I wouldn’t consider anything on that website a valid source for anything. YMMV.
Its also irrelevent to my point that context of the discussion is key to how much of the writer’s life is relevent and unsubstantiated claims in any context are of concern.
I think that’s a potentially interesting point. Marriage creates a fungible pool of money that people are adding to/drawing from. Can you financially support one half of a marriage without supporting the other half? (No need for this to focus on or be about Bradley exclusively.)
Well, actually, both are perfectly reasonable responses. We’re allowed to express our opinions, aren’t we? Or should someone stifle their response to your input?
It’s a very reasonable debate topic, but there is no winner or loser, just different opinions. That is, there are two topics here. One is “Does it matter?” The other is “Can people criticize each other for disagreeing about whether it matters?”
The answer to the first is that it matters to some and not to others, for various interesting reasons.
The answer to the second is yes, they can, and they will. And you can criticize them for criticizing. And they can criticize you for that. And so on. Soon, everyone else gets bored by this. Don’t expect either party to be ruled “correct”.
Grin! The insecure ego of authors will take whatever consolation it can! Personally, I blame my poor sales on really bad cover art, which, of course, was foisted on to me by evil editors.
Agreed.
Personally, I stopped reading Marion Zimmer Bradley because I disagreed with the premises in her actual books. There is a line, early in the first Darkover book (I believe) where she admits that it may be unfair to blame all men for the wrongs of only a few, but that she will progress upon that basis anyway. At that point, I lost interest.
(I can only quote this very roughly and loosely from memory. I no longer have the book, but I remember it being in the first ten pages or so. I read it in a “Feminist Science Fiction” class at university. I actually enjoyed all the other books, but was left uncomfortable with Bradley’s absolutism.)
Some years later, I actually met her, and she was abominably rude to me and to several others. But I’d already decided I wasn’t interested in her books at that point.
This thread was based on MZB being an enabler of her husband’s crimes. If this blog is to be believed, it’s much worse than that (warning: this is pretty gut-wrenching stuff):
Marion Zimmer Bradley: It’s Worse Than I Knew by Deirdre
Normally I know squat about the personal lives of authors I read. And up until I saw this, that was true of MZB. But this is beyond the pale.
You really ought to start a pitting with one well-written paragraph explaining your position. Add links for support if you like–but this isn’t Great Debates. Don’t expect people to click on those links to discover what you can’t be bothered to say.
I checked Wikipedia to see how much Marion Zimmer Bradley I’d read. Yup, only Mists of Avalon. A pedestrian reworking of the Arthurian thing (with the usual lashings of Graves), I was never tempted to read it again. And I do a lot of rereading. (Damn, there were sequels?)
I read one Orson Scott Card–some kind of alternate Columbus–& was not impressed. He was preaching.
Throughout my life I’ve read fantasy & SF. During some periods, I inhaled vast quantities; I’ve still got the paperbacks. Never gave a shit for either of these artists.
I would never investigate an artist’s biography before experiencing their work; their beliefs come across in their output. Unless they decide to get up on their soapboxes & spout crap–which will affect my appreciation of their work. Kipling or Heinlein? I disagree with some beliefs of both gentlemen but they were intelligent & complex–& wrote beautifully.
Please–feel free to let us know what you think about any artist. But learn to express yourself clearly. Don’t say “click this link” or “as all those rumors say.”
Umm…
Fuuuck. That makes anything about Breen a bit of a sideline - turns out she was a violent child abuser in her own right. Of her own kids. News to me, but considering the source, seems legit.
Looks like the story’s hitting the papers now. I guess with the Saville scandal no-one is going to want to take this sort of thing lightly right now.
I think this quote from Janni Lee Simner sums it up best:
I know I live in grey world that is at time extremely muddy, so I can acknowledge that deeply flawed people can nonetheless produce some good things, too, and vice versa. The fact that MZB and her work helped some people does not excuse hurting other people, yet if her work had been suppressed those others helped by her would not have been, and in the end may have been worse off.
