Who is your favourite author?

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7Wannabe5
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Re: Who is your favourite author?

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

Riggerjack said: In writing, nonfiction would be the salt box, novels the craftsman and Victorian, poetry is the style extreme, where the fanboys hang out.
Eh, I think your style categories are useful, but I can easily think of examples of non-fiction, novels and poetry that would fit into each and every type of house. I once had a very heated argument with my Persian-American ex defending the salt-box style of my favorite poetry written in English. I scored half a point with this quote because he was arrogant enough to think it could be about him. -lol.

Wilderness
By Lorine Niedecker

You are the man
You are my other country
and I find it hard going

You are the prickly pear
You are the sudden violent storm

the torrent to raise the river
to float the wounded doe

Of course, I think "favorite" and "best" are two different concepts. The Persian language is more poetic at core because so many words hold multiple meanings. OTOH, IMO, everything written in Arabic comes off like raw, driving rap. Part of the reason I can't bear to watch the news is it's so apparent that hardly anybody who works for the media organizations in the West has even a pre-school level appreciation of these facts.

Off the top of my head, three salt-box style novelists might be Hemingway, Kent Haruf, and Willa Cather. Another style of modern novel that is one of my favorites is what is sometimes referred to as K-Mart or dirty realism, this might be trailer-park-style in your model. Raymond Carver, Carolyn Chute, Katherine Dunn and Anne Tyler are some popular practitioners of this style. What single style of architecture could possibly encompass the works of Saul Bellow, James Baldwin, Elizabeth Gaskell, Louis Zukofsky, Maxim Gorky, Ray Bradbury, Jose Saramago, Laurence Sterne, Graham Greene, Aimee Bender, Toni Morrison, Anthony Burgess, Thomas Mann, John Dickson Carr, Diane Johnson, Haruki Murakami, John Lanchester, John Updike, E.L. Doctorow, Louise Erdrich, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Sigrit Undset, Penelope Fitzgerald, Samuel Butler, Mark Twain, James Fenimore Cooper, Alice Rice, Albert Camus, Norman Mailer, Jane Austen, Vladimir Nabokov, Elmore Leonard, Charles Dickens, Chuck Palahniuk, Herman Melville, E. Annie Proulx, etc.etc.etc.

JasonR
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Re: Who is your favourite author?

Post by JasonR »

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Riggerjack
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Re: Who is your favourite author?

Post by Riggerjack »

I hesitated to keep going on the style/substance subject, not wanting to highjack the thread. But since it seems to have run out of steam, I'm back at it.

I wasn't thinking of categories, I was thinking of independent scales, that usually run in opposition. The more important one is to someone, the less the other is, in general. Both to author and reader.
Not sure architecture makes a good metaphor here since no writing really has any function beyond entertainment
Then why read? Writing is about communication, trying to get other people to think about what you want them to think about. Reading is about wanting to think about something someone else thought about. Favorite authors are those who write about things you want to think about, in a way that you like. This requires both style and substance. The mix right mix is as subjective as the right amount of rum in your Coke, but straight rum or straight Coke is pretty distasteful...

luxagraf
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Re: Who is your favourite author?

Post by luxagraf »

Riggerjack wrote:I wasn't thinking of categories, I was thinking of independent scales, that usually run in opposition. The more important one is to someone, the less the other is, in general. Both to author and reader.
This is why this discussion probably won't go anywhere. To me form and function (style/substance) aren't opposing or even different things. Each works in the service of the other. Or doesn't work as the case may be. But they are inseparably intertwined. I don't see anything to be gained by trying to separate them and pick favorites.
Riggerjack wrote: Then why read? Writing is about communication, trying to get other people to think about what you want them to think about.
That's certainly one thing writing can do, but it's not the only thing.

There's plenty of writing more concerned with sound than meaning (children's books, Dr. Suess, poetry in general, sound poets to an even greater degree) or form than meaning (Joyce a lot of the time, books missing certain letters, books with deliberate structures) or with unearthing meaning among noise (automatic writing, Burroughs, Gysin). The broadest word I could think of to encompass all that was "art", but since that has a lot of culture-specific baggage I went with "entertainment" (which probably has just as much baggage, so fail there).

Riggerjack
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Re: Who is your favourite author?

Post by Riggerjack »

.To me form and function (style/substance) aren't opposing or even different things. Each works in the service of the other. Or doesn't work as the case may be. But they are inseparably intertwined. I don't see anything to be gained by trying to separate them and pick favorites.
The gain in deconstruction is twofold. As a writer, it helps to identify how someone did something you like. As a reader, it helps to find what you like, in a world of plenty.

