I should probably go try some of his more recent stuff, although I know he praised Cromac McCarthy’s The Road, and I opened that and saw no quotation marks and sighed and put it back on the shelf, although it did sound interesting. But who knows.

Intending something to be entertaining is one thing. The other thing is finding the subject entertaining.

@ Cuchlann

Nothing to forgive! I was serious with that question, which I find relevant to our discussion here. I’m referring to my imagined binary between Books/Blogs, as well as Academic Lecture Halls/blog post comments sections, etc. I made the discovery, as it were, here – not through Ann Dillard (who I assume is reading material in academics). I’m not saying that this discussion right now will suffice as reference for students writing papers, but since I feel that the learning here is valid and legitimate, why shouldn’t it be?

Is it because, this is merely ‘entertainment’?

Of course, at this point I like him solely for his essays. I *own* a copy of C&C that I picked up cheap at a used bookstore, and mean to read it eventually. You should see the huge stack of unread books I unpacked yesterday. I had to stack them, as I don’t have enough space to line them up properly. Sigh.

…then so be it.

Or maybe I should track down that copy of Maps & Legends. I find it fairly humorous that I had trouble finding anything interesting about The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay over 500 pages, but I’ve liked his essays immensely; or, well, the one I read before some McSweeney’s anthology on genre and its increasing uselessness.

I do think you (and he) are right in that everything is entertainment, more or less: I think it’s kind of what I was naively trying to get at by asserting tongue-in-cheek a year or so ago that everything is “pandering” towards its audience, except in reverse. Something needn’t be bad to be entertaining, it simply has to do something which you find entertaining to be such. If your entertainment is derived from contemplating the potential ramifications and meanings of Oshii’s Sky Crawlers and not from bouncing assets in ToLoveRu,

Should there be a value judgment if I generate my discovery of the ‘writing begets writing’ idea for myself participating here at Superfanicom, and not with Anne Dillard?

@lelangir I think Fish is actually directly saying discourse is a practice — in the context of saying it’s a different practice from the act discoursed about. In the simple version, I agree, but if pressed I might have to say I believe discourse is a realm of practices; the specific practice within discourse would be the talking, or writing, or filming that’s taking part. I’m not sure there’s any noticeable difference, though I’m sure it reveals deep philosophical underpinnings that lie beneath my theoretical practice. :D

Chabon actually talks about the perceptions about entertainment. He says we’ve attached a veneer of disrepute to entertainment, that it’s nothing inherent in the thing itself, but we’ve plugged it on there. As a result, he goes on to claim, we can’t accept anything other than the predictable, as anything else, by nature of not being predictable crap, isn’t entertaining, and that by expanding our definition we might see more “literary” stuff in mainstream entertainment, because we would be admitting that stuff can be entertaining. It’s an interesting essay, you might want to check it out. Any decent library should have a copy of Maps & Legends, if you don’t want to buy it. Of course, I might be able to scan it into a pdf, as it’s a hardcover and would likely survive the scanning process.

ts;dr version: people are stupid, people are smart, The End.

tl;dr version:

“Entertainment” takes two distinct routes in the sphere.

There is one faction that stringently insists that entertainment is not “deep”. This is the political/industry route: anime = entertainment, and entertainment is based upon the industry, which caters to the majority (to get $$$). The majority is stupid. Stupid does not = smart, therefore, entertainment = anime = dumb. Deep anime is incidental and rare. [this one's good...and pessimistic...but realistic because it's political]

The other route, “I would like to propose expanding our definition of entertainment to encompass everything pleasurable that arises from the encounter of an attentive mind with a page of literature.” – in relation, a more “bohemian” (is that a correct word choice?) view expands entertainment to subvert and upset the “dominant” discourse on entertainment. Inasmuch as I enjoy this route, it’s basically a plea saying “take me srsly!!!111!!111!!~” (because the dead tree is unacceptable insofar as it (1) is not IKnight, (2) is not “literature”, (3) is not British [literature], (4) has real citations, (5) is somehow related to lelangir and/or his constitutive blog[ger friend]{s})

So, the discourse on entertainment is really predicated upon the medium – the medium justifies. It’s where the unholy commandment srs bsns comes from – it even produces dialects [digital vernaculars?] whose memetic value underscores such tropes. I’m always complaining about how stupid people are, and that’s because we’re coerced to believe that the internet is intrinsically stoopid enough to which we stoop…

that was a hate rant.

I’m of the opinion that writing responds to writing, hence the conventions of allusion and allegory. It’s unlikely that writers are ever eyewitnesses to the subjects they write about, so they write in response to some kind of document one way or another.