Only.

[mrissa]

I don't know how many times I have to say this, people, but apparently once more is required: do not tell me that something is only a book, only a movie, only a TV show. Do not.

If you are informing me that a piece of fiction is, in fact, fiction, rest assured that I have a firm grasp on the difference between nonfiction/documentary and fiction, and on the different modes that exist between them.

But mostly people who say that are not trying to make that clarification with someone they suspect of being genuinely confused. They are saying, Relax. It is only a work of fiction and therefore not important. It is nothing to get excited over. It is nothing that can change your life or anybody else's, much less the world at large. It is certainly nothing for which you should have standards. It does not matter. It cannot matter.

I think that's false and not only that but damaging in its falsity, and while we're at it let's not forget patronizing, and I just plain don't want to hear it. Ever. Okay? Okay. I certainly don't want to hear it as many times as I have this week. I have gone over my quota.

I think that should get my crankiness for the morning out of the way, but I make no guarantees.

Comments

[madwriter.livejournal.com]

>>"It is only a work of fiction and therefore not important. It is nothing to get excited over. It is nothing that can change your life or anybody else's, much less the world at large."<<

(Cough)Harriet Beecher Stowe(Cough)

(Cough)Mark Twain(Cough)

(Cough)Upton Sinclair(Cough)

(Cough)Johnathan Swift(Cough)

I've got a lot more coughs where those came from. This kind of thinking, as you can see, makes me sick.

[roadnotes.livejournal.com]

Amen. May I borrow this speech, every once in a while? It's neater than the bludgeon I always want to pull out.

[madwriter.livejournal.com]

Feel free. :) And please add as many authors to the list as you so desire!

[madwriter.livejournal.com]

(Doh--I just realized you were commenting on Mrissa's post rather than my comment. Sorry!)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Go for it. Thanks.

[madwriter.livejournal.com]

Then again, there's the distinct possibility that the people who makes this kind of inane comment have never heard of Stowe, Sinclair, or Swift, and probably has never actually read any of Mark Twain.

I know I gripe about TV a lot and get obnoxious when I bring it up in regard to people asking me how I find time to write, but even I wouldn't say "It's just a TV show". Not only would that make me a hypocrite (I'd get angry if someone said that about the few I watch), but there are quite a few out there which are well-written. I may choose not to watch most of them--but unless people are going to use them as an excuse not to write, I won't begrudge them being important to someone else.

(Sorry if I've just posted this three times...LJ keeps getting stuck when I try to post. Though at least it lets me make corrections. :) )

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Some of the people who use this approach may be cultural illiterates, it's true, and for them there might be some kind of excuse: if a book has never changed their lives, it might be less obvious how it could change other people's. But I don't think they compose the majority of people making that kind of comment, not by a long shot. I think many people want to put Stowe, Sinclair, Swift, Twain, and others like them into a special category: art can't change the world, except for the art that can, which is, of course, special and not to be expected. Bleh.

Television shows are an art form. Someone using that art form badly does not mean that the form itself is no good. If someone says one of my paintings is puerile and obvious and doesn't even have the consolation of deft representation, they'd probably be right, but it certainly wouldn't destroy painting as a field.

Even if people use TV as an excuse not to write, it's generally not for me to get upset about: it's the symptom, not the cause.

[madwriter.livejournal.com]

(Danny makes a note to be more careful in his comments, or at least type more carefully: Even after three chances to make corrections, his LJ grammar still horrifies him.)

>>Television shows are an art form. Someone using that art form badly does not mean that the form itself is no good. <<

As my Mrs. can tell you, I have plenty of DVDs, and a large portion of these are documentaries about history and science. While I prefer reading for information and forming my own imagery mentally, I also get a lot out of visual learning. Especially if it's something I (IMHO) consider well done, such as the BBC "Walking With..." series, or most any astronomy series that may feature shots from the Hubble or other major telescopes.

>>Even if people use TV as an excuse not to write, it's generally not for me to get upset about: it's the symptom, not the cause.<<

Very true. But like you with the "It's only fiction" comment, this is a big thing that pushes my Cranky Button because I hear it so much.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I don't quite understand why it should make you cranky if other people don't write. Let 'em. I mean, occasionally, yes, there are books that you want to read so much you feel like camping out inside the author's computer, even if it's really scrunched in there. But for the most part, if someone consistently prioritizes something else over writing their fiction, it is not my problem.

