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Escapism Is The Highest Form Of Art
San Francisco, 7:01 PM
Mon Dec 14
23 posts in the last 24 hours
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10/06/09
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10/07/09
If LeGuin was wrong, you have to show how she was wrong. But you aren't doing that! You're just re-writing her argument, but with the word "escapist" in place of the word "myth"!!
You're basically just re-writing the definition and attributing everything that used to be attributed to mythic literature to escapist literature. Escapism can be dark? Escapism can teach us about society? You're talking about myth.
You can't simply efface a definition because you want it to be a point. If you call escapism the new mythic, well sure... but then something else becomes the new escapist. And you're left with no advancement at all. You're just written 10 000 words just to change a name.
10/06/09
Been entertained reading the entire discussion and eventhough I disagree with some of the posters, the level of civil discourse on this thread has been just amazing.
While it's almost impossible to always "hit a homerun everytime you come up to the plate" the article, the theme, and the response to it has raised the bar and shown -without a doubt - i09's potential within the SF community.
Wow.
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10/06/09
Too soon? Or to never be mentioned again? ^_^
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And this is one of the problems with escapism. When you're "soaring," you're not paying attention to who is picking your pocket. The capitalist masters win by having you make money for them working in their business all day long, and then spending your money on their escape tools to forget about how boring, alienating, and pointless it was at night. I don't blame anyone for wanting to escape this world, but there really is no escape. You're still in it paying rent, 24/7.
10/06/09
1) "It's a space designed by marketing committees to create a high-end aesthetic image that customers wish to identify themselves with by buying expensive products that make them feel better about themselves."
Okay, but what makes that not art? Are you saying that artistic choices were not made in the creation of that high-end aesthetic? Or is it just because it's selling something? Is "true art", then, something which sells ITSELF as the product (the music, painting, photograph, comic book, regular book) rather than selling something else?
2) "It's basically the entire message of the Mac/PC ad campaign: be cool by spending more money in order to associate yourself with cool-looking objects and hip people."
Isn't that also the message of "true art" as you've described it? Being cooler and hipper and more aware than the brainless, tacky people who don't associate with the right kind of art?
3) "That's not art to me, that's vanity."
All "true art" is vanity, isn't it? Why should any of us care what desperately important thought some self-described artiste is having?
4) "When you're "soaring," you're not paying attention to who is picking your pocket."
Doesn't this sort of assume that one is or should be feeling at war with entertainment media? And how, in turn, does this reflect on the art world? Is a pocket picked by an artiste any different or better?
5) "The capitalist masters win by having you make money for them working in their business all day long, and then spending your money on their escape tools to forget about how boring, alienating, and pointless it was at night."
Isn't this really just projecting your own shitty job situation? Do you honestly think it's true that everybody in our society is feeling bored, alienated and pointless? Do you really think that every person defending "escapism" in this thread feels that way about their lives? At what point does a statement like this go from being a judgement call to just being judgementalism?
6) "I don't blame anyone for wanting to escape this world, but there really is no escape. You're still in it paying rent, 24/7."
And that's kind of the rub anyways, isn't it? Even artistes need to pay rent. "True art" is a privileged position that essentially skims off the top of civilization. The problem you've outlined with corporations isn't really a problem of corporations: it's a problem of competition. The corporations just make art for the plebian rabble.
10/06/09
Harvey Pekar had a 40-hour a week menial day job as a Veteran's Hospital file clerk schlepping around a cart full of files while producing his best work, which he paid people to draw and paid to publish out of his own limited income. Not much privilege there.
"Why should any of us care what desperately important thought some self-described artiste is having?"
This is a sit-com level cliche not even worth addressing.
10/06/09
"This is a sit-com level cliche not even worth addressing."
Okay, but only if ""Wow cool" is not a philosophy, it's a dead soul drooling into cold oatmeal" is a sentence dappling like the sunshine through a baboon's toes in the jungle. Given how eager you've been to project your misery, alienation, boredom and pointlessness onto everybody else, should you really be talking about cliches?
10/07/09
10/07/09
Allow me to paraphrase a line that I find quite hepful to keep things in perspective and stop from turning depression into a philosophy. It comes from CS Lewis' Screwtape Letters, wherein Screwtape is advising his student that an ideal world for the work of His Infernal Majesty is one in which people believe in demons but not angels. That is, they take the existence of evil to mean that there is no such thing as good at all. They allow the fact of death to sap them of the enjoyment of life.
