ts big dogs 2014 edition #1: dostoyevsky vs austen

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