narrow, white, male, middle-class etc perspective.

who the fuck cares about "prestige lit" or gets riled up enough about it to denounce it? the phrase itself strikes me as weird, and raises questions in my mind, such as where does this prestige come from, where does it go, and it is any different from self-congratulation?

xp I guess so, but I think she kind of answers her own question with the jibe about novels 'middle-aged uni professors lamenting their employer’s updated guidance on sexual harassment', she already has the answer as to what novels by straight white men about the straight white male condition would look like, it's just that she doesn't like it?

That seems terribly reductive.

I know many people in law and business who read nonfiction but no fiction. And they are NOT reading self-help or Seven Habits or whatever. Plenty of biography and history because it is "real" while fiction is "just made up."

yeah this is what i was thinking of too. there are a lot of people out there who fancy themselves polymath intellectuals devouring political bios and soft science/history books with titles like "History of Chairs: How Sitting Shaped Our Brains and Changed the World", but who still never touch novels bc that would require them to engage the consciousness of someone outside their own life experience.

(i may or may not consider those folks "real readers" either, but still definitely a separate category from ppl reading CEO books & self-help)

among the bookish people I'm familiar with I feel like there's an attitude that straight white men reading novels by/about straight white men is bad and cringe, but also if you are straight white man then novels by authors from a marginalised identities are not for engaging with, they're for Sitting Your Ass Down And Learning from, it would be presumptuous engage with them at a different level than that?

A book is a book

Why not just read what you like? I don’t recognise the part about marginalised authors at all, I assume this is some Twitter nonsense

There are sections of book Twitter that react against a de-colonial aspect of teaching literature. I see them reacting to a Torygraph piece. This functions as a way to radicalize liberals.

I think the attitude that Sarkar talks about is of white men in their 40s and 50s onwards who read mostly European men and haven't done the 'work'. But as I see it a lot of White women only read Euro women and I don't see them shouting about books from outside the continent.

But this is all to do with impressions of Twitter discourse. Ultimately a small % of the population read fiction, nevermind poetry.

I think that the thing with this article is you can write about ppl (ok, sure, men) who read non fiction but nit fiction or youcan write abt men who read genre fiction but not literary fiction but once you stick those together like they're the same thing, well, basically this ends up just being about Ash's bf.

Just saw someone complaining about the article. I actually missed Ash's thread on it. This is my favourite post.

Faced with the challenge of articulating themselves as themselves, it’s like straight white men have given up on the subtleties of the novel and said: “Fuck it – I’m doing stand up about cancel culture instead.” https://t.co/QYcBhZDL88

— Ash Sarkar (@AyoCaesar) May 17, 2022

I think that the thing with this article is you can write about ppl (ok, sure, men) who read non fiction but nit fiction or youcan write abt men who read genre fiction but not literary fiction but once you stick those together like they're the same thing, well, basically this ends up just being about Ash's bf.

Just seeing that inanity pulled out like that, for all the world to see xp

I only skimmed this, but ime lots of leftist nerds of all genders are into the exact sci-fi authors she mentioned (plus, especially, Octavia Butler) right now, and that seems like a both new and distinct phenomenon to me, not one in continuity with the whole Big Dogs thing. This is a very anecdotal and localized theory to be sure

'Caucasian Big Dog' sounds like an actual dog breed.

If my gf wrote an article about patriarchal ideas behind men reading less literary fiction cause I was reading Ursula K. Le Guin while she read Jane Austen, I’d ask for a divorce.

— ege (@egeofanatolia) May 17, 2022

just three posts later lol

Ps: This excludes YA, if your adult partner only reads YA then break up. I’m a YA hater first, book lover second.

— ege (@egeofanatolia) May 17, 2022

YA discourse on twitter is wild.

I mean, I like Ash, but the piece is dumb and frustrating, lacks proper reporting, and fails to interrogate its own biases (which might have been interesting!). Also I will forgive a lot but not talking smack about Ursula Le Guin. Still -- OTOH it's just an opinion piece for the shit, low-selling men's magazine GQ.

