Andrew Sullivan links to Bud Parr who argues that, yes, blogs can save literature from “the Hollywood-style roll out of books.”
A healthy literary culture is one where not just the books with the biggest marketing budget or buzz should be publicly discussed. This, I believe is one of the greatest assets of the literary blogosphere. It is here where translation is not a dirty word. It is here where the publicity schedule means little. It is here where literary authors from independent presses get equal or better attention than whatever hotty the New York Times is billowing about this week to accommodate the tastes of myriad general readers. This is where being bitty becomes an asset. It’s specific, it’s personal, it’s opinionated. Those traits aren’t mutually exclusive with being critical; in fact they are the very assets that gives criticism life and probably why so many professional writers are finding themselves writing online, inviting comments from their readers, discovering others who happen to share their interests, no matter how specific.
Thoughts?
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I was thinking along similar lines recently, looking at some of the posts at SoG.
The most striking example is the conversation going on at the No Del Toro for Deathly Hallows post, led by ultra informed comments from Mary Jo Neyer, and comments from several other bloggers (including myself) about the friendship between JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis, their personal lives, the Inklings, and of course, their works, with footnotes on Dorothy Sayers and Daphne DuMaurier. An interesting side note is the fact that the post didn’t start out with that focus: it started with del Toro, quickly moved on to criticism of the LOTR movies, then on to criticism of the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe movie, and from there to the relationship between the two authors.
We’ve also spent some time on HP Lovecraft and Guy de Maupassant, Ursula LeGuin, Madeleine L’Engle, Emily Bronte, George MacDonald, the Vander Ark / Lexicon debate, and Charles Dickens, to list the names that first come to mind.
So yes, I think SoG is playing its modest role in providing a forum for people who are passionate about books to share knowledge and opinions.
Bud Parr talks about “The verve and intellect to be found in the literary world online” and about “many fanatically informed and serious writers”.
So come on you vervacious intellects, you fanatically informed and serious writers, stand up and take your bows. At least, check in. You’re keeping literature alive here. Tell us how that makes you feel.
Reyhan,
I will do so. But tomorrow. It’s been a long weekend of car troubles, shopping, & then more car troubles, plus an incredible Super Bowl & then the joy of trying to pull everything together for the start of Lent this week.
Hope you didn’t bet on the Patriots.
I only looked in on the game in the 3rd quarter. The look on Brady’s face said it all.
No, I was rooting for the Giants.
As for blogs saving literature, I think they will play an important part. Of course, people will have to continue to read literature & other works in order to discuss them.
It seems as if we’re entering an aliterate society. We can read; we just choose not to. We’re so connected to technology that we never take time to sit & be quiet or listen or read contemplatively. People are in constant, immediate communication through technology but I’m not sure they’re saying much. People can’t write letters anymore because it’s, as we say, snail mail. Why write when you can just email or text message 24/7.
We also face challenges in our reading because the way we read is to some extent formed now by the way we watch video media. TV & movies do not encourage slow, deliberate, well formed plots. They don’t even encourage fast well formed plots. They demand action, constant action, mind numbing never stopping action. Hence, as example, all the whining about the wandering in the woods in DH being too long. People can’t be patient & they can’t appreciate subtlety or a slow build up. It’s gotta be now.
So, there’s the downside of the age in which we live. But as with all things, there are massive positives. With blogs & the Internet in general, the space of our world has opened up tremendously. At SOG, for example, we get to discuss a myriad of topics, as reyhan pointed out, & we get to converse & debate with people from all types of countries, backgrounds, & perspectives that we might never get to do in real life.
Plus, as reyhan notes again, we can access a wide range of information on a wide variety of subjects. This information on the web can also be updated much more rapidly than books. We also have better access to primary sources.
SOG & other blogs like it are, in essence, bigger & better book reading clubs. Instead of coming together just once a week or a month & just restricting ourselves to a small group of people, we can come together anytime for discussion, we have a wide variety of people in the discussion, & we have better access to information to help inform our discussions. And while a blog is still vastly accessible, it still has a bit of a drag time built into it. That is, you can take time to read people’s answers & you can take time to formulate your own responses. It allows for thoughtful response.
So, getting back to our purposes, bring on A Wizard of Earthsea, Travis. I just finished rereading it. It’d been a couple of years, so now I’m refreshed & ready to get back into it.
Agree with most of what you say, revgeorge, except the tedious waiting about in tents. There was, as far as I can recall, no build up, subtle or otherwise, except for a build up of boredom. I’m pretty sure that JKR was trying to develop something, but what it was eludes my understanding.
