At behest! Frolick a gander at
My main man: Leonardo Tolstoyus!
His exposition unmatched:
a deliverance upon thy sacred calf!
Writing Sense - Shakespeare Sucks! by Leo Tolstoy
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At behest! Frolick a gander at
My main man: Leonardo Tolstoyus!
His exposition unmatched:
a deliverance upon thy sacred calf!
Writing Sense - Shakespeare Sucks! by Leo Tolstoy
AND ANOTHER THREAD IS SINGLE-HANDEDLY DESTROYED
Nary a fool! Resuscitation commence!
http://i.imgur.com/3c9uW.jpg
My nigga
Or if it's American Gangster
My man
I wonder what she's drinking. And what's with the desk right at the front door like that? Embarrassing.
I mean, I agree with much of what he says, but I disagree with his conclusion. The thing is that Shakespeare wrote these things back when everything else was inside jokes about how Catholics suck and praises for the Queen and morality plays and, quite frankly, dreadful. One of Shakespeare's biggest contemporaries was Edmond Spenser, who wrote a 6-book series about a Knight going around and killing stuff and saving a princess and slaying symbols of Catholicism and upholding symbols of Queen Elizabeth, and it's just not at all interesting.Quote:
Originally Posted by wufwugy
In short, some have argued that Shakespeare invented humanity (or at least was the first to talk about "the human condition"), and the arguments for it are compelling.
Buuuuuuuut I personally think people have only gotten better (and more up-to-date intellectually, aesthetically, etc, obviously) as time has moved on. It's fucking earth-shattering that Shakespeare addressed internal, existential conflicts (I have a chance to kill my PoS uncle and avenge my father who literally bothered to take the trip across dimensions to visit me and tell me to avenge his death, but like, I don't know if I can/want to/etc), but Tolstoy does make fair points about how there are a lot of bare plot and dramatic devices and such. In the context of Shakespeare's time--back when characters ran into three-headed monsters, not because duh that's what makes sense to happen next, but because it's time for the knight to prove his bravery to the princess, and it's not a 4-headed monster because the three heads very specifically refers to an x type of symbol, yadda yadda yadda; fuck, that's even how renaissance art pretty much works, just a bunch of lame-ass symbolism--Shakespeare told very good stories with startlingly natural progressions. In the context of our modern world where you could just simply read something else, though, I think you're better off reading something else.
So, sure, whatever, I'll agree because why not. Giving high school kids a Shakespeare play and saying, "Literature doesn't get any better than this!!" is a really bad way to discourage enthusiasm about the arts. Moar Easton Ellis, McEwan, Diaz, Borges, etc plz if you actually have any interest in having your students take an interest in what you're teaching them.
I do want to say, though, that Shakespeare was a massive fuckin baller.
lolmpaa.jpgQuote:
Originally Posted by spoonitnow
Just about everything in literature genuinely sucks, or sucks enough for complaint, before ~1980. The best of the best is at best stuff you want to have read not stuff you'll be glad you're reading.
It probably has something to do with being alive ~1980 and not ~16dickitytwo
I pretty much agree with the premise here. People talk about how contemporaries "stand on the shoulders" of their predecessors, which is why we should have such a profound appreciation for the classics. But doesn't that also imply that the contemporaries stand with a higher vantage point and that the classics are, in one way or another, below what the contemporaries provide?Quote:
Originally Posted by a500lbgorilla
Again, I don't at all mind giving Shakespeare his kudos because he was incredible, but if kudos are a finite resource (which they might be in the education system, for example), then maybe we should save a few for those writers who are actually addressing issues that have to do with people living in modern cities with modern technology that transcend and build upon the themes of older works.
Anyway, there are things that certain time periods systematically do better than contemporary works. Fans of 19th century British novels, for example, aren't going to enjoy things coming out now because they so rarely have the huge, cataclysmic plots with a massive cast of characters and all that fun stuff.