I am quite aware that everything we love dies, as well as ourselves. Of course, I also believe that we stop being dead at some point down the road, whenever God decides. Nevertheless, if you want a life of dead souls drooling into cold oatmeal, allowing the fact of death to sap you of the enjoyment of life is the way to go about it. That would be far more horrid than the vivid reflections on the Sublime and the Beautiful that enrich life and inspire those "oh wow" pointes supremes moments.
10/06/09
There are no more standards. You don't have to defend yourself against elitist critique because no one is paying attention to academics except other academics. That's why avant-garde art doesn't mean anything any more. As Robert Hughes observed in his miniseries, "The Shock of the New," in order for avant-garde art to be shocking, the public has to actually believe in art, and the public no longer believes in art. It's been divorced from religion and all other cultural authorities.
You have nothing to worry about. You can call pulp magazines high art, you can claim (as the Wachowskis did) that the Matrix trilogy is philosophically deep and aesthetically superior, and no one really cares. Anything anyone says about art is just another blog comment or YouTube response. All that matters is money, and escapism is a moneymaker, so you have nothing to worry about...
...except whatever nagging voice in the back of your head thinks that all of this pulp material isn't the best use of your limited time on earth, in which case all you have to do is pop in another Joss Whedon DVD and the voice will go away, deadened by the warm glow of pretty young people doing daring things in exciting places.
10/06/09
The happy caveman creates what is beautiful to him by the method that pleases him most. That is art.
10/06/09
There's a point that Pinkhamster has and it's a valid one: nowadays we have a sense that "art" is creating what is beautiful for us however we like, but that's not always been the case, culturally. Norms and standards were establishing by political, religious, and cultural bodies and were sternly enforced. For centuries, art was indistinguishable from religious ritual and practice.
But out cultural standards are so broad now as to be practically irrelevant. There was a time that you could shock the art community by painting something that wasn't portraiture. There was a time when, because of the content of your play, someone could close it down. We've reached a point now that in order to actually be shocking, you have to go to such lengths as to make it clear that you've got no point except to shock.
So, by and large, it seems that there are no real rules about good and bad anymore.
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Don't get me wrong--I'm opposed to censorship, and I'm opposed to persecuting artists for immorality. I wouldn't want to live in Communist Czechoslovakia for nothing. But man, that kind of cultural counter-pressure that demanded paint-by-numbers art at all times--it really gave you some good numbers to paint with.
10/06/09
"One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy."
Sisyphus is happy through perceiving his situation, not through escaping it. Only through finding the beauty in our burden, in the texture of the rock and the exertion of our muscles, can we find happiness. Escapism, like any other drug, only intensifies the pain of our existence once its narcotic effect leaves the bloodstream.
10/06/09
Escapism is a means for making a miserable life more palatable. It's a sedative for the mind. Life is already a walking daydream. We walk through life not truly seeing ourselves or the things around us, because we see only that which is necessary to survival and the attainment of our immediate goals. The phrase "stop and smell the roses" is a shortcut acknowledgement of this. We barely perceive our world, because our minds are occupied with menial tasks, and floating off into la-la land (escapism) from the boredom.
True art awakens us to the world we live in, rather than deadens our perception of it. A well-written passage of a book, or a carefully composed sequence in a film, can allow us to perceive our lives in more detail than we perceive it in daily life. Escapism is a shutting down of the world in preference of dreams and nightmares based on childish fears and desires. Who gives a shit if the good man with the blue lightsaber killed the evil man with the red lightsaber if it doesn't improve our perception and enjoyment of life when we leave the theater?
"Wow cool" is not a philosophy, it's a dead soul drooling into cold oatmeal.
10/06/09
Yes, art does make one aware of social issues, cultural awakenings and such like, yet it also is an exploration of science and visual representation. True Art to another might mean the line on a page, the points of paint that make up a painting, or the math behind perspective. And that is a valid view also. Because those things are the esence of reflecting reality in visual terms. (Also film making, photography, graphic novelisation, etc) To this person, a social comment or awakening message inside the art is only secondary to the creation, the artifice. the truth of Art is in its craft.
