Susan Sontag on the moral superiority of the novel & the "task of the novelist"

March 17, 2007 9:55 AM

Susan Sontag on the moral superiority of novels over the mass media. "The real force behind the argument against literature, against the book, comes, I think, from the hegemony of the narrative model proposed by television." [Sontag previously on MeFi]
posted by patricio (60 comments total)

Why not just say:

Susan Sontag = Moral superiority
posted by KokuRyu at 10:00 AM on March 17, 2007

rolf rofl
posted by grobstein at 10:19 AM on March 17, 2007

your favorite medium sucks.
posted by unknowncommand at 10:19 AM on March 17, 2007

Huh. I hate TV. I almost never watch it. And I love novels. And I think Sontag was wise and insightful.

But I"m not feeling this "these newfangled technologies just aren't as good as the old days" stuff.
posted by serazin at 10:22 AM on March 17, 2007

Taleb on Sontag:

This brings me to my comparative discussion Benoit Mandelbrot/ Susan Sontag that I truncated on the day Sontag died. I met both on the very same day, in New York, in October 2001. At the BBC studio where we were interviewed (separately) about our books, Sontag was told that I dealt in “randomness” and developed in interest in talking to me. When she learned by looking at my bio on the dust jacket that I was “in markets”, she gave me the look as if I had killed her mother. She turned her back to me as I was in mid-sentence, leaving me to the discomfort of having to speak without audience. It feels extremely humiliating to be speaking to someone’s back; it felt like the worst, most demeaning insult I ever had in my life. I swallowed my pride and, as I had an afternoon to kill, I forced myself to go to B&N get a copy of her book. I forced myself to enjoy her style, in spite of the frustration, and, after 4 pages, I was able to find it charming –but I kept wondering & introspecting: had I not had witnessed closed-mindedness and abject manners, how would my appreciation of the text turn out to be?
posted by geoff. at 10:35 AM on March 17, 2007 [2 favorites]

It's a rare medium that's well done.
posted by Abiezer at 10:37 AM on March 17, 2007 [7 favorites]

Susan Sontag was a charming but frustrating textolater on the magnitude of the most committed Torah scholar or Marxist Theorist. Her devotion to the written word (specifically Literature) was absolute, and in my opinion she spent a sadly large portion of her talent needlessly attacking other mediums in what I perceive as an effort to secure or perhaps prolong the primacy of the written word in our culture.

Although she wrote some truly brilliant things, she also wrote some truly asinine things, mainly because like many brilliant people she was also an asshole.

Such is the way of the peoples, I guess.

I've long wondered if Annie Liebowitz ever felt bothered by Sontag's hatred of photography.
posted by illovich at 10:56 AM on March 17, 2007

"I've long wondered?"

WTF is wrong with me? I don't even talk like that!
posted by illovich at 10:56 AM on March 17, 2007 [1 favorite]

I still haven't forgiven Sontag for relegating rock and roll to the status of kitsch in "Notes on Camp."
posted by jonmc at 10:59 AM on March 17, 2007

Good post, good thread. Love the Taleb excerpt; love the textolotry link. She was fascinating and frustrating.
posted by everichon at 11:10 AM on March 17, 2007

I stepped in dog shit last week yet I didn't chop off my leg.
posted by srboisvert at 11:11 AM on March 17, 2007

I haven't read the article yet, but prediction: it will piss me off. Kind of like the time NPR interviewed a group of play writes about cinema, prompting the observation from one, "Live theatre is about people and emotions, whereas movies are about objects like cars and guns."

I may eat my hat about this, but I doubt it.
posted by brundlefly at 11:28 AM on March 17, 2007

geoff.'s quote made me feel bad for Taleb until I clicked on the link and read this:

I just had to withdraw a piece from publication. The copy editor wanted to “improve” the sentences. I pulled it out immediately upon hearing claims that she represented the “general public”, with the assumption that she knew what the “general public” needed –not realizing that she was talking to an empiricist who despises impressions (based on anecdotal evidence) & pompously stated superstitious. There is an expert problem with copy editors particularly when they are self-appointed representatives of the “general public”. (“Advice” from book editors reminds me of Warren Buffet’s comment about people in limos taking stock tips from people who ride the subway). Fooled by Randomness was not copy edited (with close to 200 typos in the hardcover edition). My next book will NOT be edited. An edited text is fake. Really fake. It is as shameful as ghostwriting.

