I've never been able to get into Stoicism, but I still like reading about different philosophies. However, I also know that that is one where a lot of popular works deviate badly from the original.
So, a question: are Ryan Holiday's books solid/accurate? Are they in line with ancient Stoic philosophy? Are they a purely modern interpretation? Are they worth reading for growing my non-expert knowledge (in a positive, not just critiquing, way)?
@aehdeschaine@bookstodon I don’t know about Ryan Halliday (he strikes me as quite commercial but that could be unfair), but I do very much like Kai Whiting’s Being Better, Massimo Pigliucci’s Think Like a Stoic, and Brigid Delaney’s Reasons Not to Worry.
(And also the weekly The What is Stoicism? Podcast)
When people tell me they read one of my books and found it “quite good”, I like to assume they’re from the US where “quite” apparently means “very” 😊
As opposed to the UK/Aus, where “quite good” is just damning with faint praise.
Unless you say it was “really quite good”. That’s when you mean “very good”.
If you say “quite good, really”, that means you’re surprised it was any good.
And if you say “Oh, I say, that is quite, quite remarkable”, you’re an 18th-century Earl confronted by a tempestuous highland beauty who is tossing her raven-black locks and flashing her sapphire-blue eyes at you because you’re enclosing her commons 😉
@pelielios oh that’s interesting, my instinctive response was “of course muppets is an insult” because I’ve heard it like that so often.
Our neighbouring town is called Manjimup (on the linguistics topic, place names in Western Australia with the -up ending generally are Indigenous words, with -up meaning “place of”) so naturally, in the manner of friendly small town rivalry, they are called the Manji Muppets.
Though my partner ran a basketball tournament between the two towns and was rather shocked to discover the friendly small town rivalry wasn’t so friendly after all.
I have less of a point or argument here than a musing. But I wrote about my fascination with fairy-tale time, its unpinnability, and how I keep wondering what relation that might have to the pseudo-contemporary non-time we find in many realistic stories.
I do wonder how much of contemporary non-time comes from “a fish has no word for water” type thinking.
As in, if writing historical fiction (or fantasy inspired by historical settings, as is my experience), a writer will research the era, and deliberately put in markers of the time period (technology, fashion, language) and avoid anachronisms. The writer really has to really think about time eg I wrote in the “unspecified past” for my fairytale world, but at one point they go into the “real” world and so I pinned the time a la historical fiction (with the waltz and dance cards).
But if writing contemporary fiction, the setting is just “now”. The focus might be on making the “here” feel authentic, and taking the “now” for granted.
On the other hand, it almost seems like a genre convention: deliberately don’t put in anything that will date. Ignoring that any mention of technology will date it. That language change alone, not even in slangy dialogue but just in the narrative, will date it faster than anything.
That doesn’t mean the author is obliged to try and pin it down, of course, but being vague doesn’t work make it timeless, it just gives it that familiar non-time feeling you talk about. But I’ve read books that really feel like the author has taken a historical fiction approach to contemporary fiction by putting in those little time-specific details, and it’s noticeable.
BTW, I’m reading the Beowulf translation by Maria Dahvana Headley at the moment, and she’s made the conscious decision to use modern slang, and why not? The translations are always a product of the time they were made in, as well as the product of a scribe or two 1500 years ago, and all the oral reciters in the years before that.
As an aside, I do find the collective decision to “skip” the pandemic (unless the pandemic is a plot point) to be fascinating. The same thing happened with the pandemic 100 years ago.
Do you include sex scenes in your work? I have an actual sex scene in an upcoming novel. It's kind of my first, but also something that had to happen from the story. It was quite a positive experience for me. Normally I just write up to the sex part and then draw the veil, but not with this character. She isn't the mysterious type. She's going to flat-out tell you all about it.
Yes, I do. They’re part of the character development and relationship arc for me. They started as quite short and almost brusque but are now “proper” sex scenes.
My most important thing is that the characters stay in character during the scene — I’ve read too many books where you could copy and paste the sex scenes because it could be any two (hah, or more) characters rather than the characters I’ve been following.
And also that they don’t go on too long and don’t get too flowery and overwrought.
In the most glorious "fuck you" I have seen in a while, you know the book that Cumberland City Council banned because they're homophobic bigots - Holly Duhig's "A focus on Same Sex Parents"? Well, the publisher, BookLife Publishing, have made a PDF version of the book available for free.
Sure be a shame if it was shared far and wide now, wouldn't it?
Every time you ban a book filled with hope and kindness, and care and love, we will resist.
@Firlefanz yes I saw that (thank you, a lot of people don’t) but I’m terrible at translating times so it was quicker for me to just click on the link to read about it (I’m not entering, just curious), and on my little phone, the only paragraph visible was “filled in 41 minutes” 😂
@crcollins@Firlefanz I read that too (once I went back and actually scrolled down 🤦♀️). I assumed it was wording from previous years. Surely this year where only a random selection of the entrants will go into the actual contest, they’d allow resubmission if yours missed out — but hopefully they update the wording to make it clear one way or the other.
(Though I see the page has been updated and you both made it past that first hurdle — congratulations and best wishes for the next stages 😃)
Have reached the stage of going sentence-by-sentence, changing many three times before deciding to leave them as they originally stood and muttering curses at Past Me for the sheer number of notes in brackets I left for the revision pass.