Perhaps not. Any relation to Tom Corbett, Space Cadet?

“the thread is not lit-crit, as some seem to think – it’s self-revelation.”

Quite so.

I also was fascinated, a couple of years earlier (age 12) by Charles Berlitz´s books, to the point of writing an article for my school newspaper about Atlantis and all the evidence that it had existed. That article is one of my most shameful secrets; some day I plan to track and find all surviving copies and make a bonfire with them.

Generally, they fall into specific categories.

Romance potboilers: Danielle Steele, Jackie Collins.

Best-selling SF/Fantasy: Stephen Donaldson.

NYC Cocktail Party Smalltalk Books: Philip Roth (except for PORTNOY), Saul Bellow, Updike, Cheever, both Wolfes. The only one of those I am actively hostile about is the relentlessly inadequate Salinger. But the rest of them have that sort of dated “isn’t that quaint” quality of wrestling with big ideas from the squeezed sphincter POV that that comes from excerpts from sophomore philosophy class as translated through the transcendence of one’s own cock. Kind of like Kingsley Amis, except replace “cock” with “glass of gin”.

But you know, that’s no better or worse than the often stilted “word from the streets” style of writers I like, like Algren, Farrell, London, or Dreiser. but I came to those on my own, not from some sense of obligation to literary culture and distrust of my own taste.

The writer whose dated race-writing most embarasses me is Vachel Lindsay, especially his poem CONGO.

If it was for you an emotional response, then my remark falls. I had read in your post a reaction to genre-bashing. While i’d agree on the principle, this thread didn’t look like the right place to me.

Now i know i have to try one Piers Anthony, and i’d like to keep them coming, y’know :)

Much later, it dawned on my that my ability to see “SEX” written into the patterns of wall-to-wall carpeting might not be a sign that the carpet manufacturers had embroidered subliminal messages into their products.

But I didn’t read Atlas Shrugged (until this year). Even as an angst-and-hormone-laden teenager, I had standards.

One thing it all reminded me of, and I’m not certain whether this is shameful or just silly, is a theory I formed (aged 11?) about the reasons why sci-fi was brilliant and fantasy novels were rubbish. Roughly, my reasoning was that sci-fi novels were set in the future and therefore not obviously false. Fantasy novels, by comparison, seemed to be set in some made-up past, but we know that the past wasn’t like that, therefore they were false and a waste of time. (I also really enjoyed historical novels, which muddies the waters here). I wish I could say that my adult self is far more sophisticated about such matters, but I suspect that I’m just as prone to spurious theorising about why my tastes are highly rational now as I was then.

On a different note, I do remember an old english teacher of mine explaining that there was something useful about kids enjoying sci-fi. Roughly, it provides a teacher with an easy way into “proper” grown-up literature, via books like 1984 and Brave New World. I’m not certain whether this theory works, but it’s certainly how I moved from Asimov to Orwell, and then from Orwell it’s a quick step to Lawrence, and so on. So, I say let the kids read Asimov, L Ron, etc.

They (and Joseph Campbell) pretty much all share the same message: “Do what you want without thought for the consequences to others.”

Follow your bliss, my ass.

i’m ashamed (and only mildly, really – more like embarrassed), at the reasons i did so (for some of them) and at the breathless, guileless swallowing of hooks, lines and sinkers that i was prepared to do.

the thread is not lit-crit, as some seem to think – it’s self-revelation.

Oh, and I used to read my grandma’s True Detective magazines when I was a kid.

Possibly a background in mass-market publishing gives a different perspective.

Not that there’s anything wrong with enjoying a good sneer at an appropriate time and place; it’s the implication that there’s some serious weight to one’s subjective reactions that may strike someone who doesn’t share the same feeling as less “playful” than intended.

And what you’re asking is why, in a thread about emotional responses to text, a slightly emotional statement about text is made?

What people are posting about is either books/text that “bothered them,” or their own reaction eventually bothering them. So I’m unclear why it’s a nonsequitur for me to a) comment on this; and b) mention something textual that bothered me.

Doesn’t really mean anyone is “wrong,” but simply that, yet again, emotional responses differ. One person’s “playful” sneer isn’t necessarily another’s. So if someone happens to have a different emotional response to someone else’s “playful” sneer, well, if that “comes up,” it’s precisely as valid a reaction as the “playful” sneer. I mean, you wouldn’t bridle at my less-than-sneering remark simply because it wasn’t your own reaction, would you? (Sure, you might; so that’s why such things “come up”; because not everyone is ourself. Since you asked; I’m going to be lazy and not edit this down to the more concise version it yearns to be.)

