How about a huge argument?
What makes good literature? What makes bad literature? What isn't literature at all?
> The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.
> -- Edwin Schlossberg
Good literature is literature that you, personally, enjoyed reading.
>>3
You're violating the whole [Vitriolic] nature of the topic. Please step outside until the conclusion of the thread. Thank you.
I think everything on the New York Times bestseller list is bad literature. I think anything very popular in its own time will turn out to be bad literature in ten years. I think that it takes at least twenty years for the worth of a book, its true literary status, to even begin to be realized.
I hate the da vinci code and I don't understand why people I thought were intelligent like it.
>>5
Da Vinci Code is terrible. I read Dan Brown's Digital Fortress too which was almost the exact same as Da Vinci Code. Both the books read like a movie script and insulted the reader's intelligence.
>>6 Cont.
But the mythology and story was entertaining. Digital Fortress was boring though.
I haven't read any Dan Brown books, but I have read this highly entertaining blog by a linguist who likes to mock Dan Brown and his horrid writing, at length:
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000844.html
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001622.html
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001628.html
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001631.html
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001684.html
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001811.html
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002325.html
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002345.html
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002467.html
After reading some of that, I did open up a Dan Brown book at random in a book store, and nearly laughed out loud at the wonderfully stupid opening passage, which is also quoted in one of the articles:
> Death, in this forsaken place, could come in countless forms. Geologist Charles Brophy had endured the savage splendor of this terrain for years, and yet nothing could prepare him for a fate as barbarous and unnatural as the one about to befall him.
>>8
Insult the reader's intelligence meaning that he assumes his readers are stupid. And LOL, the blog is funny. If you google Dan Brown, it comes up 4th.
>>10
I know that, I'm interested more in a deconstruction of his techniques. Although I guess the blog above might do that somewhat.
Good literature for me is literature which requires an intellectual effort to consume. Writing that doesn't concentrate on action, but situation. Writing that carefully places words.
The best part about Dan Brown's Digital Fortress is that the plot depends on basic math not working right. Also, someone invents "unbreakable encryption". Also, when they try the unbreakable encryption in the secret government magic unencryptor, it turns out to be a VIRUS! and deletes the Pentagon's network. Also they all stand around yelling instead of turning it off while it does this.
>>13 it's obviously a four dimensional religivirus
duh
So, was his technical consultant from First 4 Internet, or was it just a bottle of JD?
Oh, please tell me everyone gets fired after that. Please? Lie if you have to.
everyone gets fucking fired
Looking at a lot of this:
Did the bastard even READ Applied Cryptography?
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002467.html
>Dan Brown literally does not know bits from bytes (he thinks an encoded message presented in groups of four letters separated by spaces can be called a "four-bit code")
>it's obviously a four dimensional religivirus
I lolled
What are your opinions on Stephen King? Most of his books are seem to be the same old bestseller crap, but often a story or scene will stick with me. Not just that one about the prison, but there was that one story where a boy goes to kill something, and his "reality" keeps switching, he becomes a knight killing a dragon, and then a Persian killing a giant snake, and etc...
> "a thundering iron gate" has fallen (by the way, it's the fall that makes a thundering noise: there's no such thing as a thundering gate).
> A voice doesn't speak —a person speaks; a voice is what a person speaks with.
What an obsessive-compulsive jerkwad. I mean, obviously Da Vinci Code is badly written-- it's pop lit-- but "thundering iron gate" is a perfectly good literary device. Having read his reviews I think it's time for me to read the book myself; it sounds like fun.
> What are your opinions on Stephen King?
I read "The Tommyknockers". It was supposedly about people in a town being controlled by an alien device. Instead it was about a lump of space metal that made everyone menstruate a lot and grow tentacles. So, yeah.
I just tried googling for a phrase someone quoted from Angels & Demons that made me giggle:
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22cern%20has%20a%20particle%20accelerator%22
And it turns out there's a handy Russian site that has the whole text online! This seems somewhat legally dubious, and you can now admire how cleverly I avoided linking to this questionable site!
Er, anyway: Just looking through it at random, I find gems like:
> Langdon did a double take. He remembered the CERN driver saying something about a huge machine buried in the earth. But—
>
> "It is over eight kilometers in diameter… and twenty-seven kilometers long."
>
> Langdon’s head whipped around. "Twenty-seven kilometers?" He stared at the director and then turned and looked into the darkened tunnel before him. "This tunnel is twenty-seven kilometers long? That’s… that’s over sixteen miles!"
>>23
haha, it reminds me of one of Bill Brysons columns. The weird urge americans have to state the obvious
heard on news: "Milwaukee had over 10 inches of snow.. That's almost a foot!"
ps. this is written by an american no longer living there and is simply a co-opted casual observation, no anti-american sentiments behind this, hell i don't even know where mr. Brown is from, he could be swedish for all i care, this is merely something that struck me as amusing and humorous
pps. forgot the vitriole, "fuck america" or something unless you want to interpret the ps. as sarcasm which is kinda related, i guess
PS:
> Antimatter is highly unstable. It ignites when it comes in contact with absolutely anything… even air. A single gram of antimatter contains the energy of a 20-kiloton nuclear bomb—the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
> The pilot nodded. "Altitude sickness. We were at sixty thousand feet. You’re thirty percent lighter up there. Lucky we only did a puddle jump. If we’d gone to Tokyo I’d have taken her all the way up—a hundred miles. Now that’ll get your insides rolling."
I think the "[Vitriol]" tag on this topic will go down in history as a failure. You just can't say on a whim, "This topic will have vitriol." The vitriol has to want to be there.
Fuck you, >>26. Your opinions aren't worth a gnat's ass.
yeah >>26 I put that vitriolic tag there and it was totally TONGUE IN CHEEK you stupid fuck
If you read any books by Stephen King, it's probably best to make those The Dark Tower series.
the iliad
I disagree, there's plenty of stuff out there that I know is good literature that I simply don't enjoy as my tastes are very specific. And in keeping with this thread's vitriolic requirements, I'd like to say: FKUC POETRY. I can't imagine a bigger waste of time than trying to unravel a supposedly beautiful mess of words so I can then figure out what annoyingly vapid message the poet may or may not have not been trying to get across.
Often I feel like succumbing to the sentiment expressed in >>32 regarding poetry. Blase crap like you read in the New Yorker just doesn't spark any emotion in me, and the point of a poem is nowadays not as obvious as it was in the past when standardized meter made it easier to read even the boring poems.
But, there are good poets out there. Someone I know was editing a poetry review and she got the weirdest stuff imaginable, if it weren't unethical I'd get her to post some of it here. Probably the best poets just aren't published now because no one understands them yet.