Ancient Greeks believed it was impossible to escape from your fate.
That is not true, or a gross simplification, for post-Homeric Achaean and derived cultures. Neither Plato or Aristotle could have come from such a culture Maybe you should stay in and read more.
(About Charles) lol is this guy for real ? Aside from the fact that you have avoided logical response to any, perfectly valid, argumentations against your perfectly invalid viewpoint,
Oh? Give me your scientifically advised opinion contrary to the findings of the report I cited.
And (@ Charles) You have already cited pharmaceuticals as the substances that the two worst cases you speak of were possibly affected by. And the other two, one of whom was a victim of blatant racism, and another who died after exhibiting actions and demeanor that are counter-intuitive to the effects caused by the substance we are speaking of, were entirely different in all aspects. You could just as easily say that they died because they were Black, or because they had both eated bread within the previous 24 hour stretch of time. And all 4 of the incidents of which you speak had entirely different sets of circumstances, aggrivators, external influences, and methodologies involved. That you attempt to prove causation through only the very loosest of correlations is simply beyond comprehension as a complete, logicial argument. Your posts are rife with ignorance and incorrect information, as well as a lack of logical or scientific backing.
There is no valid argument that the legalization of anything can be justified on an absolute basis as safe and effective, or harmful and socially destructive -- there is no such thing in reality as biological determinism, so that there is only one political choice -- that the individual always gets to decide for himself, or he doesn't. I don't hear that from you. Am I wrong? Nor do I wish to be patronized by propaganda of lies that any factor of racism was involved in the Martin and Brown cases or that marijuana use played no factor.
Tom Oldman wrote:Mr. Bell: Since December, 2014, the Federal Government has lifted the ban on medical marijuana. See the following:]
http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-med … story.html
~Tom
Thanks for this info, Tom. Here is another link, but without the ads or push-to-join forms:
http://www.hightimes.com/read/congress- … -marijuana
I see some brilliant interactions in this post. Like Charles, I was once very adverse to cannabis, but remembering the very few time I smoked it—way back when— I now recall a very relaxing sensation of muscles, the very relaxation that I could benefit from now.
All I can say is that just ten minutes with the level of pain I have (at total relapse and with out pain-killers), you might sell your mother into slavery to rid yourself of it.
I have no beef with the old and the sick taking whatever measures to get them through the rest of their lives, but broadening that issue into a greater political action without due consideration of all consequences is mistaken. (1) The push to legalize marijuana for medical reasons is 100% so that rich men can be made more rich off a scam --like the "immigration" issue is similarly a slavers' economic issue and not within a tiny sphere of feeling sorry for people stuck in rotten countries; (2) you oughtn't simply ignore medical advice in order to obtain a placebo effect you will probably get; (3) political progressives on the socialist left talk about shared social responsibility when coercing an individual into government-supervised medical care while obviously in that same coercion create an autocratic medical decision-making process that excludes, virtually and really, individual choice -- and that political leaning, which also instituted Jim Crow and Prohibition, for example, flags down every social-responsibility cause and ignores every individual-responsibility cause such as the examples of Martin, Brown, and Roof who were alleged as victims or victimizer in racism, not individually chosen, and not that they were drug addicts, always individually chosen.
Initially my comment was directed toward an open public statement concerning the violation of federal law -- like those who object to the income tax publically stating they are not paying their income taxes. That one can get away with a violation of federal controlled-substance law and not so much an equally obtusely derived taxation law shows the corrupt nature of the U.S. federal government, and yet again it does not seem to matter to the social-responsibility progressive-socialists that their means of coercion is corrupt.
I was wondering if anyone has any thoughts about the use of fate/destiny in your writing. I have two characters, both of whom are told it is their destiny to save the human race from the Apocalypse, although they use different, even conflicting, methods in the attempt to do so.
Can someone fail to achieve one's destiny? The very word suggests otherwise. If it's fate, how dumb do you have to be to screw it up? Can you walk away from fate?
Thanks.
