Category Archives: Quotes

We’re all being far too polite now

[F]or the first time, authors have been sitting in on the entire Canada Reads process, and I don’t think it’s done the program any good. … authors got so in on the action, that their personalities became inseparable from the books in question. Relationships through social media developed so that it was impossible for many to read these books without a conflict of interest. The books themselves ceased to be the point at all.

…

What’s more ridiculous though is that no one having this conversation. I’ve refrained from saying anything until now, because I don’t like to talk shit about books, but we’re all being far too polite now, and I fear that authors attending our book club is most of the reason why. It’s why book bloggers are celebrating these books without question, not a word of criticism, though there is plenty to criticize, but how can we  criticize when the author is our friend on Facebook, and our favourite Twitter pal?

—Kerry Clare

This. I’ve mentioned I feel like a weirdo on Goodreads because I give ratings other than 4 and 5. At the same time, I’m not immune to what I’ll call the six degrees of politeness. If you like a writer, personally, even if you only know them via social media or reading their blog, it’s really, really hard to say that their book disappointed you or even that you just didn’t like it as much as you thought you would based on how much you like their thoughtful blog posts or hilarious tweets.

On Goodreads, if I realize I’m hedging, I find it helps to ignore the numbers and rate based on the descriptions: “didn’t like it”; “it was ok”; “liked it”; “really liked it”; “it was amazing.” At first, they sounded a little facile, but you know what? You can pretty much stick any book into one of those categories without hesitation. It works, I think, because it makes it subjective. You’re not making any great objective pronouncements about the quality of the book. One-star says: “I didn’t like this book.” Not “this book sucks” or “you will hate this book” but “I didn’t like it, ymmv.”

This, btw, is the same problem I came up against with my master’s thesis. The urge to be kind rather than critical is strong even when you’re “just” a reader, even when you’re doing your best to stand at arm’s length and not develop a conflict of interest. You get to know people through their writing, and if you like them, the urge to protect them is strong. What’s funny, though, even just sticking to reading, I developed favorites (as one does) and I worried that would show through. Obviously, I didn’t want that because the thesis wasn’t about who had I had the most in common with or who had the best friendship potential. Anyhow, I guess I needn’t have worried, because no one picked up on that at all.

(It still surprises me that it was read as a “negative review” so to speak, when my goal was a more positive reading of personal blogs than I’d come across in traditional media and academic writing. In fact, my big concern was providing a positive viewpoint without being uncritical about the aspects I did find problematic. In the reading, though, all the focus seemed to be on the criticisms. Then again, maybe the negative perception isn’t so surprising. We writers do have a tendency to glaze over compliments, regardless of how large, and obsess over criticisms, regardless of how minor.)

Real Things

[The] Volkswagen Jetta ad in which the cut-out bodies of Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor “dance” “in the back seat” of a Jetta … comes from about the 5:45 point in this performance that Kelly and O’Connor did on a TV special, where you’ll see much of what you see in the ad. All they did was remove all the context.

That’s the funny thing about Gene Kelly, and really all the big dance scenes of the time — they were all context. … Dancing in movies in this era was largely about where you were, and about touching real things. Other people, of course, but also feet on the floor, feet in the water, umbrella in hand, hat rack as partner, and by the way, if you want to defy gravity, you’ll have to turn the room.

… something seems tone-deaf and disrespectful about removing everything that affected the physics of the dancing, from the floor to the chairs, replacing the music so they’re interpreting something entirely different, and concluding that you can still get an expression of these two men’s talents as long as you have their floating, context-free figures moving as they did in 1960.

—Linda Holmes

This analysis reminded me of Albert Borgmann’s focal things and practices.

Nothing else going on

Just finished watching (well, listening) to this Nicholas Carr lecture in which he says:

I think one way to think about this is that what the web does—despite the fact that it’s this incredible high technology and we think of it as the cutting edge and everything—is bring us back to a much more primitive and in a way more natural style of thinking. I mean I think Fred and Barney would have been very happy online and using our new technologies, because our brains seem to be naturally wired to shift our focus very rapidly. And you can understand this if you think about our distant ancestors in Stone Age times and so forth. You were rewarded by your ability to keep track of as much of what was going on around you at once. You know by shifting your attention all the time, by shifting your focus, you were the person who survived because you saw the predator approaching before everyone else, or you were the person who survived because you spotted that bush of berries that you could eat that everybody else missed. And so in a way we’re naturally wired to be distracted, to be interrupted, and what’s hard for us is to pay attention, what goes against our instincts and our nature is to focus on one thing. You know, the worst thing a caveman could do is actually focus on one thing for a long period of time because then he would end up being eaten pretty quickly.

