[ExI] Fan of Sci-Fi? Psychologists Have You in Their Sights

[William Flynn Wallace]

James Joyce's novels are literary jokes.  English teachers keep teaching
courses on them and looking for some meaning amid the simple or complex
plots and characters.

They will never find any (that they don't create).    If Joyce is anywhere
he is laughing his ass off, thumbing his nose at people who think they know
what he is up to.  He was up to fooling them and he succeeded.

Ditto premodern, modern, post-modern (who can keep up?) poetry - so obscure
that no one can find any meaning or sense in it.  Ergo, it must be really
important and profound.

Classical music kept up too.  I won't name names out of a fear of skewering
your favorites, but the more abstract and random they could make it, they
did.  And acted like snobs when we didn't like or said we didn't understand
it.  Again, laughing behind their scores

Truly accurate last words that should have been said by all of the above:
"I did it.  I got away with it!  I am famous and they don't know why!"

So if you think you understand any of the above, the joke's on you.

bill w

On Mon, Oct 26, 2020 at 1:11 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> On Mon, Oct 26, 2020 at 1:40 PM John Clark via extropy-chat
> <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> > On Sat, Oct 24, 2020 at 11:20 PM John Grigg via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> >> "Psychology has often supported a dismissal of the genre. The most
> recent
> >> psychological accusation against science fiction is the “great fantasy
> migration hypothesis.”
> >
> >
> > This is nothing new, all non-fiction is some form of escapism, except
> for stuff like James
> > Joyces's Finnegans Wake that nobody reads unless they're teaching a
> course on it or
> > are a student in such a course and have to. So if you're going to
> condemn Star Wars
> > and Harry Potter then to be consistent you should also condemn the
> Bible, the Quran
> > and all religions.
>
> I believe you meant 'fiction' -- not non-fiction.
>
> I believe comes down to, as I mentioned in another post, what's
> acceptable entertainment by some person or established taste. What's
> not is considered escapism.
>
> By the way, I wouldn't make a hard line between stuff like _Finnegan's
> Wake_ (okay, I haven't read that, but I did start to read _Ulysses_
> and found it's actually easy to read; the Wake will have to wait:) and
> 'genre' or commercial fiction. There's no hard line and nothing to
> stop a genre author from crossing it or blending it in a given work.
> Think of the literary Westerns of Cormac McCarthy, Peter S. Beagle's
> fantasy (which owes more to Lord Dunsany than Tolkien and his hordes
> of imitators), or the SF of LeGuin* or a host of others writer today.
> Blending established genres -- and genres do have a history too;
> they're malleable rather than ideal types -- is done often enough,
> time and again.
>
> Regards,
>
> Dan
>   Sample my Kindle books via:
> http://author.to/DanUst
>
> * I hate to use her because she's the 'go to' literary SF writer, but
> it's not like she invented that or that all literary SF must follow in
> her wake and adopt her approach. Certainly, much of the SF being
> written today, even the New Space Opera of authors like Becky Chambers
> and Ian McDonald write to a different, more literary (IMO) standard
> than most popular Golden Age SF authors.
>
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