Hard News: Some things you may not know
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merc,
Programmer teeshirt I saw,
Code warrior, Perl is poetry.Me I just say RTFM.
Poetry began when Adam started to name things. (a quote I saw once don't shoot me).
Neruda has a poem on poetry,Poetry
And it was at that age ... Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don't know how or when,
no they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.I did not know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names,
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire,
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating plantations,
shadow perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers,
the winding night, the universe.And I, infinitesimal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke loose on the wind.Pablo Neruda
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Beautiful
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Just that LOTR is a vastly superior work of art to the Harry Potter series, and that comes mainly from the connection between Tolkien's work and the profit motive being very weak. In fact, the Lord of the Rings was a sellout in Tolkien's mind, the book he really wanted to write was the Silmarillion.
The LOTR was the one that made the money, yet its a vastly superior work to the Silmarillion which is a hodgepodge of stories and histories and literary notes which Tolkien could never pull together into anything that a publisher was interested in. And he worked on it for his entire life, so it's not like he didn't give it a decent go.
I'm not sure if Tolkien's books support your argument that 'going for the money' reduces the quality of the work. If you decide that LOTR is much better than Harry Potter, it might have something to do with them being aimed at different audiences, one being a professor at a top international university, and the other not, simple taste, or... y'know, 'snobbery'.
And I doubt that JK Rowling did books 2 - 7 for the money, though I'm sure the publishers did it for the money. She did fairly well out of book 1 after all. She wrote them because she's a writer and that's what writers do. And because she's written the most popular book series in history, and the readers want the rest of the books. If she's stopped at 6 and said 'fuck it, it's not art any more' then she would have been hung.
Emma, I can agree that Tolkien didn't invent the fantasy genre in a 'first person to make it up' way, though he was one of the early people to cross over from mythology and religion to 'fantasy fiction'.
However I think fantasy writing in the second half of the 20th century completely changed as a result of his writing. His creatures and the world they inhabit are the model for thousands and thousands of books, games, computer games, movies etc. Why are elves tall chaps with bows instead of little pixie like creatures? Tolkien. Why are goblins snivelly nasty green things that live underground, rather than things that live under toadstools at the bottom of my garden? Tolkien. Trolls turning to stone in sunlight? He borrowed that one.
In the sense that nobody really invents anything major new in literature, sure. In the sense that he turned it on its head, made it a major part of fiction writing, and set the model that all others compare to - yeah, I'll give him fantasy.
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That's a very, very big call. Tolkein drew heavily on Norse mythology. He didn't invent elves, or dwarves, or orcs, or magic rings, or fantasy for that matter, and he freely acknowledged his own influences.
No one had ever thought to do it on such a scale before though. Mythologies built up over hundreds of years with collected tales from many sources, borrowing from older mythologies etc. To make an entire one yourself, and serve it just as the backdrop for one particular story, was his idea. And these days you will find entire rows in any bookshop copying that idea, where before Tolkien there were none, except 'Tales of King Arthur' and other group mythologies.
Of course he's derivative, but much less so than Rowling. She even calls her evil character "The Dark Lord" ffs. And I read "A Wizard of Earthsea" well before Harry Potter was ever written, in which a young boy with a tragic past is apprenticed into a school of wizardry where all the spells are in Latin, who unlocks a curse that pursues him throughout his life and turns out to be a flipside of his own personality. At least Tolkien was drawing on books that weren't written in his own lifetime, with limited appeal to the audiences of the time, something he turned around in a few short years.
Again, I'm not saying Tolkien is the greatest writer who lived, just that the LOTR is a vastly superior work to Harry Potter, both in originality and in care. And I believe that to be an outcome of the motivation - Rowling wants the money, where Tolkien just wanted to write the story.