[madwriter.livejournal.com]

I never said it was a logical crankiness. :) I think it just became annoying through repetition. In every writing workshop where I was on the back side of the table, and dozens of times afterward, people would come to me asking how I found time to write, and in three-quarters of the cases (when I had them tell me what their daily schedules were like) they would average about three hours of TV per night. I guess it's not the blaming TV for writing that bugs me so much, but their refusal to recognize the true problem.

So no, I know it doesn't effect me personally--but I'm not bothered by people talking loudly on their cellphones, crying babies in public, or other such things, so I suppose it had to be something. :)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Ah, yes, I get this part. I was particularly frustrated with the idea that I found time lying around loose on the ground when I was writing my first novel. Now I can see where not having a day job does legitimately give me more writing time than people who have a day job, but at the time I had two hours of day of commute on top of nuclear physics grad school and a new family in a new town, and I was not really willing to listen to anyone who claimed they had nooooo tiiiiiime.

[madwriter.livejournal.com]

I actually consider myself lucky, after a fashion, that I don't need to go into work until 2. So while I still work 8 hours a day, I can write during my personal peak, which is before lunch.

I also have to remind myself that some folks have other underlying circumstances, too. One friend of mine who had written lovely poetry in college stopped after she got married (and before she had kids)--I thought at first it was from an addiction to TV, but it turned out to be a completely unsupportive spouse. "Writing is stupid, writing will never make any money," yada yada. By the end of the day she'd be so exhausted--sometimes from just her husband's negative yammering--that turning on the TV was about all she could manage.

It's taken awhile, but she's finally gotten back into writing, which I'm glad to see and doing my best to encourage. :) Apparently she's finally started learning the trick of "thinking time"--while many of my stories are written while walking or doing dishes, she comes up with hers now while gardening.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yes, there are dozens or hundreds of good reasons not to get writing done even when you are a motivated person who is genuinely interested in writing.

[handworn.livejournal.com]

What should English class in school be?

My theory is that intelligence in kids can't come to full fruition because every year their world is different, with different expectations, different rules, and different abilities, and they have no faith in the conclusions their intelligence leads them to because the ground keeps shifting under their feet. It wasn't until much later that I understood why English class was important. It's not that these authors are really trying to insert symbolism as a kind of crude code, which was how it seemed (and which irritated me). I wish some smart English teacher had explained that symbolism and themes are ways to express the things about stories that human beings find most compelling, often without even realizing it, and that the worth of thinking about them is that it can help me understand my life. It's the same thing as with history, in the sense of that old saying: reading history by reading newspapers is like telling time by looking at the second hand of a clock. Wish I'd heard that saying, early on. Why is it so hard to find good teachers?

But I'm starting to think memorization has gotten a bad rap. I suspect there's a Tipping Point (http://www.gladwell.com/tippingpoint/index.html) in the brain for intelligence, and the more we can, say, quote Twain or Shakespeare or Jonathan Swift from memory, the more its application in our lives will occur to us, and the less people will dismissively say, "it's only fiction."

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I think intelligence is about dealing with the ground shifting under our feet.

I think it's hard to find good teachers for some extremely obvious social reasons, starting with the fact that our society assumes that care of the young, in any form, is not worthy of respect. Elevation to godhood, occasionally. Honest respect, no.

I doubt that forcing people who don't like to read things in school in the first place to memorize them for about two weeks in order to be tested on them will change their lives. Memorizing poems or passages one loves because one loves them and wants to have them close to hand is a different critter entirely.

[handworn.livejournal.com]

I define intelligence as the ability to look at a mass of data, much of it seemingly unrelated, and see the patterns in it-- to tell what is actually going on, and given that, what are the two or three really important facts. Since that helps a person deal with changing conditions, that may be saying the same thing in a different way, but children don't know enough about the world to reach the conclusions which would allow them to have faith in their own intelligence.

People who don't like to read are that way for quite a few reasons. In the rare case where they're unreachable past that aversion, maybe for them it IS "just a book" and no big deal, since it'll never change their life. But I think most people could be convinced of how a book could change their life, if good enough teachers worked at it. And sometimes the combination of memorization and intelligence is a delayed reaction-- a person who remembers a passage by heart will encounter that situation later in life and realize that was what it was about.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

That's a definition of intelligence that entirely leaves out creativity, for one thing. I don't believe intelligence is just fact-processing.

