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[bdub76]

That hasn't really changed much.

During the course of my four semesters of Short Story Workshop at a local junior college, I had an ongoing friendly debate with the professor in which I asserted that (1) all fiction is genre fiction, because all fiction has a genre, even if the genre is "contemporary realism" or "historical realism," and (2) the distinction between "popular fiction" and "literary fiction" is completely artificial, because there is very little fiction that wasn't intended to be popular.

Best to read everything and figure out what you like.

A lot of books considered classics these days were serialized stories that were highly commercial. Think Dickens. I can best compare Dumas to James Patterson today. Only Patterson seems better with his money matters.

If you want to dig deeper into this, check out the book Jane Austen's Bookshelf. It deals with how critics selected what we now considered classics by women authors from the 19th century. It's pretty fascinating. Though the writer inserts themselves a bit more than I would like.

 

[Procutus]

The late, great, Dr. Karl Haas, in explaining the title of his long-running series of radio broadcasts, Adventures in Good Music, asserted that there are really only two kinds of music: good and bad, and they are entirely independent of genre.

I miss Karl's program greatly. It was such a joy to listen to, and deepened my appreciation and love of classical music. His program made many a drive to work bearable by listening to it, and the station that hosted it here in Cleveland, WCLV.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

. . . and the station that hosted it here in Cleveland, WCLV.

That wasn't just the station that carried AIGM in the Cleveland market.

It was the originating station.

He was the one who originated the term "classical combo" to explain what chamber music is.

On discovering that he had interstate truck drivers among his listeners, he dedicated one program a month to them.

He introduced me to the legacy of E. Power Biggs.

 

[Procutus]

I knew about the first two things, but not the one about the truck drivers. That is cool.

 

[Steve Roby]

A lot of books considered classics these days were serialized stories that were highly commercial. Think Dickens. I can best compare Dumas to James Patterson today. Only Patterson seems better with his money matters.

That's pretty harsh on Dickens. I've read some Dickens. I've also read a couple of Patterson's farmed out novels supposedly rebooting the Shadow pulp novels but basically trying to smush together dystopian YA stuff like The Hunger Games with the MCU. Dickens may have been commercial, but nobody's going to read Patterson's factory output in a hundred years.

 

[bdub76]

That's pretty harsh on Dickens. I've read some Dickens. I've also read a couple of Patterson's farmed out novels supposedly rebooting the Shadow pulp novels but basically trying to smush together dystopian YA stuff like The Hunger Games with the MCU. Dickens may have been commercial, but nobody's going to read Patterson's factory output in a hundred years.

It's the reality. Dickens wrote serialized stories. Stephen King replicated this when he released the Green Mile. It's basically a TV soup. Stuff gets dropped and changed sometimes without making a lot of sense. Don't hold Dickens to too high of a pedestal.

He wrote to make money. After the success of a Christmas Carol, he wrote several other Christmas stories. Some work better than others.

It's all about what the critics and academics say. You don't have to agree with them. It's like the Oscars. Sometimes what wins isn't what you enjoyed the most.

You have to figure out for yourself what you enjoy reading and ignore the critics and academics. Also, all because stuff is churned out fast doesn't mean it's all bad. Some writers can produce novels faster than others. Spending ten years writing a novel doesn't make it better than a novel written in six months.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

It's like the Oscars. Sometimes what wins isn't what you enjoyed the most.

I stopped paying attention to the Oscars when the first SW film was beaten out by a movie by Woody Allen and his girlfriend, about Woody Allen and his girlfriend, starring Woody Allen and his girlfriend as Woody Allen and his girlfriend (what an acting stretch that must have been).

Be that as it may, . . . So Dickens wrote serialized stuff. So what. So did Doyle. So did a lot of excellent writers. Kind of demonstrates my point that nobody who expects to be paid writes intentionally unpopular fiction; therefore the distinction between "popular" and "literary" fiction is even more artificial than the distinction between "popular" and "classical" music. (Folk music, genuine folk music, the kind for which the composer of any given piece, assuming it even has a single composer, is lost to history, is another animal entirely, although occasionally a composer will crib off what he assumed was a folk tune, only to find out that the original composer is not only known but still alive and still enforcing the copyright.)

 

[bdub76]

I stopped paying attention to the Oscars when the first SW film was beaten out by a movie by Woody Allen and his girlfriend, about Woody Allen and his girlfriend, starring Woody Allen and his girlfriend as Woody Allen and his girlfriend (what an acting stretch that must have been).