Yes, yes, yes, i can understand that, but why does it come up in this rather playful thread?

The standards of Bad are less tricky than the Good ones. It’s rather straightforward to poke fun at mass produced dope like Eddings’, simple freaks like Rand or wackos like Clancy.

You can do that without being some True Art bore, i’m sure.

I agree. There have been many comments on this offshoot thread at Unfogged, by the way.
http://www.unfogged.com/archives/week_2005_12_18.html#004369
(Embedding the link didn’t seem to work in preview, inexplicably.)

Among other comments I made:

I find it interesting how nearly universal the number of citing in the CT threads of works of sf and fantasy are made, some far more flawed than others. Not at all surprising, though. It’s not news how many adults still find the genres embarrassing. (How many folks are bothered, in contrast, that Sherlock Holmes is no less of a complete fantasy, or Nero Wolfe, or that neither cozy mysteries nor hardboiled are any more “realistic”? Not so many, it appears.)

[...]

“I’m kind of embarrassed about all the Nero Wolfe stories I read. ”

Okay. I’m not embarrassed by all the Rex Stout Nero Wolfe’s you, I mean I’ve read (I’ve not read any non-Stout Wolfe). They’re certainly not badly written. They do what they came to do, and did it well; they’ve amused and entertained millions of people. They’re not the most beautiful prose ever written, nor offering of greatly deeper pleasures, but is that the standard of what we’re embarrassed to enjoy?

[...]

Non-sequitur, I might clarify that for all my various “what’s to be embarrassed about” observations above, I certainly amn’t oblivious to the simple emotional reaction of looking at something one once really liked, and concluding that it was really quite awful in ways that didn’t bother us then, but do now. I’m just distinguishing, or trying to, between an understandable emotional response, and what’s possibly actually rationally defensible about it.

[...]

“The embarrassing thing about a lot of bad science fiction I loved as an adolescent was its wish-fulfilling quality and the callowness of the wishes it attempted to fulfill.”

I left out my thought here, which runs along the lines of, so you’re saying that adolescents are callow? But, you know, I’d want to say it in a gentle and kind way.

Yes, there’s definitely a ton of callow and shallow wish-fulfillment in much—though certainly not all—science fiction and fantasy. In particular, much popular sf has featured themes of persecuted smart people, particularly persecuted, unappreciated, smart kids.

But I’m unconvinced this is anything to be embarrassed about. If anyone could use some wish-fufillment, well, actually, there are plenty of other candidates than unappreciated smart kids, but not so many who would find and obtain books that make their lives seem a little less hopeless and miserable and totally not understood!

I think that’s a good thing, overall, that there are books and stories that provide that support and wish-fulfillment fantasy, and such callow messages as that it’s okay to be different and it’s okay to be smart, and you are not alone, while also providing some pleasure and thrills and sense of wonder at the possibilities of this and other universes, and maybe even some crunchy knowledge, or cool ideas, besides, like sprinkles. (Sometimes a bit deeper.)

That we won’t have identical emotional needs at age 30 as age 13 doesn’t change my mind. As a general rule, I might find that “reading or not reading something based upon what you imagine other people will think of it may not be the best way to go” to not be the worst possible advice.

“We probably need to know when you graduated (1976)….”

Not everyone here is necessarily a college graduate, oddly enough.

The seeming implication by some, incidentally, that there is some sort of Objective Standard Of “Good,” in terms of literary virtues, bothers me no end. Standing on that high horse to sneer will result in entrapment in quicksand, methinks. And it’s turtles all the way down. We choose our measures, but choosing them for someone else is another sort of act, as is letting someone else choose them for it. (Simply later realizing the flaws of something one did not when younger is merely to be human, however, and might be similarly non-astonishing or embarrassing to some.)

Generally speaking, I find literary enjoyment to be a bit of a crap-shoot: much depends, these days, on mood, time of year, time of day, whatever is going on in my life. I’ve abandoned a few books lately, because I’m in the wrong mood for them. The same is even more true for me of films. I don’t think my filters were so arbitrary as a teenager, I simply read whatever came my way. And on reflection I’m not sure I’m embarrassed by the VC Andrews books any more, terrible as they were, though I do wonder what teen-incest-gothic novels were doing in my high school library.