I don't think a delayed reaction requires memorization or is a particularly good argument for it. But then, I know older people who were raised in an era of memorization who have enjoyed books and poetry on their own but have had a knee-jerk negative reaction to "all that nonsense they made us memorize." True, some people may later appreciate having things at their fingertips, but others will feel a greater resentment for the specific works. It's not a situation composed entirely of neutral results and wins.

I think one of my biggest problems with advocating rote memorization is that I'm extremely dubious about how long the unwilling will keep something memorized. People who could rattle off Bible passages for my eighth grade Confirmation exam will probably find those same passages familiar-sounding, but few of them can still reproduce them. I'd rather have a good teacher spend the time on something else than on drilling memorization, and I don't think it would enhance a bad teacher's classroom much.

[handworn.livejournal.com]

That assumes that I believe creativity and intelligence are entirely separate things; that creativity plays no part in making the leap, or that the same pattern-finding in intelligence plays no part in "traditional" creativity like art. I don't think my definition of intelligence does leave out creativity. It simply doesn't specify or quantify its role.

I think "all that nonsense they made us memorize" is more a matter of bad teachers and bad textbook-writers, a la Madwriter's comments, than it is a matter of memorization in general being useless. (If you think today's textbooks are bad, you should read some of those from the 19th and early 20th centuries.) And I wouldn't demand people memorize the Gettysburg Address, but I think the anti-memorization thing has been taken to the extreme of not memorizing what years the Civil War occurred, and things like that, and I think that that's not OK. There's got to be a good middle ground.

People who hate being forced to memorize things usually hate school. They might feel a greater resentment toward the specific works, but in terms of the effect (or non-effect) the work has on a given person I don't see a lot of difference between a person hating a work and being indifferent to it. You might say that if a person is only indifferent to it there's a chance he or she might read it in later life, but I don't think that happens very much. Our society today suffers from a glut of things clamoring for our attention, and anyone who wants to read instead of watch TV, play golf, go to the movies, etc., is not the kind of person who'd decide not to read a thing because of how much they hated school way back when.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

It sounds from this as though your experience of people is extremely different from mine. I wouldn't agree with statements like, "People who hate being forced to memorize things usually hate school" or that people rarely/never find "classic" works later in life at all, and I can think of several counterexamples on my friendslist alone. I guess it depends on what group of people you're dealing with.

[handworn.livejournal.com]

Well, by "things" I don't mean only poetry or speeches or what have you. I mean anything. Including names, dates and events. I don't draw a distinction.

I didn't say that people rarely find classics later in life, much less that they never do so. I said (or at least meant by what I said) that those who are indifferent to books as children are unlikely to become readers of serious fiction in later life, whether or not they're made to read or memorize things in English class. You can be a reader as a child of...oh, I don't know, the Hardy Boys, or the Baby-Sitter's Club, and then come to love much better writing later, but if you're not a reader of some sort already I think the chances are remote of you not only becoming one, but gaining a taste for good writing. I wouldn't be so arrogant as to say it never happens (you sometimes hear of that sort of thing in prisons), but I think it goes beyond uncommon to rare. In any case, my main point was that anyone so powerfully turned off of a work by being forced to memorize a passage from it in school, that they decide not to read it thirty years later, is the kind of person who would almost certainly never have chosen to read it anyway.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I understand that main point, and I disagree, since I know several counterexamples personally.

I also know at least one person who is a serious reader as an adult and was totally indifferent to it as a child.

So I really think we're at the point of just plain disagreeing here.

[handworn.livejournal.com]

Okay. Glad to hear there are some such who have come to books late in life. But how do you know whether those counterexamples would otherwise have read the things they were turned off of by being forced to memorize something from it?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Because they've gone on to enjoy similar works but categorically rejected the ones they'd had forced on them earlier.

[gaaldine.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, my response to this thread is far too long to fit into a comment, so I've posted a response in my lj.

[supergee.livejournal.com]

How about defining intelligence as the ability to see or make patterns? That includes creativity, and besides, sometimes it's hard to tell which the person is doing.

By the way, I'm adding you to my reading list.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I'd go with that a bit better. I also think that understanding the distinction between seeing and making patterns is extremely important in some fields and not at all important in others, and it's good to pick one's own accordingly.