For me this sort of opinion writing exhibits the "most journalists are assholes" category error of understanding the world. IME a lot of journalists are unreflective assholes, who hang around and partner up with similarly unreflective assholes, and tend to assume everyone else in the world is an unreflective asshole. Everything gets analysed under this greasy prism of glibness.

I blame the defeat of that Marxist Jeremy Crumblyn for this.

fwiw I don't think Sarkar thinks she's dunking on sci-fi or non fiction in this piece; she assumes ppl go to sci-fi for different reasons than litfic, and I see no evidence that she thinks the reasons ppl go to litfic are superior, just that they have value, too.

she is still wrong tho

(wrong about ppl going to sci-fi for fundamentally different reasons, not wrong about litfic having value, lol)

i don't read fiction bcz it's all made up
i like to read abt maths, science and the law (also all made up)

This is another one of these "why are men like this?" pieces.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jul/09/why-do-so-few-men-read-books-by-women

An old favourite of yours for stirring shit iirc

Then you get this kind of thing as a "literary challenge". It's ok as it goes but this time the writer's brother gets it.

https://www.ft.com/content/99936410-fdf8-11e8-aebf-99e208d3e521

An old favourite of yours for stirring shit iirc

― gyac, Wednesday, 18 May 2022 bookmarkflaglink

http://2h3mh837ken53kitqv1co5fh83o.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/image1-1-1024x538.jpg

Ffs! Hate when the internet spoils my joke

I did do a year of reading only female authors myself, after noticing how few I've read. I can understand the frustration at this sort of self-improvement/micromanagement of cultural tastes taking up so much space in the discourse at the expense of looking at things from a more structural pov but I do think it's a worthwhile thing to do, on an individual level.

the writer's brother is sadly behind a paywall

If you Google the headline you should be able to read it

gendering of fiction always struck me as weird and the specific gendering in that piece is both lazy and misses the mark

that being said, in very general terms women read more than men and afaik it's been like that since the early 19th century, and those men who do not read are missing out obv

I did do a year of reading only female authors myself, after noticing how few I've read. I can understand the frustration at this sort of self-improvement/micromanagement of cultural tastes taking up so much space in the discourse at the expense of looking at things from a more structural pov but I do think it's a worthwhile thing to do, on an individual level.

Agree, I think last year was the first year I read more than 50/50 books by female authors, which is ridiculous.

I remember chatting to guy in Oxfam Books, a big novel reader, who said he didn't want to read Ferrante because he thought it would be "too much of a woman's book" and it's always a shock to meet people like that in the wild

I know a guy who's a very sweet person and a talented writer, but who doesn't read any books by women except for The Shipping News, which he loves. Very strange.

haha, so weird

reminds me of something Sigrid Nunez said:

For pretty much my whole writing life, I always felt—as did every woman writer I know—we lived in a world where if you heard “women’s fiction,” you heard “lesser fiction.” Not just male readers and male editors. Women also felt that a thing made by a man was superior to that made by women. Look at publishing—it was dominated by women. Most of the editors and agents were women, and the books that were admired most and given the most attention were by men. That’s changed. But to be honest, with books written by a woman, an older woman in particular, I’m still surprised when a man says he loves the book. I would feel like it was a hard sell.

and Nunez is obv brilliant

Ursula K. Le Guin bf, GQ essay gf

— Alexander Wells (@ajbwells) May 18, 2022

I did do a year of reading only female authors myself, after noticing how few I've read. I can understand the frustration at this sort of self-improvement/micromanagement of cultural tastes taking up so much space in the discourse at the expense of looking at things from a more structural pov but I do think it's a worthwhile thing to do, on an individual level.

"I remember chatting to guy in Oxfam Books, a big novel reader, who said he didn't want to read Ferrante because he thought it would be "too much of a woman's book""

Give him the latest copy of GQ. It's for men.

