Posts by BenWilson
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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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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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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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FletcherB
But it doesnt follow that you have to be poor to do art for its own sake.
Nor did I say that. It's a correlation, not a cause. Those few people who were both highly talented and also born rich have created much of the world's greatest art. But a lot more people are born poor, and I think talent is probably distributed evenly across all classes. Of those people, the ones who chose to pursue their art for it's own sake are usually impoverished for much of their lives. Some are discovered in their lives and do OK out of it. Then there's the ones who cashed in (and I'm not saying they shouldn't), who created lesser art but made a great deal of money out of it.
Classic example would be Tolkien vs J K Rowling. Tolkien created his own vision with very little outside encouragement, and effectively started an entire genre. In the last decades of his life he did well out of writing basically the most popular book ever written by one person. He was not a poor man, being a middle class scholar, he was able to indulge his dream to write the LOTR. Rowling, on the other hand, merely taps into a preexisting genre with derivative ideas carefully marketed, and has made an incredible fortune out of writing works that are lesser, each sequel copying the formula of the first, and synchronizing the works with movie rights.
I'm not saying Rowling is bad and Tolkien good. 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. This dream was never realized until after his death, and I can't say it's a great read. So the profit motive wasn't entirely bad, at least it got the LOTR written - Tolkien realized that he would rather write something that people would read, and they weren't going to read the Silmarillion. But it certainly wasn't that burning quest for cash that pumps out endless Harry Potters.
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Andrew, there is art in everything we do, or at least there can be. And I don't think that just because you're getting paid for it, it's any less masturbatory. You're just jerking to someone else's tune, providing money shots to fuel the masturbation of others.
I'm not really Romantic about it, though. I don't think there was a golden age when artists didn't struggle for a living. If anything, there is more genuine art being created now than there ever was, as more people are freed from worldly concerns. But I think society as a whole does value them less than it did, and a lot of potential is still lost to practical concerns.
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Not for free anyway, which turns the tables. Where once you had your muse for free and you pimped her for cash, now you have to pay her every time, and each is less sweet than the last. Eventually you end up a whoremonger, paying many jaded old muses for sad renditions of your lost youth.
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Danielle, amen. Building on my previous post, the differences between NZ provinces is one of those subtleties that we've trained ourselves to magnify out of all proportion. No foreigner would be able to pick the difference between an Aucklander and someone from the west coast of the South Island. Nor would they care to. Even ozzies can't do it, just as we'd struggle to differentiate a Victorian from a NSW accent.
It's one of the best things about travel, that it throws the idiocy of local obsessions into the laughable context they deserve. The difference between the NZ Labour Party and the NZ National Party is less marked than the difference between NZ Labour and Australian Labour, despite being supposedly politically aligned.
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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.
Sad but true, I think. The best poetry and art generally is done for the sole reason that the artist wanted to do it for itself. The profit motive will always distort the art, and the artist who does that can never avoid the feeling of having been cheapened, something that can colour their outlook forever after.
I feel that way about my 'art', computer programming. If the profit motive had never been there, I would have worked on only the projects that interested me. As it turned out, I managed to work mainly on projects that were of some interest to me, but that's not the same thing. Even my ultra-conservative business partner, who made a fortune from programming before we became partners, admitted to me that if making money had not been an issue, he would have done what he loves, writing computer games. Now he wants to go back to it, but I have to wonder what could have been achieved if he'd spent his best years on it.
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Craig
Not for the first time, I think we agree on more than might be apparent at first sight. :)
Yes. It's not even strange. What is strange is that it's difficult to see the level of similarity. That requires a lot of training and conditioning, to create difference where there really is very little. Like Pepsi and Coke, which most people who had tasted neither would find indistinguishable.
I had this point made to me by a Japanese professor once, who said I was very religious. I told him I didn't believe in God, but he said to even have an opinion on the matter meant I'd spent quite some time thinking about it, and that made me very similar to those who do believe. I thought it was a huge difference, but it was kind of enlightening to see it from afar, from the perspective of a culture that doesn't concern itself with the same questions, that all he saw was a different kind of religious person.
Makes you wonder - I'd spent years training in philosophy, but of course that training is so heavily influenced by the christian backdrop that to a foreigner unfamiliar with the subtle differences, a philosopher is just a different kind of priest. Quite a humbling revelation I must say.
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Craig
Well, Ben, I actually thought it was delightfully naive to believe Labour won't start scaremongering about National's evil "hidden agenda" no matter how many reams of insanely detailed policy they produce. Or were we in alternate universes during '95?
Quite probably, I was living in Australia then. But I never said Labour won't use every trick in their book, of course they will. Especially the old chestnut that National makes extremely easy with their failure to be specific about anything. My point was that National could easily evade that, if they had the nous to put some policy together.
But their game is the opposite, they seem to think actually divulging policy only opens them to potential criticism. And they are right. That's how it works. If you actually take a position, it could be the wrong one, that's quite true. Which means there is no debate of any worth, other than Labour defending their policy and challenging National to prove somehow that their policy isn't this hidden agenda you're trying to put into my mouth.
I don't know if there's an agenda. If there is, I'd bet it's about as vague as their official policy. It'll just be Nats doing Nat stuff when they're in, which we only have past history to go on.
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