The Raring Twenties
Sep. 17th, 2009 10:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
randy_byersAt the pubmeet last Sunday, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jackwilliambell at one point exclaimed, "What is it with you and 1920? You only read science fiction from the Twenties, and you only watch movies from the Twenties!"
I didn't have an answer for him at the time, but thanks to the spirit of the escalator I have one now: Because the past is another country, and I'm interested in foreign cultures.
This is for sure why I have given up on new SF and only read old stuff. The new stuff started to seem too familiar, too ordinary, too tired, as though I'd seen it all before. (I have the same feeling about modern rock music.) Going back to pre-Amazing SF took me back far enough that it seems strange, alien, unexpected, even when I can see the roots of the modern stuff in it (another source of the fascination, for sure). The concepts are different, the language is different, the perspective is different. Thus it seems fresh and unencumbered with stale debates. It challenged my preconceptions in ways that modern SF had stopped doing.
Likewise with silent film: I can see how it's connected to what came after, but the language and visual grammar of silent film is significantly different than that of sound film. This is why so many people bounce off of silent film -- the acting styles seem unnatural, the frame rate is unnatural, the way scenes are staged is static, the camera angles and set-ups don't change in the manner we expect. You have to learn how to understand the films on their own terms. It's like being in a foreign culture where the few words and gestures you understand only get you so far.
Mind you, it's an exaggeration to say I only watch old movies. I'm much more interested in modern film than I am in modern science fiction these days. It's also true that another reason I gave up on modern science fiction is that I was reading fewer and fewer novels of any genre, and it feels as though you have to read a lot to keep up with what's happening in the SF field. I just wasn't keeping up. With film I don't care as much about whether I'm keeping up or not, because I don't expect to be knowledgeable about film and don't really hang out with other people who are knowledgeable. (My few attempts to participate in online film discussions generally run aground on my lack of knowledge and the fact that I've seen few films relative to other film fanatics.)
It's not that I think that the science fiction and films of an earlier era are better than what is produced today -- far from it. But they are different, and I find the differences fascinating. At least I haven't given science fiction up for mysteries and crime novels!
jackwilliambell at one point exclaimed, "What is it with you and 1920? You only read science fiction from the Twenties, and you only watch movies from the Twenties!"I didn't have an answer for him at the time, but thanks to the spirit of the escalator I have one now: Because the past is another country, and I'm interested in foreign cultures.
This is for sure why I have given up on new SF and only read old stuff. The new stuff started to seem too familiar, too ordinary, too tired, as though I'd seen it all before. (I have the same feeling about modern rock music.) Going back to pre-Amazing SF took me back far enough that it seems strange, alien, unexpected, even when I can see the roots of the modern stuff in it (another source of the fascination, for sure). The concepts are different, the language is different, the perspective is different. Thus it seems fresh and unencumbered with stale debates. It challenged my preconceptions in ways that modern SF had stopped doing.
Likewise with silent film: I can see how it's connected to what came after, but the language and visual grammar of silent film is significantly different than that of sound film. This is why so many people bounce off of silent film -- the acting styles seem unnatural, the frame rate is unnatural, the way scenes are staged is static, the camera angles and set-ups don't change in the manner we expect. You have to learn how to understand the films on their own terms. It's like being in a foreign culture where the few words and gestures you understand only get you so far.
Mind you, it's an exaggeration to say I only watch old movies. I'm much more interested in modern film than I am in modern science fiction these days. It's also true that another reason I gave up on modern science fiction is that I was reading fewer and fewer novels of any genre, and it feels as though you have to read a lot to keep up with what's happening in the SF field. I just wasn't keeping up. With film I don't care as much about whether I'm keeping up or not, because I don't expect to be knowledgeable about film and don't really hang out with other people who are knowledgeable. (My few attempts to participate in online film discussions generally run aground on my lack of knowledge and the fact that I've seen few films relative to other film fanatics.)
It's not that I think that the science fiction and films of an earlier era are better than what is produced today -- far from it. But they are different, and I find the differences fascinating. At least I haven't given science fiction up for mysteries and crime novels!
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no subject
Date: 2009-09-17 09:03 pm (UTC)On the other hand, there are people who collect old pulp magazines to read the stories that were never reprinted. As my friend Craig Smith has said, "Maybe there's a reason they were never reprinted." But undoubtedly there are some lost gems too.
On the other other hand, it has to be said that some of the old SF I'm reading is also drek. I haven't made up my mind if I'm going to finish the Darkness and Dawn trilogy by George Allan England. I got partway through the second book before I switched to Bulwer Lytton.
(BTW, I thought "The past is a foreign country" was from F. Scott Fitzgerald, but it turns out it's from a British writer named L.P. Hartley. The opening sentence of his novel The Go-Between (1953) is "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.")
no subject
Date: 2009-09-17 10:01 pm (UTC)I do entirely agree that history's sorting process is ... faulty at best. I mean, just speaking as someone with a vested interest in seeing more writing by women, for example. What the past decides is important enough to keep to send forward for the rest of us isn't necessarily what the rest of us want to read from or know about the past.
no subject
Date: 2009-09-17 10:29 pm (UTC)One of the pulp writers I want to get around to is Francis Stevens (pen name of Gertrude Bennett). She seems to be one of the women who is being pulled out of the shadows of the past. I've got a copy of her 1918 novella, "The Labyrinth," on my To Be Read pile.