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Intellectual as oppossed to Commoner commentary
Posted by Daniel Macione on 22/1/2002, 4:09:32
This site impresses me with the consistent quality of discussion, as oppossed to for example, Amazon.com; there are two ways to evaluate the reviews on an Amazon.com per say:
1)quality of the reviews on a given book
0236 reviews of "Bias"Golberg(released in Dec/01:Jan/02)
2940 reviews of "Harry Potter I"
The question then is what is the difference between popular literature (Harry Potter or Bias) and classic literature (Don Quiote)that will stand the test of time?
And where is the best place to go to be able read reviews of and dialogue with the Commoner supplying popular reviews, and where is the best place to go to be able to read reviews of and dialogue with the Intellectual?
Posted by Lale on 22/1/2002, 17:23:23, in reply to "Intellectual as oppossed to Commoner commentary"
I will think on this some. It might lead us to a a treasure chest, a little like Pandora's box, no not full of anything evil, just full of exciting arguments.
One thing I want to comment on real quick:
You have to wonder about the 2940th reviewer. He/she looks in there, sees 2939 reviews and wants to write his/her own. What can he/she possibly say that has not been already said in the previous 2939 reviews?
I didn't check the Harry Potter reviews in Amazon; if they are mostly written by kids, then I understand and encourage them, but I have a feeling not all of them were kids.
I'll come back to this topic later.
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Posted by Anna van Gelderen on 22/1/2002, 19:59:23, in reply to "Re: Intellectual as oppossed to Commoner commentary"
That's an interesting question you asked.
In the UK the term "commoner" denotes anyone who is not a member of the aristocracy, but I suppose you don't mean that. I assume that you really want to talk about the difference between highbrow and lowbrow books. In Dutch we have different names for books with literary merit ("literatuur", unsurprisingly) and those without ("lectuur", which could be loosely translated as just reading matter).
The question is of course when is a book considered "literatuur" and when is it "lectuur". A lot of people are not at all interested in this question, or worse, they don't even want to hear about it. They consider it wrong to attribute more worth to "intellectual culture" than to "popular culture". The two should be seen as of equal value, they think. I don't agree with that stance. It is alright to be discriminating. Everybody is entitled to enjoy and read nothing but popular fiction (personally I am not at all averse to a good legal thriller), but these books do not belong in the same category as Austen, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, James and Conrad, to name but a few of the classics, not to mention heaps of excellent contemporary authors.
What is the hallmark of Literature with a capital L? People who only read popular works will probably say that the hallmark of Literature is "that it's difficult", and that for that reason they can't be bothered, because they just want to be entertained. Fair enough and they do have a point of course: a book of quality usually demands more effort on the part of the reader. But if it is a really good book that effort will pay off a hundred times. What makes a book Literature? I don't think any of the experts have ever agreed on that, but it should provide more than just entertainment, more than platitudes, more than a sloppy story. Different books can be Literature for different reasons. The one is Literature because its characters and settings ring so absolutely true that they practically become real to you, another because the work is so unexpected and imaginative that it opens up entirely new vistas, to mention just two examples. I am sure other people will have lot more to say about this.
Where you should go for good reviews? Well, this place naturally ;-). But among the several bland reviews on Amazon there are also quite a few that provide excellent analyses and are really spot on. When I see a review with a lot of exclamation marks, or with little more than "this was a great book, I couln't put it down" I know I have to skip that one. But a review that goes beyond that is often quite informative in my experience.
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Posted by Lale on 22/1/2002, 20:06:13, in reply to "Re: Intellectual as oppossed to Commoner commentary"
Sort of related to this, there is an article in this month's Literary Review that might be of interest. I don't know all the names mentioned in the article but I think it is worth sharing. It is written by A. C. Grayling and it is called "Lice in the Locks of Literature". I scanned it in and I put it, temporarily, under the "Up and Coming" page, the place reserved for new books. There might be all sorts of copyright issues with this, so I am going to keep it in there just for a week.
A note to the copyright police:" We are not a commercial site, we have all the good intentions and all we want to do is to discuss this article. Please look the other way, just this once. Thank you."
So, for one week only, Lice in the Locks of Literature, under Up and Coming.
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Posted by Gerrit on 22/1/2002, 23:54:30, in reply to "Re: Intellectual as oppossed to Commoner commentary"
To me it seems all right to make a distinction between books that can be skipped if there is something more important and books that deserve to be made time for, so long as we don't get a mix up between important and difficult. I think that a simple but truly spoken book can be more important to read than a highly sophisticated brainbreaker with fancy wordplay and hidden references.
My hypothesis is that the category of not that important books overlaps to a large extent with the category of the so-called popular books.
I think most people only turn to a book for leisure, because when they have time to read they are in their leisure-time, it's often just too hard to develop yourself after a 9-5 day. Personally I hope I'm not being classified as either a commoner or an intellectual, both would restrain my options.
