Women are much more conformist than men. Go along to get along. Men can argue with each other, get a little heated, and all's well tomorrow. Two women who argue won't forget for weeks, years or even life.
For the most part that's true. However there are exceptions. IF two men were arguing over a business deal, and one party believes that he was cheated out of major amounts of money....then yes, that grudge will carry over perhaps for a lifetime.
So it does and it can happen, albeit it isn't the majority of times.
Also, a lot of female written fiction is the much despised "genre" fiction. Frankly, "literary" is becoming shorthand for an overwritten novel, that would be sneered at if it didn't appeal to the prejudice of an upper-middle class female.
It's an interesting question whether male writing tends to transition from genre to literary. E.g., Hammett, Chandler, and Cain were considered genre writers in their own time but over the generations have risen to being American classics, in part due to film directors like Huston, Altman, and the Coen Bros. returning to them.
Male literary lions whose early work had recognizable antecedents in genre fiction include: Defoe, Dickens, Collins, Melville, Hawthorne, London, Conrad, Greene (thrillers) Waugh (boarding school stories), Hugo, Balzac. Gay males like James, Proust and Forster seem to have focused more on social character dramas from the beginning. There are a few classics by females using genre tropes like “Frankenstein” (gothic romance/early sci-fi) and “Silas Marner” (romance/fairy tale).
Ellroy, Pelecanos, Lehane, (perhaps even Rankin, Coben, Connelly and Child) are all "current" transcendent genre fiction writers who have moved into movie and tv. I say current as it is being kindly to describe them as middle aged, yet they were all first published to success in their twenties and thirties.
I'd love to know who and where the writers in their twenties to fifties are. It strikes me that the change must have been well underway before anyone noticed for these guys well into their fifties and beyond to be the last cohort.
At the same time, I happily read Blyton and Crompton before London and Hawthorne and Christie and Conan Doyle before Chandler, while Highsmith is up there with Cain and the MacDonalds (Ross and John D) so I am not adverse to female literary lionesses by any means
No, Orwell was a political writer and wrote both books as political allegories. Orwell's greatest fear was the whole world becoming a Soviet style police state but with different camps. Yes, they are a part of the literary canon, were almost immediately revered as great books.
I think my point is that these works both transcended their respective genres. Animal farm is a fairy story that uses the farm animals suffering as allegory for the early Soviet collectivizations at least that was my reading of it, 1984 uses a sci-fi setting (the hi-tech future) to write about the totalitarianism that was going in the present (1948 when he wrote it), there were aspects not just of Soviet government propaganda but also the wartime British government propaganda that influenced his novel 1984. I believe Orwell did not live to see his books become a great financial success either and it was not until the 1950s with a bbc movie that 1984 began to become popular.
How you keep coming up so consistently with “sleights of hand” that I completely either fail to notice or never even began to suspect…well it’s pure beauty to me as someone who would’ve failed statistics if I hadn’t cheated…(in order to get that BS she admitted embarrassingly). I understand maths implications-I’m just lousy at calculating them. I’m grateful you’re so good at it “Count”🧛🏽♂️
Perhaps my most valuable One Weird Trick is assuming that what we ought to learn from observing daily life and what we ought to learn from academic analysis is one and same, that there aren't different Gnostic levels of reality, there's just the real world.
Rod Dreher on his substack yesterday mentioned that he was told that publishers don't even look at writing submitted by white males. Pretty damned sad. Almost every important American writer has been a white male from Washington Irving to Tom Wolfe. Perhaps Elon Musk could start his own publishing house and publish the work of white men.
As for the Jews, I wonder what percentage of traders on the floor of Wall Street are Jewish. I don't think Wall Street has any real quotas. If you make it on the floor, you have talent. I'd guess that Jews are a large percentage of Wall Street traders because they've earned it.
I have only superficial knowledge of finance but I don't 'on the floor' is necessarily where Jews excelled. I'd be more interested in percent Jews among quants.
Which is an example of the kind of assumption, or perhaps error, I take issue with in the quoted article-- the idea that the measures of prestige/success from the recent past remain valid today.
I am sure that you know more than I do of the world of Wall Street finance. My clumsily written post just wants to explain that Wall Street is a place of intelligence and talent and not some sort of quota joyride.
I used to work at a major prop trading shop in the 2010s. We had around 40 traders. Roughly half asian and half white(zero that weren't white or asian; two women-one Chinese-American and one Indian national). Roughly two thirds of the "white" traders were Jewish.
"on the floor" is basically obsolete. the place I worked at had 3 traders on the floor at the exchanges and all 3 were non jewish white guys.