Dirk
My book Remembrances and Reconciliation is about that. I don't explicitly deny determinism (not meaning only causality, which is axiomatic) but I do think it is a delusion, even so is classical physics, we accept to distil some happiness from: Shit happens and then you die. {Is life a meaningless struggle toward an inevitable nothingness?} Fate/destiny is a lie one tells oneself, or, of course, given to him by society.
In the sequel, Maximilian's Achilles and Patroclus, I put the fate/destiny to the test in a different context fairly well the same as in Homer's Iliad and the premise of your story.
Charles_F_Bell wrote:Johnnie Ruffin, M.sc. wrote:
The worst part about marijuana in my opinion was that it was controlled by drug cartels and unscrupulous characters that kidnapped and murdered entire families to till their crops and sell their products.
What did Treyvon Martin and Michael Brown have in common, other than being thieves? Adolescent brains soaked in THC.
I'm not sure how to respond to that.
You might respond by recognizing that there are 20% of all persons (higher proportion of teens) whose judgement is so impaired by pot paranoia that they would act just as Martin and Brown did -- so insanely inappropriate for their circumstances and thus were the cause of their own deaths. I might add that Dylann Roof has been an early drug addict but rather (as we know at this time) more of the pharmaceutical type as was the Newtown CT. shooter Adam Lanza -- though those were mis-prescribed medications. There is no such thing as an innocuous intake of anything. There is such a thing as taking the first step into an intoxicated state of delusion, and the last persons to ask about the rightness or wrongness of such a step are those who have already taken that step. There is a long history of alcohol in beer and wine and its abuse from which to learn and then erect social measures of control, not all of them, or any of them, legal measures, and a much shorter history of alcohol abuse in distilled spirits which eventually spurred the Temperance movement (as social control, not necessarily in Prohibition) for what was bad enough in drug abuse up to the 20th century, but there is a tiny history of anything else "recreationally" intoxicating from which to learn, but what we do know that within a statistical significance all of these are worse in effect to more people than alcohol. There is nothing about alcohol, short of long-term inducement of alcohol related psychosis, not a one-time consumption, that could cause a Martin or a Brown, and as to Roof and Lanza, we have far more to go to understand pharmaceutical treatment of mental illness to suppose there would be "nothing much to it" in using those drugs recreationally.
In the end, I think you make my point. Control the output and it might become less accessible to teenagers. It also might put the drug dealers that are giving these drugs to teenagers out of business.
No, the drug dealer will become legal and rid himself of all that expensive law-enforcement overhead and make more money. That's it. If you care to make a moral argument for the legalization of everything that is purported to be only "self-injuring" let's hear it, but otherwise you have no utilitarian social argument at all. There is no "less accessibility" of alcohol to teenagers because it is a legal substance; it is just lame to them these days for the purposes of intoxication. There is no benefit to me at all to have more and more potheads, more and more Martins and Browns, in this world, or in that part of it I inhabit, and you have to argue that I should not care, first about myself and then about them, for Treyvon would have been a better person, even if possibly not the best person for several other reasons, had he not been a pothead. And he would be alive.
Tom Oldman wrote:Mr. Bell: Since December, 2014, the Federal Government has lifted the ban on medical marijuana. See the following:]
http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-med … story.html
~Tom
That omnibus spending bill bars the Justice Department from spending money to prevent states or the District of Columbia from implementing laws allowing medical use of marijuana; it is still against federal law to possess marijuana for any reason just as it is against federal law for an alien to enter or remain in the U.S.A. without a valid visa. What we have is the "supremacy" of federal law by a federal government that does not respect the rule of law.
And if anybody favors taking down the Confederate flag in Columbia S.C, he should also advocate armed invasion by federal troops of those 26 pothead states that are in rebellion against federal Supremacy.
Mr. Bell: Since December, 2014, the Federal Government has lifted the ban on medical marijuana. See the following:]
http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-med … story.html
~Tom
That omnibus spending bill bars the Justice Department from spending money to prevent states or the District of Columbia from implementing laws allowing medical use of marijuana; it is still against federal law to possess marijuana for any reason just as it is against federal law for an alien to enter or remain in the U.S.A. without a valid visa. What we have is the "supremacy" of federal law by a federal government that does not respect the rule of law.