Then I realized he was a dumb fuck who deserved whatever Sontag dished out.
posted by languagehat at 11:35 AM on March 17, 2007 [3 favorites]

brundlefly: to be fair, it's more wandering than inflammatory. To me, the more interesting part deals with what a novel is and what a novelist does. She quotes a great passage from the "The Book of Disquiet" (what a wonderful title) by the "supremely great early-20th-century Portuguese poet and prose writer" Fernando Pessoa:

I've discovered that I'm always attentive to, and always thinking about two things at the same time. I suppose everyone is a bit like that ... In my case the two realities that hold my attention are equally vivid. This is what constitutes my originality. This, perhaps, is what constitutes my tragedy, and what makes it comic.

posted by patricio at 11:49 AM on March 17, 2007

Susan Sontag makes a passionate case for the moral superiority

Is that elitist? I hear a lot of people say they don't like to read, but I have never heard "The Moral Superiority of Cheap Entertainment Masquerading as News."

Wait for it....

Serious fiction writers think about moral problems practically

They narrate. They evoke our common humanity in narratives with which we can identify, even though the lives may be remote from our own. They stimulate our imagination. The stories they tell enlarge and complicate - and, therefore, improve - our sympathies. They educate our capacity for moral judgment.

I seriously hope the likes of Robert Heinlein and Right-Wingers/Anarchists/Genre Writers are lumped in the typical literary fiction idols.

I could be wrong but it appears to be another example of working backwards from a conclusion: "I love novels, I love them so much, why don't other people love them nearly as much? I'm afraid it will become an even more irrelevant medium."

I don't see what morality has to do with aesthetics.

The greatest offense now, in matters both of the arts and of culture generally, not to mention political life, is to seem to be upholding some better, more exigent standard, which is attacked, both from the left and the right, as either naive

Yet, libertarian writers are pretty much shut out. I'm not talking about ideologues, I'm talking about those moral standards. The left and right will always have the loudest voices, because there crowd has the largest number. I find that those that tend to complain about this are of the liberal mode: Not revolutionary enough for the left, and not enough appeal to the right. Other minority opinions (Racial Supremicisy, religious fundamentalism, anarchist, sexual radicals, etc) tend to be treated as deviant, and unpublishable. Can't forget, publishing is first and foremost a business.
posted by Gnostic Novelist at 12:04 PM on March 17, 2007

Ugh: there = their. I keep doing that a lot lately.
posted by Gnostic Novelist at 12:05 PM on March 17, 2007

Any writer who tells other writers what "the task of a writer" is, has already failed the "am I an ass?" test. I had great hopes for this essay, but in the end I thought it was vapid. I have read some good essays by Sontag, but this wasn't one.

And I don't understand her definition of "modern." Is she saying that modern = two-dimensional, empty, disposable? So why tie it in with the 1850's? I think she's referring to Baudelaire's statement that modern works of art can be as good as the classics (which was a fairly radical idea at the time). Does she mean that the idea that contemporary works of art can be as good as older works leads to a culture of waste? I felt kind of dense reading that essay, as if there was some crucial matter I couldn't understand.

Oh, and not all airports are alike. O'Hare, for instance, is very much not like Logan. This is an observation somewhere along the lines of "all cathedrals are alike." Yes, they all serve the same purpose, they all have similar layouts, but I don't think anyone would argue that Chartres looks like St. Paul's.
posted by Kattullus at 12:40 PM on March 17, 2007