And welcome, hi! Oh! You are "friend" #200! I feel I should throw you a party or something.

Memorization

[madwriter.livejournal.com]

Hopefully this is something we will never be faced with, but your comment in your last paragraph made me think about Elie Wiesel and other Holocaust survivors whose educations helped them survive in the camps. I think it was Wiesel (though I could be wrong) who would run classical music through his mind--sometimes an entire symphony if he was able. Another survivor I read once said that he had memorized large chunks of Shakespeare in school and would reenact the plays in his head. Another woman had learned Classical poetry, especially Homer, and 17th-19th century verse, and recited it to herself while suffering in the camps.

So maybe you can add those examples to the list of how fiction (and poetry) changed people's lives as well--or maybe, in a way, even helped save them.

Re: Memorization

[handworn.livejournal.com]

I might also add that Abraham Lincoln used to memorize poetry to tell over to himself on the long rides on horseback from courthouse to courthouse in backwoods Illinois. It's worthwhile on several levels. And the number of times I've been glad later I did things I fiercely didn't want to do at the time makes me skeptical of kids (or adults, for that matter) who say they know that they hate reading and always will.

Re: Memorization

[madwriter.livejournal.com]

I do try to keep all of this sort of thing in mind when I hear kids say things like that.

[pieslut.livejournal.com]

What drives me nuts about people copping out with that phrase is that they're purposely being deluded.
There actually is a strong connection between entertainment and reality or the zeitgeist. You can tell alot about a society by watching its commercials for fuck's sake. To disavow that is just stupid. And usually used when something you've noticed makes other people uncomfortable, so they want to get to ignore it.
Bastards.:)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yes, I don't react well to codes for, "I don't want to think about that." If you don't want to think bout something, say so.

[everyonesakitty.livejournal.com]

dude, I so totally agree. Story is art, and it can have more impact on our life and way of thinking than a documentary or (especially) a newscast. Good fiction reveals more truth than biased reporting.

*shakes the world* why doesn't everyone get that? aaaaaa! :D

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I think they do get it. I think they don't want to have to apply it outside leeeeettle bitty boxes.

[laurel]

Word. I completely agree.

[pameladean]

That "It's only a -- " approach always makes me want to quote Tolkien, Lewis, and Austen at once, but perhaps fortunately for everybody, they tend to get stuck in the door on the way out.

I have never understood why, in a world full of horrors outwith the reach of most individual people to redress, escape is so much vilified; why in a world where people's brains work so differently that what is the veriest piece of unrealistic trash to one may be to another the means of escaping alive from one of those horrors, fictional works are rigidly divided into those that are graciously allowed to perform such a service and those that, in flat contradiction of the evidence, are not; why in a world that is so unkind that any transitory escape ought to be welcomed gratefully, the act of having resorted to said escape is blamed for states of mind in fact caused by the conditions that made it necessary for people to seek out some escape in the first place.

While I'm at it, I'd also like to complain that I can't write sentences like Jane Austen's.

P.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

We already had a Jane Austen. I'd rather have a Pamela than another. (I'd rather have a Pamela than the first, but nobody has put me in charge of that decision.)

[ckd]

Where did I read something like "[I]t is useless for you to try to be beautiful like anyone but yourself"?

Oh, right, in fiction. I think the same character said something about men moving mountains, but ideas moving men. But hey, it's only a book important truth.

[gaaldine.livejournal.com]

I once presented a conference paper on precisely that topic -- the vilification of escapism. It still horrifies me that, even amongst intelligent academics, looking at escapism positively is still a tremendous mountain to be scaled.

And, despite Ms. Marissa's views otherwise, more sentences like Jane Austen's would make the world a lovelier place.

Indeed, if only more fictional prose works today were allowed to have sentences over two or three lines long the world would, I think, be a lovelier place . . .

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

When I tell Pamela not to write like Jane Austen, I am not telling the world in general not to write like Jane Austen, I am telling Pamela to write like Pamela.
There is a difference.

[gaaldine.livejournal.com]

Poor, poor pameladean. Not allowed to be like Jane Austen.

[pameladean]

Aw.

I don't want to be Jane Austen (poor thing). I just want those ivory-working tools in my toolbox.

P.