The worst part about marijuana in my opinion was that it was controlled by drug cartels and unscrupulous characters that kidnapped and murdered entire families to till their crops and sell their products.
What did Treyvon Martin and Michael Brown have in common, other than being thieves? Adolescent brains soaked in THC.
I have no idea where to post announcements of any kind anymore, max. Old Forums is where I posted a couple of announcements--probably unseen. That's what's missing--an announcement forum. And F! the federal crime thing. If you don't transport it back, I guess you'll be okay. I hope it helps what ails you.
Possession of marijuana in any quantity for any reason is against federal law in all fifty states.
Nothing like admitting to intent to commit a federal crime in a public forum.
What if the books are books in a series? For example: The Raiford Chronicles is the series I have in print (3 of 4 anyway).
1. Lucky Thirteen (It's the story of the 13th intended victim of a serial killer and the relationship that develops between her and the cop investigating the murders.)
2. Heartless (In this one, our killer is literally removing the victims' hearts.)
3. Broken (The third installment is about broken hearts, broken, spirits, and broken bodies.)
4. Whatever It Takes (On schedule to be released in September. Ray, my MC, has always done whatever it takes to solve a crime, but when the person working to help another solve a crime is his headstrong teenage daughter, his philosophy takes a U-turn. This is the last in the series.)
Did you look at my "Eating Out with Lesbians" ? Grabbing title, but also teasing with something that is not there. I think your choice of titles is mildly suggestive of Romance genre, and not thriller/mystery/crime, but also not particularly grabbing, rather ordinary, that is a safe route against toying with the reader in promising him something that is not there -- they could be both Romance and Crime, as in an intended pun. Both titles for my novellas onsite is suggestive of something "erudite", no? I have the approach of putting up a gate against those who might look for something I cannot provide (explicit sex, graphic/gruesome violence, potty-mouth characters, derivative unoriginal plots) while also signalling to the curious literate reader writing of a different and still traditional nature. Literary-allusion in the title technique as I have done for Maximilian's Achilles and Patroclus signals both that there is allegory but not by Homer. It is not that someone who has never read the Iliad (or seen the movies) cannot enjoy the story, but that those who have will get a bonus and be amused (or outraged) in what I did to Homer's tale.
In general, I believe that a title should accomplish: (1) Attention Grabbiness while (2) Not Lying and (3) Fairly Descriptive.
Thank you Charles, you've enlightened me and I've enjoyed reading your definitions of LF. Yes, the written excellence and acceptance of ideas of a generation can be the measure of good LF. However, that they are passed on, generation after generation, gives these ideas profound, sometimes lasting and perhaps international repute and reverence. However, I do have very conflicting thoughts about Ayn Rand as a meaningful author. I think of her as Bill O'Reilly in drag. And, towards end of her life, she lived on Social Security provided by the government, the government that she thought was the shark character in the movie JAWS.
However, you still don't understand that the meaning of "literary fiction" of a contemporary genre-type is *not* to be compared and contrasted to classics (let's say: anything prior to 1945) even if a LF author may pattern his style (prose and/or dialogue) and thematic presentation on classical writing, for it is easiest to consider that what LF is -- is not genre fiction after 1945. I would also say that surrealism/absurdism (Becket) style and neo-romantic style (Rand) , and the writing in the present tense and italicizing internal dialogue, experimental, etc. does not put a novel in the LF category but may signal the author's deliberate intention to pass universals in a medium that is not genre fiction which exists exclusively for the purpose of entertainment. As to your opinion of Rand as an author, you may be proving my assertion that a LF author will always fail against the ideological or other kind of intransigent. Randian politics is absolutely the least important aspect of her novels though certainly in so judging her novels by her explicit political stance on her support for Thomas Dewey and Richard Nixon is an absurdity accompanying the thought pattern of the obstinate ignoramus.