Be that as it may, . . . So Dickens wrote serialized stuff. So what. So did Doyle. So did a lot of excellent writers. Kind of demonstrates my point that nobody who expects to be paid writes intentionally unpopular fiction; therefore the distinction between "popular" and "literary" fiction is even more artificial than the distinction between "popular" and "classical" music. (Folk music, genuine folk music, the kind for which the composer of any given piece, assuming it even has a single composer, is lost to history, is another animal entirely, although occasionally a composer will crib off what he assumed was a folk tune, only to find out that the original composer is not only known but still alive and still enforcing the copyright.)

If you search around, you'll find a lot of reporters and college students giving Bob Dylan grief over where he took his folk music. It's both depressing and fascinating. You can see videos of it in documentaries.

Having read a lot of Sherlock Holmes over the last year, he was really ahead of his time with his prose. It's reads a lot like modern stuff today.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

Having read a lot of Sherlock Holmes over the last year, he was really ahead of his time with his prose. It's reads a lot like modern stuff today.

Doyle really wanted to be taken as a serious novelist, but he was better at the shorter stuff. (Even the Sherlock Holmes novels are on the short side.) His long-form prose is on the turgid side, and his peak was probably 1890-1910. (So, the Holmes and Gerard stories.)

 

[Steve Roby]

I stopped paying attention to the Oscars when the first SW film was beaten out by a movie by Woody Allen and his girlfriend, about Woody Allen and his girlfriend, starring Woody Allen and his girlfriend as Woody Allen and his girlfriend (what an acting stretch that must have been).

Alvy and Annie are not Woody and Diane. They're characters who have some things in common with their creators, but they are nonetheless characters. Annie Hall won because it's a good movie. Sometimes there's more than one good movie in a given year.

 

[DarrenTR1970]

Looking over what was nominated that year and having seen most of them, I have no issues with the winners.
I think the Academy voters made the right choice.
The only one I've ever had issues with is Shakespeare In Love over Saving Private Ryan.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

I didn't have much of a problem with Gandhi beating ET (since there isn't a category for "Most Important Picture"), and back in the early 1970s, I liked the fact that The Sting "beat the devil out of" (as one newspaper headline put it) The Exorcist.

But seeing The Right Stuff lose to Terms of Endearment, now THAT was an injustice.

 

[KRAD]

The only one I've ever had issues with is Shakespeare In Love over Saving Private Ryan.

Ugh. No. Saving Private Ryan is the second-most overrated movie of my lifetime (beat out only by The Matrix).

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

I'd hardly call Saving Private Ryan bad. Just harrowingly difficult to watch. More difficult than Gandhi.

I've heard Hidden Figures hard to watch, but never understood that characterization, because the unsung heroines had plenty of allies ("we all pee the same color"), and because I've never had a problem with confronting the fact that people who look like me have a long and sordid history of doing unspeakable things to people who don't look like me (which is why, if you must refer to me by my ethnicity, please do so in the most dysphemistic way possible).

Saving Private Ryan is probably the hardest-to-watch movie I've ever seen. It's intended to be hard to watch.

 

[bdub76]

Saving Private Ryan is probably the hardest-to-watch movie I've ever seen. It's intended to be hard to watch.

It's okay. I much prefer Band of Brothers.

But at this point, I'm a little burnt out on WWII films. I'd rather see films about more recent conflicts.

 

[KRAD]

I didn't say Saving Private Ryan is bad, I said it's overrated.

The opening sequence is a brilliant piece of filmmaking. It also has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the movie whatsoever. It's a film-school homework assignment cosplaying as a prologue.

The actual movie is based on the worst of patriarchal 1940s bullshit. Completely realistic, and the sort of thing that happened, but hardly something that should be glorified or celebrated. It's completely absurd that all those people would be sent to their deaths just to make sure that there's an adult penis in the Ryan household.

 

[Cicero]

The actual movie is based on the worst of patriarchal 1940s bullshit. Completely realistic, and the sort of thing that happened, but hardly something that should be glorified or celebrated. It's completely absurd that all those people would be sent to their deaths just to make sure that there's an adult penis in the Ryan household.

The second part of the movie is actually very unrealistic (but not in the way that you meant). The Army had a functioning administrative and communications apparatus, and wouldn't have had any need to send a squad to wander the assault area.

Also, the point wasn't that he was male, but that the family had already paid an excessive price. General Marshall's own beloved stepson had been killed at Anzio a week before D-Day.

Our leadership was deeply concerned about casualties, and after the loss of the five Sullivan brothers on the U.S.S. Juneau in 1942, was particularly sensitive to the losses suffered by individual families.

(The Sole Survivor Policy, when adopted, also applied to daughters. It was actually about survivors in the service whose family members had already paid the ultimate price. A family's last surviving son was also excluded from the draft—because only males were drafted—if they had already lost a daughter in the nation's service.)

It was probably beyond the film's budget, but I think Omaha would probably have been a better movie than Saving Private Ryan.

(That said, the best motion picture of 1998 was obviously Mulan.)