Soiling the building blocks and well-known tropes of our treasured modern myths is no different than other artists taking a crucifix and dipping it in urine, covering it in ants, or smearing it with feces. In the end, it’s just another small, pathetic chapter in the decades-long slide of Western civilization into suicidal self-loathing. It’s a well-worn road: bored middle-class creatives (almost all of them college-educated liberals) living lives devoid of any greater purpose inevitably reach out for anything deemed sacred by the conservatives populating any artistic field. They co-opt the language, the plots, the characters, the cliches, the marketing, and proceed to deconstruct it all like a mad doctor performing an autopsy. Then, using cynicism, profanity, scatology, dark humor, and nihilism, they put it back together into a Frankenstein’s monster designed to shock, outrage, offend, and dishearten.In Other Words:
Wailing her woe, the widow old,It's a crying shame because he starts off on a good foot by recognizing the existence of Howard, a man who's often neglected in the hagiography of Tolkien as the alpha and omega of the genre. But then he spoils it with the usual cultural-conservative reactionary moral judgement. But what do you expect, it's a site devoted to griping that the entertainment industry is a liberal cesspool.
her hair upbound, for Beowulf’s death
sung in her sorrow, and said full oft
she dreaded the doleful days to come,
deaths enow, and doom of battle,
and shame. -- The smoke by the sky was devoured.
Grin seems to be an honest-to-God ‘Flat-Brainer’: someone who literally thinks that his yardstick is not bent, that he has not only won the Magical Belief Lottery, he has obviously done so.From R. Scott Bakker's response to Leo Grin.
Which is to say that Grin is passing judgment on fantasy from a fantasy world – or worlds, as the case might be. The first is the fantasy world where, despite being one more me-me-me schmuck like everyone else, he is obviously right unlike everyone else. The second is the fantasy world where the entire parade of human conceit, everything from our sense of moral certainty to the spiritual inferiority of the Other, possesses objective weight.
Which is why he uses the language and the attitude that I’m continually try to work into my fantasy world! Why I think the above quote is so awesome.
The ‘nihilism’ that Grin blames on decadent individuals (who also happen to be his political competitors) is as impersonal as can be, the result the forces unleashed by the Enlightenment twins of science and capital. Someone like him is bound to see ‘liberal contamination’ everywhere he turns, simply because, like our less tolerant ancestors, he needs to personify those things he does not like. But you don’t need liberal conspiracies or social dystopia to explain the evolution of contemporary fantasy. The transformation of ‘earnest art’ into forms than are progressively more baroque and revisionary is something you find in pretty much all genres of artistic expression. Familiarity breeds boredom, if not contempt. Humans stranded with old equipment come up with new games to play.
"Well, true. There's two sides to every coin, but there's my very point. People like simple stories." Craw frowned at the pink marks down the edges of his nails. "But poeple ain't simple."posted by robocop is bleeding at 11:30 AM on February 16, 2011
On one side are the towering mythic geniuses of Tolkien and Howard, who wrote “in blood and lighting” according to Leo, although presumably on extremely hardwearing paper.The bit near the end with kitten-powered zeppelins also had me laughing.
« Older In 2009, the question was asked: Can a comic book ... | Fileteado Porteño: whims... Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
Alas, I haven’t read it
Oh. But you read one previous book by the author and feel like it doesn't live up to the Catholic technophobia of Tolkein and the violent and occasionally deranged pulp of Howard.
posted by Astro Zombie at 8:23 AM on February 16, 2011 [11 favorites]