And this from Moira, Greylord, MZB’s daughter:
It’s tragic that anyone so victimized would keep their mouth shut, although remembering what a high school friend of mine went through after accusing her father of molesting her despite her mother’s absolute and unwavering support of her I can understand the reluctance of a victim to speak up. If Moira herself speaks of the good her mother did despite her misdeeds and doesn’t want to hurt those whom her mother had helped I think we should do the same. Certainly, don’t steer people away from authors who had nothing to do with abuse and rape yet wrote in MZB’s universe.
It’s funny though - some of my favorite authors/writers from that period of time, roughly 1950-1980, I’ve heard terrible things about. Not all of those things criminal, but rudeness and pettiness and a malicious tongue. It’s one of the reasons I’d rather not know much about authors/artists/actors, all too often I found they were people I didn’t respect or didn’t like. I had a choice of either avoiding a lot of the works I enjoyed, or divorcing my opinion of the work from my opinion of the creator.
Holy shit, that’s awful. And like a few others, once I know of someone’s true colors (like with the director Victor Salva), I couldn’t enjoy their works if I tried. So, in good conscience, I have to walk away, no matter if I’d like to keep reading / watching / hearing their output for my enjoyment. It just seems wrong to me.
I think this is a slightly fallacious argument - I think it’s likely for a lot of the people that MZB “helped” (whatever that means, I’m never clear on exactly how she saved anyone’s life), if she hadn’t been the author, they would be “saved” by the next author in that vein they found.
I read those as why Moira didn’t speak out before - but not as an ideal situation - hence why she is speaking out now.
She’s also confirmed that neither she nor her brother see any money from the MZB Trust, BTW, in reference to earlier points about who is benefited or harmed by buying her books.
I wouldn’t do that. I still like Darkover as a setting, for instance. People are free to write in it.
But I would object everytime people choose to laud her.
If I recall correctly, MZB was one of the first people to not only allow fanfic in her universe, but was actively involved in getting the better ones published so she really did launch some careers.
Would those same authors have found another benefactor? I’m not too sure about that - there really is a certain amount of luck involved in getting that first break, and at the time there were far fewer avenues to get your work out there or tolerance for trying your hand at someone else’s world milieu.
I wonder why they don’t get anything, and who does get money from it?
I try to distinguish between praising the work vs. praising the person in these cases.
It’s not really so surprising if you look at it from the perspective of MZB’s partner/quasi spouse inheriting.
Though half the money going to the San Francisco Opera and half to Lisa (Elisabeth Waters) and none to her three children seems off.
Honestly, I don’t think it’s possible to separate an artist from his works. Yeats’ famous question - “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” - is its own answer. They are the same. The books, the paintings, the music - an artist will say, “I made it up.” And it’s true - it’s all made up of the thoughts and feelings and experiences of the artist.
This is true of great art (and what we call great art, is great, because it captures the most honest expression of the artist’s intent.) Art which is maybe not as honest but, perhaps, shallowly or temporarily pleasing, or even merely, affordable, may still be enjoyable but is ultimately disposable.
I would argue that it’s not just important to know the facts of an artist’s life, as best we can, but indispensable. It doesn’t matter what the works is “about.” Art is only ever about one thing. Art is always autobiography. People who say that an artist should only be judged by his art and not his personality are making an artificial distinction.
Are there some artists who are so distasteful that it becomes impossible to appreciate their work, dispassionately? Certainly - but that depends on the thoughts and feelings and experiences of the one doing the appreciation, not the one creating the expression. The response of viewer is individual to each individual, after all. A great artist will be expressing something great (as in, enormous) and universal but each individual viewing or, I should say, experiencing that expression, will be doing so through their own individual lens of experience.
Is Bradley a great artist? It doesn’t matter. Knowing more or less about her doesn’t change what she created. It changes the lens through which each individual experiences her work.