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merc,
May be of interest,
http://dir.salon.com/story/books/feature/2003/12/03/tolkien_lewis/index.html -
Kyle, agreed. I don't think the "I don't want the money" is all there is to it. LOTR was a compromise forced on Tolkien by his publisher and friends who assured him that the Silmarillion would never work. But apart from that bit of criticism, the work itself is all his idea.
I agree with the rest of what you say. I don't think Rowling is crap. It's entertaining. But the first one was the best one, the rest formulaic. The final three seem to really be the one trilogy (not that I've read the final - don't give me any spoilers please). And they're a hell of a long book - to accuse Tolkien of plodding along is rich. The Potter series occupies three times as much shelf space as the LOTR series.
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And so may this - Erica Challis's* series of essays on what may have inspired Tolkein & what came before (quite a lot) on theonering.net
*writing as "Tehanu" - which is the name of the 4th book in the Wizard of Earthsea trilogy.
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Yay! And here's the link I forgot to paste in
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No one had ever thought to do it on such a scale before though.
Elias Lönnrot's 19th Century Kalevala - which is where Tolkien acknowledges copping most of his licks - runs to over 22,000 verses.
Lönnrot of course was a compiler and collector of existing work rather than an author. -
Heather, I both agree and disagree. Just as with writing, a lot of coding is purely utilitarian. Most programs are much like instruction manuals, a creation for a task, to a spec. The creativity is limited mostly to stuff that users will never even see, the code itself, which could only be appreciated by others.
But every now and then, a programmer gets to formulate a new problem and solve it, all by themselves. Or they get to solve an old problem in a startlingly creative new way. I love those times, they make me feel young again. And I think the same goes for most of life, to create is a neverending process that can permeate every moment of your day. Whether you put that time into making sounds for the entertainment of others, or images for their viewing, or it's something as simple as how you walk from one place to another, are just personal choices reflecting the level to which you need your art to be widely appreciated.
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Then surely.... the artist with no money may well already be distorting their art in order to survive, and equally, an artist that wants for nothing, can surely also do thier art for its own sake?
It is reasonably true that many great artists have known poverty at some point....
But it doesnt follow that you have to be poor to do art for its own sake.
Has anybody read Keep the Aspidistra Flying recently? From memory Gordon Comstock's dedication to poverty for his art is mocked by Orwell as ultimately self-defeating and pointless. In the end he gives up his poverty & his poetry for an office job and marriage to his pregnant girlfriend. Comstock's writer's block is, at least indirectly, caused by his poverty as he spends most of his time worrying about money!
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merc that is quite interesting. I never knew Treebeard was a homage/caricature of Lewis.
And I think I should add to my 'profit motive muddies art' point that eschewing the profit motive is of course no guarantee of making great art. Most people simply don't have the talent for it. And as Paul Rowe says, poverty can make people obsess about profit even more than they would if they were just dribbling along making decent money with commercialized art. It's an observation about art, not a prescription for how to become a great artist.
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Why are elves tall chaps with bows instead of little pixie like creatures? Tolkien. Why are goblins snivelly nasty green things that live underground, rather than things that live under toadstools at the bottom of my garden? Tolkien. Trolls turning to stone in sunlight? He borrowed that one.
Not disputing that, I wrote this for work a while back. What I dispute, I guess, is the treatment of Tolkein as some kind of god-wonder who made the whole thing up. He had a huge influence on what came after him, but 'quest for the magical artifact' is one of the oldest stories there is.
And they're a hell of a long book - to accuse Tolkien of plodding along is rich.
By 'plodding', I don't mean long, I mean dull, and I'm standing by that. I watched my son have the same problem with LOTR as I did - zipped through book one, inched through book two, nearly gave up halfway through book three. I've always felt it would have done wonders if he'd written the outline and then passed it to someone else to actually write. someone who could write breezy engaging prose and leave out all the 'songs'.
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zipped through book one, inched through book two, nearly gave up halfway through book three.
