Who is your favourite author?

[jennypenny]

What do you mean by "too straight"?

Sorry, I don't mean the modern connotation of the word. I guess I mean Emerson isn't provocative enough, although he was probably considered provocative in his time. It's just my taste I think. Emerson is something you could read anywhere. whereas Whitman always feels like something that should be read in private, at least to me. Maybe a better way to explain it is that Emerson is something I would read to my brother, but Whitman is something I would read to my lover.

Also, what do you like about Dostoyevsky?

Well, the first work I read was The Brothers Karamazov, so I was then predisposed to like everything else he wrote. I admire how he makes flawed characters likable, and how well he illustrates the moral dilemmas we all face and the great lengths to which we'll go to justify our own ethical positions and decisions.

I have a fondness for Russian writing in general, so it's no surprise I love Dostoyevsky.

[Riggerjack]

Seriously? Page 2, and I am the first to bring up Neal Stephenson?

I'll spare you all my rant about poets and poetry.

As to the classics, I read them too late. By that I mean most classics are classics because they were the first or ironical example of a concept. Because I read so much modern stuff,I've read derivatives, spin offs, rehashes of it all, first. So by the time I get to the original, I feel like I read it better, before.

[jacob]

@Riggerjack - Haha!

Of awesome fun facts about NS ... The Baroque series was hand-written!! The guy must have an incredible tolerance for tendon pain. He studied physics at the uni which obviously makes him a better person, as everyone knows He consults for various space orgs. And he's a $10k donor to the Long Now project; something I aspire to some day when I feel like dropping five-figs on something. I wanna be this guy.

PS: Everyone knows that most poets are psychotic and that their writings are better ignored when it comes to understanding the human condition. My 18 yo self informed my "English" teacher of this very fact. This very accurate insight wasn't received as well as I expected.

[jennypenny]

You guys are killing me.

Poets are so misunderstood. Yet if you give them a back-up band ... suddenly they're rockstars.

[Riggerjack]

Poets aspire to being misunderstood. Most never make it past being pretentious.

But then I think anyone who believes style is a viable substitute for substance is a flake. Style can enhance substance, but has no value of its own.

[jacob]

This reminds me ... I need to get my hair cut.

[Ego]

Style can enhance substance, but has no value of its own.

I wonder if style is valuable in the way that it can open substantive doors. Or maybe the opposite is true. A lack of style can keep them closed. But maybe that's what you meant by enhance.

[luxagraf]

Poets aspire to being misunderstood. Most never make it past being pretentious.

But then I think anyone who believes style is a viable substitute for substance is a flake. Style can enhance substance, but has no value of its own.

What do you mean when you say the word "style" in this context?

[peerifloori]

That's an absolutely impossible question for me to answer. I don't know how anyone who reads much can either.

I read an average or around 3 books per week and have done so since I got my first library card in the 4th grade. The math tells me that that being the case, I have read somewhere around 9,000+ books over the years. That to me doesn't sound like very many books considering how many are published in just one year alone. http://www.worldometers.info/books/

I don't know if I'm surprised or not (probably not) that the average number of books read per year is 6. http://gawker.com/5971571/are-you-an-ab ... ook-reader

What makes sense to me is that it is far easier to have a 'favourite' if you only read 6 per year or less and far harder if you read around 150 per year.

Like, if you eat a greater variety of foods, it's harder to pick a favorite food than if you eat only 10 foods? Or, if you know 1,000 people instead of 100 people, it's harder to pick a favorite person?

Favorite is kind of irrelevant, sure, why pick just one? It's just a conversation topic. But you can be a prolific reader and still have favorites.

[Chad]

@Riggerjack
I'm with you on poets and poetry.

[fiby41]

Someone popular said (paraphrasing) half the things I say don't mean anything but I say them so that the other half may reach you.

[Riggerjack]

. What do you mean when you say the word "style" in this context?

Well, in architectural terms:

Substance:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saltbox

Add style:

http://www.google.com/search?q=craftsma ... CZEQsAQICw

Add more style, beginning to lose substance:

http://www.google.com/search?q=Victoria ... UQ_AUIBigB

Style strongly exceeds substance:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flintstone_House

Style, completely lacking substance:

http://www.tdrinc.com/edises.html

Poetry on that scale starts at the flintstone house (Robert frost) and goes down from there (Emily Dickinson).

Now, since my mom and step father are artists, I think I can speak with a bit of authority on the subject of how style is packaged for sale.

You can make a living as a production artist on your art. Doing print work, pottery, what have you. When you get to the gallery show level, the presentation of the artist is more important than the art. At the extreme end of that scale, NYC, etc, artist presentation is the show.

Fanboy behavior is just a collection of bottoms desperately seeking tops. Pick your medium, at the extreme of the style scale is the congregation of fanboys.

In writing, nonfiction would be the salt box, novels the craftsman and Victorian, poetry is the style extreme, where the fanboys hang out.

[George the original one]

O. Henry
C.M. Kornbluth
And, for world-building, Kim Stanley Robinson (even if it is the same world each time)

Hmm, non-fiction... yeah, Jared Diamond is up there. As I look at the non-fiction books on the shelves, it is topics rather than authors, so Diamond stands out as an author that matters regardless of topic. Another part of the problem of picking a non-fiction author is that the material is dry, so good story-telling means the richer topics are social sciences rather than science.

[OldPro]

Like, if you eat a greater variety of foods, it's harder to pick a favorite food than if you eat only 10 foods? Or, if you know 1,000 people instead of 100 people, it's harder to pick a favorite person?

Favorite is kind of irrelevant, sure, why pick just one? It's just a conversation topic. But you can be a prolific reader and still have favorites.

I agree you can have favourites but it is much harder to pick just one as the number to pick from increases. If you asked me to list my favourite authors (plural), I would probably still end up with a list of at least 50. Which if you then think about it, means that in fact I don't have a favourite. There are simply too many I like, to consider any one a favourite.

The more you have to choose from the more difficult the choice becomes. That isn't a new concept. https://www.google.ca/search?q=more+cho ... se&ie=&oe=

Or you can just realize that in fact you don't have a favourite author at all. http://bookriot.com/2011/10/11/you-dont ... te-author/

[luxagraf]

What do you mean when you say the word "style" in this context?

Well, in architectural terms:

Substance:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saltbox

Add style:

http://www.google.com/search?q=craftsma ... CZEQsAQICw

Not sure architecture makes a good metaphor here since no writing really has any function beyond entertainment (and whatever else we assign to it). But I get what you mean. Different strokes I guess. Don't want to derail the thread with circular arguments about aesthetics.

[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]

o

[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]

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.

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]

.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.