I am so tired of people acting like the possibly homophobic snubbing of BBM was an actual event that deserves an actual response. Maybe it was motivated by homophobia. I don’t know and I am so far from giving a shit that I’d get Air Miles from getting there.
OMG, SOME VERY WEALTHY PEOPLE ONLY GAVE, LIKE, TWO OR THREE AWARDS TO OTHER VERY WEALTHY PEOPLE CONCERNING A FICTIONAL MOVING IMAGE INVOLVING A STRAIGHT WOMAN’S FANTASY ABOUT TWO GUYS FUCKING WITHOUT LUBE. Screw queer youth suicide, someone put out a press release, stat!
I liked BBM. I found it incredibly sad and the score was haunting.
I though Crash blew. I thought Goodnight and Good Luck was a far suprior picture. But then, I have disappointed often by ‘Best Picture’ winners. Hell, Out of Africa won . I tried to watch that twice and fell asleep both times.
It’s only stupid to cretins who cannot distinguish between ‘bad writing’ and ‘what I don’t like.’ She writes very well and the book is very good. The Pulitzer shows others with appreciation of literature agree.
If anyone thinks her writing is bad they are just flat out wrong. But by all means you people feel free to parade your philistinism.
Me? I can distinguish between ‘doesn’t do it for me’ and ‘bad.’
It’s possible to think Annie Proulx is a bad writer without being a cretin. She fails to live up to the standards of good English literature, the standards of Austen, Joyce or Shakespeare. She is, in fact, an objectively worse novelist than Stephen King, who at least knows how to move his story along, something Proulx is miserable at. She crams image and metaphor after image and metaphor into each sentence until they can hold no more. She doesn’t care if her images hang together or make any sense in themselves. “Yeasty ferment that is America” is all too typical Proulx. Here’s a Proulx passage Myers quotes, from a short story:
Why is the year “spooled out?” Why was the ground “strange?” (and what a lazy adjective strange is), Would a kid hustler really be tight-wound? Why was it a so-called ranch? “Unfurling” and “kicked down” might work in a less crowded context but here they’re just more images stuffed into a sentence without care or craft, just a con-job on people who will say “Wow! How writerly!”
Ezra Pound once said “Poetry should be at least as well written as prose.” This applies to poetic prose as well as pure poetry.
As far as her winning the Pulitzer, all this does is prove the gullibility of intellectuals, something that was already well known.
This distinction you’re talking about? It doesn’t exsist. If you read a book, and you don’t like it, that is a bad book. If you read a book and you like it, that’s a good book. That’s it. There is no objective standard to artistic quality. The stuff in Proulx’s writing that you say is “proof” she’s a good writer? There’s no objective way to demonstrate that she’s better at that than anyone else, and even if there were, it’s still entirely a matter of opinion as to wether that style is a good thing in the first place. You’re talking matters of pure opinion, and past a certain point of basic competence in the form, there’s no way to say someone’s opinion is any better or more correct than anyone else’s. Your opinion on Annie Proulx is no better or worse than Larry Borgia’s, whose no better or worse than the Pulitzer comittee. The only difference is how well you can defend your opinion. And generally speaking, calling people who disagree with you “cretins” doesn’t do a whole lot to convince people of the validity of your position.
You are wrong. The world is full of great art that people don’t appreciate. If you don’t like Shakespeare you don’t like it. You cannot then say it is ‘bad’. I’ve no time for all this subjectivist bullshit that puts any piece of crap scrawling on a par with Milton or 50 Cent with Mozart.
And yes - informed opinions are superior to uninformed ones. Anyone who thinks Shakespeare is a bad writer becuase they don’t like it is an uninformed person whose opinion holds no weight.
The Proulx short story that Larry Borgia quotes is “The Half-Skinned Steer,” which appears in the same collection as BBM.
I would imagine because Proulx was looking for a more evocative way of saying “fall” or “winter.” In fact, had she said “fall” or “winter,” it might’ve come across as cliched, given the number of times writers use those seasons to suggest the end of one’s life (in this case, Mero, who’s quite old).
I find the image of a spool running out of thread as metaphor for the end of a year a creative turn of phrase.
I don’t know why precisely, but the context might help. However, I don’t think “strange” is lazy - it fits with all the sibilance in “so-called ranch on strange ground at the south hinge of the strange horns.”
Sure, why not? Are all kid hustlers the same? Also, “tight-wound” contrasts nicely with “spooled-out.”
