I like the idea, but what I found really intriguing was this particular phrase:
If they have done anything wrong (and I am unconvinced they did), they have been punished well beyond their desert.
(Emphasis mine.)
I understood what he meant immediately, but I thought I couldnât remember ever seeing the word âdesertâ used in quite that way before. So I jumped over to the OED and found, among others, this definition:
That which is deserved; a due reward or recompense, whether good or evil.
All my life Iâve heard about people getting âtheir just dessertsâ. Iâve even seen it spelled that way. So not only has Mr. Swanwick set a good example as a writerâheâs set a good example grammatically too. Now I really want to read something else by him.
Heh, âjust desertsâ is one of those classic archaic sayings thatâs stuck around primarily to confuse people. I personally group it into the spellings like spelt, spoilt, leapt, burnt, and so on, which are chiefly British but not unheard of around the world. Desert is also weird because, like the sandy desert and the tasty dessert, itâs a noun, and talking about things people deserve via nouns is kind of weird. I think most people say âbeyond what they deserve.â
Anyway, I applaud Mr. Swanwick and think itâs a very good point that as an author, his goal is not to unnecessarily criticize another authorâs books. If he was at a meeting with that author, or he and the author were working together, undoubtedly he would offer much criticism to the individual. But wasting his time and the time of his readers to focus on negativity doesnât help anyone, considering he is well aware that his opinion will influence others much more than a friend or a book review.
I think this is also the same mentality behind creative people not responding to reviews or public criticisms of their work. At least, the classy ones donât.
I get where heâs coming from, but I live in a very different space. First of all, this right here is the closest I come to spouting off on social media. I bailed on Facebook years ago, never bothered with Twitter, and am chronically shy about starting conversations, even online, rather than joining existing ones. Also, and probably more importantly, I am not a professional writer. Someday maybe, but certainly not yet. So there isnât a sense that Iâd be slagging my colleagues if I publicly badmouth their crappiest work. Thereâs also the fact that here at BBS, Iâm just another voice in the forum, without a particular audience thatâs paying particular attention to me over any other given commenter. So there isnât much damage I could do at any rate.
Still, I have no qualms about telling people what I think about Dan Brownâs writing, if asked. Or the failures of Scott Smithâs The Ruins. Sure, those guys made a mint off their bestsellers, and lots of people liked them. Big deal. Who am I to criticize? Well, Iâm a reader. I subscribe to the idea I first heard from Harlan Ellison that everyone is entitled to their own informed opinion, and so if Iâve read a particular book or seen a particular movie and Iâve satisfied myself that I have a reasonably well-informed opinion of its merits and shortcomings, I donât mind voicing those. I agree that filling up the world with my negative opinions doesnât feel as constructive as offering my recommendations of what I actually liked and why. And yet, if Iâve read something that provoked a negative reaction in me that was stronger than merely boredom or garden-variety ânot working for meâ distaste, that reaction might be of interest to someone, particularly if they asked. If someone asked me what I thought about Paul Haggisâ Crash winning the Best Picture Oscar, Iâd fill their ears with everything I found wrong with that mindless waste of celluloid (and for once Iâd go toe-to-toe with Ebert over this one). I canât hurt Paul Haggis, nor his career (and I wouldnât want to), but though I outwardly show respect for the opinions of those who preferred that movie over Brokeback Mountain, I privately wonder what in the hell is wrong with those people. Itâs similar to my tolerance for the religiously devout. I can carry on perfectly polite and amicable conversations (even disagreements) with theists, but somewhere in the back of my mind lingers a persistent suspicion that their intellectual development is somewhat incomplete. I square this with the idea that they probably believe Iâm damned to perdition, but theyâll still share a sixpack of Dr Pepper with me, and the world goes 'round and 'round.
It strikes me as a trifle disingenuous to mention in a Facebook post that something you read struck you as lame, or ill-conceived, or poorly-executed, or simply flat-out wrong, and when someone asks you what it was you read, you coyly refuse to answer on the grounds that you donât want to incriminate the author with your negative opinion. Then why in the world did you speak up in the first place? Facebook isnât really a private journal for one to muse out loud; thereâs an audience (however small; my own Friends list never reached three figures) and itâs kinda dumb to pretend theyâre not there. And it strikes me as a teeny bit rude to bring up a thought or opinion that you arenât prepared to clarify with a corroborating fact or extenuating circumstance or two. If you post, âBoy, I read the most nauseating sonnet this morning, completely put me off my oatmeal, so now Iâm starving,â and somebodyâs interested enough to ask, âWhat sonnet was that?â now youâve painted yourself into a corner. If you donât want to rat out the fact that your Great Aunt Esmeralda canât string two iambs together with both hands and a staple gun, you then say, âOh, Iâd rather not say; the point was I missed my breakfast,â and you sound like a bit of a bait-and-switch twit for selling your headline with a juicy kernel of dirt and paying it off with a high-minded platitude that makes your readers sorry they cared for a second about what you were saying.
Thereâs an ancient wisdom behind momâs old proverb âif you canât say anything nice, then donât say anything at all.â Donât just fill the air with your opinion about some unnamed hackâs failures in order to get it out of your system, and then feel everythingâs fine if you just donât name the hack. Now youâve just alerted the multitudes about the existence of some work of (arguable) art that fails in ways you found interesting enough to expound upon, but you wonât condescend to name to said multitudes so that they may see if they share your opinion, or perhaps might like to challenge it. In my opinion, thatâs about as insulting to your audience as your negative criticism might be to the artist in question.
