~~ no more guilty pleasure!
Nov. 29th, 2004 09:02 pmI was just thinking how oddly different reading or experiencing a piece is from thinking about it, to me. There are so many stories I really enjoy as I read them, with all my heart, and then I think back in disappointment and realize 'oh. That was really nothing special, was it. Oh.' Those would be what one would call the 'guilty pleasures', I guess.
And I think that's how I gain my semi-elitist attitude about most fiction while remaining an utterly voracious reader-- because it seems like once I start analyzing something, it falls to pieces, and the disappointment is such that I can't bear thinking of it. Reading is something I've always done mainly for pleasure; indeed, I can't stand to read for class a lot of times because reading is so tied with pleasure for me. Especially when it comes to having found a favorite subject to read about-- I simply cannot get enough. I love seeing variations on a theme, and it takes me a -really- long time to lose interest if there's lots of material to go through. And another thing is that this enjoyment I get from reading isn't really tied to quality. It's a basic function of reading about the things I enjoy, and generally if there's some basic level of competency in style, my compulsion to continue supplies quite a bit of the pleasure.
So even post-analysis, the memory of my emotional response remains rock-solid, completely beyond the nitpicky questions of style, language, characterization or plotting-- usually, a piece either works emotionally or it doesn't, and analyzing it is always going to be somewhat redundant in that way, though it could easily turn one off from reading more.
I was remembering just how much I loved oodles and oodles of H/D fics, especially after Aja's post about favorite moments. I know I say 97% of (fan)fic sucks, and yet I myself have enjoyed about 75% of the (H/D) fics I've read, and many of them I wouldn't be able to reread without an equal level of emotional investment and suspense, which I'm rarely able to attain. How to reconcile that?
True, there's a small contingent of fics (or published works) I could reread with an analytical mindset and enjoy equally-- but these 'thinking' stories would be the exception. Usually, they're the works of what one would consider some form of 'genius', perhaps, because they stand the test of time & return where most works don't. And yet, while we could enjoy them repeatedly, do we really enjoy those works more than the 'guilty pleasures' at the time? Perhaps it depends on the kind of reader one is. In my own experience, I wouldn't necessarily say so, especially because I don't tend to reread anything at all, no matter how great I find it. So this theoretical repeatability of the experience shouldn't factor into how highly I rate it.
Perhaps in this case, my notion of 'return' gets translated into 'thought'-- that is, my 'ultimate test' is whether a story can bear thinking about afterwards. That experience was never meant to be enjoyable, per se, but with some 'great' fics there's some sense of... lingering admiration or wonder. The story then becomes part of one's 'ideal' set or even an example of how a subject -should- be written. But is this idealization really all that important to a casual reader-- or rather, why should it be?
( Alas. )
~~
On that note, gods, I love Cyber Love & Tickle Me Pink & Harry: On Top of Things. Porn should always make you laugh, man. Even after it's over, but also during, eheheh <3
Ahhhh, yet another H/D parody = ♥ Sometimes I think sarcasm really is as good as porn.
And I think that's how I gain my semi-elitist attitude about most fiction while remaining an utterly voracious reader-- because it seems like once I start analyzing something, it falls to pieces, and the disappointment is such that I can't bear thinking of it. Reading is something I've always done mainly for pleasure; indeed, I can't stand to read for class a lot of times because reading is so tied with pleasure for me. Especially when it comes to having found a favorite subject to read about-- I simply cannot get enough. I love seeing variations on a theme, and it takes me a -really- long time to lose interest if there's lots of material to go through. And another thing is that this enjoyment I get from reading isn't really tied to quality. It's a basic function of reading about the things I enjoy, and generally if there's some basic level of competency in style, my compulsion to continue supplies quite a bit of the pleasure.
So even post-analysis, the memory of my emotional response remains rock-solid, completely beyond the nitpicky questions of style, language, characterization or plotting-- usually, a piece either works emotionally or it doesn't, and analyzing it is always going to be somewhat redundant in that way, though it could easily turn one off from reading more.
I was remembering just how much I loved oodles and oodles of H/D fics, especially after Aja's post about favorite moments. I know I say 97% of (fan)fic sucks, and yet I myself have enjoyed about 75% of the (H/D) fics I've read, and many of them I wouldn't be able to reread without an equal level of emotional investment and suspense, which I'm rarely able to attain. How to reconcile that?
True, there's a small contingent of fics (or published works) I could reread with an analytical mindset and enjoy equally-- but these 'thinking' stories would be the exception. Usually, they're the works of what one would consider some form of 'genius', perhaps, because they stand the test of time & return where most works don't. And yet, while we could enjoy them repeatedly, do we really enjoy those works more than the 'guilty pleasures' at the time? Perhaps it depends on the kind of reader one is. In my own experience, I wouldn't necessarily say so, especially because I don't tend to reread anything at all, no matter how great I find it. So this theoretical repeatability of the experience shouldn't factor into how highly I rate it.
Perhaps in this case, my notion of 'return' gets translated into 'thought'-- that is, my 'ultimate test' is whether a story can bear thinking about afterwards. That experience was never meant to be enjoyable, per se, but with some 'great' fics there's some sense of... lingering admiration or wonder. The story then becomes part of one's 'ideal' set or even an example of how a subject -should- be written. But is this idealization really all that important to a casual reader-- or rather, why should it be?
( Alas. )
~~
On that note, gods, I love Cyber Love & Tickle Me Pink & Harry: On Top of Things. Porn should always make you laugh, man. Even after it's over, but also during, eheheh <3
Ahhhh, yet another H/D parody = ♥ Sometimes I think sarcasm really is as good as porn.
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