And I think in this regard it’s very very interesting and very informative to compare what the web is doing to us with what the other great modern information technology did for us and that is the book. I mean, think about the difference between being online between looking at a screen and sitting down with a book. The fundamental difference is that whereas the screen bombards us with distractions and interruptions, the book, the printed page, shields us from those distractions and interruptions that come at us all the time. You know, we tend to think of the book, the printed book, as somehow being flawed today because it doesn’t have links, it doesn’t have video, it doesn’t have multimedia, you can’t like check your email while you’re reading a book, but in fact that’s the fundamental strength of the book as a technology. There is nothing else going on. And so that way of thinking that’s very hard and very unnatural for us, for we human beings, that very attentive way of thinking was encouraged by the book and in fact I  think you can argue that for many people over the last 500 years the story of our intellectual lives is the story of how the book helped us to pay attention. And that, because the brain is adaptable and plastic, our ability to pay attention that we learned from reading could then be applied to all sorts of other aspects of our mental lives.

—Nicholas Carr
(starting @ 49:40; emphasis added, obvs.)

The first part (single-minded focus vs. multitasking) is interesting because it fits into where I”m going with my dissertation, this idea that in online writing we have conflict and misunderstandings because of a clash between worldviews, i.e. writers (creators) and non-writers (communicators). (Or literacy/individuality vs. orality/community.)

The second part… I’m like, hmm, I’m sure I’ve said/written something to this effect before. So then I dug around in my archives a bit and aha! I did indeed. Now I just need figure out how to get people to pay me to write books and give lectures based on my amazing and prescient blog posts.

Undistracted reading environment

Franzen writes the kinds of novels that are best read on the Kindle. They demand attention solely to the text, the kind of undistracted reading environment that makes e-readers so appealing – not to mention the perk of carrying a small electronic device instead of a 700-page hardcover copy of Freedom.

—Kevin Nguyen

This just struck me as an odd thing to say. Do people really think that ereaders are less distracted reading environments than traditional books? I don’t have an ereader (yet…), but I have downloaded a bunch of books to my phone, none of which I have actually sat down and read through because I find it’s such a distracted reading environment. Maybe it’s just because I have the attention span of a gnat, but I find print books, with their singular purpose and lack of any hyperlinks to click or buttons to push, make it easier for me to focus, to settle my brain. If I want to read something else, I have to physically move to do so. I’m afraid with an ereader all the “something elses” a click away would just be too tempting and I’d end up never finishing anything.

We’re having an ereader discussion at the TC forums if you want to join in (no registration necessary!).

Thin on story … thick with introspection

The [new Great Gatsby] film won’t come close the power of the novel, but not simply because Gatsby is a book, and, as the cliché insists, the Book is Always Better Than The Movie. Film versions of Fitzgerald’s masterwork inevitably fail because of the kind of novel Gatsby is—frankly thin on story, but incredibly thick with introspection, thoughts unspoken, intricately woven metaphor, and long, dazzling descriptions of otherwise mundane things like sunsets, front lawns and angry wives that are only special because of how the narrator describes them.

Not every book is better than the movie, after all. … [Fight Club and The Godfather] made such good movies because their plots are visual and action-packed. Gatsby‘s plot isn’t. … The novel’s genius is in how Fitzgerald can invest mere tabloid fodder with some sort of epic grandeur. He delves deeply into his character’s thoughts, Nick’s semi-omnipotent narration describing motives and sensations that simply don’t translate well to the screen.

Movies, for all their scope and power, and for all the CGI/3D technological whiz-bangery, have never been any good at expressing human thought.

—Hampton Stevens

This is something I’ve often thought about / discussed before. How I often enjoy movies (or TV series) based on books I didn’t like (or know I wouldn’t like, based on past experience). And of course part of it is that good actors turn stock characters into nuanced ones  and similarly, that good cinematography can turn bland descriptions of place into stunning visuals. But part of it is also this, i.e. that some material is more suited to film than books and some material is more suited to books than film. Anyhow, what I was wondering is if this can be related to ebooks vs. pbooks. As in ebooks are perhaps more suited to plot-based reads, books where the story is more important than the writing (how the story is told). Books where you can be a little distracted and it doesn’t really matter. And correspondingly, pbooks are perhaps more suited to character-based reads, books where how the story is told is more important than the plot. Books that require undivided attention, where all the benefits of ebooks and ereaders would not actually be beneficial. As in, the pbook is better suited for this kind of reading than any ebook (with accompanying distractions) because this kind of book was developed for the pbook. Whereas the plot-based story has been around forever and is easily transferable from one medium to the next—but is perhaps best-suited to media other than the pbook.