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Posted by Michael Sympson on 23/1/2002, 3:55:15, in reply to "Re: Intellectual as oppossed to Commoner commentary"
It is actually rather simple: there is no such thing as a classic - only authors who ran out of copyright. In other words there is only one difference that really counts - the difference between good and bad writing. And this can be found in the most surprising places. Chandler was a good writer, Stephen King is competent, Mayle is very good, Douglas Adams is divine.
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Posted by Lale on 23/1/2002, 14:48:06, in reply to "Re: Intellectual as oppossed to Commoner commentary"
There are two kinds of reviews:
1. Written for the people who haven't read the book yet.
2. Written for the people who have read the book.
The first kind of review (most of my reviews fall into that category) tend to be a little weak or bland, or "common place" (to get close to Daniel's term "commoner"). Why? The writer doesn't want to spoil it for the potential reader and is very limited in what she can say. She cannot go into an in-depth analysis. So, she keeps it to a very brief synopsis and a few words of praise or bashing. These reviews are usually a paragraph long (a good size for the purpose) and there are only so many praise/bash adjectives in the English language. Excellent, trash, masterpiece, waste of time, useless, brilliant, don't bother, you shouldn't go on living without reading this book... All reviews of the first category are bound to sound like one another. The challenge for those of us who write for "the person who hasn't read the book yet but considering" is to make our one paragraph as informative and as ingenious as possible without giving away any plot twists and turns, without revealing too much about the characters, without repeating our meaning with all possible words in the thesaurus. Not a lot of room for sophistication in this kind of review.
The second kind of review can take all the time and space it requires. It can analyse the author, its characters, the metaphors, the connections with other works... It doesn't have to bother about the spoilers, it can just go right ahead and criticize even the end of the book if it feels like. People look for these reviews once they've read the book. They want to see what other people have thought about it. Which details they might have missed, what other possible explanations, interpretations are there... They are looking for commentary to agree and disagree with. They are simply curious about other perspectives.With this second kind of review, it is possible to get very literary, very sophisticated, very fancy. Only because there is room for it.
The two kinds of reviews should be judged on their own merit and not in comparison with one another. There are good and bad reviews in both categories. I agree with Anna that only a few qualifiers and comments such as "don't miss it" are not sufficient to sway a potential reader one way or another, they do not constitute a *review* by any standard and they are a waste of space. I find it more of a challenge to write a short review. As one great man once said (I have no idea who he is, please enlighten me if you know) "I don't have enough time to make this letter short." It is harder to make it brief and interesting.
I took Daniel's categorization of intellectual review and commoner review to mean, simply, good review and junk, respectively. But the words he used "intellectual" and "common" are begging for a discussion on the meaning of these words. Who is an intellectual? Does an intellectual want his status to be kept separate from "common"?
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Posted by Anna van Gelderen on 23/1/2002, 19:43:45, in reply to "Re: Intellectual as oppossed to Commoner commentary"
I had not thought of it, but Lale is right: I, too, write two kinds of reviews. In the ones for our monthly discussions I try to provide analyses and viewpoints that have not yet been given by any of the other participants, and I may go into all kinds details that have caught my attention. The occasional review that I write for Amazon is meant to inform those who have not read the book and persuade them to do so. I try to indicate why I like the book, but I also briefly try to tell something about for instance the form of the book, the techniques the writer uses, the mood of the book - anything to let the prospective reader know what kind of book she or he is dealing with. In both kinds of review my aim is to provide more than just a liked it/didn't like it (the kind of thing Daniel probably means by commoner review - or am I wrong there, Daniel?)
Then there are the two really interesting questions Lale asks: "Who is an intellectual? Does an intellectual want his status to be kept separate from 'common'?" I was immediately reminded over the row that happened when Oprah chose Jonathan Franzen's novel "The Corrections" for her bookclub. Though this is always a guarantee for huge sales, Franzen was very unhappy about it, because the Oprah-sticker on his book was bound to deter a lot of "intellectual" readers, the audience he had apparently written the book for. I can understand some of his qualms. Most of the Oprah-books seem to be wishy-washy tearjerkers, but that does not go for all of them. Morrison's Beloved and Mishtry's A Delicate Balance are definitely serious works of literature (whatever that means - now I am sounding like Prince Charles ). And she has done one good thing: made people read who previously did not or at the very least made them read some fairly decent some stuff for a change. I am enough of a snob to be secretly wishing to be considered an intellectual, but I also know that it is stupid only to read books that are regarded as Great Works of Literature, because I will miss out on very enjoyable books (as Gerrit rightly points out). So while I still think it is important to learn to discriminate between potboilers and works of lasting quality that require an intellectual efffort, I don't want to be too finicky about it. BOOKS ARE THERE IN THE FIRST PLACE TO BE ENJOYED. That said, I must also say that I generally get more and lasting enjoyment from the more Literary works. Carl Hiaassen's and John Grisham's novels are very engrossing and entertaining while you are reading them, but they don't make any sort of lasting impression. As soon as you have finished them they are gone, whereas a book that has cost you some intellectual effort will stay with you and come back at odd moments and colour the way you look at things.
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