Blah. Writers are among the most despicable people out there. They exist only to reinforce the status quo and encourage stillness in their readers. If authors are the 'chief glory' of an age it's only because they're nothing but fun house mirrors that carefully glorify the virtues of the masses while forgiving their weaknesses. It wasn't television that put novelists out of business, it was the 20th century. After that sordid affair nobody could believe with any seriousness that there's anything glorious in humanity. Television is useful in its total acceptance of this fact. Television doesn't flatter you endlessly the way a novel does, indeed it doesn't give a flying fuck who you are; it requires only that you watch--this is all anybody can reasonably ask of another human being at this point. 'Watch this', the same deliciously logic that drives everything from the nightly news to YouTube to Mefi, shouldn't be interpreted as a command but a plea from one human being to another. There is no 'hegemony of the mass media', there's just a bunch of bored, frightened people looking for something to do that isn't too tiring and maybe perhaps is a bit funny.
posted by nixerman at 12:47 PM on March 17, 2007 [2 favorites]

I'm left wondering from where she gets the idea of the "hypernovel". Did that idea ever leave the ghetto of WiReD-reading, MIT Media Lab worshipping "cyberpunks" (read "kids with Macintoshes") and enter any kind of mainstream?

And if it did, how is it different from Burroughs' cutup techniques and "word holes", which were done long before computers were useful for writing or reading literature?
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 12:48 PM on March 17, 2007

Anyone who thinks a certain medium is inherently good or bad is incredibly lazy intellectually.

or:

boring old lady says some boring crap. meh.
posted by drjimmy11 at 1:10 PM on March 17, 2007

I'm left wondering from where she gets the idea of the "hypernovel"

I'm guessing she heard about it from some of the skateboarding, hip-hop listening kids she chased off her lawn.
posted by drjimmy11 at 1:11 PM on March 17, 2007 [1 favorite]

Guess I'm in the minority, but I found this nourishing & insightful, and I'm looking forward to printing and spending some time with it. It's a lot more subtle and nuanced than this thread will have you believe.
posted by muckster at 1:31 PM on March 17, 2007

Ideas are both wild and free, to large for books, movies , TV.
I read I watch I listen too, I do the things that most folks do.
But one thing that I'll never do , and that is tell you one thing's true.
posted by nola at 1:39 PM on March 17, 2007 [2 favorites]

Kattullus, on "the modern", I thought this passage was well put:

"what "the modern" means is, above all, the abolition of barriers, of distance; instant access; the leveling of culture...What serves "the modern" is standardization, homogenization."

against literature's

"invitation to develop the kind of inwardness that resists the modern satieties."

I'm not well-read enough to say why she identifies 1850 as the beginning of the modern novel, but what history I'm aware of leaves me thinking that's a fair description of the creation of the modern over the last two or three hundred years. There really is a spreading sameness in culture and bodily practice on a global scale that wasn't there before.
I'm not sure about literature being alone in the ability to create "inwardness" but if I understand her right I would agree that it's a quality that helps make sense of ourselves in the world. For myself I've found it more often through the written word than any other medium.
posted by Abiezer at 1:45 PM on March 17, 2007

All of the bluster aside, I found some truth to it. You don't currently have the issue of a novelist leaving out a lesbian kiss because the wife of the CEO of one of the network sponsors finds the whole thing distasteful. The more people involved in a work of entertainment, the more it becomes of the common denominator. It's like Lost In Space. Somewhere, some bigwig thought the idea of a color-changing alien monkey was a great idea and it just stuck in there. The more people involved with the creative process, the less of a distinctive voice you can find.

That "hyperfiction" thing sounds like one of those awful post-modernist solutions that goes around looking for a problem, too.
posted by adipocere at 1:46 PM on March 17, 2007

Sontag was often refreshingly insightful and great--I think of her essay on pornography--and yes she was bad at times. Clue: we judge a writer by his or her best work and not by the bad--we don't weigh it up as though at a fish market before deciding.

She had the decency (as in her work on photography) to say one thing and later, revise her views and admit where she was mistaken.

She would have been dismissive by most of the silly wiseguy comments for this post.
posted by Postroad at 1:49 PM on March 17, 2007

All of the bluster aside, I found some truth to it. You don't currently have the issue of a novelist leaving out a lesbian kiss because the wife of the CEO of one of the network sponsors finds the whole thing distasteful. The more people involved in a work of entertainment, the more it becomes of the common denominator

This happens rather frequently in publishing, it is just not mentioned in the news. Having certain content deems work unmarketable or less marketable, and publishing is about profit just like television/cinema. Literary Fiction is the only sub-field of fiction that is usually expected to sell poorly.

