Today there is a hot search is “Culture people dislike people too sharp”, the example is mainly Yi Zhongtian, the host asked how can say Zhuge Liang is a handsome man, the answer said Zhuge Liang body length Eight feet long, very great appearance, is not a handsome man?
Is height a necessary or sufficient condition for handsomeness? Kant is less than five feet tall (160), but the book “The Philosopher and Love” says that he “has a pair of sky blue eyes, some childish, lively and happy, and can prevail in the voting mechanism of appearance in the mouth of Casanova, this face attracts heaps of women. “
Culture dislikes people either with justification and directness, or quoting the scriptures and bending the rules.
Susan Cohen reviews “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”: This is without a doubt the worst book I’ve ever read. And just so you know, sister I did read John Grisham.
Donald Clarke reviews Woody Allen’s “Out of Thin Air”: Many readers will be glad that Woody Allen’s memoir was published during a Time when masks and latex gloves were worn. The book is so toxic that someone might have to resist washing it with disinfectant before setting it on a counter two meters away. How come no one told Woody at 21 that it’s now not OK to introduce female friends all judging their looks? It’s as if he wrote this book at the Miss World contest during the Nixon years.
Roger Ebert reviews Transformers 2009: If you want to save money on movie tickets, go to the kitchen, play the boys’ chorus of hellish Music, and have a kid bang on a crockpot and a pan at the same time. Then close your eyes and use your imagination.
Nabokov: I’ve been baffled and amused by the pseudo-concept of the so-called magnum opus ever since terrible mediocrities like Goldsworthy and Dreiser, and Tagore, Maxim Gorky, and Romain Rolland, were often dismissed as geniuses. For example, Thomas Mann’s foolish “Death in Venice” or Pasternak’s exaggerated, badly written “Doctor Zhivago” or Faulkner’s Southern chronicles being considered masterpieces, or at least what journalists call magnum opus, seems to me an absurd delusion, like a hypnotized person making love in the same chair.
Taleb: For enjoyment, open Nabokov’s work and read a chapter. For self-punishment, read two chapters.
There are books whose contents cannot be summarized (real literature and poetry), some of which can be compressed into about 10 pages; most of them can be compressed right down to zero pages.
Wilde: There are two ways to dislike poetry: one is not to like it, and the other is to read Pope.
People of culture often dig in their heels to make a point. The American scholar Joseph Epstein said, “Writers attack each other in such a way that one gets the impression that they have the same base motives and are just as subject to unpleasant emotions as ordinary people. Their efforts at goodness and beauty in writing did not improve their character. “
In 2002, the American scholar Anthony Arthur published a book, “Eight Pairs of Wrongdoers in a Century of Literature,” chronicling the conflicts between Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, Edmund Wilson and Nabokov, Truman Capote and Gore -Vidal and others. The British Writer Richard Bradford wrote a similar book entitled Literary Rivals: Discord and Hostility in the Book World. The British writer Evelyn Waugh once said, “Modesty is a virtue unfit for the Home. What drives a man to finish, process, perfect, destroy, and renew his work is usually pride in art, emulation, greed, and resentment. He enriches the world more than the generous, kind-hearted man, although in the process he may lose his soul. This is the paradox of artistic achievement. “
In terms of fame, no writer feels justly treated, while he feels unjustly praised and rewarded by many of his contemporaries. Doctors, scientists, lawyers, and businessmen may compete with each other among their peers, just as writers do, but they do not make resentment so memorable as writers do. They excel at using language, so the sarcasm, curses, invective, hostility, and even malice with which they attack their peers has a long aftertaste. Sometimes a writer’s antagonism can span centuries. Tolstoy just couldn’t figure out what all the fuss was about with Shakespeare. While walking with Chekhov, he turned to Chekhov and said, “Anton Pavlovich, I appreciate your short stories. No one appreciates your short stories more than I do. Write more short stories, wonderful short stories, immortal short stories. But your plays, Anton Pavlovich, your plays are worse than Shakespeare’s. “
In 1959, Norman Mailer published an article in Gentleman magazine entitled “The Genius in the Room,” listing novelists of his generation. He listed novelists of his generation. The thrust of the article was that there was not much genius in the room. Belleau’s style was bent on the same thing, and Kerouac lacked training, intelligence and honesty.
The difference between British and American writers, says Richard Bradford, is that British writers are often darkly pigeonholed in their writing and still polite to each other in real Life. The fights between American writers, on the other hand, are filled with unrestrained malice. He argued that the reason there was so much tension between Mailer, Gore Vidal and Capote was that none of them had written the great American novel. Joseph Epstein, on the other hand, argued that they were merely arrogant and narrow-minded, plus they were the first generation of writers to be on television, which made them stars, and as a result neither one of them thought much of the other. The enemies of the British literary world were Dickens and Thackeray, Anthony Burgess and Maugham, Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis, Paul Theroux and Naipaul, David Lodge and Tobin, Leavis and C. P. Snow of Cambridge. P. Snow, and biographers Bevis Hillier and A. N. Wilson.
In the book, Bradford offers some of the writers’ nasty comments about their peers. Cyril Connolly says of Vita Sackville-West that “she was like Lady Chatterley from the waist up and a gamekeeper from the waist down. “Ruth Rendell commented, “To say that Agatha Christie’s characters look like cardboard cutouts are an insult to cardboard portraits. “
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