One wonders, sometimes, how literary snobs manage to keep their day jobs.

I was a member of an online discussion group of people interested in the poetry of Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney....

When one of the Lord of the Rings movies came out, they were dissing on Tolkien.  I pissed them off by pointing out that they were a bunch of professors specializing in deservedly obscure and notoriously difficult poets...and they were having a laugh over one of the most successful and most influential writers of the century.  They got all huffy and stuff.

It always amazes me that people can sniff at the work of writers like HPL, REH and JRRT while admiring the silly (but...granted...entertaining) work of people like the Bronte sisters...or the dreadful work of writers like Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad.

A thought just struck me....

What would the books Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre (sp?) or Moby Dick be like if they had been written by Michael Moorcock?

OOOOO!  Must think more.......!  

Mark  

PS:  I just thought the same thing about Joseph Conrad's book, Heart of Darkness.  If Moorcock had written it, Heart of Darkness would have looked exactly like the movie Apocalypse Now!  Sometimes the goodguys do win!

When one of the Lord of the Rings movies came out, they were dissing on Tolkien. I pissed them off by pointing out that they were a bunch of professors specializing in deservedly obscure and notoriously difficult poets...and they were having a laugh over one of the most successful and most influential writers of the century. They got all huffy and stuff.

It always amazes me that people can sniff at the work of writers like HPL, REH and JRRT while admiring the silly (but...granted...entertaining) work of people like the Bronte sisters...or the dreadful work of writers like Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad.

Perhaps the same way you mock Conrad and Melville while admiring REH and Tolkien. As an aside my undergrad U. a group of english professors formed a club for readings of  REH, Lovey, Tolkien, Hammett and a dozen other early 20th century writers. They felt as do I that many authors and particular genres aren't as appreciated as they should be. As for the Brontes' I'd guess they were fantastic for their day and greatly influenced many writers and academians who essentially designed most of the modern english cirriculae. I wouldn't read them even if threatened at gunpoint...Personally, I despite the seemingly formulaic nature of his writing I think Lovecraft is rivaled only by Poe.

Everybody's a snob about something. Me? I'm a tea snob.

edit--speaking of which http://cgi.liveauctions.ebay.com/303-2- ... 3239QQrdZ1

Xaxaxe wrote:Well, I'm just about ready for my annual summer exercise with A Game of Thrones, to wit:

1. Go into it full of optimsim;

2. Read X number of pages/chapters/whatever;

3. Fling book across room;

4. Donate book to our local Paperback Exchange.

Seriously, for fans of the series: what am I missing here? Shouldn't I love this series?

For non-fans: should I even bother this year? Maybe I could just drive the book straight over to the Paperback Exchange without even cracking the cover?

(BTW, my personal record is right around chapter 4 or 5, set in the summer of 2003).

I've had the same problem.  It's a shame too, because I've really enjoyed George RR Martin's short fiction, especially that creepy damn story he published in Omni back in 1980 (can't remember the title).

All my friends who read swords & sorcery fiction swear by this series.  And every time I dive into it and have the same reaction you do, they'll say, well you should've chapter 5 (or 6 or 7 or 8 ... ad nauseum ... and I mean that literally).

Keith

Cattledog wrote:

Perhaps the same way you mock Conrad and Melville while admiring REH and Tolkien.

Everybody's a snob about something. Me? I'm a tea snob.

I mock Conrad...and always shall...because he wrote Lord Jim.  Anyone who wrote Lord Jim deserves to be bonked on the nose with a newspaper...repeatedly.

I am being unfair to Melville, who wrote for a different era.

The difference between myself and a number of literary snobs is that I have read the works I am criticizing.

I like the work of the Bronte sisters.  I think Wuthering Heights is a good novel......

....but if Moorcock got ahold of the novel....and Heathcliff had returned from a parallel world where he and Katherine had fallen madly in love, married and then been tragically parted by the whims of Heathcliff's runesword...and Heathcliff had returnd to woo the original Katherine....after casting away his soul-destroying weapon....but then finds himself pursued by Chaos...and is forced to take up the sword once again to protect the Katherine he really loved....and to win he must somehow contort his mouth to pronounce the Unspeakable Oath....and Wuthering Heights itself turns out to be a transdimensional nexus which all the higher powers strive to control...meanwhile the tormented soul of Alternative Katherine (the ghost from the first chapter) is wandering about the estate trying to warn everyone that the Chaos Wars are destined to burn down all connected worlds unless Heathcliff returns to fight the cosmic battle which he abandoned millenia ago in the world of his true ancestry....a battle which he might win, only at the expense of his own existence...while mad gods laugh.....

  Well, then you might have something!