It's very hard to sell certain themes in fiction, especially if they are sexual. Even comic novels lambasting Christianity are usually only published by small publishing houses (unless a big shot writes it).

I would say fiction is as homogenized as visual mediums are. I think it is far easier to get access to literary work that doesn't fit the paradigm than television, because there are only a few dozen relevant channels (excluding those basic cable channels that are niche like Animal Planet and Home shopping network). There are thousands of publishing houses (although fewer than 10 companies control more than 80 percent of the market)

I also forgot to mention: time. Visual media only gets a limited amount of time, whereas a book can be read over a period of hours, days, months, years, etc. This factor alone, in my opinion, is more than enough evidence to lead me to the conclusion that it is an apples v. apple juice type of comparison.
posted by Gnostic Novelist at 1:59 PM on March 17, 2007

Sontag was told that I dealt in “randomness” and developed in interest in talking to me. When she learned by looking at my bio on the dust jacket that I was “in markets”, she gave me the look as if I had killed her mother.

What the hell does "In markets" even mean?
posted by delmoi at 2:42 PM on March 17, 2007

Apparently he deals with "financial mathematics."

wikipedia
posted by Citizen Premier at 3:03 PM on March 17, 2007

Also, even if he is a dumb ass, there's no excuse for turning your back on a person mid-sentence, unless they're a genuine bad person. If Susan Sontag really did that, then she really is an asshole.
posted by Citizen Premier at 3:05 PM on March 17, 2007

Also, even if he is a dumb ass, there's no excuse for turning your back on a person mid-sentence, unless they're a genuine bad person. If Susan Sontag really did that, then she really is an asshole.

I agree with this generally, but if she was in the midst of her chemotherapy, I would give her a pass. I have seen several benign friends turn into Torquemadettes during that stuff.
posted by jamjam at 3:40 PM on March 17, 2007

Susan Sontag is the ultimate troll. Years after she died, she is still inciting massive flamewars.
posted by Sukiari at 3:43 PM on March 17, 2007

Arrgh. She was a morally superior boat anchor. Sukiari, take a pill or something.
posted by nj_subgenius at 3:50 PM on March 17, 2007

Then I realized he was a dumb fuck who deserved whatever Sontag dished out.

Jeesh. I don't really agree with what Taleb wrote, but I know enough about him to realize that it would take some serious balls to levy a claim like that against him based upon a little paragraph I read somewhere.
posted by Kwantsar at 3:50 PM on March 17, 2007 [1 favorite]

I'm not well-read enough to say why she identifies 1850 as the beginning of the modern novel

It's probably a mix of several factors - The Scarlet Letter was published around there, it's a nice even date, and when I googled "modern novel 1850" I found a number of college courses that seemed to use 1850 as either a start or end cap for period of modernity, although modern always seems to be in flux, and dependent on who's talking and about what.

If I recall correctly, I've heard some po-mos say that the modern begins with the Canterbury Tales^, for christ's sake.

When I think about different English professors saying what the first modern novel was, some titles that come to mind are Tristram Shandy^ (1759) and Moby Dick^ (1851, so there you go).

Then I realized he was a dumb fuck who deserved whatever Sontag dished out.

For the record it's entirely conceivable that both of them are assholes, each in their own way. I've noticed that assholes are sometimes of opposite polarity and repel each other almost instantly.

For the record, I have much more data supporting my conclusion that Sontag was an asshole, if an incredibly interesting and brilliant one.
posted by illovich at 3:56 PM on March 17, 2007

"Sukiari, take a pill or something."

WTF?
posted by Sukiari at 4:37 PM on March 17, 2007

languagehat must shit himself when he reads Finnegan's Wake.

I've read quite about about Taleb and his associate Mandelbrot. Taleb is well respected amongst quant circles and is good friends with Niederhoffer among others. He's really just an intellectual more than a trader.

