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If you're not successful then you're probably writing literature
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Still very true these days. It always amazes me how the big reviews, awards and critical plaudits never go to the authors of the books people actually read.
I prefer literashure.As long there's picshures.
But seriously...How can the critics feel all righteous and pompous if they show they approve of accessible and widely appealing novels?
Ummm.
Except for sparkly vampires and squirmingly badly written 'porn'.
Patti (baconater) wrote: "But seriously...How can the critics feel all righteous and pompous if they show they approve of accessible and widely appealing novels?
Ummm."
I've noticed that literary snobs are generally the ones that disapprove of Kindles.
I suspect it is because they can't feel superior through showing off what they are reading whilst sneering at the choices of others.
Yes David. I rather agree. I have an acquaintance who takes great delight in saying that people who have kindles only use them to hide 'their poor choices in books'.She's an appalling book sniffer.
Between the critics who hate anyone popular and impatient readers who hate anything even smelling of literature there lies a narrow tightrope all authors have to walk. :D Thanks for a great post.
Patti (baconater) wrote: "Yes David. I rather agree. I have an acquaintance who takes great delight in saying that people who have kindles only use them to hide 'their poor choices in books'.She's an appalling book sniffer."
Well, that is certainly why I got a Kindle.
Well yeah David. As you're such a huge dinosaur porn aficionado, that's understandable.
Patti (baconater) wrote: "Well yeah David. As you're such a huge dinosaur porn aficionado, that's understandable."Oooh! Huge dinosaurs....
I need to go for a lie down now.
I'm very proud of myself for not being shocking right now.
Good girl. Go to the Late Night thread and I'll give you a drink. And a dish of olives.
Patti (baconater) wrote: "I'm very proud of myself for not being shocking right now."That's a shame.
I'll have the olives, thanks.I don't do "literature". I do books I like to read, and books I don't. And I don't think that ANYONE should necessarily listen to my opinion, because they will like different things from me (like dinosaur porn, for instance). But then I'm not a Critic :)
Oh piffle Nosemanny.We all know you're into plant porn.
Plant porn? Like triffids?
Plant porn? Is that a thing?
Oh. Apparently it is...Thanks, google
Well is plant porn counted as literature?
Patti (baconater) wrote: "Yes David. I rather agree. I have an acquaintance who takes great delight in saying that people who have kindles only use them to hide 'their poor choices in books'."Tell her that she only wears underwear to hide her smelly minge.
Well, that's elevated from book sniffer!
I came on here to bring the tone down, but I don't think I can.
Yep. Mike certainly has a way with words.
To be honest I'm dying to use that response in real life now.
Rosemary (the Fourth Plinth) wrote: "Plant porn? Is that a thing?"Rule 34: If it exists, there is porn of it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_34_...
How have I not heard of rule 34 before now???I lead such a sheltered life.
An interesting article about Daphne du Maurier
Her dark, macabre tales of Gothic romance and revenge have enthralled millions of readers and remain in print decades after her death.
But for Daphne du Maurier, the wealth and worldwide fame she earned from novels such as Rebecca and Jamaica Inn were a poor substitute for the acclaim she craved from literary critics who dismissed her as a second-rank “romantic novelist”.
Now her only son, Kits Browning, speaking for the first time ahead of the BBC’s three-part adaptation of Jamaica Inn, has criticised the “Hampstead literati” for overlooking one of the last century’s most original literary talents.
In an interview with the Radio Times, he claimed that it was du Maurier’s popularity with the reading public, and the massive sales that her work enjoyed, that ensured her literary talents were dismissed by the critics.
“The Hampstead/Highgate literati of critics totally dismissed mum just as they do with best-selling authors today,” he said.
Mr Browning said he measured his mother’s success not by reputation or critical acclaim but by the pleasure her works continue to give fans. Rebecca, published two years after Jamaica Inn in 1938, still sells 4,000 copies a month.
Despite a 46-year career that spanned novels, short stories, plays and biographies, du Maurier won no leading literary prizes and her books are absent from many lists of the best 100 modern novels.
The author herself, before her death in 1989 at the age of 81, lamented that critics considered her “a hack-writing, best-selling spinner of yarns”.
Although du Maurier’s writing made her rich, the criticism lacerated her. She once wrote to a friend: “You don’t know how hurtful it is to have rotten, sneering reviews, time and time again throughout my life. The fact that I sold well never really made up for them.”
Once told by fellow author Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, “the critics will never forgive you for writing Rebecca,” she acknowledged that her popularity with readers, and the wealth that ensued, exacerbated the disdain for her among the literary set.
In a letter to a friend, du Maurier, on the verge of publishing another novel, said that if her agent for once just “told everyone that 'this book has sold no copies, and nobody who has looked at it can understand a word’, the critics would be nice, for once”.
Du Maurier’s status as a neglected literary genius has been endorsed by the American author Stephen King, another writer who has had the cold shoulder from critics. In 1993, he described Rebecca as “a book any aspiring popular writer should read, if only for its bravura pacing and narrative control. Critics may sneer, but it’s impossible to do this sort of thing unless you have an almost perfect downbeat in your head. Du Maurier had it”.
Mr Browning also revealed that the popular image of his mother as a romantic novelist enraged the author, whose dark, macabre stories The Birds and Don’t Look Now attracted the filmmakers Alfred Hitchcock and Nicolas Roeg.
“She absolutely hated all this bunk about her being a 'romantic novelist’,” said Mr Browning, who still lives at Ferryside, the house in Fowey, Cornwall, that has been in the du Maurier family since the Twenties. He said: “Jamaica Inn is full of the most extraordinary violence. It’s an aspect of her writing that tends to be overlooked.”
Putting his mother’s case for posterity, Mr Browning added that the BBC’s version of Jamaica Inn will bring her unique mix of suspense and acute social awareness to an even wider audience and help to safeguard her legacy.
“A great story will do it every time,” he said. “And that’s what mum always wanted to be remembered as – a damn good storyteller.”