[HN Gopher] Which Writers Will We Remember?
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Which Writers Will We Remember?
Author : benbreen
Score : 32 points
Date : 2023-10-29 14:24 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (biblioracle.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (biblioracle.substack.com)
| test77777 wrote:
| I was just thinking about Micheal Lewis being for tech bros what
| Joan Didon was for hippies. Most of the time people are
| remembered for their era and not themselves.
| zabzonk wrote:
| i think bellow may well be remembered - i've started reading
| augie march, and it is great so far - somewhat dickensian. but
| ayn rand and dorothy parker (who did make me laugh a bit)-
| definitely heading for time's great dustbin.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| You need to be sure to not confuse "I don't like it" with "No
| one likes it". _Atlas Shrugged_ is still selling a hell of a
| lot of copies, > 65 years after it was published.
| tiahura wrote:
| L. Ron Hubbard definitely. Mission Earth is without question the
| greatest dekology of all time.
| light_hue_1 wrote:
| He did manage to brainwash tens of thousands into an abusive
| insane alien cult that takes away their families, money, and
| sanity. So yeah. I guess they'll carry the torch of abuse
| forward into time.
| karaterobot wrote:
| > Despite all this evidence, I'm actually not sure that Saul
| Bellow is a writer who is still going to be talked about 40, 50,
| 100 years from now
|
| I'm not sure what it means to ask which writers will be
| remembered. There isn't a monoculture anymore, and the prominence
| of the literary novel is a lot less than it was in 1973 anyway.
| So what does it mean to be remembered? What counts as being
| remembered?
|
| Setting that aside, none of the authors in that article will be
| remembered by _everyone_ , but everyone he lists will be
| remembered by a small, passionate, connected community in 100
| years, I can do everything short of guaranteeing that.
| kriro wrote:
| Probably just the classics: K&R, Abelson/Sussman, Knuth,
| Sterling/Shapiro, Geoffrey James, Tanenbaum, Polya, Crockford,
| Stroustrup, Bentley, Russel/Norvig, Fall/Stevens.
|
| For fiction authors, I feel like I'm not an author kind of
| person. Tolkien had a big influence on me, same for Poe and Neal
| Stephenson. I don't really read a lot of the authors that are
| considered classics/great writers. If someone asked me if I'd
| rather never have read "The Great Gatsby" or "Silence of the
| Lamb", I'd readily purge Gatsby from my brain. I suppose the
| fiction author our generation will remember is xGPT.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| _The Friends of Eddie Coyle_ is a book I 've read twice. I think
| the clean, tight simplicity of the story might make it live on,
| like O'Henry stories. But who TF knows?
|
| I have read some Nabokov, but I'd never even heard of
| _Transparent Things_ , FWIW.
| lazlee wrote:
| I hate to say it ... Stephen King.
| billfruit wrote:
| Not that sure. Look at the best selling authors of the 1920s,
| they aren't widely known anymore.
| hotnfresh wrote:
| It's possible the film version of The Shining will have
| better recognition than the name Stephen King, in just a few
| decades. That's been the fate of a lot of once-ultra-popular
| early 20th century authors whose works were made into still-
| well-known films. Might happen to him, too.
| JackFr wrote:
| Edna Ferber.
|
| The movies Cimarron, Giant and Showboat definitely more
| well known than her novels on which they were based.
| kaesar14 wrote:
| Well hasn't he been a best selling author for 4 decades now?
| lazlee wrote:
| You under estimate the lasting power of a good ghost story.
|
| You need a good example? Edgar Allan Poe.
| chilmers wrote:
| Every so often I stumble across the Wikipedia page of an author
| from the 19th or 20th century who was _hugely_ successful in
| their time, writing many bestselling books, and yet is almost
| totally forgotten now. They must have justifiably believed they
| had attained some kind of artistic immortality, yet it turned out
| not to be so (at least, probably not to the degree they expected
| -- they do at least merit a Wikipedia entry, which is more than
| most of us will ever get).
| gumby wrote:
| I remain astonished that Dickens has endured while Wilkie
| Collins has faded. The two were contemporaries, but Collins was
| much more famous and successful (and the inventor of the
| detective novel!).
|
| Yet hardly anyone reads even The Moonstone any more, while much
| of Dickens' work is not only read but has become cultural
| touchstones (Scrooge, Oliver Twist, etc).
| zabzonk wrote:
| i am not at all astonished, at a uk grammar school in the 60s
| we were forced to read "the moonstone" for our eng.lit.
| o-level, at the same time as "great expectations" - guess
| which we liked more.
| gumby wrote:
| I read very little fiction by living authors. There's an enormous
| volume, but a good filter is if the author is dead yet their
| books are still in print.
|
| Sure, I'll miss some good books but it is impossible _not_ to in
| the sheer torrent of volumes being published every day. But my
| filter increases the likelihood I'll pick up something I'll be
| glad to have read.
| disintegore wrote:
| That's probably the best heuristic for finding quality stories
| nowadays. The publishers and their readership are stuck in a
| taste-affirming feedback loop and it seems most of the big
| literary awards are administered by people who have chosen
| representation activism as their primary reason for existing.
| retrac wrote:
| I would suggest reading reviews and literary critiques,
| written by authors you appreciate and respect. I rarely
| regret pursuing a book recommendation from someone whose own
| writing has engrossed me.
| backtoyoujim wrote:
| I hope that the A.E. Stallings translation of Hesoid's "Work And
| Days" lasts for centuries.