  See what I mean?

Cattledog wrote:
I actually like Nostromo but didn't really care for Heart of Darkness.

If these snobs you've dealt with haven't actually read anything they criticize then isn't pretty easy to deal with them? I mean don't you just say "Have you read anything by REH ?!? No? Pick up a story then get back to me."

As for Wuthering Heights, perhaps you could work something out with the estate of the Brontes' and HPL. Of course I'm sure that's exactly what the Great Old Ones want....

OT: Azathoth must have written the leatherstocking tales.

I've actually read nearly everything by William Faulkner.  Talk about the antithesis of "easy reading".  He's one of the few great writers I never recommend to anyone.....unless they are willing to tough it out.
   Saw an interesting study many years ago when I was researching Faulkner.....a throw away line comparing him to Lovecraft in terms of the monstrosities of his novels.  His novels were pretty hard core southern gothic....it would have been interesting if it could ever be proven he picked up a Lovecraft story, but no one will ever know.  Faulkner was a huge fraud in terms of literary influences, saying in interviews he only read the "classics" and foreign writers, but secretly enjoying pulp and hardboiled fiction (of his friend Hammett, for example).  It's entirely possible he may have picked up a pulp containing "The Shunned House" or "Mountains of Madness" and never told anyone.  

Mike B.

Badmike wrote:
I've actually read nearly everything by William Faulkner.  Talk about the antithesis of "easy reading".  He's one of the few great writers I never recommend to anyone.....unless they are willing to tough it out.
   Saw an interesting study many years ago when I was researching Faulkner.....a throw away line comparing him to Lovecraft in terms of the monstrosities of his novels.  His novels were pretty hard core southern gothic....it would have been interesting if it could ever be proven he picked up a Lovecraft story, but no one will ever know.  Faulkner was a huge fraud in terms of literary influences, saying in interviews he only read the "classics" and foreign writers, but secretly enjoying pulp and hardboiled fiction (of his friend Hammett, for example).  It's entirely possible he may have picked up a pulp containing "The Shunned House" or "Mountains of Madness" and never told anyone.  

Mike B.

Never thought of the connection between Faulkner and Lovecraft.

One can almost feel the darkness in the Yahknapotapha (sp?) valley encroaching on Faulkner's characters.  Of course, this darkness makes Faulkner almost impossible to read, but....anyway.

It might be cool to write a story about the Lovecraftian haunting of...William Faulkner.

Or, the Cthulhu Mythos would make a nice addition to the novella, The Bear.  What if the legendary bear being hunted were not really a natural animal at all?

By the way, one of my favorite mythos stories is not by Lovecraft.  It is called Black Man With Horn.  I can't remember the name of the author, but the story is written as a letter to "Howard," (who is long dead when the story begins) from one of his old Wierd Tales protoges.

I believe it was in a DAW collection...I'll have to go find it in a storage bin!  Anyone else familiar with it?

Badmike wrote:
The comparisons IMO are so profound and clear at one point I thought about writng my master's thesis about it.  

Mike B.

Joyce Carol Oates wrote:
"The arts of the grotesque are so various as to resist definition. Here we have the plenitude of the imagination itself. From the Anglo-Saxon saga of Grendel's monster-mother, in Beowulf, to impish-ugly gargoyles carved on cathedral walls; from terrifyingly matter-of-fact scenes of carnage in the Iliad, to the hallucinatory vividness of the "remarkable piece of apparatus" of Franz Kafka's "In the Penal Colony"; from the comic-nightmare images of Hieronymous Bosch to the strategic artfulness of twentieth-century film—Werner Herzog's 1979 remake of the 1922 classic of the German silent screen, F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu the Vampyr, to give but one example. The "grotesque" is a sensibility that accommodates the genius of Goya and the kitsch-Surrealism of Dali; the crude visceral power of H. P. Lovecraft and the baroque elegance of Isak Dinesen; the fatalistic simplicity of Grimm's fairy tales and the complexity of vision of which, for instance, William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" is a supreme example—the grotesque image as historical commentary."

(God, I envy that woman's talent.)

Keith

P.S. If you haven't read Oates' Haunted short story collections, I highly recommend them.

More specifically, Black Man with a Horn is in the book Dark Gods. I only know this through my research on the guy, because he wrote the screenplay "Trauma" for Dario Argento, and I love me some horror movies!

FormCritic wrote:
Did you pull that up from memory, Mike, or did you look it up somehow?

Not to brag (much), but memory. I know most of the works of guys I enjoy like Klein, Wagner, Howard, Lovecraft, etc.  Also helps that "Horn" is heavily anthologized.  As it should be, it's a great story.

Mike B.