If my model doesn't work for you, find it make your own, but surely you have some way of identifying what you like.
There's plenty of writing more concerned with sound than meaning (children's books, Dr. Suess, poetry in general, sound poets to an even greater degree) or form than meaning (Joyce a lot of the time, books missing certain letters, books with deliberate structures) or with unearthing meaning among noise (automatic writing, Burroughs, Gysin).
And in each of these cases, the author is trying to convey a thought. He wants his reader to think of X. Whether X is a sound, how a book was written around a letter, or the price of tea in China.

I lack poetry/art/form receptors. Very rarely do I get any kind of warm, fuzzy, feeling from any of that. I've also been extremely over exposed to it, and any receptors I would have are burnt out. A very artsy friend of mine thinks this makes me unqualified to judge. Maybe it's true. This doesn't stop me.

It is clear you are more comfortable than I, at the style end of the scale. To each his own.

luxagraf
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Re: Who is your favourite author?

Post by luxagraf »

Riggerjack wrote:As a writer, it helps to identify how someone did something you like
Oh definitely, I try to deconstruct everything I read until I figure out exactly what happened* and why, I just don't tend to think in terms of style vs substance, but more specifics like sentence structure, word choice, punctuation, etc. All that micro level stuff that sets to tone of the macro stuff that's going on.

*whether "happened" means "I really like this" or "this really didn't work", etc.
Riggerjack wrote:surely you have some way of identifying what you like.
I do obviously, but its entirely unquantified. or at least I've never been able to pin it down in any set of words that I can convey to anyone else. There's an intangible thing that some writing has and other writing does not. My friend calls this "the jeff mangum", the closest word I know of to what I mean is in spanish: duende https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duende_%28art%29 or maybe the japanese concept of wabisabi, but that's a bit more encompassing than what I mean.

Since this thread was supposed to be favorite authors, here's a few of mine in no particular order: Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing, Henry Miller, Joan Didion, W. G. Sebald, Rebecca Solnit, Robert Anton Wilson, Alice Notley, Edward Abbey, etc, etc. If there's a common thread there, beyond my own personal take on duende, I've never found it.

jacob
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Re: Who is your favourite author?

Post by jacob »

Chad wrote:Agreed with Tolkien. He is boring. Builds a cool world, but does it with too much telling and not enough showing in his writing. Though, I love the overall story line.
Wait what?! You don't like a 110 page description of a birthday party? What about Russel&Whitehead's equally long proof that 1+1=2?

How did you feel about Silmarillion?

+1 for Frank Herbert BTW. He also ended up living in Port Townsend, WA. Some day I want to go to there.

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jennypenny
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Re: Who is your favourite author?

Post by jennypenny »

@luxagraf -- I love Doris Lessing.

@JasonR -- For all of the books consumed in our house, Dr. Seuss gets quoted more often than any other author LOL.

@all -- You can't dis Tolkien and then +1 Herbert. Pot, meet kettle ...

jacob
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Re: Who is your favourite author?

Post by jacob »

I see Tolkien as S ... all history and relations. It's like reading Genesis.

Herbert is N. Full of ideas. Even single sentences contain the seed of multiple ideas.

Chad
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Re: Who is your favourite author?

Post by Chad »

Agreed. Tolkien has a lot of stuff that doesn't matter. In fact, most of it doesn't even add some color to the world, as there is too much minor color and too much color just for the sake of color. But, Herbert, while sharing the the same propensity at length, is usually adding something of value...at least in my mind.

@Jacob
I can appreciate what Tokien and Russel/Whitehead were trying to do, but, no, slogging through either is not enjoyable. Surprisingly enough.

Riggerjack
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Re: Who is your favourite author?

Post by Riggerjack »

. You can't dis Tolkien and then +1 Herbert. Pot, meet kettle ...
Sure I can. Herbert wrote of systems (human populations) and speculated into the long term effects if minor changes. Dry stuff, but just the kind of thing to excite a teenaged INTJ. Wonderful stuff. I read everything he wrote over 25 years ago, and I still smile to think of it.

Tolkien, on the other hand falls into that classic category I wrote of earlier. Yes, he effectively invented the epic fantasy novel, heavily influenced by Scandinavian folklore and sagas. But it's been done better since. Specifically, I'm thinking by Tad Williams, but also by many others. Tolkien will always get respect for breaking the ground, but his writing is only great if you read it first. Like Lovecraft, Homer, and many other classic authors.

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