While he can be aggravating at times, I do have sympathy for his general premise. Journalists and the like want quick snippets, things that can fit into a headline and an article for the general populace. The markets, being as complicated as they are, are really the antithesis of this. Remember the big market drop several weeks ago, when CNN immediately said "Market drops on news of Cheney attack." For those of us in finance and economics, this is really aggravating. I respect him and Mandelbrot trying to question the very fundamentals many of us were taught in school (modern portfolio theory, efficient market hypothesis) and showing how success in the markets can be out of sheer luck rather than skill. They're trying to apply empiricism to something where applying empiricism is hard to do.

I could go on, but it would really derail. I plan on making a post about him when his new book comes out here shortly. For those who went through business school and had to sit through things like "Who Moved the Cheese", and anecdotal evidence that made stupid conclusions, he is a welcome relief.
posted by geoff. at 5:25 PM on March 17, 2007

incredibly lazy intellectually

kids she chased off her lawn

Reach for the skies, why don't you?
posted by Wolof at 5:46 PM on March 17, 2007

Also, even if he is a dumb ass, there's no excuse for turning your back on a person mid-sentence, unless they're a genuine bad person. If Susan Sontag really did that, then she really is an asshole.

She may be an asshole, I don't know, I never met her. Taleb may be an asshole too. Stephen King evidently is a very delightful and sociable person. These people are to be judged by the quality of their work, not on the basis of some second-hand subjective account.

Oh, and not all airports are alike. O'Hare, for instance, is very much not like Logan. This is an observation somewhere along the lines of "all cathedrals are alike." Yes, they all serve the same purpose, they all have similar layouts, but I don't think anyone would argue that Chartres looks like St. Paul's.
posted by Kattullus at 3:40 PM on March 17

All airports are alike in that they are anodyne public spaces that reflect a technocratic vision of the future, frozen at the time of their construction. They are a dual corporate and bureaucratic center of mass, and as such can in any meaningful way reflect their home city's local culture the way a train station might. Grand Central Station is more beautiful, more charming, and more human than any airport in the world. See also the Moscow subway. I think that was her point, not that they are all designed the same.

And her comments in this essay are insightful. I believe the television narrative she's talking about is the episodic, serial structure of sitcoms or dramas. And she is dead on right. They suffer from the same collective thinking guided by an emotionless bureaucratic mindset that plagues airports. TV has to have a formula, the formula has to be in the script. The script should be simple enough that new viewers can follow along and not feel confused or excluded. The novel narrative makes you think because it typically doesn't have a formula, insofar as it is a complex reflection of life that itself has no formula. The TV narrative makes you sleep. It is safe and comfortable, neither morally or intellectually challenging. And I don't mean challenging in terms of a puzzle like Lost or Twin Peaks. I mean morally ambiguous.
posted by Pastabagel at 6:49 PM on March 17, 2007 [1 favorite]

Journalists and the like want quick snippets, things that can fit into a headline and an article for the general populace. The markets physics, politics, religion, psychology, art, etc., being as complicated as they are, are really the antithesis of this.
posted by Pastabagel at 7:12 PM on March 17, 2007

languagehat must shit himself when he reads Finnegan's Wake.

Huh? I love Finnegans Wake (no apostrophe, by the way). What's your point?

I don't really agree with what Taleb wrote, but I know enough about him to realize that it would take some serious balls to levy a claim like that against him based upon a little paragraph I read somewhere.

You must be kidding me. If you don't bitch about people based on "a little paragraph," what are you doing on MeFi? I never heard of Taleb and I don't give a damn about his insights into markets; anybody who tosses off an idiotic (and ill-written) screed like the one I quoted is a dumb fuck.
posted by languagehat at 7:13 PM on March 17, 2007

I was making a joke about Finnegan's Wake having a lot of typos, and in need of a copy editors. I think it fell through.
posted by geoff. at 7:15 PM on March 17, 2007

This thread is so MEFIy. Did the people here actually read this article? I don't have a lot of time right now, but:

(1) Most of it isn't even about TV or moral superiority, but about the way novels deal with tme and space. This isn't one of her best or more rigorous articles, but she throws off a number of interesting claims about characters in novels being bounded by fate and novels having to deal with certain confines (for example, only certain slices of time and space, and only certain types of language--not necessarily metaphors, for example).