10/06/09
Escapism, on the other hand, usually works in shorthand symbols of this sort: "elf," "zombie," "vampire." Mal in Firefly is a shorthand cliche, a secondhand Han Solo, when Han Solo was already a handed down cliche. These symbols don't help us understand life, they help us reduce life to an easily digested daydream, lubricate the gears on the slaughterhouse conveyor belt.
10/06/09
One thing I can't help but think about in all this is the Platonic argument that realistic art is immoral. He was, of course, more interested in the ineffable forms of things and art was an imitation of an imitation. Realistic art would be a twice-removed oxymoron.
There was one amusing echo of his "art is stupid because it adds to nature and that's unnecessary" on a Steampunk board one time. This one guy - one of the Punker-Than-Thou DIY types who thinks he's living a lifestyle - was arguing for putting more reality into Steampunk and having it "transcend" mere cosplay and escapism. Someone wisely replied "Why would I want to do that? I get enough reality in my reality."
However, Plato was kind of a nutter. Deeper than his nuttiness over ineffable forms was the distinction he was making between art and reality. It's the distinction that even non-Platonics rely on when making the argument that realism is superior to escapism (kind of like how all Materialists rely on Gnostic arguments... antitheses that hold the same worldview).
If you cease making that distinction then you can reach one of Charlie's major theses here: that you can learn plenty about reality from escapism. For escapism to work, it must speak to the worldviews, desires, morals, etc. of the people watching it. The green and red lightsabers work because that's what people WANT. So why do they want it? Another fruitful film for psychoanalyzation is ID4. Maybe the basis for your definition of true art is "art that constantly challenges and contradicts your worldview".
Yet escapism can do that as well. There's nothing in your screed that necessarily contradicts escapism. Good escapism absolutely can make us take a fresh look at the world aruond us. I love the series Galaxy Express 999, which is all about this boy taking a train trip through outer space and visiting all these crazy planets. It's also an achingly melancholy meditation on the human condition. It's not that far off of Star Trek.
Again, it seems that what a lot of people decry as escapism is simply bad writing.
10/06/09
Why cannot men running around with lightsabers reflect and illuminate the human condition? Is that another human construct, this idea that something that could entertain on a viceral levell (wow, cool!) could also have some sort of deeper meaning? As far as Star Wars, Harry Potter or Batman go, I don't think that we'd have developed these heroic archetypes over time and wouldn't have stuck with them, if they were not, somehow, tied intrinsically to the human condition and our ability to understand it.
Do we all want to be Luke Skywalker, or Bruce Wayne? Yes. Unequivocably (though I could do without the arch-nemeses and emotional retardedness). It may be a hightened version of reality, or an exaggerated view of one aspect of reality that we keep revisiting over and over again with these types of stories and characters, but we've all known some highly efficient jerk who always knows he's right like Batman. I'm sure everyone hates working with Batman, but they know when he's on the group project, it's going to get done right. I mean, Batman's awesome, but would you want to have a drink with this guy? no. You'd probably end up good-hearted but slightly neurotic like Nightwing. There is SOME truth about the human condition here.
Does it need to be Speed the Plow? Probably not. But would Speed the Plow be Speed the Plow without the yin to its yang?
I've been through a conservatory playwriting program. I've been through a masters program. What do I write? Cute parody involving babies with lasers. Y'know, while I'm looking for doctoral programs.
You can say I'm shallow, or I'm looking for escapism because I'm so busy, or because I'm so stupid, or whatever. Fine. But Babies with lasers and zombies in high school are how I best illuminate the human condition. Something fun, unabrasive, and leaves the audience cheerful and hopefully thoughtful.
The other side of that coin? Dude, I'm frickin' busy. I write all day at my day job, then I teach research and writing at night, and I'm not exactly thinking to myself "I'd like to write something about the horrors of war." or "I'd really like to watch something that makes me more aware of what it means to be human." I'm thinking... "Explosions. Cool." Cos, like, I've explored the human condition for the day. Done. Check that off my list.
I don't see what I'm doing, or what I enjoy as somehow being "lesser," or less artistic because it conforms to certain archetypes or tropes. "Art" and "literature" do too, they're just less honest about it. And really, the only difference between mediocre art/literature and mediocre populist trash is a lable, as far as I'm concerned. "Literature" is a genre, and "art" is defined by who's willing to pay what for which piece of work at auction. Yesterday's populist trash is tomorrow's previously-unappreciated work of ahrt that captures a time and an aspect of the human condition so well. I can think of a few authors now days that're quite reveared for how they've explored and illuminated what it means to be human that were published in popularist mediums in serial format.