I would argue that people who read Bradley without knowing the details about her life experience are using a lens that’s partially obscure. It’s not surprising that some people would prefer to hold on to a lens that lets them see only what they want to see. I think it’s best to know as much as possible, providing the clearest (but of course, not flawless,) view. Sometimes looking closely can show things people would rather not see. It’s no surprise that sometimes people get angry when they’re forced into an unpleasant experience. OTOH, it’s no surpise that each of us has our own individual experience that makes the unpleasantness of viewing this or that work (or artist, either way) a tolerable or intolerable event.
The work is the work - an expression of the artist’s experience. Our response, as viewers, to that work is shaped by our own experience. Part of our experience is our knowledge of the artist (or the work, whichever). Everyone’s response, like their mileage, will vary.
Aside from all that, which is really just my philosophy of Art, there's another thing people do, which doesn't relate to art or the preceding paragraphs, which is, if they like something, they identify with it. Then if someone comes along and questions or denigrates that thing, they feel like their personal identity is being threatened. (Freud would have a word for all of this, but I can't recall just now.)
You see this a lot on the internet for some reason. Maybe because we are all of us constructing our identity each time we write. Anyway, some of the online responses around this Bradley thing are coming from this direction. It goes like this:
1. I like Marion Zimmer Bradley's books
2. Those people are saying that Bradley is a horrible person!
3. I am not a horrible a person - and I like Bradley! -
4. Therefore Bradley cannot be a horrible person.
5. Those people are saying that I'm horrible person.
6. Those people are horrible people.
So some of the push-back from the "don't tell me my favorite author is a creep" crowd is part of this unexamined identity problem.
Finally, in re Darkover - IIRC, MZB invented the world and it’s people and customs when she was a teenager. Then she worked at it over decades, altering the ideas as she grew and developed as both a person and a writer. The first books were published in the 50’s and the last in the 90’s. Of course, since her death, there’s been a bunch of stuff added, some from her unpublished material, some just new. The whole series is wildly uneven in terms of quality. You can find almost anything in there. The best I can say about it is that she was exploring ideas that were new territory for mainstream SF at the time. She had mixed success.
To the best of my recollection, Dyan Ardais’ actions toward the cadets were uniformly condemned in the books. The reader wasn’t supposed to approve of him although he’s a complex figure with some sympathetic elements. His making Danilo his heir was not simply a matter of buying him off.
That…only tells half the story. She changed her stance on fanfic after it came back to bite her in the ass. Suffice to say her motives behind it weren’t always quite altruistic. She viewed the fanfic as some sort of evolutionary breeding pond for her stock of ghostwriters.
Maybe, maybe not - the odds go up if they’re actually any good, I suppose.
But I don’t think getting published is what people are talking about when they say MZB “saved” them, somehow.
From here: “MZB’s partner Lisa Waters is the only beneficiary from the sale of MZB’s books (per her daughter Moira, a dear friend I’ve know since my teens). If anyone would like to benefit MZB’s surviving children, Moira suggests looking up her brother Mark Greyland’s incredible art.”
Why that is, I don’t know - but that would be the same Lisa Waters(MZB’s lover, BTW) who also covered up Breen’s (and likely Marion’s) abuse and admitted it in court testimony.
THat’s fine if you’re talking about an individual work’s literary merit, not so fine when talking about their influence and overall legacy. Like I said a while ago, I desire that MZB never be mentioned without the “she was also an abuser and abuser abettor” stringer.
Frankly, I view that as pretentious bullshit. And I speak as someone who has sold both visual arts and writing.
Yes, quite a bit comes from the artist, but it’s not like everything is made up out of whole cloth. There’s a lot of research and pulling stuff in from the real world that goes into making a coherent whole. (MZB, for example, used Spanish and Gaelic for the languages of Darkover rather than making something up entirely). Not everything an artist does springs from the same source - not all of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photos had to do with sex, for example.
