Writing, Media & Blogs: November 2012 Archives

This zombie-themed sports equipment ad was banned during prime time in Norway. I think it's pretty fun.

(HT: RB, Blastr.)

I don't have much desire to read "50 Shades of Grey" but the debate over whether or not it's "great literature" interests me.

There's a couple of assumptions people are taking it on their own to make: 1) that EL James is not a great novelist. 2) that the trilogy is not an epic. 3) that her characters are forgettable. I think these assumptions are unfair and that most people at this point are extremely jealous of the success EL James is enjoying. I strongly disagree with all the assumptions. Clearly the characters are not forgettable (I will not forget the above passage so easily). Clearly it's an epic (all three in the trilogy are bestsellers) and clearly the marketplace has bestowed its grace on the talented writer. Then one blogger says its "not all about sales" but that "artist should be agents of change!"

First off, what is "great literature"? Why are all of these people trying to put their own assumptions on a concept that is pretty subjective. I've never once seen a definition of "great literature". There's two ways I can think to define it: 1) if I determine something is great, but that seems somewhat arrogant. And 2) If history determines something is great, i.e. a book withstands the test of time. Many books were published in 1952, for instance, but the only one I've ever read and will probably at some point re-read is "Old Man and the Sea".

Why would something withstand the test of time? It may or may not have great writing. That seems subjective and also determined by the colloquialisms of the time. If someone wrote like Shakespeare right now, for instance, they would have a total of zero sales other than the author's mother. But it does seem like great literature touches on elements that are universal (why are we here, what is the purpose of life, etc) or push the envelope on issues that are controversial. In the past that might've been racism, slavery, poverty, class warfare, the decline of the close-knit family, sexual taboos, etc.

Clearly "50 Shades of Grey" has done something to trigger the fascination (and sales) it has. It's sold over 50 million copies to become the fastest selling book of all time not because of the quality of the quotes above but because it hits right at the core of what the boundaries of a healthy sexual relationship might be and how wide those boundaries can get. Soft-porn and romance do not do that. "50 Shades" did. We can all be so lucky to write a book so thought-provoking. Artists are often met with hostility, disturb the establishment (including the ones who try to define art). They provide a sincere map of the human condition that both entertains and resonates with a "that's how I feel!". Is EL James soft-porn, great literature, or both. Time will tell. Not random bloggers (including me).

Altucher is basically using sales as a proxy for greatness, and that fits my broad intuition. Within any niche or genre I think that quantity sold is an adequate measure of greatness... and literature snobs should agree, given the zillions of "Best Seller" lists they vie for positions on.

More abstractly, if you can't measure it then it doesn't exist. Sales numbers are a way to quantify the I-know-it-when-I-see-it metric.

I good counter-arguement would be to perform a regression analysis on the time series of sales vs. "greatness" defined by some other measure (e.g., elite opinion). Do the ratings converge over time? Diverge? What's the correlation?

David Horovitz describes how Iron Dome has protected Israel from rockets while simultaneously creating political complications.

Successive days of rocket attacks on Tel Aviv and efforts to reach Jerusalem? Well, that's worrying for sure. Those alarms are terrifying, no question. Plenty of Israelis from the center will now join the traumatized ranks of the Kassam-worn south. But injuries and death on the scale so gleefully contemplated by Hamas? Sorry. No, actually. We brought protection. We've got Iron Dome.

This being the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, however, even in Israel's defensive victory, even in its staggering success in keeping its people physically safe, lies the danger of defeat.

When Israel's short-sighted critics insistently refuse to look beyond the numerical asymmetry, the very effectiveness of Iron Dome becomes the latest weapon with which to attack Israel for its purported aggression. All those Gazans are suffering terribly, dozens have been killed, yet hardly any Israelis are dying? That can't be right. How can the Israelis claim to be the victims of unprovoked and indiscriminate aggression? They're still alive.

Here's the problem: it's easy for the media to report on suffering, because very few people deserve to suffer. The audience instinctively knows how to line up its sympathies and the journalists don't have to work very hard to explain anything. It would be a lot more work for journalists to explain why the audience should side against the people who are most immediately, most visibly suffering.

The success of Iron Dome can be explained in one story. Each Hamas rocket that doesn't land and kill anyone doesn't get its own treatment because the potential victims are vague and faceless. When an actual Palestinian is killed the victim is specific and has a face, and the tragedy of the suffering wrenches the heart and draws viewers.

Our world is perverse in that we glorify people who suffer without looking into the cause of their suffering. A person who suffers for doing wrong deserves our pity, but should also stand as a warning to others and not simply be excused out of sympathy. In reality the suffering of the Palestinians is caused not by Israel, but by Hamas.

And Palestinians in Gaza are dying in growing numbers because they are either directly involved in trying to kill us or -- to our genuine sorrow and Hamas's cynical delight -- they had the misfortune to be sleeping, walking, talking, studying or praying very close to a key Hamas terror chief, missile launch site, ammunition store or other element of the sprawling Hamas kill-the-Jews infrastructure.

To put it succinctly, Hamas is doing its best to kill any and all of us in Israel, while cynically seeking to protect itself from attack by emplacing its offensive capacity among Gaza's often unwitting civilians. And Israel is doing its best to prevent its citizens being killed, while trying to thwart the attacks without harming Gaza's civilians. There's the relevant asymmetry.