Also, both TV (e.g. Prison Break) and movies (Brokeback Mountain, Michael Clayton, Atonement, There will be Blood) do still feature slow, deliberate, well formed plots. They also feature a lot of fast-paced mindless pap. But something makes me think that mindless entertainment is not the unique product of our civilisation. The Roman Coliseum, after all, was built entirely for that purpose. And people died almost as fast there as in the movies.
I guess we at SoG are a bigger, better kind of book club. That is even more humbling than I had conceived. I sort of fancied us as a kind of informal, ill disciplined graduate seminar without credit.
I’ve done some thinking recently about the whole period in DH with the tents. Try this for an exercise: imagine the same plot points taking place, but in the context of the regular daily workings of the Hogwarts School year. It wouldn’t have dragged at all. Less happened throughout the middle portion of PoA, for example, than in the tent section in DH. So one of two things is going on there: Either we were not prepared to read an HP book that broke from our familiar structure, or Rowling herself was unable to successfully break from needing the rhythm of Hogwarts year.
Now, I’m one of the odd people who didn’t find the tent section tedious, long and drawn out, or anything of the sort (though I admit I’m in the minority on that). So I’m sort of watching that discussion as a bit of an outsider.
Thoughts?
Can someone who didn’t find the hanging about in tents section tedious explain to someone who did (me) what the purpose of the exercise was?
As for the loss of the rhythms of the school year, that’s a good point Travis. There was a sense of being cut off from normal routine, predictability, stability etc. But then what kind of sane person would follow the normal routine while a megalomaniacal murderer is on the loose?
However, the loss of routine should have made for a sense of unpredictability and excitement, living life on the edge. The hanging about in tents was anything but that: it was highly monotonous and not at all productive, in contrast to the school year where the kids are at least learning something. It was also a little disturbing. Our three heroes seemed to be drifting without reason or purpose.
But I’m sure something was meant to have been going on. So I ask, again: what was the point?
reyhan,
I think you hit upon the point of it all, that is, the forest wanderings. The trio was drifting without reason or purpose. This is in effect Harry’s long dark tea time of the soul. He’s come to that crux in the road. He knows what he has to do but yet when it comes down to it, he has no idea how to do it.
I think also that we are drawn into the tedium & listlessness of the trio. People don’t realize it, unless you’ve been in the military, but most warfare is boring & tedious. You sit around waiting & waiting for something to happen just to break the boredom & then when it does, it’s fast & furious.
Not that I’ve been in the military, but from all I’ve read & heard, boredom is the rule not the exception.
Sorry, I accidentally sent my message above before I was ready, so my thoughts got cut off.
To continue, I think the great tedium of the forest wanderings is necessary to set up the buildup of tension between the trio, especially Ron. And then Godric’s Hollow is a short, intense break in the midst of it. And then after more boredom, we have Ron’s dramatic return. None of these things would’ve had the impact they did if they’d come, bam, bam, bam, right after another.
reyhan wrote,
“I guess we at SoG are a bigger, better kind of book club. That is even more humbling than I had conceived. I sort of fancied us as a kind of informal, ill disciplined graduate seminar without credit.”
I guess we are that as well. I think we can be both. I’d forgotten about the seminar aspect of it. The whole point of a seminar is for people to present their findings & conclusions & then have the group tear them to shreds. Not for the purpose of hurting anyone but for the purpose of making a person’s thoughts & conclusions stronger & more well rounded.
I regret not being as involved as I have been. Sometimes I get up in the morning before work and check the site and find a new post and a plethora of comments and ideas already expressed. I spend the time reading them, leaving myself no time to post, rush off to work, think about it all day, come home, get online only to find the discussion has moved on and my point already made by someone else.
Bummer…
I think with fewer visitors to the site, post DH, the discussion happens much more rapidly. If only we could do it in real time!
2nd Life anyone?
Matthew
I don’t have DH in front of me, because I just arrived at my desk this morning. But, I recall the tent sections of the books as the moments in which the trio’s faith in each other is tested for the first time in a truly adult fashion. For the most part, their squabbles had been mostly juvenile stuff: Tri-Wizard Tournament, petty jealousies, etc. One of the main plotpoints in the series has always been Harry’s unwillingness to invest his trust in his friends at crucial moments — to “go it alone”, so to speak. The tent scenes play on this theme by putting Harry square in the middle of trusting his friends. I think it is Hermione who says at the end of HBP that Harry should get it through his head that he’s not fighting Voldemort alone.