Yeats example - the dancer - necessarily incorporates the artist on a level not seen in, for example, writing or painting. Yes, it IS possible to divorce a great story from the originator’s political views.
Well, then it’s just a goddamn shame that the Book of Kells or the Epic of Gilgamesh are worthless because we don’t know a damn thing about the artists, right? On to the trash heap with anything that doesn’t have a bio attached!
You’ve really swallowed the post-modern Kool-Aid, haven’t you?
For me it went like this:
It’s rather like how I can appreciate Gwenneth Paltrow as an actress while thinking that as a person she’s a spoiled, snobbish rich girl. I can enjoy Terminator without constantly thinking Schwarzenegger is the sort of douchebag that cheats on his wife. I can hang up Escher prints all over my house without also thinking about how irritating I would have found him as a human being from what I’ve learned of his life.
That true of any work developed over several decades. You can say that of Doctor Who, only more so.
Her motives don’t have to pure to have done some good
Oscar Schindler was no saint - he was, in fact, a goddamned Nazi himself, a womanizer and adulterer, and he used children as slaves in his factories. Nonetheless, he also saved 3000+ lives during the Holocaust. You don’t have to BE good to DO good in the world.
Yes, the fanfic bit her on the ass. Going forward, that changed how everyone did business. Yes, she at times exploited people used as ghost-writers. She also helped get people published and on their way to careers as writers. The world isn’t black and white, it’s very grey, and no one is purely good or evil. Revelations about bad things doesn’t magically go back in time and erase the good.
Now, it may turn out that in the end a person’s bad outweighs their good… but that doesn’t erase the good they did, any more than the good they do erases the bad. Maybe it’s just that I don’t make the creators of works into some sort of hero for being creative, so when there are unpleasant revelations about them it doesn’t smash an idealized view of them.
Maybe, maybe not. I’d have to know more about those individual people, wouldn’t I?
I’m OK with people discussing her misdeeds - what I object to is telling people “don’t ever read her works because of this, that, or the other thing”. Tell people her works were influential AND that in personal life she did some terrible things and let them decide whether or not to read what she wrote, and whether or not to like it.
Frankly, I’m not entirely surprised to find out there were all manner of sexual hijinks going on. She came out of an era of “free love” theories and experimental polyarmory which might have been enjoyed by the adults but were very disruptive and upsetting to the kids involved even when there was no molesting of minors going on. Starhawk strikes me as another such, although her fictional portrayals of group intimacy were much, much more idealized and pretty. In the 60’s and 70’s a lot of people who tried to make it work in real life didn’t succeed and groups dissolved into ugliness.
I also wonder if MZB was one of those women who would have been happier without having children but had them because that’s what you did in those days.
The funds that you give them enable their actions. Of course, in Chick-Fil-A’s case, they fall under the large umbrella of fast food, that I’ve gradually stopped eating anyway. Coors is also involved in lots of other nefarious activity that has nothing to do with gay issues.
No, and he can’t even speak intelligibly either. As for Michael Jackson, as creepy as his behavior may have been, didn’t investigators turn his life inside out, and find no proof that he actually harmed any of the kids?
Pat Boone?!? He’s quite the reactionary.
I haven’t listened to Regina Spektor since she endorsed Operation Cast Lead in an article on her Myspace. In contrast, I’m quite taken with The Shondes- anti-Zionist Jews who are willing to take the heat that ensues. The members of Rage Against the Machine really seem to walk the walk, donating lots of money, getting arrested at protests, and so on.
Whoah, there. The post-modern Kool-Aid is a completely different flavor: reader response and Death of the Author, and all that. Art as autobiography is about as far away from that as you can get.
Unless I have the power to censor her works (and I don’t), or compel people to do as I say (again, I don’t) telling people that I think they shouldn’t read her works is just a recommendation I make. It’s always up to people to decide if they want to listen to that rec or not. As I’ve said before, the issue here is that I was told not to even bring it up at all. In fact, my original post said, in total:
Nothing there telling people what they should do.