Again, context would help. Possibly it’s not a very successful ranch.
I like “unfurling” because to me it suggests the image of a flag slowly unfurling in the wind - an appropriate image for an old man who’s lived an uneventful life on the Wyoming prairie.
As for “kicked down,” I guess Proulx could have said “repressed,” but I doubt it would convey Mero’s forcefulness.
Anyways, the point of all this (aside from the fact that using one sentence to condemn a writer is blatantly unfair) is that Proulx clearly uses “care and craft” in her writing. If you don’t like it, fine. But to suggest that she’s trying to “con” me into liking her - well, that’s pretty bloody offensive to both Proulx and myself.
If you cannot listen to both and just know it, if you cannot watch MacBeth then some fA Team and know that one is intrinsically better than the other then you’re beyond help.
You feel free to continue to wallow in your little relativistic muck pool. What do I care if you’ve no taste or discernment.
Everything is as good as anything else. Happy now?
Very well put but you’ve fallen among Philistines. I’ve no idea why people get to angry at the suggestion that there is such a thing as ‘quality’ and that some cultural artifacts are the expression of superior insight and mastery of craft. Best leave 'em to enjoy the latest Dan Brown.
Oh, come now. If MacBeth is so much better than the A Team, it should be trivially easy for you to prove it, shouldn’t it? After all, you don’t even need to convince me that your conclusion is correct: I like MacBeth a lot more than the A-Team. You just need to show that your process is correct: that one is objectively better than the other. Considering the contempt you show for anyone who doesn’t like exactly the same things that you do, it shouldn’t be that hard at all. Like you said, it’s obvious, right? So pony up: prove that one’s better than the other, in a way that does not rely entirely on your opinion of which is better.
Certainly not. There’s lots of things that I think are better than other things. It’s just that, unlike you, I’m capable of discerning the difference between opinion and objective fact. I’d recommend learning this skill, as it prevents embarassing situations like pitching a tantrum just because somebody doesn’t like your favorite author. Although, I suppose given the behavior described in the OP, it’s not really a surprise that you like Annie Proulx so much. Neither of you seem to be mature enough to handle a simple disagreement in taste.
I am neither a philistine nor a cretin. I’ve read most of the books in the canon of English literature. I’ve read Ulysses five times, and–thanks to the excellent annotations of Don Gifford–can now read that difficult book with the same ease as any other novel. I’m not saying this to brag, and I certainly have embarrassing intellectual weak spots, I’m just astonished at the idea that anybody who dislikes Proulx’s writing is an unlettered moron who moves his lips as he pages through Tom Clancy’s Op-Center. I simply find that Proulx stuffs her sentences with way too many images, and doesn’t seem to care if they make sense or not. If that makes me a cretinous philistine, I guess I’d better make the most of it.
In regards to Miller’s excellent points, I will say that if you like Proulx’s writing then you like her writing. I retract the phrase “con-job” above. I only wrote it because I was pissed at being called a cretin because I dislike someone else’s favorite author. I’ll admit that there is a certain musical quality to her writing if you don’t stop to think about it. I prefer the precision of Nabokov and Joyce. YMMV.
tagos: Winning awards is not proof that an artist or a writer is “good.” Your proof that Proulx is a great writer because she won a Pulitzer, is specious as hell. Is that the best you can do? You dismiss BBM despite it’s many awards, and despite the fact that many people with discerning intellects and excellent taste in movies think it was a great film. Why are you the arbiter of what’s good and who’s a philistine? Why isn’t your casual dismissal of BBM a sign that YOU are a cretin?
I personally don’t like Annie Proulx. I find her prose is often tortured to within an inch of its life, and is often made cryptic for no good end. This, coming from someone whose favorite novel is by William Faulkner, so don’t tell me I can’t parse a sentence or can’t dig intricate prose.
Another fine lesson is not to call anyone who disagrees with your taste a cretin. I am entitled to think that Proulx is a highly overrated writer, despite her awards, despite your strident commentary on her behalf. If you think Miller was being a jerk ( ), maybe you ought to look to the beam in your own eye before you start pointing out the motes in others’.
Oh, and comparing Mozart and 50 Cent is like comparing apples and hand grenades. What an idiotic comparison. If I’m a philistine, then you’re a snob. See how much fun the ad hominem attacks can be?
), maybe you ought to look to the beam in your own eye before you start pointing out the motes in others’.