Conversely, I heard that Shakespeare didn't hold much of The Wire or of Titanic.
Have any of you ever acted in a Shakespeare play? I don't think a person could possibly pick up on 1/4 of what he puts into his scripts even given multiple readings as just a reader, whereas putting on the show requires incredible amounts of analysis and unpacking content and meaning.
This conversation reminds me of when I learned why the Beatles music was so cheesy.
It kinda goes like this:
Well, what they did wasn't really profound, they just stole from everyone on the fringes and repackaged it for mainstream audiences. They weren't the first 4-piece rock-n-roll band, but they did it in a way that attracted the attention of nations. They had musical gifts, but mostly they had great PR.
They were so successful that everyone in the pop-rock music industry has been trying to copy them for decades. With every attempt, the ratio of Beatles music to Beatles-like music decreases. Add in the advances in technology and the occasional massively talented artist and hey... now the Beatles sound is so antiquated and bland.
It doesn't sound bland because that's what they were... it's bland because many talented people have critiqued their work for decades and some talented artists have taken that criticism in stride.
To relate this to Shakespeare: A similar phenomenon. He mostly re-wrote classic tales in a way that contemporary audiences would appreciate. He achieved huge fame in his lifetime and has been critiqued and copied ever since. Take into account that the colonists who founded America generally had only 1 or 2 books if they had any books at all. Those books were the Bible and/or some collection of Shakespeare's works. So the literature of America is rooted in these two sources. It's no wonder that the originals seem antiquated and bland today.
I don't pretend to catch even close to everything that's awesome in Shakespeare's works. The thing is that there are different types of appreciation of the arts. These nuances still generally lend to something like "Ophelia's underhanded reference to her fanny here would have shocked the audience of their time," or "there's some layered commentary here on the Elizabethan military hierarchy," etc. In other words, they lend to appreciations within historical contexts or lend to appreciations of how Shakespeare can be considered the best writer of all time.Quote:
Originally Posted by kingnat
They don't directly or easily lend to actual artistic appreciations that affect you emotionally or challenge your conception of our world or anything like that (again, they can do that, but all of these filters through historical contexts, changes in language, etc seriously tempers the effectiveness of those things for me at least and a lot of people).
This isn't so much meant to be a cursory dismissal of all of the puns and nuances and degrees of cleverness and thematic development in Shakespeare's writing. They do indeed prove that he was an unmatched talent, but I suppose you can say that there are some important ways in which he's going to suck compared to contemporaries. I think that's a terrible, misleading way to word it that's only going needlessly polarize the conversation, and I prefer to focus on how awesome the contemporaries are at addressing the human condition, but from a pure semantic vantage that argument could be viable based on certain definitions of the terms.
Yes he was revolutionary and wrote some stuff quite beautifully, but that doesn't seem to be what is taught about him. He is upheld as some great storyteller and philosopher, but he's neither, yet nobody can see this because nobody forgets what they were told about him and never just reads the texts to see what they really say.
The "to be or not to be" soliloquy, for example, is considered some of the most profound material in history, yet if you actually read it you see that it makes no sense whatsoever. His explanation of why "to be or not to be" is entirely different than his explanation of why "to die, to sleep". His explanation for why the "to die, to sleep" stuff is important is completely irrational and not insightful at all. I assume that with a proper translation, some of that would be clarified since maybe it would change several "we" to "I", the soliloquy would make more sense as a characterization of Hamlet, but even then it ends up being inconsequential in the way Tolstoy claims.
The Shakespeare love is just an echo chamber of English teachers and students who aren't actually thinking for themselves or scrutinizing the material. There is virtually nothing in Shakespeare that represents good contemporary writing, yet it's taught as if it's good. That's the problem. For being a bunch of liberals, the English profession sure has a conservative pedagogy. Not only is there nothing to learn from Shakespeare about good writing, but teaching students that he is a good writer only furthers their inability to scrutinize writing. I have encountered way too many people who love Shakespeare yet still have no idea what he wrote about other than what they were told, and what they were told had nothing to do with what he actually wrote about. It's gross. It baffles me at how unable to scrutinize characterization and plotting the classics were, and it baffles me that contemporary critics don't blast them for that
Titus Andronicus is the shit.