(2) Her arguments against TV aren't really very new or crotchedy. How many people would really claim that, say, Everybody Loves Raymond promotes a special aesthetic vision, a careful mode of attention, some kind of empathy with people different from us, and a sense of surprise at difference and unpredictability? Also, she's not making any kind of claim about TV as it is intrinsically: for example, she doesn't talk a lot about the formal qualities of television (for example: images), but about the way we use TV (banal formulaic television shows). So while there is some high cultural lamenting, this isn't really a case of someone from the old technology hating the new. Also, while she is arguing against the commodifiction of television, her point seems to be more interesting than that: the problem of television isnt' necessarily that it's moneyed and shies away from controversy, but that it isn't local. If the point of the novel is to give a sense of place, television doesn't do that: it is an anti-realist genre in how it scrubs all the social details off people. In this sense, the best response might be not, say, "Star Trek: The Next Generation does offer an empathetic meeting of others!" but that shows like reality tv shows now do invest a lot in amateurs and the Americanness of people.

(3) This essay was unpublished when she died and apparently written some time ago. Sontag probably wouldn't be a very good critic of video games, but it's very possible that this was written in the mid-to-late nineties when, thanks to the dot-com boom, the hypertext novel did seem like a plausible new form. We all remember the hyperbolic claims that were being made at he time.
posted by kensanway at 8:10 PM on March 17, 2007 [1 favorite]

Metafilter: Did the people here actually read this article?
posted by stbalbach at 8:29 PM on March 17, 2007 [1 favorite]

I guess I am the only person to find some airports charming and lovely. The reason I chose Logan and O'Hare is that O'Hare is pleasant and easy to get around, while Logan is... well... let me just put it this way: the first time I disembarked at Logan, the route to the passport inspection had been changed, so that we had to walk through a men's bathroom.
posted by Kattullus at 8:30 PM on March 17, 2007 [1 favorite]

I find it extremely strange to make comments on Taleb's level of courtesy and manners based on his stand against editing and the commodization of his style. He who made the comment is falling for a collection of journalistic fallacies ...
I also find it extremely unrigorous to generalize from a section in someone's notebook, particularly out of context. Hate me all you want, but do not misrepresent his personality. Taleb is "obsessed with the aesthetics of personal manners" ...
posted by epistemeter at 1:54 AM on March 18, 2007 [1 favorite]

I was making a joke about Finnegan's Wake having a lot of typos

D'oh—sorry!

I guess I am the only person to find some airports charming and lovely.

No, I do, but only the tiny ones, like Santa Barbara airport.

I find it extremely strange to make comments on Taleb's level of courtesy and manners based on his stand against editing and the commodization of his style.

Once again, I have little idea what you're talking about. I made no "comments on Taleb's level of courtesy and manners"; I said he was a dumb fuck. But then, I don't even know what "the commodization of his style" means, so I guess I'm a dumb fuck too.
posted by languagehat at 5:37 AM on March 18, 2007

Sontag died before The Wire.
posted by Hobbacocka at 6:10 AM on March 18, 2007

I fail to understand how you can make general comments about Taleb's intelligence (and some other attribute) based on a paragraph taken out of context. This is barbaric.
posted by epistemeter at 9:29 AM on March 18, 2007

"How many people would really claim that, say, Everybody Loves Raymond promotes a special aesthetic vision, a careful mode of attention, some kind of empathy with people different from us, and a sense of surprise at difference and unpredictability?"

Actually I find "Everybody Loves Raymond" (ELR) to be a fascinating riff on the dysfunctional family genre pioneered by The Honeymooners and All in the Family. For such a seemingly innocuous show, it as a surprisingly dark aesthetic, and rarely stoops to cheap moral pandering.

On a similar note here is News Radio and the Comedic Art, which claims News Radio is the single greatest work of Dramatic Art America has produced in the last 50 years.
posted by afu at 9:51 AM on March 18, 2007 [1 favorite]

Damn. There was a great line from Lewis Lapham or somebody like that recently about truth/fiction/novels. I suck.