But this also makes Harry responsible for them, because he realizes for the first time that they are looking to him as a leader, yet he hadn’t realized how much of the “man, the myth, the legend” of Harry Potter he’d relied upon (I think Rowling is toying with her readers here, too — tearing away at all the perceptions of him as the hero with the indominatable spirit). Hence, the major blowup in which Ron storms off.
I thought it was tedious in many ways because there was plenty of dead time in which it simply seemed that Harry was staring at Hermione while she cried, or Ron while he sulked. But, I thought the whole point was to chip away any of the childish facade remaining around the main trio’s friendship and move them fully into the adult world. The moment when Harry gives Ron the sword to kill the Locket-crux is the pivotal scene in which their adult lives really come to fruition and their’s some recognition of precisely how they rely on each other. And I thought writing Ron’s reunion with Hermione as a tempestuous one was really smart — adult consequences and all that.
Just a few thoughts this morning before I have to talk to students about research papers…
I have to agree with Travis because I found the tent section of DH to be one of the more enjoyable parts of the book… Not tedious at all for me… Now, that’s just my personal feelings on the subject. Perhaps it was meant to really draw attention to the sister/brother relationship that Harry and Hermione have. That’s what I get out of it, thus the taking of Ronald out of the picture for a time. Just a thought.
As for great literature and blogging… I’ve been finding tons of great books lately by little known or only moderately known authors through the world of blogging.
Matthew,
I say, “Post away!” Who cares if they’re already outdated. You may have thought of a point that the discussion hadn’t gotten around to or hadn’t fleshed out very well. In the end, it’s all good. Well, except for trolls, of course.
Dave,
There is much in what you say, about the protagonists dealing with relationship issues – trust, jealousy – as well as what it means to be a leader, in more adult ways.
But I’m not sure that that was the best way of dealing with those issues, when nothing much is happening, given the context, which is fantasy, suspense, adventure and a dash or two of mystery and a strong theme of love’s triumph over death.
I think the relationship and heroic fallibility / infallibility issues could have been addressed much more interestingly in the context of action. As it was, the action stops while the protagonists sit around in damp tents and argue and storm off. My first reaction was: you don’t have time for this right now, guys.
I think my criticism also goes back to the point that an author can write about boredom and monotony and their corrosive effect on the soul, but she shouldn’t do it in a boring fashion.
Matthew, while honoring you for reading what others have written before venturing into the fray, I feel bereft of all the comments you’re self-censoring because you feel they’ve already been said.
I think there’s an extent to which there will just be widespread disagreement on the tent section. I wasn’t bored. I did have the thought, “You don’t have time for this right now,” and “She’s going to have to cram a lot into the last bunch of chapters” (which she did), but I found that during the tent section, I was taken along with Harry’s frustration and desperation – something that is needed for true euchatrastrophe. It needs to feel like we’re losing, we’re not getting anywhere, we can’t possibly make this happen in the last few pages of this story.
Here’s the one thing about the tent episode that I think forced Rowling’s hand to rush something and do it somewhat carelessly: The idea that Voldemort would have believed the Room of Requirement had only been discovered by him, in the entire thousand-year history of Hogwarts, is silly. Even arrogant Voldemort is more intelligent than that. Rowling took a bad guy who had us recoiling in horror midway through the book as his snake jumped out of Bagshot’s head and turned him into a cartoon right before the final conflict.
How does that relate to the tent episode? I think so much time was spent with no horcruxes being found that, in trying to get them all into the end, she had to really cram in the finding of the tiara, resulting in asking us to believe Voldemort would be that foolish, and the inclusion of a really forced subplot with the ghosts.
Travis,
I think the problem with the plotting in DH goes back to something bigger than the time spent hanging about in tents. In my opinion, JKR didn’t give herself enough time to resolve the horcrux sub-plot satisfactorily because she introduced the sub-plot of the Hallows. After focusing on the horcruxes for all of HBP, she puts them aside and rushes through their resolution and introduces a new set of magical objects with earth-shattering ramifications.
Too much.
On the other hand, I kind of enjoyed the admittedly last minute Rowena Ravenclaw and the Grey Lady sub-plot. It added some meat to the bones of the Founding Fathers backstory. I wouldn’t have minded more on the other founders as well.