Sure, it's easier to get populist trash published. However, something being classified as ahrt or pulp (a human, and flawed distinction with no quantitative reasoning behind it, I feel) doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be good or bad. I would argue that what endures (for the most part) is of value. Stuff slips through the cracks, and it's not a perfect system, but looking at something because of its construction and using it to determine its value to humanity is a much more flawed system from which to work.
"Wow, cool" is a viceral reaction to something. That doesn't necessarily invalidate any intellectual or emotional value that may be lying beneath that initial gut reaction. Just as "wow, this is frickin' depressing" is a bad lens through which to view The Grapes of Wrath, or "wow, ZOMG DARCY UR THE DREAMIEST" is a bad lens through which to view or judge Pride and Prejudice and the valuable things it says about class systems and how we judge and evaluate people.
Just sayin.
10/06/09
In a way, it's like religion. The "rightness" of any given faith (my own included) is based on the authority it gives itself, and its followers allow it to have. Why is it the right faith system? Because it says it is, and it uses its own internal logic (often devoid of external influence), to "prove" its rightness. Think of it like that, but with AHRT.
Why the "us-against-them" attitude? Hey, man. I used to be one of them. They're all miserable and spend their time contemplating how much smarter they are than the common man, because of their education and taste. And they're unhappy while doing it, because the common man will not just deffer to their obviously better opinion.
So, yeah. Humanity and AHRT will plow ever onward. They'll think we're plebeian, we'll think they're elitist bastards, nothing will change.
10/06/09
I know that was ground into the Steampunk example I used earlier. You should try to bring more reality into Steampunk (and vice versa) because you wouldn't want to be one of those brainless, tacky dolts who just sit around the TV eating MacDonald's and watching "So You Think You Can Dance". Cosplay and escapism is what people like THAT do, or something.
10/06/09
I enjoyed the one episode I saw of Galaxy Express 999 too, but you have to acknowledge it was a show for children in Japan. Turning to that show for comfort indicates a desire to escape into nostalgia for the wonder that cartoons promised us as children more than a desire to "take a fresh look at the world."
I definitely sympathize. That's why I'm so angry at escapism, because I'm angry at myself for wasting so much of my life with it. I'm 38 years old and have spent more time with sci-fi, comic books, and video games than I have experiencing the touch of another human being. That fucking sucks. I'm not blaming anyone else, but I do distrust escapism because it's such a seductive means of ruining your life.
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Escapism is a genre, the same as literature is a genre. it's just a name. Escapism is only true escapism, a hole to crawl into and never come out of, when you let it be. When you don't allow it to inform your life, and allow it to touch you and learn lessons from it. Learning "don't be a douche in a group setting" is something I can thank Batman AND House for! Letting it affect you, emotionally or professionally, or interest-wise is FINE. Using it, or ANYTHING as an opate is NOT. But you can hide in ANYTHING. You can hide in a hobby, you can hide in an art musem.
Buying into the pretension of high ahrt and pretending you're thinking deep thoughts about the "meaning" of humanity or life is just as time-draining as living strictly in a fanboy world. As with anything, plebeian persuits, high ahrt, sports, lawn care... whatever, it only has the meaning we ascribe to it, and the context we give it.
If you can use escapism to see a larger picture of the world, be it our hopes and dreams as a nation for the space program in Lost In Space, or our current popular thinking of the man vs. society problem in every incarnation of Batman, then you ARE learning and growing from it.
The thing itself does not mean, by virtue of its structure, that it is meaningless or an opate. Meaning is inherant because it is a work of humanity. Everything from a scrunchy to that POS Transformers 2 has a larger context to relate to. I think seeing something as meaningless escapism has more to do with how one views the world, and how one views "entertainment." I think it has less to do with the inherant worth of the thing itself, since the thing itself is devoid of meaning without the context our human minds construct for it.
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10/06/09
"I enjoyed the one episode I saw of Galaxy Express 999 too, but you have to acknowledge it was a show for children in Japan. Turning to that show for comfort indicates a desire to escape into nostalgia for the wonder that cartoons promised us as children more than a desire to "take a fresh look at the world."