It irritates me that Shakespeare gets so much credit for opening up existentialism. This is only a phenomenal idea to the aristocracy which is used to getting their way so much that they don't even have much human condition to acknowledge in the first place.
Literature history isn't that great. It's really just a bunch of rich people who thought they were better than everybody else, but then when literature was eventually opened up to the poor and middle class, it was improved in ways far beyond what aristocrats ever did in a fraction of the time.
I don't like the "upon the shoulders of giants" idea because I think it's really just "letting real people who live real lives write stories". It's not a coincidence that the more aristocracy-heavy the literature, the more wacky their characterizations and plotting. Deus ex machina is the kind of idea an aristocrat would unwittingly fabricate due to being too isolated from the real world
what the
fuck
is this
That's like saying you don't like the idea of "monkey see, monkey do."Quote:
Originally Posted by wufwugy
Surviva's right, you learn the ways of the guy who succeeded before you in order to succeed even further. And it's strangely tied to that book I didn't like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and its idea of Quality. Anyone worth their salt can see what's good across many works, separate it from what's not, and combine it into something better.
It is relevant in many ways, but not necessarily here. It's not like stuff like deus ex machina is a precursor to normal plotting. In fact, it seems that deus ex is more of an artificiality in the first place and the development of normal plotting didn't depend on its existence.Quote:
Originally Posted by a500lbgorilla
The overwhelming majority of classic literature was written by special people who lived special lives. It's not coincidence that after the middle class entered the arena, so much of what the aristocrats thought was so nifty became swiftly crushed by the much more capable storytellers simply by merit of not being aristocrats. Existentialism, for example, is a neat idea to an aristocrat who has never worked a day in his life, but it's par for the course for a poor laborer. The giants' shoulders we stand on today are people like Steinbeck. Modernism doesn't rely that much on classicism and its several different rebirths. What makes modernism modernism is the fact that literature is no longer just the product of the aristocracy, and we haven't expanded upon the highly limited aristocratic ways so much as we've shown why they were wrong
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edit shipping the right link
A good analogy is music and black people. The most downtrodden, oppressed, and poor people in any modern society were merely allowed to create music and within just a few decades they created better material than the entirety of aristocratic history combined. As great as Beethoven is, his material is still just a niche that will never find the great success of what was created by poor black people. "Standing on the shoulders of giants" is an archaic descriptor; a more apropos one is "opening up the creativity of the masses". Poetry was the dominant form of literature for thousands of years not because it was the best form but because literature was bogged down by a narrow set of authors and audiences.
I have very little patience for propping up people who were only as good as their lack of competition from true artists. The uniqueness of art is that you need the struggles of life to create the good stuff, and this struggle is something the aristocracy greatly lacks but the poor have a wealth of. The classics and their rebirths are their own dark ages when compared to modernism
In both posts you demonstrate the same mistake, thinking that the giants are members of the aristocracy. The giants are simply those who improved the craft before you.
Rapping wasn't created in a vacuum. Its practitioners borrowed from what came before it. Its best were improved by and influenced by the best that preceded them. Even if they can't tie the ideas to a name, they're still clambering up the back of a faceless giant.
Rapping - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia >>Rapping can be traced back to its African roots. Centuries before hip hop music existed, the griots of West Africa were delivering stories rhythmically, over drums and sparse instrumentation. Such connections have been acknowledged by many modern artists, modern day "griots", spoken word artists, mainstream news sources, and academics
Standing on the shoulders of giants is a way of things. Good artists borrow, great artists steal. Same thing, in essence.
lolQuote:
Originally Posted by wufwugy
Trying to upstage spoon?
ikr