Agree that Voldemort kind of lost his punch near the end. Many reasons for this. But you know, he never was a very deep character, just your garden variety megalomaniacal murderer. Externally handsome and compelling because he tortured and killed people, but devoid of interest as a character. Now if we’d had Grindelwald for the archenemy, there would have been a villain worthy of the name.
Reyhan, I agree with you, and you’ve hit the nail on the head of something I’ve been struggling to put into words since I read the book.
The tent section seems to break with both the style and tradition that Rowling had established for so long. Yes, she could/should remove the predictability from the routine she had established, especially at the crucial apogee of her story. But, I think I learn toward Travis’s second explanation: that Rowling’s attempt here was, to some degree, unsuccessful.
And, yeah, that Voldemort thought only he could have found the Room or Requirement was “silly”, as Travis put it. She built this grand villain only to write him as making one of the most terrifically dunderheaded strategic mistakes he could have.
Now that I think about it, DH does suffer from a slight case of Minority Report/Stephen Spielberg syndrome — a slowly paced beginning forcing existential questions, followed by a mad-dash to the end that deflates some those questions in the name of action and convenience.
Maybe Stevie Spielberg should direct DH…
You’re right, reyhan, Voldemort doesn’t come off much as a character, per se. We needed a big baddie to drive the story & so we have LV. But he’s really dehumanized to the point where he can’t come off as a real person. Your stereotypical villain, just wanting to conquer the world.
It kind of reminds me of all the James Bond villains. They’re megalomaniacs out to conquer the world for undisclosed reasons. And yet they’re surrounded by these huge operations full of loyal followers & just regular Joe Schmoes putting in a day’s work.
I think of The Simpson’s episode “You Only Move Twice” with the villain Hank Scorpio out to conquer the world but yet also concerned about giving his peons pensions, good healthcare, & vacations, etc. Nothing like that with LV. Sirius said it best, “It’s a lifetime of service or death.”
I would have liked more set-up in the previous books for the Hallows, I think. But I’m quite glad they were introduced, because of their symbolism: the hallows say everything Rowling wanted to say about virtue. I think what would have made a huge difference overall would have been somewhere, from Hermione perhaps, a history of “Hallows,” because as I’ve argued here after DH was released, there are more hallows than just the “deathly” ones. I count at least seven “hallows,” by definition, but that’s precisely the problem: Rowling never defines a “Hallow.” What I was waiting for was, after the story was told by Xeno, for Hermione to find something in a book about hallows in general.
If Rowling had done that, “Deathly Hallows” as a plot device would have made a lot more sense, I think, because then we’d see that Horcruxes vs. Hallows has always been the story, all the way back from book 1. Four of the six horcruxes were perverted hallows.
Missing that vital explanation, the deathly hallows does seem like a last-minute introduction.
Hallows are all about the worthiness of the possessor and the telling of the hero’s journey in a very Arthurian way.
I’m such a contrarian. No sooner does someone agree with me, then I disagree with myself.
I think that Voldemort could have been more interesting than he was. He had s lot of potential: abandoned at birth, delusions of being the child of a powerful wizard dashed by the revelation that he was a half-blood, fear of death leading him to inordinate lengths to conquer death. But somehow, it didn’t all come together to make a vivid character who stepped out of the page. Even when we had access to his thoughts, we didn’t really know him. There were only a few moments – in his interactions with Dumbledore – that we could see more of the person underneath.
But I really have mixed feelings on this. Part of me thinks that JKR actually did a fine job of portraying a psychopath: that’s how real life psychopaths are, very shallow and without a rich internal life, or even much of an internal life. Real life psychopaths are actually boring people. So I think she did get that right.
I join Travis in thinking that the tent time was not only not boring, but important thematically.
I don’t know the literary analysis words, but it is the time when Harry is most lonesome, “when every earthly prop gives way”, when hope is basically gone, when a person is most tempted to give up. Perhaps John G. would know the alchemical setting, but it seems that it is here when Harry becomes reduced to almost nothing: pure, unadulterated helplessness, and a lack of purpose or (almost) even meaning. This does not happen overnight—or even in one season—but takes time. Slow-passing, drawn-out, creeping, inching time.
In a sense, it reflects the existential and purposeless problem of post-modernism.
What ends it? An unexpected leadership by that most timid and helpless of creatures, a doe. Where does the doe lead? To a baptism reminiscent of a squire’s cleansing bath before being named a knight. Harry reaches for the cross—and regains his friend. But, more than a friend, now: a comrade.
OK, that’s abbreviated, but I think it conveys dimly what I perceived from the tenting sections.