Speak for yourself... I watch it because SAD IS HAPPY FOR DEEP PEOPLE!! Well, that and I like both history and science, so it appeals to the romance of steam travel and space exploration. And I'm anti-Transhumanist. The earthy, incarnational and environmental themes of the show speak to me.
I'm not entirely sure if this comment says more about how much you don't seem to understand of the Japanese or of the medium of animation. Accusing Leiji Matsumoto or, say, Hayao Miyazaki of not being deep because they make escapist cartoons for children is a pretty superficial view.
It might help, if I can make the recommendation, to read some Abraham Maslow some time. His discussion of peak experience is quite useful.
"That's why I'm so angry at escapism, because I'm angry at myself for wasting so much of my life with it. I'm 38 years old and have spent more time with sci-fi, comic books, and video games than I have experiencing the touch of another human being. That fucking sucks."
It sure does, and you have my sympathies. But your not getting laid is not escapism's fault. As I sort of indicated in my response to another of your posts above, I don't share your lack of fulfillment with life. I work in museums teaching kids about history and science, and I volunteer at other museums and with avocational organizations and have a church community I'm a part of and plenty of friends and go clubbing and hiking and am a serial monogamist. And I love Sci-Fi, Horror and Fantasy both high- and low-brow.
That having a fulfilling life is also the impression I get from tammygarrison... When you're busy actually doing stuff, the "narcotic" effect of escapism is muted. In fact, your whole perspective may shift to seeing a great deal of positivity in it, maybe BECAUSE you are motivated by it to go out and experience life. If Data's and Superman's and Tetsuro's struggles to understand what it means to be human help me to reflect on my own humanity, then that is very enriching. If Disneyland inspires you to actually go to the African jungles and American southwest (which it did, for me), then ur doin' it rite.
10/06/09
No kidding... Going back to Steampunk, because it's the most immediately relevant and resonant example, this is a lot of why I had to get out of that scene once it hit big.
Prior to 2007, Steampunk was tonnes of fun. Not because it was necessarily superficial and lowbrow... Yes it had its moments like Wild Wild West and Back to the Future Part III, but it also had its 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Vision of Escaflowne. It had a whole bunch of awesome, commendable things going for it, with its rich aesthetics, historical gaze, views on science and progress, and such, all while still being extremely silly and fun.
Then along came the desperately important DIY Punks and artistes. They decided that Steampunk couldn't be fun anymore. It had to be MORE than that... it had to be IMPORTANT. It had to have IMPORTANT things to say about society and consumerism and all the dreadful things that make Punks and artistes so unpleasant to be around. It became a critique of mass society where the most important thing was not to be seen as one of those tacky, plebian consumers.
Everything that was great and engaging and brilliant about escapist Steampunk was lost once it became true ahrt.
10/06/09
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*sigh*
10/06/09
It seems to me that the crux of the matter is one of changing the meaning of the term "escapist" from a pejorative used to dismiss a work, to a useful term of critique.
Labeling a work "escapist" currently means that one may ignore its content, because it is considered to be without any real importance. It means that the work is just a vessel for a feeling, a mood, a desire for escape. To call something "escapist" is to say that it is at best a drug used by the lower classes to take the edge off after a hard day. For many escapist works, this may be true, but the point of the redefinition is that escapism or escapist elements don't doom a work, but may instead be vital, and enhance it.
This is quite a fascination argument, as it presents us with a new dimension of critical tools. If one accepts that Escapism is a tool for an author and not a state of failure, one can then use the analysis of how an author used this tool in their work in all kinds of interesting ways. The idea of using it to see what people wanted to escape from is a great example, but we can also look at How they wish to escape, and what they are escaping towards. You can start to look at the depth of escapism required by the story, and the severity of the break needed to achieve escapism. And we're just talking about one axis of this new dimension, examining the interaction of the work and its era. We could also look at the "negative space" of it, ie what the author did not escape from. Look at Tom Clancy's cold-war novels. Often dismissed as escapist populist page-turners, armed with this new concept, one could write a thesis about the elements of he could have changed for escapist purposes, but didn't. I'll leave it to the reader to try that exercise with some of their own favorite works.
