This is great. I would add to your list that bad snobs often don’t understand that there is a time and place to share or critique views. Somewhere along the snobby hero’s journey, you develop that self awareness and learn that conversations about art or taste become much richer when they are welcomed in the first place!
This is great. I would add that any pleasure is subjective even any opinion. However, it will be nice that you could say why do you like your favorite book. Being good snob and respect others taste is good, but I would add that in the right moment (when there is safe place to share just as @Ryan Groom said) one could develop their own taste. It is important to develop your taste but with a good argument :)
I loved the phrase 'Art becomes a battleground rather than a carnival' - a perfect summation of what we lose when we fall into the 'bad snob' camp, a camp I was also guilty of belonging to in my younger days!
I feel that with snobbery there’s a little bit of yin in the center of the yang. Coffee is one example. Some people hate coffee. Some people like coffee, but with no discernment. The quality of the coffee is less relevant to them. Some people love coffee so much that they develop a taste for really good coffee. And with this developed taste is a kernel of hatred for bad coffee.
That being said, you can have discerning coffee taste without putting down “regular coffee drinkers”
I thought this was a great article. That being said, I sorta took the rotation around slobbery to be a sorta literary device. Snobbery is a very democratic word in the negative sense - there's no way to be a good snob if you use the term snob. Snob comes from a reduction of everything into one thing. It's part of the romantic linguistic backlash against monarchies where words like condescend, pontificate, officious etc became either ironic or finger-waving against aristocratic functions. So I just mean I feel like it doesn't really propose a new outlook.
As a sort of supporting example to why that mindset colors the whole examination, you've sorta negated "generalities", while band-aiding it with "extreme" to maintain consistency, as in the individual is what is fundamentally good. This leads to an obvious contradiction. Any discussion about universal values with individualism inherently has this issue but without a better concept of generalities you're stuck borrowing the libero-romantic one.
Now maybe all that leads into this: you said a way to give a character more depth is by practicing dissonance. This character depth leans into what you define "realism" like, which is not unlike how academics sorta define it (outside socialist realism). You would be forced to say there is more realism in a doctor who smokes despite all the medical culture and hospital regulations trying to tamp down on that. You'd have to rotate on that instead of seeing it as a quirk or even a degradation of being a doctor. I had a recent discussion on what is "real" for people in literary realism and I think that sorta gets to the heart of all this, values and what-not. I was wondering what you think of that.
Love the detour into speculative fiction and Ursula K. Le Guin's treatment of the topic. You're right that spec authors tend to focus less on craft than they should. The genre currently seems to be consumed with a desire for short term results and less of an understanding of just how powerful it can be. There is so much of an emphasis on genre conventions that spec fic books tend to be more pastiches of themselves, which is frustrating to read. But I think it also makes the really good authors all that more interesting. When everyone is walking in one direction and one person is going the other way despite the temptations for short term gain, that's a person worth paying attention to.
Nice take on this. Love the idea of a “Good Snob”. It would be fun to put this through Aristotle’s tests.
One of my favorite quotes from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie when being interviewed by Zadie Smith is: “It’s easy to confuse something that is badly written as somehow deep.”
Being an asshole means you care. I remember I used to think that when someone condescended me, it was because they were a snobbish ass, but now I realize that they only act that way because they care just as much if not more than me. If someone wants to be critical, let them be critical. The problem with a 'bad snob', as you call it, is that they are snobs for snobbery's sake. Fuck that shit. If someone wants to dismiss something and they have a genuine reason to do so, I'll listen and let them condescend and if I really did care, I'd fight back.
This is great. I would add to your list that bad snobs often don’t understand that there is a time and place to share or critique views. Somewhere along the snobby hero’s journey, you develop that self awareness and learn that conversations about art or taste become much richer when they are welcomed in the first place!
This is great. I would add that any pleasure is subjective even any opinion. However, it will be nice that you could say why do you like your favorite book. Being good snob and respect others taste is good, but I would add that in the right moment (when there is safe place to share just as @Ryan Groom said) one could develop their own taste. It is important to develop your taste but with a good argument :)
I loved the phrase 'Art becomes a battleground rather than a carnival' - a perfect summation of what we lose when we fall into the 'bad snob' camp, a camp I was also guilty of belonging to in my younger days!
I feel that with snobbery there’s a little bit of yin in the center of the yang. Coffee is one example. Some people hate coffee. Some people like coffee, but with no discernment. The quality of the coffee is less relevant to them. Some people love coffee so much that they develop a taste for really good coffee. And with this developed taste is a kernel of hatred for bad coffee.
That being said, you can have discerning coffee taste without putting down “regular coffee drinkers”
I thought this was a great article. That being said, I sorta took the rotation around slobbery to be a sorta literary device. Snobbery is a very democratic word in the negative sense - there's no way to be a good snob if you use the term snob. Snob comes from a reduction of everything into one thing. It's part of the romantic linguistic backlash against monarchies where words like condescend, pontificate, officious etc became either ironic or finger-waving against aristocratic functions. So I just mean I feel like it doesn't really propose a new outlook.
As a sort of supporting example to why that mindset colors the whole examination, you've sorta negated "generalities", while band-aiding it with "extreme" to maintain consistency, as in the individual is what is fundamentally good. This leads to an obvious contradiction. Any discussion about universal values with individualism inherently has this issue but without a better concept of generalities you're stuck borrowing the libero-romantic one.
Now maybe all that leads into this: you said a way to give a character more depth is by practicing dissonance. This character depth leans into what you define "realism" like, which is not unlike how academics sorta define it (outside socialist realism). You would be forced to say there is more realism in a doctor who smokes despite all the medical culture and hospital regulations trying to tamp down on that. You'd have to rotate on that instead of seeing it as a quirk or even a degradation of being a doctor. I had a recent discussion on what is "real" for people in literary realism and I think that sorta gets to the heart of all this, values and what-not. I was wondering what you think of that.
Love the detour into speculative fiction and Ursula K. Le Guin's treatment of the topic. You're right that spec authors tend to focus less on craft than they should. The genre currently seems to be consumed with a desire for short term results and less of an understanding of just how powerful it can be. There is so much of an emphasis on genre conventions that spec fic books tend to be more pastiches of themselves, which is frustrating to read. But I think it also makes the really good authors all that more interesting. When everyone is walking in one direction and one person is going the other way despite the temptations for short term gain, that's a person worth paying attention to.
Nice take on this. Love the idea of a “Good Snob”. It would be fun to put this through Aristotle’s tests.
One of my favorite quotes from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie when being interviewed by Zadie Smith is: “It’s easy to confuse something that is badly written as somehow deep.”
It comes around the 15 minute mark of the video: https://youtu.be/LkeCun9aljY?si=aF9tpDJgRH8f0LlP
She goes further into the discussion and why she prefers a clearer writing style in her work.
Being an asshole means you care. I remember I used to think that when someone condescended me, it was because they were a snobbish ass, but now I realize that they only act that way because they care just as much if not more than me. If someone wants to be critical, let them be critical. The problem with a 'bad snob', as you call it, is that they are snobs for snobbery's sake. Fuck that shit. If someone wants to dismiss something and they have a genuine reason to do so, I'll listen and let them condescend and if I really did care, I'd fight back.