This is a good piece on the resistance young men have for reading, changes in the market, etc.

https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/theres-no-hype-machine-for-selling-literature-to-dudes

I think there’s a difference between not reading women (which is dumb) and reading things that only suit your “quiet, tasteful sensibilities” (Nathalie Olah, in the link above). I think that’s ok! Being middlebrow or boring in your reading is literally no one else’s business

And the weird snobbishness (which obvs people here don’t have) about video games. I’d feel desperately sorry for someone who spent more time reading Tom McCarthy than playing Zelda. (Although having bad taste is also ok!)

Trying to get people to voluntarily read anything that doesn't appeal to them is a losing battle. Lots of readers have very narrowly defined ideas of what they want from books and they never break out of whatever narrow niche they fell into.

The best you can hope for from niche readers is that the very habit of picking up books and reading them to the end will permit them some day to accidentally read a book outside their chosen niche, enjoy it, and discover a new niche to add to their old one. If this happens more than once, they may eventually start looking for such 'accidents' and become an adventurous reader.

I've been part of a book club for about ten years now. The host for each month chooses the book. I've read stuff I never would have heard of, let alone thought to pick up, otherwise. It's been a great experience (witness its longevity).

"Trying to get people to voluntarily read anything that doesn't appeal to them is a losing battle. Lots of readers have very narrowly defined ideas of what they want from books and they never break out of whatever narrow niche they fell into."

Lots, not all. Just in this thread three posters talked about their efforts to read more women, and what that might have done for their reading. I certainly see quite a bit of that on book Twitter. Reading women, engaging with more translated literature.

"And the weird snobbishness (which obvs people here don’t have) about video games."

Yes, did overlook that as I haven't touched a game for 20 years.

Ah well.

A champion emerges. pic.twitter.com/PjzAit2mFY

— Elvis Buñuelo (@Mr_Considerate) May 19, 2022

And the weird snobbishness (which obvs people here don’t have) about video games. I’d feel desperately sorry for someone who spent more time reading Tom McCarthy than playing Zelda. (Although having bad taste is also ok!)

C was a pretty bad book, but I reckon it'd make a semi-decent point'n'click tbf

What about bad books vs good video games?

_And the weird snobbishness (which obvs people here don’t have) about video games. I’d feel desperately sorry for someone who spent more time reading Tom McCarthy than playing Zelda. (Although having bad taste is also ok!)_


realisation this post prompted in me: im far more interested in - and enjoy - bad books than i do bad video games.

now imagining a YouTube account called The Angry Literary Nerd doing shticky screaming at a book videos

This is not good.

The latest episode of The Backstory with Andrew Neil is out now.

This week, @afneil talks to @AyoCaesar about why she’s “literally a communist”, her support for Jeremy Corbyn and how she deals with the abuse she gets on Twitter.

Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

— Tortoise (@tortoise) May 26, 2022

thread drift taken to delirious new heights

I have not read this thread, but this strikes me as a not very helpful use of the poll feature. Why compare in this way?

I started to skim the content and realized people here say interesting things whatever prompt they are given.
(I stick by the oddness of the comparison. I think you are challenging something outside literature.)

(outside the form of the novel assuming it transcends time and place and more or less writers had/have a common idea of what they want to achieve)

I have not read this thread, but this strikes me as a not very helpful use of the poll feature. Why compare in this way?

― youn, Saturday, 28 May 2022 bookmarkflaglink

Most polls don't lead to much interesting discussion. This was a bit different, maybe you could read it?

Or just read this:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/may/28/books-by-women-that-every-man-should-read-chosen-by-ian-mcewan-salman-rushdie-richard-curtis-and-more

"Howard Jacobson: Middlemarch by George Eliot
Not every page of Middlemarch is a masterpiece of impassioned intelligence, where action is imbued with thought, and thought is shaped by feeling; but every other page is. No man or woman can be considered educated who hasn’t read it at least twice."

Or just read this:

I started to skim the content and realized people here say interesting things whatever prompt they are given.

― youn, Saturday, May 28, 2022 7:35 AM (five hours ago)

No man or woman can be considered educated who hasn’t read it at least twice.

Okay, Casaubon

Real car crash of a piece. Just schizophrenic in the way it's put together lol.