Amen to that. It took me about four goes to get through the whole thing. I don't reread LOTR much anymore, but I find myself skipping through long passages, particularly at the beginning of Book1 (Jackson was right to cut Tom Bombadil from the film). The prose is dire at some points (which might reflect its age) and he could have done with a decent editor.
I read somewhere that he & CS Lewis used to read their novels-in-progress to their faculty chums for feedback & advice, I imagine that a closed group of intellectuals also contributed to the clumsiness of some of the writing.
(I've never read Lewis, couldn't get into it)
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3410,
A poet at some stage has to be poor. And somehow money spoils poetry. It does, it takes away, it changes your original intention. I always become nasty when I have money.
I think one point has been overlooked. Nico's statement is not about the difference between making money from your art and not, but about the inability of the financially secure person to have much insight into the human condition.
Wealthy people (at least those who have never been poor) generally make worthless "art" because everything that they experience in life is filtered through their position of financial superiority over other people. In short, because they can buy anything, they do not appreciate the value of anything. Thus, their musings on life will almost certainly be utterly corrupted.
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But every now and then, a programmer gets to formulate a new problem and solve it, all by themselves. Or they get to solve an old problem in a startlingly creative new way.
Absolutely.
.. although in the first instance it's the formulation of the problem that's the creative aspect, and strictly speaking it's not a programmer that does that - in the sense that the role the person has taken is entrepreneur rather than programmer (that comment may be coloured by mild frustration at being in a job in which I must write what they tell me to, *coff* no matter how awful the specs are).
In the second instance, yes, programming creativity - the development of a solution whose structure has no precedent. It's not completely unheard of, but not very common. And I don't reckon there are that many codemonkeys that even want to be artists. Art appreciators, perhaps, they'll read the books & blogs of the top IT creators, but to use the tools & methods that the creators have made, rather than creating themselves (& that comment may be coloured by mild frustration at being in a workplace where there are no better programmers to keep me on my toes).
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It's not completely unheard of, but not very common.
Hmm...by that I meant as a percentage of the full body of code that exists; but compared to, say, music it's probably about the same percentage of pure creativity to derivation. So I think I'm going to have to rethink my opinion.
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3410 makes a good point, but I would amend it slightly.
Someone who is independently wealthy has no need for their "art" to be financially successful.
As an example, I love Gram Parsons' work. It was mostly unsuccessful while he was alive, though he never starved (he was able to swan off to France for months while the Stones recorded Exile on Main Street) because of his Trust Fund. He was a probably a pain in the arse to work with cos when he got bored he moved onto something else, leaving the "real" (starving) musicians to take up the slack.
IMHO, a commercially successful song or book or whatever happens because the author's creation finds a common wavelength (? emotional link? sorry, WIP) with an audience, not an easy or common occurrance. Dilletantes like that Hilton woman never spend enough time on one thing or commit to it emotionally (at least Parsons was emotionally committed to his music) to be able to make the emotional connection with the audience - she has no insight into their lives at all.
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Keen to demonstrate that I was a hip young man deserving of the deputy editor's job, I brought Murray around to my flat and stuck on Orange Juice's You Can't Hide Your Love Forever album: the one with the wonky version of Al Green's 'L.O.V.E.', and much beloved of John Campbell.
Little did I know that Murray, as a genuine soul fan, loathed the record, and that cover version in particular. "Could you please take this off?" he asked, eventually. Whoops.
Sorry Russell, 25 years later, but that was my fault. Mo and I had been flatting together since 1980 and generally reached musical consensus (god I learned a lot from that man) but OJ's cover of L.O.V.E, which was a big fave of mine, was a major point of difference. I used to bang it on in the morning and he'd come out of his room and pull it off before it got more than a few bars in. I guess you caught the flack because of that flat fracas.
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Amen to that. It took me about four goes to get through the whole thing. I don't reread LOTR much anymore,....
But you have reread it. Which is more than I can say for Potter, and I have more tolerance for that genre than most.