If youâve got nothing positive to say⌠be quite.
Swanwick isnât stand out here, heâs in the majority, and âclassinessâ isnât the prime motivation for most authors.
In truth, thereâs a definite price to be paid for honestly evaluating the bad work of fellow authors. Itâs understandable that neither Swanwick nor Cory want to be pariahs in their field, but classy? It may be a nice way to treat fellow writers, but itâs a poor way to treat fellow readers and paying customers. âClassyâ would either be honest recommendations or refusal to give any recommendations at all.
Writerâs blog recommendations seem to fall into two general categories. Some writers will recommend nearly anything written by one of their friends or associates. Other writers will only recommend books they have actually have found to be of high quality.
Unfortunately, Iâve had to put Cory in the first category. I totally get wanting to give your friends a leg up, but recommending crap doesnât help friends, readers, or the author doing the recommending.
Iâve found I donât like Coryâs recommendations, so I ignore them. It doesnât make them totally invalid, they are subjective after all, albeit unreliable.
Agreed. My suspicion is that the unreliability of Coryâs recommendations is mostly caused by his feeling bound to compliment the works of friends and associates, whether or not those works are of any particular quality. This is routine behavior in the publishing world, so not at all surprising, but neither does it qualify as âclassyâ.
There actually are a handful of top writers who rarely recommend the works of others, but when they do, it will usually mark a must-read.
I canât disagree.
This is the reason I feel critics are important. Science/speculative fiction has always been a little weak in the regard, as the critics are very often writers in the genre themselves, and itâs a smaller world than mainstream, so thereâs more worry about toe-stepping.
Not that there hasnât been some great literary criticism in SF, but aside from various best-of collections, actual criticism of contemporary work has always seemed hard to come by.
If you have nothing positive to say come and sit next to me.
Exactly. If youâre only going to say good things, might as well kiss criticism good bye.
Itâs not about what you say but how you say it.
Criticism offers a solution and doesnât simply slag off peopleâs efforts. And unless youâve tried something yourself, and realise how hard it can be, you donât get to be a critic.
Well, actually I thought there was an interesting point made here. From the perspective of information theory, if youâre in a space where most things arenât good, then saying theyâre not good conveys very little information, and therefore is arguably not very valuable. In such a space, it is much more valuable to mention the good. Of course the argument can be made vice versa if the space contains most things that are good, but sadly that wouldnât apply to the space of literature.
That said, if there is a significant cost to encountering something bad, then knowing that is useful, even if the information conveyed is small. Although I suppose you could assume that if you havenât heard anything good, then that must mean it is badâŚ
I canât help but think that analyzing why something failed is going to produce useful information. Probably more useful (certainly more useful) than scrotum rubbing PR based âfeatures.â
the space of books that I donât think is worth reading is so large
that thereâs no point trying to map it â especially since such a list
is a lot less useful than a list of books that I do rate as the good
stuff.
I very much appreciate Coryâs approach to reviewing. When I spot a book that Cory has reviewed, I donât have to try to remember if he liked it or not. If I remember it via Cory, he thought it was worth reading. And as a result, Iâve confidently purchase many of the books that heâs recommended.
It is, indeed, a useful thing to remember that Cory (and Mark too, for that matter) tends to reserve his mentions of new pop culture items like books and movies and TV shows for those about which he feels enough enthusiasm to want to recommend. These guys consume media and know their stuff, but since theyâre not technically paid critics, theyâre under no obligation to critique things they donât like or donât want to be bothered with, So yeah, a fairly good rule of thumb is, if itâs new and they mention it here (unless itâs actually newsworthily awful), then they probably recommend it.
But I treat most of Coryâs and Markâs recommendations in a manner somewhat like I treat most criticsâ reviews. Iâve bought many things that theyâve raved over, and many of the things theyâve loved Iâve enjoyed as well, whereas a few of them missed the mark with me. By now, Iâve come to know their tastes well enough to have a pretty good idea when Iâm going to like what they like, and when Iâm going to disagree. And reaching that point has made their recommendations more valuable to me. Iâve had to learn that no critic is a useful predictor of how youâll like anything until youâve had time and opportunity enough to compare your tastes.
So. Through this site Iâve learned that I like John Scalzi and Richard Kadreyâs Sandman Slim books. But Iâve also learned that Ryan North is very hit-or-miss with me, and Iâm just never going to appreciate Amanda Palmerâs work.
Years ago I found that David Elliott (the movie critic for the San Diego Union-Tribune) was a useful âanti-criticâ for me, in that most movies that I really loved he tended to really hate, and vice-versa. Once I realized that, I could put his opinions to good use.
I donât take back anything that I wrote above, but I gotta say that I donât share Coryâs taste in music.
At all.
Ever.
Yeah I canât say while I would go read a lot of the stuff that does so well with the general readership in the world. I find a lot of it not even interesting just from the descriptions, but I do have a fondness for the Doc Savage pulps which are nowhere near stellar writing and I make no case for them but I personally get great enjoyment from the stories and I have found that I am also a sucker for Steampunk so one mans trash and all. Long ago I realized it may be trash writing and not really my thing but PEOPLE ARE READING and that is a good thing.
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