I'd also like to specially note the often-forgotten point that escapism isn't neccessarily about happy endings. In the world we live in many live long, safe, and happy lives. We may never make really hard decisions, or encounter life-or-death situations. Few of us will ever be in a position to die for honor, or love, or our ideals. When a protagonist does end up in such a situation, and makes that decision to put everything on the line, win or lose, that is just as escapist as imagining leaving one's troubles behind for a fantastic world of dragons and wizards.
I think this could be quite usefull, unlike the McGuffin thing from a bit back. If I have one major concern, it's that the proposed defintion is an "Eat your cake and have it, too" situation. If you want to be able to use escapism as a tool of literary critique instead of as a pejorative term, you need to have it apply to work that most will agree is escapist, whether it is genre fiction or not, whether it is good or not. There may still be an escapist ghetto, where the degree of escapism is so high that the work collapses under it. Yes, the real problem usually is bad plotting and writing, but if the main tool employed in a terrible work is escapism, you have to call it out.
Taken together with the article on McGuffins, it makes me wonder if io9's secret charter involves re-defining large number of words often used in genre criticism. And in light of that, I would like to implore you that if you do not have a secret charter, please create one, and add that to it.
10/06/09
At the same, time, there's a lot you can learn about a society by studying it's pottery, but that doesn't change the fact that the primary purpose of pots is not as an object of study, but as an object to hold things. So, in a sense, studying pots is the wrong thing to do with them--you aren't a pottery-user, but some kind of strange pottery-studier.
10/05/09
That said, I still can't understand the appeal of "Twilight", and this does not bode well if the theory is true.
10/06/09
As for Twilight... well, I was one of those sad girls who played The Phantom of the Opera soundtrack over and over again in junior high. I think it's some kind of developmental or emotional phase that one eventually gets out of. Or at least... I hope so.
10/06/09
Self-hypnosis is another way of looking at reprogramming the right brain to make the whole mind behave to your liking (cognitive behavioral therapy).
Now, you can wish me luck on getting that bastard Webber's "Phantom" overture out of my head (forced listenings at work, oy).
10/05/09
I would argue that Escapism itself is in fact Inescapable.
All things we as a species determine as entertainment IS escapism. A random blog about a middle-class housewife in New York and what she made for lunch; the lives and times of Tom & Katy Cruise; FOOD TV; Obama's presidential race; reading this article and its comments even!All these things are escapism in essence, because they distract us from the monotony of our day to day, our boring work-sleep-work-sleep-work-drink-maybe-sleep routine and yet we are still truly imprisoned by our ineffectual reality.
Its a harsh world where you are watching Bobby Flay cook an amazing BBQ'ed rack of ribs and all you have in the pantry is some 2 minute noodles and a tin of baked beans.
And you are right in saying that escapism reflects our social, cultural and political ideologies - our zeitgeist if you will - through its means of interestingness and popularity. It reaches a large audience. Fantasy itself evokes in its very genre name the idea of the out of reach, the desired yet unobtained. And that is in effect what keeps Escapism alive - perpetuates its purpose.
look at the popularity of celebrity magazines, the larger than life attitudes of Mega rap stars, reality TV characters! All presenting a desirable life style (maybe, depending on your tastes I suppose ^_^) and in effect actually showing the rest of us how impossible it truly is to achieve.
Escapism = Inescapism projected right back
10/05/09
You also have to remember what LeGuin and Malzberg were reacting against, and that was the stigma mundane academia and society, for the most part, regarded the fantastic arts, a state which I guarantee you would still exist today if it wasn't for the fact that the fantastic arts now make so much money. LeGuin and Malzberg were (are) serious writers who aspired to be taken seriously, even if they were having fun. At the time it was also quite a shock for people to realize that the literature which had provided them with so much insight, which had so influenced their world view, was kinda like a bastard stepchild. Yet they knew this literature — this pulp fiction — had provided them a door to the possibilities of achieving an artistic end which they could only dimly imagine.
I was obviously a New Wave champion in my personal life, but as the years went on, I realized I'd developed a taste for the sf of all the eras, and I realized there was something of validity to the observation that sf should go back into the gutter where it belongs. I say this because now that sf has fused both pulp and mainstream best-seller fiction traditions, it often embodies the worst of both traditions.
But I could just be a grump.