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36355637-works-and-days
|
| It would show the future some portion of us as English speakers
| knowledge of ancient Greek and Latin. And since it is in heroic
| couplets it will offer a window into our pronunciation, syllabic
| emphasis, and vocabulary.
| magnio wrote:
| One possibility are writers whose works are hard for GPT to
| emulate. IMO examples include Jhumpa Lahiri, Christopher
| Buehlman, and Walter M. Miller Jr.
| 23B1 wrote:
| I think the better question is: which writers is Amazon killing
| by favoring popularity over discovery? A thousand rediscovered or
| newly discovered writers are buried every year by optimization
| for profit.
|
| If you actually want to broaden your horizons, you'll have to
| find an indie bookstore, tilt your head to the right, and let
| chaos take over while you browse.
| lolinder wrote:
| It's not like publishing and receiving attention for books was
| easy before Amazon--most writers would never see publication in
| any format because the gatekeepers wouldn't let them through.
| Amazon's filter is different in that it's created a world where
| everyone can publish but few people get attention for it, but
| it's not obvious to me that their mechanisms are smothering
| creativity for profit any more than the large publishing houses
| did in the 20th century.
| 23B1 wrote:
| I'm not talking about getting a book published, I'm talking
| about the joy of discovery, which can lead to success for
| authors who otherwise don't have the 'right' commercial
| approach (or the right skin color or background or gender).
|
| And what do I mean by success? Unique and special and
| important creative people living a sufficiently middle-class
| lifestyle to continue providing us with their gift(s).
|
| Amazon's filter has created a world where that is nigh on
| impossible.
|
| I can scan the spines of thousands of books at Powell's or
| Strand in an hour, with Mother Chaos guiding my hand, and
| come away with twenty new discoveries.
| lolinder wrote:
| > And what do I mean by success? Unique and special and
| important creative people living a sufficiently middle-
| class lifestyle to continue providing us with their
| gift(s).
|
| > Amazon's filter has created a world where that is nigh on
| impossible.
|
| You haven't really addressed my main point, which is that
| this kind of outcome was always a rarity--before Amazon the
| filter was the publishing houses. If you couldn't persuade
| them you were worth publishing, then you didn't get to
| share. Period.
|
| Amazon first created a world where literally everyone can
| publish anything they want. They then had to create filters
| to help people actually find what they're looking for in
| that deluge of content. The result might be that it's
| harder to find new content, but that's not because it's
| harder to make a living publishing good books.
| spondylosaurus wrote:
| One counterpoint is that there still are/have been plenty
| of indie publishing houses who take on books that the Big
| Five-type publishers won't take, but even then those
| indie books are printed at a much smaller scale and don't
| generally make it into big retail bookstores. And so we
| arrive back at the discoverablity problem :P
| milliams wrote:
| "No one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world
| die away, until the clock wound up winds down, until the wine she
| made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is
| harvested. The span of someone's life is only the core of their
| actual existence."
|
| -- Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man
| blockwriter wrote:
| These estimates seem weighted toward the reality that books are
| simply not read, and it is a meta-rationale, like the book's
| relevance to some theme that is perpetually bandied about in our
| political discourse, that is a more reliable vehicle for
| relevance. If books do end up being read again, and if therefore
| the individual merits predominate our perception, appreciation,
| and institution of these works, then the list would not be
| appropriately calibrated. As of now, it might be more right than
| wrong. It's not sad. It's not not sad. It's just the way it is.
| LanceH wrote:
| > relevance to some theme that is perpetually bandied about in
| our political discourse, that is a more reliable vehicle for
| relevance.
|
| This is why Sir Mix-a-Lot's opus magnum will be played forever.
| jamestimmins wrote:
| Surprised he doesn't mention that No Country For Old Men won the
| Oscar for Best Picture, and is generally considered a
| masterpiece. That alone seems like it would boost Cormac
| McCarthy's legacy considerably.
| ngetchell wrote:
| As someone coming of age around the time of that movie, that
| was my first exposure to his work.
| intalentive wrote:
| Another factor to consider is political climate and the character
| of the ruling class. Political and cultural changes can make some
| authors suddenly unfashionable.
| progne wrote:
| LLMs could be great tools for measuring the impact of an author
| on the culture. They have the data to recognize when new concepts
| and motifs are introduced by a piece of literature and disperse
| forward in time through the culture. They can somewhat measure
| the breadth of the influence. You could build an index of the
| cultural impact of a source from zero to one, and rank them. It's
| a more direct and general measure of influence than citation
| count.
|
| It would be interesting to list the sources with the most impact
| but the least recognition. Does the dark matter of literature
| have a large pull?
| derbOac wrote:
| I wrestle a bit with how relevant books will continue to be in
| the future at all.
|
| I way this not as someone who wants to see the demise of books,
| but more the opposite. It's difficult to read articles about the
| financial reality of book sales and distribution and not wonder
| what the future holds in general.
|
| Sometimes to me it seems as if modern celebrity in certain areas
| is due to fickle fate and social dynamics, popular attribution
| and cults of personality and so forth. I'm not saying there isnt
| real talent in there, but why some attain recognition and others
| not is often lost on me.
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