Further, while plot-based stories have universal appeal (I don’t mean that everyone likes every story, but that everyone likes some plot-based stories), writing-based stories do not. Writing-based stories have always had a smaller audience. It’s a niche market.

So I think one of the reasons the “death of the book” argument seems to go round and round in circles is that you have two groups of readers and two groups of writers who think they’re discussing the same thing, but really aren’t. When every story was packaged in a pbook, they were all booklovers and it was all good. But now, with choice of medium, the divisions start to create this content/format clash. For example, I think this is why you get people saying stuff like content is what matters; format is irrelevant. By “content” they’re thinking of the story, the plot, which could be told in any medium. But to a writer/reader who leans toward writing-based stories, this makes no sense. To them, of course it’s important where the words appear on the page, what typeface is used, whether Britishisms have been Americanized, etc. Because it’s about the writing… as an art, I guess. As opposed to a craft. Yes, I guess you could think of it like that: art vs. craft.

I tried to start a discussion about this at TC once but it didn’t go so well. I think I was misunderstood. It’s not about one style being better than the other. They’re different. One has a wider appeal; one has a narrower appeal. But there are always going to be plot-driven stories that appeal to those who generally like character-driven ones and vice versa. Just like classical music vs. pop. Or modern art vs. Etsy crafts. Both have their merits and it is totally possible to find both appealing (but probably for different reasons). Both require skill, but different kinds of skills.

If you think about modern art, for example, when people look at a piece, they often say, “I could have done that.” But that’s the key: they didn’t. The execution of the piece may not have required a great deal of skill, but the skill is in the idea, the concept, the meaning of the piece. On the other hand, a craft might not have a “big idea” behind it, but it can nevertheless require a lot of technical skill to execute. The artist needs to continually be coming up with new ideas (i.e. “wow, where did that come from?” ideas). The crafter needs to be able to replicate (or riff off) successful pieces. They’re different, but (done well) neither are easy.

I think you have to start from that point, that both kinds of story can be good (and also: both can be terrible) in order to even have a discussion where people are actually listening to each other and not just shouting that the other is elitist or dumb or covering their ears and going, “lalala I can’t hear you.”

One conveys a story, the other an idea

Ever notice the difference between editorial photography and architectural photography? One conveys a story, the other an idea. The first is often styled and “contrived”, a set, make believe. A room is tweaked and tarted to fit a storyline or an editor’s vison. Architectural photography is a showcase. It tells the truth and trumpets the details of a designer’s work. It concentrates on big picture as well as the intricacies.

—Jo @ Desire to Inspire

Huh. Struck me as rather a DavidShieldsian observation.

A reminder of the world outside

[In The Things That Needed Doing, Sean] Manning reveals how the small screen acts as a panacea, but more important, as a reminder of the world outside. Death and dying are big moments in life, moments that are near unbearable. It’s comforting to know that the world does and will keep revolving as we go through them. In modernity, sometimes it’s the dulcet tones of bad television that tell us so.

—Jordan Heller

The smoothed fabric of unmentionableness

Funny running across this on the heels of my Reality Hunger post. Coincidence or serendipity?

Prosaic examples illustrate the familiarity of [obstacles to communication]: some people speak more loudly than others; some are never in the conversation to start with; some topics are difficult to raise, or fall out of conversation quickly. Such examples may be encountered much more explicitly in fiction than they are noticed in everyday life, especially if we are ourselves invested, however unconsciously, in keeping something relatively unmentioned. In fiction … we can witness the discomfort that ripples out from rifts in the smoothed fabric of unmentionableness, while in our own conversations, we are often too much of the cultures of discourse, axiomatic beliefs, and de facto assumptions to attend to the parameters of what cannot be said that hedge our choices of explicit verbal exploration.

We are comfortable enough with the elephant in the room, that which will remain unsaid, or is better left unsaid, or a decision to let us never speak of this again that it becomes an interesting challenge to mention the unmentionable.

—Kirsten Valentine Cadieux

Always fiction

What actually interests me now, as I get older, is just narrative writing, telling a story. In a way that is always fiction, even when it’s memoir, or autobiography, or biography, or history; there is what actually happened, which is a total enigma, and then there is the story that people make out of it. It’s never really true. It’s always “made up.”

That having been said, there is a different kind of freedom to just totally making something up, out of nothing, with no reference to what supposedly happened. No other kind of writing is as interesting as writing a novel.

—David Guy