One more thing: you want to know the real difference between the Gene Roddenberry of classic Trek and the Gene Roddenberry of Earth II?
The answer is one name:
Gene L. Coon
10/05/09
10/05/09
Which, you know, fine, I guess--except that's not at all what LeGuin or Disch meant when they used it.
A "coming-of-age" tale isn't inherently escapist because it's about escaping from something. The point of "escapist" isn't that the art is about escaping, it is that we, the audience, use it in order to escape.
And if you accept that art has some actual purpose other than distracting us from the misery of our ordinary lives--like, you know, educating us about social mores, criticizing outdated institutions, helping us develop a kind of mental flexibility, enabling us to vicariously acclimate ourselves to unfamiliar experiences--really, ANY purpose--then "escapist" art like the kind that LeGuinn opposes is the kind that excuses, you, the reader, from having to address any of those purposes.
10/05/09
10/06/09
Both Disch's and LeGuinn's comments are clearly directed to the widespread use, as they're describing the characteristics of the "escapist" texts in terms of the audience relationship to the work as though the work is a tool for ignoring the strains of the real world.
There's nothing about such a tool that demands that it be about escaping, any more so than a tool that's designed to address moral ambiguity is prohibited from being about escaping.
The Shawshank Redemption is about escaping, but it's not what Disch is talking about when he says "escapist" because it's meant for us to respond to it in a way other than simply, "Hahah, yeah. Awesome."
I can buy an argument that the only real purpose of art is escapism, anyway, or that it's okay to just take an escape from the mundane now and then, or that Star Trek is more than just escapism because it addresses social and cultural issues. But I don't think saying that "anything about escaping is escapist, and some of those stories are good, therefore escapism is good" is a strong argument.
I'm also not sure that saying that a metaphor is inherently escapist is especially strong either. You're positing that a metaphor lets you "escape" reality--but I don't know that I follow that. Isn't the point of a metaphor to explain reality? Metaphors are imaginative ways of seeking clarity, not imaginative ways of avoiding the reality they describe. Well...euphemisms are, I guess. But not every metaphor is a euphemism--and we have two different words for the term precisely because we use metaphors so much more often.
10/06/09
As for the thing about metaphors, I'm saying that any metaphor takes you away from the strict reality of what's being discussed -- and thus, to some small extent, represents an escape. This is part of a larger point: that if you posit an axis between "escapist" and "realist" works, you'll find that nothing really falls entirely at one end or the other. Nothing's ever purely realist, and the most realistic works appeal, to some extent, to our escapist urges. "There is no frigate like a book" and all that.
10/06/09
Likewise, you're positing a spectrum in which the more "real" something is the less "escapist" it is--but how can you suggest that "realism" in a genre precludes "escapist" urges? You've described them as though they're distinct things, and yet aren't things like romance novels and pulp thriller novels catering to escapist urges without engaging the fantastic at all?
The term "escapist" refers to the author's intentions regarding the audience--it does not refer to how fantastic or outlandish or imaginative or grim the work is. Of course grim works can be escapist--because "grimness" is an aesthetic style, and it can therefore be applied to any particular intention. "Grimness" doesn't necessarily imply moral ambiguity, and therefore doesn't preclude escapism--but, at the same time, moral ambiguity doesn't imply grimness, and does preclude escapism.
10/05/09
"Stories in which there are no consequences, in which the choices are easy and the heroes always right, aren't escapist — they're just bad."
That's merely your opinion, and is noted, and colored the whole piece for me. You like your morals gray, your heroes confused and uncertain about their decisions, and their eventual actions weak and hesitant. Now that's what I call bad storytelling. If I want to read about weak people, I can always open up the newspaper. If I'm going to read something for escapism, I want entertainment, not a "gritty" reminder of the times I live and love in.
10/06/09
This is a thoroughly incorrect conclusion. People can take strong action in the face of uncertainty. It's a defining element in many pieces of literature.
Also: you have failed to avoid looking like a pompous ass. This is because you make an argument that there's no point in analyzing other people's tastes and then, instead of simply noting someone else's opinion and then moving on, you apparently felt the need to justify what would have otherwise been a private, secret conclusion on your part.
10/05/09
Nicola Griffith
10/05/09
Okay, so you're kinda paraphrasing, but still: how very quotable!