- amy s
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Re: Genre History and Reading
Interesting points, but I found it full of ramble and hard to follow. I got the general point, though. The youth of todays average fantasy lover has no grasp on the classics. They don't understand the history that brought them to this place, so they regurgitate 'ground breaking' and watered-down versions of the stories that set the stage for what exists today.
This author is clearly a classic gamer with a rigid idea of what should and shouldn't exist, unimpressed by the swill that the youth in America are patronizing. He's noticed a trend (which I believe he has a point) that the classic version of elf kind has morphed over the years and relates it to the Christian version of Elves (who don't walk around all nobly and steal babies from cribs.)
I heard of most of these classic books because of my friends, but wasn't interested in reading them despite the fact that I was a complete bookworm. The material wasn't what I normally follow. I couldn't chase their preferences without giving up my own. (The exception was the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, but I started that series because the guy I had a crush on liked it)
As to his belief that all fantasy and science fiction is going to hell, I have a quote to apply. I list it because it was said better than I ever could…
Peter the Hermit AD 1274
"The world is passing through troublous times. The young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint. They talk as if they knew everything, and what passes for wisdom with us is foolishness with them"
- njc
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Re: Genre History and Reading
I think it cuts a little deeper than that. He's right about the disconnect. How many people today are reading =Stranger in a Strange Land= or the =Foundation= series, much less =The Demolished Man=? Or even Le Guin?
And I think part of what he writes links to, and maybe was influenced by, Tolkien's essay =On Fairy Stories=. (I might not have the title quite right.) The uncanny may be marvelous and inviting, but it is parlous nevertheless. Can we read the collections of the Grimm brothers with the same emotional connection that our grandparents had?
In the cover notes for an LP recorded and pressed behind the Iron Curtain, E. Power Biggs wrote of Bach's audiences and first hearers, "privileged beyond their comprehension."
- amy s
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Re: Genre History and Reading
I never read any of those books and I was part of the 'illuminated' that he refers to back in the 70's and 80's.
The point about Bach's audience (at least to me) is that Bach's genius wasn't understood in the beginning. People just liked the music. Then there was a brief Renaissance where listeners understood the complexity that played during a performance. Then people integrated the information so the techniques were part of the standard curriculum and considered common knowledge. Few people who listen to Bach do it with your understanding of math or music. That job is for the scholars and the performers.
Tolkein via Galadriel: The world is changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air. Much that once was is lost, for none now live who remember it.
- njc
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Re: Genre History and Reading
Those words belonged in the original to Treebeard, I think.
With Bach, there's more to it than that. He represented a style going out of fashion, and people were accustomed to hearing that style as old and fusty, and were not disposed to give it a proper hearing. Composition and keyboard students knew differently, but much of Bach's other works were forgotten, and just a fraction were discovered and saved.
I have somewhere an LP that was advertised as The Last Concert of the Modern Jazz Quartet. The first cut opens with a dialogue between the piano and the vibraphone, a dialogue that is a note-for-note quote of the subject of the second contrapunctus of Bach's Art of the Fugue, a massive, abstract, work, Bach's unfinished Last Testament to posterity.
- amy s
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Re: Genre History and Reading
The quote is Galadriel's as she bemoans the loss of knowledge about the One Ring and how it gets loosed onto the world a second time. At least in the movies. I'm sure of it. It starts out the story as she goes into the ring saga.
- njc
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Re: Genre History and Reading
In the movie it was given to Galadriel, in the opening. But in the books it's in the near-final scenes, as Treebeard says the he does not think they will meet again--to Galadriel, I think. But I'm not at all sure about that.
