Serdar Yegulalp's Blog, page 159
October 30, 2014
Nice Job If You Can Lose It Dept.
Five Choices: Or, Why I Won't Give Dave Pell Twelve Dollars ~ Stephen's Web
It's not that today's content is of significantly poorer quality. Most of it comes from the same people I would have read in print fifteen years ago, saying the same things (only more recently), in much the same way. I live with a certain amount of poor content, which i dismiss quickly, and I spend most of my days poring over very high quality content. The difference is not the quality. It's that it is cheaper to produ...
October 29, 2014
Here's A Little Dynamite To Stick In Your Craw Dept.
In the middle of a massive slow-motion explosion of an essay (it's worth reading, get coffee) comes this fine nugget:
Film Crit Hulk Smash: ON DESPAIR, GAMERGATE AND QUITTING THE HULK | Badass Digest
DOES TRADITIONAL ARC-BASED STORYTELLING HAVE AN INADVERTENT EFFECT OF SEPARATING US FROM MAKING ANY ACTUAL GROWTH OR CHANGE IN AND OF OURSELVES?
...THINK ABOUT HOW MANY FILMS WE MAKE ABOUT RACISM THAT ARE CONVENIENTLY SET IN THE PAST AND ARE ALL ABOUT WHITE PEOPLE LEARNING HOW TO OVERCOME SLAVERY /...
October 27, 2014
Fictioned Science Dept.
Graham Priest (I think) once defined philosophy as “that academic discipline whose limits lie within its own remit”, and all that navel gazing has a tendency to cause philosophers to be down on their own discipline. It’s common for philosophers to search for a justification for our existence by aligning themselves with other disciplines for whom that justification is supposedly not in doubt. A common (but not the only) move is for philosophers to seek a measure of intellec...
October 26, 2014
Sometimes Middlemen Matter Dept.
What Matt Yglesias Doesn’t Understand About Book Publishing | New Republic
In a system without the publisher operating as middleman, where the author takes his life’s work and just posts it to Amazon, each book becomes a lonely outpost in the stiff winds of the marketplace, a tiny business that must sell or die. “So what?” Yglesias might say, because that’s the kind of ruthless neoliberal thinker he is. “If people didn’t buy the book, that’s just proof of its worthlessness.”
It's a great dodge,...
October 25, 2014
No Such Thing As Bad Publicity Either, Right? Dept.
The Percy Jackson Problem - The New Yorker
What if the strenuous accessibility of “Percy Jackson’s Greek Gods” proves so alluring to young readers that it seduces them in the opposite direction from that which Gaiman’s words presuppose — away from an engagement with more immediately difficult incarnations of the classics, Greek and otherwise? What if instead of urging them on to more challenging adventures on other, potentially perilous literary shores, it makes young readers hungry only for m...
October 24, 2014
Building A Better Lightning Rod Dept.
Not much time for blogging recently, but then, out into my lap, came this wonderful, previously unpublished essay by Isaac Asimov on the creative process. The whole thing is absolutely worth reading, but I will chomp out some of the most relevant parts:
Published for the First Time: a 1959 Essay by Isaac Asimov on Creativity | MIT Technology Review
The history of human thought would make it seem that there is difficulty in thinking of an idea even when all the facts are on the table. Making the...
October 19, 2014
Scout It Out Dept.
The more I read about Amazon's Kindle Scout program, the less I like it.
There's a lot about it not to like, but in the end, it all comes down to the same problem: the "wisdom of crowds" is not wisdom. It's dullard-dom.
If you ask a thousand people what seems like a good idea for a book, the vast majority of them are likely to come up with either an exact copy of what's already out there or some mild variant on it. The one who does come up with something truly original and interesting gets drow...
October 17, 2014
Be Yourself, Lest You Be Someone Else Dept.
What with the recent discussion around David Lynch'sTwin Peaks coming back to TV, or something, I ended up having a parallel discussion about the appeal of David Lynch, the man I've credited with making compulsive weirdness-for-weirdness's-sake a mainstream thing. I suspect one of the results of his cultural impact has been stuff like the bizarro lit movement (the roots of which also stretch back to folks like Burroughs, the Surrealists, the Grand Guignol, Dada, etc.), but I'm finding it's po...
October 11, 2014
Top Of The Heap Dept.
Long week, not much blogarithm. But some insight: dammit, I seem to be contradicting myself. Very well, I contradict myself, multitudes and all that. Still, spotting it and singling it out is always a worthy exercise.
Exhibit A for the jury (and judge, and executioner): the other day I was gabbling about how everything is turning into overbudgeted comic book movies blah blah, and then in barely the next breath, talked about how creative filmmaking finds a way blah blah, and then in barely the...
October 8, 2014
You Are What You Dream Dept.
Going back through some of my older posts, I've noticed a few threads that I try to pick up and carry the standard for a little further each time they come up. One of them is something I guess you could call the Creator's Duty, although the way I've stumped for it might make it earn the label Creator's Snobbism instead. It goes something about like this:
If you create something, you owe it to yourself to not have the same kinds of consumption patterns as someone who just consumes. This doesn't...
