Fourteenth verse, same as the first.

[mrissa]

Okay, Jonathan Carroll loses.

I'm reading Glass Soup, and I'm going to finish reading it, and it was a good Christmas present*. And it's not bad; it's not that he's gone somewhere downhill. That's just it: he hasn't gone anywhere. He's hanging around Austria doing the same things with dogs and death and dreams, and I just want him to go crazy and write a terrible book about deathless cat-owning Puerto Ricans who can't sleep, anything, anything not to be doing exactly the same thing again.

It is worth getting worse. It is worth writing something that might be terrible. It is worth it, to grow, to move, to risk, to do something else. Sure, we all have pet tropes and pet character-types, but enough, Jonathan Carroll, enough. Do something different. I can reread Outside the Dog Museum if I want to reread Outside the Dog Museum. I don't need to ask my relatives to pay out another $25 for you to rehash it for me. You had a better single note than Mercedes Lackey -- perhaps a whole chord progression, even -- but the greats know how to make a twelve-bar blues sound different and the same all at once, and apparently you don't, so write me a waltz, or I'm done.

*Major law of Mrissish life: good presents are not always good books.

Comments

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I feel the exact same way about Jonathan Carroll, and stopped reading him after The Wooden Sea. The unfortunate thing is, I got so used to his bag of tricks that it retrospectively ruined his earlier books for me too, and I used to love them.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I fear I will have this problem as well, though I haven't tried a reread recently.

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

The only book by him I've liked was Bones of the Moon. One reason: It's the only one in which I didn't think the writer was going out of his way to be depressing.

[songwind.livejournal.com]

I could see some potential for a book about deathless cat-owning Puerto Ricans.

[greykev.livejournal.com]

::sigh:: and here I was just talking him up to someone today. (based on Sleeping in Flames, Bones of the Moon, and The Wooden Sea)

[pameladean]

I adored The Land of Laughs, but I really just never wanted to read anything else written by the person who wrote that.

Do you have any writers like that?

P.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I am not smart enough to have writers like that, I'm afraid. Even if I read something and think, "They can't match this," I try anyway.

[pameladean]

Oh, believe me, smartness has very little to do with it. It's not a rational process, and it's not even always accurate. It's a little bit more like the "This Pocket Is Full" sensation one gets while eating one's dinner, having still got room for ice cream. I just loved The Land of Laughs in a way so particular that I didn't want it infringed upon.

I know people who feel that way about The Secret Country, so at least I get to see both sides of the matter.

P.

P.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yes, but the people who feel that way about The Secret Country are just wrong, so.

I don't have the "this pocket is full" sensation, although I am familiar with it in discussion with dd_b. I get tired of food fairly quickly, but that's another thing.

[pameladean]

I should be less free with the food metaphors.

I'm not sure those people are wrong, really, though certainly they have a rather quirky attitude. If you like new-novel energy and permanent mystery, if you like beginnings more than endings, and have no objection to the other peculiarities of The Secret Country, it's really just the thing. I think it was C.S. Lewis who remarked, though certainly he wasn't the only one, that in reading biography or autobiography, the parts dealing with the subject's childhood were always most interesting. There's a way in which plots, even very satisfactory ones structurally, are also like that, at least if you are standing in a certain place. Maybe it's just part of being a stick-in-the-mud. If a book has stayed long enough in one place with a certain group of characters, or has been moving towards a particular aggregation of people and finally got there, and I'm liking it, I always dislike the moving onto new places or the breakup of the original group. This is why I have reread The Fellowship of the Ring so much more often than the rest of Tolkien.

But I suppose that this is another discussion entirely.

P.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I don't think the food metaphor is the problem. I think it may be that this is a reaction other people have a good deal more than I do.

I didn't like the breakup of the Fellowship much, but I was so enamored of Rohan and of ents that I didn't feel too much like complaining. But that is a side point, as you've said.

I think it's that I like middles more than anything (when, I should note, I'm not writing them), and the problem is that it's sometimes hard to tell where the middle ends and the end begins, on the first readthrough. Certainly the end of The Secret Country does not strike me as The Beginning Of The End in any sense.

re:the work of Jonathan Carroll, literary god

[(Anonymous)]

For someone who has yet to find a literary agent, and whose books to date available at Amazon.com have titles like CHINESE IMMIGRATION, it might be prudent for you to temper your public (literary) opinions somewhat, or at least until you have established a presence in the field. Jonathan Carroll has won every major award in this genre, not to mention his books sell in the millions worldwide.
And you?
GLASS SOUP is hands down brilliant

Re: the work of Jonathan Carroll, literary god

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Arguments from authority, particularly from anonymous cowards, are not going to carry any weight around here. I will like and dislike books as I see fit.

Here are the qualifications required for having an opinion of a piece of art:
1) reading it.

That's it.

Now piss off.

Re: the work of Jonathan Carroll, literary god

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

So... Mrissa should be a big coward and never tell the truth about how she feels about the books she reads if she doesn't like them, lest it ruin her career? I guess you follow your own advice, seeing how you're too chicken to sign your name.

Writers are also readers. As readers, we have opinions. And as human beings with guts, we sign our names to them.

Re: the work of Jonathan Carroll, literary god

[pameladean]

I've never, ever understood the attitude expressed by Anonymous. "Don't criticize it if you haven't done something in some arbitrary way, usually having to do with sales figures, like it."

Yeah, I can't have an opinion of a bowl of soup unless I know how to make one just like it. It's my mouth, it's my stomach, the soup is offered as nutrition, I can damn well have an opinion, thank you.

P.

Cowardly Anonymous

[(Anonymous)]

"If you give a chimp a typewriter that does not necessarily make him a writer. If you give a reader a book, that does not necessarily make him a good critic."
HL Mencken

"Your opinion, Sir, carries less weight than the air that brought it to my ears."

Benjamin Disraeli

Re: Cowardly Anonymous

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

And if you give an anonymous coward a Bartlett's, it doesn't make him or her a thinker, either.

What part of "piss off" did you not understand?