For all these criticisms, most of which are valid, the fact remains that this book was amazingly successful. Most people agree the prose is tedious and many have all sorts of ideas for how it could have been better. But few will even give that attention to most fantasy works.
Personally I actually read the chapter "Mount Doom" before I even started the book, when I was 9 or whenever it was that I first read it. I'd seen the cartoon and wanted to know how the story ended. So I already knew how it ended, and was in no hurry to get there, when I read the book. To finish the book took me over a year.
That is the way with mythopoetic stories. It's not about racing to the end, or 'getting the point'. The enjoyment is in the telling, in the escapism. We all know what happened at the fall of Troy, so we don't judge any telling of it by how it ends. It's how it's told, how caught up we get in it. It's the little lessons along the way, and the characterizations. The work is Art, with a capital A, no matter how many minor or even major faults you find in it. We don't say the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is kitch and trite because once again all it does is honour God and Christian mythology. We judge it by the beauty, the scope of the vision, and the care and attention put into it. It's not like no-one ever painted a ceiling before.
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Dilletantes like that Hilton woman never spend enough time on one thing or commit to it emotionally (at least Parsons was emotionally committed to his music) to be able to make the emotional connection with the audience - she has no insight into their lives at all.
I would defend Hilton by saying her art is her entire life as a celebrity. That's what she's chosen to be, to do, and she does it well. There is a lot of entertainment to be had out of Paris Hilton, something that most heiresses would not deign to give to the public. I think it is wrong to say she has no insight into the lives of her audience. She just chooses a strange audience.
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I think it is wrong to say she has no insight into the lives of her audience. She just chooses a strange audience.
Fair play. I am obviously not part of her intended audience! Will we be recalling the great days of Heiress Existence Art in 20 years time? Probably not. Will we remember the genius of Stars are Blind? I've forgotten it already.
It's not like no-one ever painted a ceiling before.
That made me think of the line in The Producers that goes something like this:
Aah, The Fuhrer was a wonderful dancer, and a painter! He could paint an entire room - two coats - in a single afternoon.
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Heather, again, I agree and disagree. There is a huge range of coding environments, from the one-person-band who is entrepreneur, analyst, coder, tester, sales, support and maintenance, all in one, right through to projects which have 10 people for each step, and thousands of salespeople.
My experiences have all been at the smaller end of this, the biggest team I've worked in is currently, 5 analyst/programmers, about 4-5 capitalists, about 5 support people, and dozens of salespeople. But I have worked with bigger teams in previous jobs. My observation was that the artistry is more and more stripped out the bigger the shop. The more processes added to up the quality of the code, the less room there is for any real flair. But I admit that I probably just don't get the subtlety of being a coder in a big shop. Perhaps there is deep satisfaction in meeting someone else's spec, which counterbalances the annoyance at how fucked the spec was to start with.
Your mild frustration asides are indicative to me of why you seem to disagree with me about the artistry. Yes it is hampering to have the ways you could solve a problem closed down by foolish analysts or more likely by the people pulling their strings further up who aren't even technical at all. It would be like telling Michaelangelo he had to paint entirely with his left hand because left-handed paintbrushes had been purchased in bulk by the church.
Naturally a great deal of the artistry in such an environment is in exactly how you tell management they are wrong. That is every bit as much the job of the programmer as cutting the code. If you are a master artist, you can see bad analysis before you go to all the trouble (and expense) of trying to code it up. You work to make it seem like their decision, in a Socratic kind of way. Or you kick some arse, get them fired and get your promotion. Either way, it's either done artistically or in a slapdash careless way that backfires more often than not. Your choice.
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And no, I don't reread the Potter books. I kind of stopped reading them at all when they started being more than 500 pages. Obviously her editor was scared to second-guess the artiste.
Tp paraphrase Johnny Ramone, does JK Rowling think I have nothing better to do than spend all that time reading her book? (he was referring to Springsteen's legendary 4 hour concerts)
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merc,
If only The Fuhrer had have passed art school.
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