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

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.