Re: believability

On Mon, 24 Sep 2007 03:35:10 -0600, boots <no@xxxxx> wrote:

Josh Hill <usereplyto@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Sun, 23 Sep 2007 02:41:20 -0600, boots <no@xxxxx> wrote:

Josh Hill <usereplyto@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Sat, 22 Sep 2007 02:00:02 -0600, boots <no@xxxxx> wrote:

Josh Hill <usereplyto@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

The key to believable fiction is toning down of reality.

The key to believability has nothing to do with toning-down or
spicing-up reality. It has everything to do with the predispositions
of the reader.

People avoid things that frighten them, and will go to absurd lengths
to believe any particular set of ideas you care to toss in front of
them when the alternatives lead toward a fear-place.

Sure. My statement is a corollary of that, and of the proposition that
(to some extent)

I like waffles. There was a waffle-house nearby, but they tore it
down to build an automated car-wash. I think that's sad, but I hardly
ever wash my truck, when the truck gets dirty it rains. Very
convenient.

the individual creates his own reality.

Perzackly.

The concept that the individual creates his own reality, thus
everything is one's own damn fault, scares the bejesus out of almost
everybody.

But that assumes that the individual is the sole creator of his
reality. That's true to a certain extent:

Are you familiar with Venn diagrams?

Since fifth grade at least.

Then you should comprehend how each individual can create his own
reality beyond "a certain extent", since those too different simply
fail to intersect.

The fail to intersect only in cases of religion, ideology, insanity,
and the use of recreational pharmaceuticals. Kings and beggars alike
must ***.

They're very useful in
combatting solipsism.

If you want to proofread my posts, I'm all for it. Me, I couldn't
stand the pain. It would be like smelling your own B.O.

You lost me on that one since I was referring to intersecting
realities as opposed to a single mind with MPD, not to any nits in
your post.

I'm confused. I thought you were arguing for solipsism.

to Kurt, a Republican policy
will never be wrong, no matter how many train wrecks it causes. But
the mechanisms of rationalization and sublimation, which does for our
emotional responses what rationalization does for our intellectual
ones, obey their own laws and impose their own limits. In the absence
of mental illness or intoxication, it's virtually impossible for the
individual to place his hand on a hot frying pan.

That's funny. Hot frying pans are only relatively hot. Welders pick
up things all the time that would set other folks to yelping. Did you
know that if you pick up something of the right temperature it will
melt your fingerprints into a smear and hurt less than a badly stubbed
toe? They grow back into fingerprints though. Takes a few months.

I have generally made it a practice to keep my fingerprints off of
anything that glows or might be used as evidence against me.

Believability has nothing to do with reality, really.

Ask any successful con-man.

The con man takes advantage of desire, plays to our need to believe.

It depends on the con. Have you watched any insurance commercials
lately? Commercials for home security systems? They play on fear.

To be sure.

Greed is really just an overblown fear of not having enough.

Ditto.

But that's precisely why the writer has to modify reality to create
plausibility, the fiction writer's metric of believability: the writer
is a con man too, albeit an essentially altruistic one, and like the
mark, the reader will reject truths he finds too disturbing or
unpleasant. Only a handful of greats take us into the underbelly of
reality, and it can be argued that they're able to do so because they
are able to ameliorate the pain.

"IF one follow Blake's mind through the several stages of his poetic
development it is impossible to regard him as a naïf, a wild man, a
wild pet for the supercultivated. The strangeness is evaporated, the
peculiarity is seen to be the peculiarity of all great poetry:
something which is found (not everywhere) in Homer and Æschylus and
Dante and Villon, and profound and concealed in the work of
Shakespeare?and also in another form in Montaigne and in Spinoza. It
is merely a peculiar honesty, which, in a world too frightened to be
honest, is peculiarly terrifying." - T S Eliot

I don't much care what Eliot thought about Blake, his opinions are his
own, and if I read Blake (unlikely) I'll formulate my own opinions too
and they will be no less opinionated than Eliot's opinion.

It is not for what Eliot thought about Blake that I quoted this, or
for reasons that aren't orthonormal to its being an opinion, in that
the opinion of the genius and the opinion of the fool are seldom of
equal interest, even though the latter may sometimes be right and the
former wrong (as Eliot habitually is in his conclusions).

Yes, well, you can dress up a hag to look like a babe, but when you do
the result is just another clown innit.

Who do you regard more highly, the kid who plays Chopsticks without
error, or the virtuoso who strides through the Hammerklavier with a
missed note or two? It's not for the absence of error that we look to
genius: there are pedants aplenty for that. We look to genius to show
us something new, or express what we already know in a particularly
delightful way. This is something that we'll never get from the dry
regurgitator of dusty tomes, the scholiast commentator upon the
commentator upon a footnote. Nothing good was ever done without risk.

--
Josh

"I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what
everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil." - Alan Greenspan
.

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