I see I am explaining badly ... It has to be something like falling in love.

This piece seemed like a collection of notes more than a finished essay, but it's still wonderful. Thanks.

I mostly agree with her, excepting her perceived "threats" to "the novel" in an absoute form. She had a really good line (in need of an edit):

And one of the resources we have for helping us to make sense of our lives, and make choices, and propose and accept standards for ourselves, is our experience of singular authoritative voices, not our own, which make up that great body of work that educates the heart and the feelings and teaches us to be in the world, that embodies and defends the glories of language (that is, expands the basic instrument of consciousness): namely, literature.

Literature is certainly major aspect of creating with language, but it's not the only one. All media still must have untapped potential.

We may be better evolved, at this time, for creating our own universes with pen/paper/word processors, but those too are forms of technology. They simply enhanced X-year-old (before writing) oral histories/stories.

What she didn't mention is one of the strongest arguments in favor of the novel/literature: the interaction with the reader. The reader fuels the novel, with no other actors in play. There is somewhat of a mind meld that happens with a reader and a book. It can be replicated with other media, but with more barriers/complications.

On a similar note here is News Radio and the Comedic Art, which claims News Radio is the single greatest work of Dramatic Art America has produced in the last 50 years.

Well, that's obvious. And why? Great writing. Though as much time as I've spent with every single episode of Newsradio, it hasn't affected me as much as some novels I've read in one afternoon.
posted by mrgrimm at 11:14 AM on March 18, 2007

I made no "comments on Taleb's level of courtesy and manners"; I said he was a dumb fuck. But then, I don't even know what "the commodization of his style" means, so I guess I'm a dumb fuck too.

languagehat is a book editor and does not appear to wish to understand that T just wants his work to be uncorrupted by intrusive book editors.
He should not attack someone's personality or intelligence based on vested interests.
posted by epistemeter at 1:58 PM on March 18, 2007

"Well, that's obvious. And why? Great writing. Though as much time as I've spent with every single episode of Newsradio, it hasn't affected me as much as some novels I've read in one afternoon."

And great acting. Since the death of Patrick O'Brian I havn't read a novel by a living writer, that I wasn't disappointed with. Comedy is the most underratted art anyway, and so much of what's good on TV is comedy, I think that's one of the main reasons it gets so easily dismissed.
posted by afu at 2:03 PM on March 18, 2007 [1 favorite]

Epistemeter, do you have an e-mail address per chance?
posted by geoff. at 9:25 PM on March 19, 2007

Geoff., languagehat, epistemeter's and Taleb's style have a great deal in common, don't you think?
posted by jamjam at 9:01 AM on March 20, 2007

I'm more interested in the fact that epistemeter signed up to comment in a thread not directly about Taleb (in fact no clue was given in the front page post), seems to know quite a bit about Taleb or at least his writings, and references an obscure logic article about the existence of a supposed "epistemeter" (epistemology being a favorite subject of Taleb and myself). That and the fact the name "epistemeter" only shows up on google searches as always something related to Taleb. Either we have Taleb himself (which seems somewhat unlikely, I do not think he would be the type to hide behind anonymity), or someone that is a fan of Taleb's work. Either way I would like to talk to them, as it is not very often you meet someone with an philosophical interest in the markets.
posted by geoff. at 9:12 AM on March 20, 2007

Well, regardless of your identity epistemeter, it is not very often one finds someone with our narrow set of interests. If you would care to get in touch with me, my e-mail is in my profile. Take care.
posted by geoff. at 9:36 AM on March 20, 2007

Now I am rambling, but my suspicion grows that Taleb and epistemeter are one in the same. How small I feel! I enjoy your work, keep it up.
posted by geoff. at 9:40 AM on March 20, 2007

my suspicion grows that Taleb and epistemeter are one in the same

I had the same suspicion, but my reaction was radically different. In fact, you can pretty much reverse the polarity of every item in your last two sentences to get mine.
posted by languagehat at 11:27 AM on March 20, 2007

hello guys. thank you for the compliment. it is very flattering but I am someone protecting Taleb's interests.
posted by epistemeter at 3:56 PM on March 24, 2007