this makes me wonder, what exactly is literature made of, that it can only limit itself. what is a quanta of poetry? Because no one's talking about opposites, no one's saying you can't like A and like B, which seems like it should be said -- poetry is a point of view and points of view necessarily exclude things. You can't follow Churchill and follow Stalin, it's impossible, though you can read Churchill and read Stalin. You can't follow Pound and follow Stevens. Even in the same school, I've heard it said that You can't like John Ashbery and like Frank O'Hara. but in our conception of poetry, I don't even know what to call it anymore except Bloomian, or Romantic, there are no two things so disparate that cannot be contained in a third. and the very act of reading is an assimilation of it with everything it contains and excludes. so what is the point of each individual point of view? What is a unit of originality besides currency for the poetic field?
For Bloom originality is never unitary. It's a spin on a football already in flight, though some spins melt the ball.
I don't think I agree, actually. Originality is very much unitary. But writers aren't just original, they're specialists in creating what will capture, hold, develop, highlight and communicate originalities. Not "here's an idea" but the activation and ramification and exhaustion of an idea to its fullest degree and furthest limits. Which is why it's kind of frightening.
Originalities are all over. Little things that are new or clever or work interestingly - even your octopus thing must be full of discussable ones. But no one reads for those, except in genre fiction (which is why genre fiction has a bad name, since it relies on small variations). Even there no one is a fan because of the variations - they want to be captured by sensual pirates or shoot space lasers or cast magic missiles at cowboys. The variations are what you talk about afterwards, the equivalent of a cigarette; or, more likely, they're what you think about when you want to break into the field, since all the work is cut out for you in a given genre except whatever gimmick will send eyes your way rather than to the other 42,000 aspirants.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2009-03-16 03:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-16 07:54 am (UTC)I don't think I agree, actually. Originality is very much unitary. But writers aren't just original, they're specialists in creating what will capture, hold, develop, highlight and communicate originalities. Not "here's an idea" but the activation and ramification and exhaustion of an idea to its fullest degree and furthest limits. Which is why it's kind of frightening.
Originalities are all over. Little things that are new or clever or work interestingly - even your octopus thing must be full of discussable ones. But no one reads for those, except in genre fiction (which is why genre fiction has a bad name, since it relies on small variations). Even there no one is a fan because of the variations - they want to be captured by sensual pirates or shoot space lasers or cast magic missiles at cowboys. The variations are what you talk about afterwards, the equivalent of a cigarette; or, more likely, they're what you think about when you want to break into the field, since all the work is cut out for you in a given genre except whatever gimmick will send eyes your way rather than to the other 42,000 aspirants.