----
Steinbeck: "he drilled-down to the root of human suffering and the human condition"
He did absolutely no such thing. His style and novel content was as any other style and content of his times, that of the journalist reporting facts as he wished to see them and which rarely corresponded to the truth, or to a truth of the simple-minded: that an uncoordinated set of facts is not truth. I pillory those naturalist author's facts of undisputed determinism in R&R. The "real" world of Steinbeck is little different than the world of my character, Joan, suffering from schizoaffective disorder.
-----
So...My concept of the LF novel is the peeling away of a generational onion, of a stratified society’ evils, and sometime its purported best qualities to expose a universal truth.
Yes, but no such author as Steinbeck (as a "classic" does not fit my definition in any case) or Vonnegut or Sharpe does that. Rand does.
Thank you for your generous words on R&R. I am frustrated by the fact that there is no medium like NTBW by which I can get any -- let alone a few -- opinions about whether or not I succeeded in tying the stated initial premise with the conclusion by means of all of the middle. I only have had a few opinions from people who already knew the objective (spoilers from me along the way) before reading R&R in its entirety. This is itself a spoiler in that a reader is not supposed to know that beforehand.
"Literary fiction" is not a style but rather a purpose. There is not, and never can there be, a single literary-fiction style. Indeed, if a novel is written in a terse naturalist style or in an elaborate 17th-century farcical style, there is no judgement to be had as to its literary merit on the basis of style. It is the intent that matters. Your keep-it-simple dictum, just like all those likeable-characters critiques, is irrelevant even if it does sometimes or sometimes does not appear in literary fiction. Orwell moved in the right direction when he could admit that truth is not simple, and "likeable" characters is a sales technique, a marketable subjective apparition.
For example, the Prologue to my novel Remembrances and Reconciliation is the only unvarnished fact that corresponds to truth in the entire book. It really happened. I will not claim that its complex and unusual style of presentation gives the book a literary-fiction flavor, nor should anyone judge it as anything other than what it is: an unusual style for a statement of fact. I will make the claim that in all probability, though in no certainty, a reader who will go "Yuck" to the style, often misrepresenting it as a run-on or in any other way as incorrect, cannot understand very much of what I wish to say by the end of the book when I return to that fact stated in a different way and in a different context [itself a theme of the book]. My Prologue is a gate against the unwanted and the undeserving.
Keep it simple is my definition of literary fiction that can impart the most knowledge or profundities for the most people, have the most profound effect in the long run and for the most good.
You are moving around within a circle of wrong definitions.
First: "Literary fiction" in the sense as it has meant since the '60's, is not good literature of the past. Literary fiction, as a genre type, means that of contemporary fiction within the generation it is written. Orwell for 1984, not some retro-active literary fiction for his time, had the benefit of hindsight to predict the outcomes of absolute socialism (vid. Pierre Leroux) that he and his ilk had advocated, and he merely offered a kind of apology, not any particular insight into a universal human condition. However, for his concept of Newspeak he does deserve credit for literary brilliance even if he himself did not fully get the concept of every word itself being a concept and every Newspeak word being an anti-concept -- credit for that belongs to Rand. "African-American" and "Latino" are Newspeak words, and yet how many obstinate, willfully ignorant people do not know that, and they will have read Atlas Shrugged several times (or so they say) and never get that?
Second: "Literary fiction" is not a style but rather a purpose. There is not, and never can there be, a single literary-fiction style. Indeed, if a novel is written in a terse naturalist style or in an elaborate 17th-century farcical style, there is no judgement to be had as to its literary merit on the basis of style. It is the intent that matters. Your keep-it-simple dictum, just like all those likeable-characters critques, is irrelevant even if it does sometimes or sometimes does not appear in literary fiction. Orwell moved in the right direction when he could admit that truth is not simple, and "likeable" characters is a sales technique, a marketable subjective apparition.
There is not one of your examples I would call "literary fiction" at the time of publication, and especially not anything by Vonnegut and Steinbeck.
There is also the technique of placing the far-future story in the present tense, and the merely future story in the past tense -- like Margaret Atwood did in Oryx and Crake, an awful book in theme and plot with silly, stereo-typed characters, but quite excellent in this and other writing techniques.
