Re: Best last lines

DocJam00@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 wrote:

> 
> Folks, eventually one gets tired of the easy stuff, and wants some
> more meat in the broth.

	Assertion without evidence; possibly dual assertion without evidence 
-- you assume people get tired of the easy stuff (without a real 
definition for "easy"), which by the continuing popularity of, say, 
romance novels I have to say is not at all something you can assert 
without doubt, and in the following lines is a clear assumption of 
what is meat and what is not, which may or may not be accepted by all 
readers. Other than other phuds of Engrish, of course.

> Does anybody really want to go back and
> reread all those forgettable Tolkien knockoffs? 

	Clever -- "all those forgettable Tolkien knockoffs". This allows the 
reader to select the stuff he does like and say "well, obviously this 
ISN'T a forgettable Tolkien knockoff, since I remember it", and then 
agree with you on all the stuff he or she doesn't like. While not, 
actually, knowing which of the many published books out there you 
might mean.


> I read hundreds of
> fantasy novels in my adolescence, and I have to say, the majority of
> them were eminently forgettable 

	But as you say, that would apply to pretty much everything. I'd 
venture to say it would apply to the canon of Western Literature, in 
fact.


> Folks, I got TIRED of reading most SF, simply because it didn't
> challenge me in any interesting way any more. 

	Then you read for utterly different purposes than I, and many others. 
I do not read FICTION to be "challenged". If I want to think about 
something -- philosophy, science, mathematics, etc. -- there's 
thousands of clear, factually written books that directly address the 
points I want to think about.

	I read fiction to live somewhere else for a while -- preferably 
somewhere where, in one way or another, things are better than they 
are here, or more interesting.

  Hemingway and Faulkner
> and Flannery O'Connor and Emerson and Sterne and Joyce and the rest of
> the merry crew taught in literature courses DID -- because they were
> saying things about the way that people behaved, in ways that struck
> me as beautifully written, which few SF works ever had.  I wanted to
> know as much as possible about the way people thought and believed and
> struggled and achieved -- and that is what I mean by the human
> condition. 

	And I'm afraid that this leaves me little more enlightened than I was 
before. If I want to know how people behave, think, believe, that's 
also written down in much clearer ways. Hell, I have a degree in 
psychology, which taught me all too much about how people think. If I 
want to learn all of that, I don't see what fiction is going to do.

	Now, if I want to FEEL something that I don't actually feel, yes, 
fiction, can do that. But it'd better do it by giving me people I want 
to spend time with, and for the most part the "classics" didn't. 
Sometimes they did -- I enjoyed hanging out with Elizabeth Bennett and 
watching her snark her way through the social whirl of England -- but 
often they didn't.


> I am going on for far too long here (I can hear the shouts of
> agreement there), but I think that anybody who shuts themselves away
> from the sheer power and enjoyment of what we call Literature is just
> as sad and wrong-headed as someone who puts down SF/Fantasy.

	I don't "shut myself away"; I've tried reading quite a lot of the 
stuff, and I do not like many of them at all, nor see what the "point" 
of them is that hasn't been done by other people much better -- often 
by SF/F authors, even.


> I just find it hard to accept so many people ridiculing books they've
> never read, 

	I tend to ridicule ones I *HAVE* read more, such as Moby Dick, 
although I'll admit to not reading ALL the "classics". I've read, or 
tried to read, quite a few of them -- both on my own and through 
application of outside force.


>or putting them down as not worth reading, when they
> haven't really understood what is being said.

	Well, the last line is a sort of hidden trap for any response, as it 
allows the writer, if confronted on it, to assert that anyone who 
doesn't think the book worth reading hasn't really understood it. I 
hope that was not your intent.





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                      Sea Wasp
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