kanders@lll-tis-a (09/12/85)
From: kanders@lll-tis-a (Kevin Anderson) Okay, okay, I'll come out of the woodwork one final time. I did the original posting about Anti-Art Snobs, which Jerry Boyajian alone of all the net seems to have taken as a personal attack on his own reading tastes. Please listen again to what I was trying to say. SURELY everyone has met people who take pleasure in disliking "artsy fartsy" writing/painting/music, simply because it IS art? SURELY you have seen people who actually take pride in the fact that they don't understand 'works of literature?' I know so many of them they must be fairly common critters. Many times I have met people who scorn taking English courses in college because they make you read "literature" -- they thumb their noses at "literature" because 'we all know nobody but <snort> English teachers like that stuff!' There IS a snobbery *against* artis- tic work as much as there is snobbery on the part of art-types. I was perceiving undertones in the net discussion of DHALGREN that some people disliked it *because* it was artsy, and once they had come to that decision, they gave up reading the book without further effort. They loudly flamed against the book (not necessarily you, Jerry Boyajian -- my posting was neither aimed directly at you as a person or DHALGREN as a book), and seemed to be implying that nobody should bother to read it because it was just artsy drivel. There are some books which can give en- joyment without requiring any ef- fort on the reader's part, such as pure action/adventure SF and other subgenres, but there are other books which do require reader participa- tion, and one should not simply dismiss such a book as "oh well, that's just arsty crap anyway!" <snort of der- ision>. I'm not saying that everyone must like DHALGREN or *any* book; I'm saying that to dismiss such a book because it is "art- sy" is not being fair. I'm rather surprised and disappointed at the vehement reaction to what I had considered to be a fairly innocuous posting. Kevin J. Anderson