I have been contemplating my use of flashbacks in Hunter. While researching the use of flashbacks and mistakes that are often made, I ran across this article that was very helpful to me, and I hope will be the same for you. Mike
I guess . . . but the author wishes us to more or less hide the flashback within the present narrative and even in his samples that is still a clumsy shift in perspective -- except the last one, and a clever one, by John Irving he calls framing -- giving away the ending and then explaining the ending for the rest of the story.
I don't think there is one way to write either. I do think that anyone aspiring to write should realize the requirement for craft in writing.
The essential problem is over the meaning of "craft in writing" when it comes to "truth in writing" and other elements of style. To equate the purported craft of building so-called likeable and believable characters, for example, is either contradictory to or irrelevant to the "truth in writing" of some literature, and yet it remains with other arbitrarily dictated elements of style for fiction adjudged as necessary and proper to create a well-crafted story, and what is worse, a story will be reviewed negatively just because the critic-reader does not like the characters or believe they are not true-to-life when there is no essential connection between good literature and that craft of creating characters as likeable and believable. It is rather a marketing strategy or a self-fulfilling prophecy by submission editors because people would not be reading what is not printed and marketed properly.
As an undergraduate (many, many decades ago!) my sole drive was to write. To understand writing I took a course in aesthetics. I read John Dewey. He described art as an experience. This explains my response to a great degree..
Let me first say that I am not one to insist this or that is the "right" way to write. To a degree I will even say such words uttered outside of a conditional --- if you want readers ($$$) who like crap about vampires, you should write crap about vampires -- are incorrect.
You have one expert philosophical opinion of writing as an aesthetic practice rather than, say, as professional practice, but I can say I have a suggestion of a diametrically opposed expert philosophical opinion in Ayn Rand by her Romantic Manifesto, Okay, so who's right? Or how do you decide who's right? I am confident that Rand would disagree with my philosophy respecting writing as an art form, which is nothing like her neo-romanticism, but I cannot disagree she has sensible opinions, especially against naturalism [1], and she made a lot of money and influenced of lot of people and created art. And Dewey?
[1] Wikipedia - Naturalism was a literary movement or tendency from the 1880s to 1930s that used detailed realism to suggest that social conditions, heredity, and environment had inescapable force in shaping human character. It was a mainly unorganized literary movement that sought to depict believable everyday reality, as opposed to such movements as Romanticism or Surrealism, in which subjects may receive highly symbolic, idealistic or even supernatural treatment.
Another characteristic of naturalism is determinism.
Then perhaps the invisible critter is being transported from over there in the copy of my text to be reviewed. I recall struggling with the NTBW editor for the upload and editing of that story. There is still never a simple cut-and-paste from Word, fonts and all, into that editor. For review I usually cut and paste the quoted text into notepad first, add my comments, and then paste over into the review comment field so all those invisible codes will be stripped.
My guess is that if you are cut-and-pasting from anything other than a simple ASCII editor like Notepad (not MS-Word, for example) there is translated invisible codes that confuse the NTBW process.
The skillful author is one who mimicks fiction to present to the intransigent the universe as it is, not how that obstinate ignoramus envisages it to be through his imprecise and distorted perceptions and self-delusions. This author will always fail but will incidentally leave behind a work of art for everyone else to enjoy.
Excellent way to put it, becket.
Of course, you might expect me to disagree. Although I agree with:
"I think reality is a far better word than truth."
I disfavor an author's status as an entertainment monkey in which:
"a writer needs to mimic reality to make fiction believable."
and rather prefer he mimic fiction in order to make reality believable (or bearable or interesting or inspiring or . . .)
"absolute critical element of fiction is to enable the reader to suspend disbelief and see your characters as real and to experience their lives in his or her imagination."
. . . is nonsense. The real(ish) characters are there as props to play as foils to the un-real characters who are the means for an author to allow a reader to see reality in a way theretofore unseen. I see it as pointless to place the reader in a world that is like his own except only to be an author who is mere entertainment monkey like a strip club dancer or network news anchor.
Dude everything you say is .
Yeah, like whatever.
Playing with "L"; "S" ("sh", "z"); and "K"
Lots of luscious lipstick lesbians licking licorice.