3 compared to 40 or so in the office..of the 40 in the office about 30 were trading on the screen and another 10 were "broker traders" that were trading on the phone(the screen traders were the top of the food chain because the broker traders and floor traders relied on the screen traders to set the price curve)
A lot of the funds and quant shops have heavy DEI. It came a bit later, but swept through the banking industry just as it did high tech. However, another factor is that Jewish people just don't tend to be at the top of doing math - even if you argue they themselves are on average better, there are only a few million of them compared to billions of Chinese and Indians. The importance of making deals at the golf club is gone, now it's all about raw brainpower. An Indian or Chinese genius will fill the DEI quota *and* be able to produce results.
It is more likely they obtained their positions via nepotism. How did Jeffrey Epstein go from being a math teacher to a partner at Bear Stearns in just four years? Maybe he was just super talented, maybe he just had connections thanks to his ethnic nepotism.
Dreher admits that he does not read fiction or watch many movies despite having been a movie reviewer at one time. What Dreher really does not like is women, homosexuals, black, Hispanics being considered the equals of white men.
I have found Dreher quite liberal on racial matters and homosexuality. He has even written that homosexual writers like Douglas Murray and Andrew Sullivan are friends of his who should be supported by conservatives. Although Dreher opposes large-scale immigration, I have yet to read him denigrate Hispanics. I have never read him denigrate women only individual women. He is Orthodox, a religion that doesn't have female priests so perhaps you consider that anti-women.
Even after Obergefell, Dreher wants to find a way to eliminate same sex marriage. And if one looks at his writings, he supports conversion therapy. And we really hates most women other than trad wives who are obedient to their husbands unlike his ex-wife.
Same sex marriage is still an absurdity so Dreher is correct. His church doesn't support same sex marriage and neither does mine. As for Dreher's personal life, I believe it is foolish to comment on someone else's marriage. Marriages are intricate affairs where two people have tens of thousands of events in common that are special just to them.
What creative endeavors are white men engaging in, those who would have at one time been authors or artists? I think you'd find the a similar pattern of fewer and fewer white male painters and sculptors. Are men deprived of creative outlets?
I'm pretty sure that a lot of male interest these days goes into things like sports betting and video gaming, which suck up the time and energy that might otherwise be used for creative endeavors.
Video games (which are becoming increasingly woke). Quite a few write nonfiction but that's a different skillset. I suspect a lot of them wind up complaining in long screeds on 4chan and, increasingly, Substack. You can jump around and find lots of white male writers on politics here, for instance.
There's indie publishing, which rarely has the impact but does have the missing authors. There are genres that didn't even exist before like litRPG, where someone gets transported into a World of Warcraft world, essentially. They often have numerically listed statistics and progression systems. There was one series, Dungeon Crawler Carl, by Matt Dinniman, that did so well tradpub picked it up.
Men remain as creative as ever. I expect in ten years we will look back and see they came up with the next big genre or medium. Maybe it will be something in VR. The big difference between now and the past is that things are far less concentrated. It used to be everyone was familiar with the same small set of hits across all media. These days? Andy Warhol got it slightly wrong-- in this future everyone is famous to fifteen people...or a large number of people are famous to 15,000 people.
Has anyone Boomer-age or younger ever written a great novel?
How 'bout a good novel?
I can't think of any.
FWIW, the Nobel Prize committee apparently can't think of many either. (Only ten Nobels for writers born after 1945, only one for a white male [Norwegian Jon Fosse.])
Also, in the scarce boomer Nobel literature prizes, it's hard not to notice a certain woke sensibility in many of the award statements:
"... society's clichés and their subjugating power ..."
"... landscape of the dispossessed ..."
"... hallucinatory realism ..."
"... monument to suffering ..."
"... crossing of boundaries ..."
"... effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee ..."
"... confronts historical traumas ..."
Take out the wokies, and how many are left?
Three: all men, one each Norwegian, Turkish, and Japanese.
The Japanese is the Conrad-esque Kazuo Ishiguro, who immigrated to Britain as a child and became culturally more British than the British.
The Turk, Orhan Pamuk, was born in Istanbul, on the western side of the Bosporus, so he's arguably European too (plus he has a Circassian grandmother). On the other hand, his Nobel award came at the same time as he was facing some government censorship problems in Turkey, so perhaps the Nobel committee put a thumb on the scale to help him out and to flatter themselves by "taking a stand".
Pamuk is my favorite contemporary novelist and I think he fully deserved his Nobel even if he got it at a time when he was dealing with problems over his discussion of the Armenian genocide.
I like Neal Stephenson very much; his System of the World trilogy is one of the best things I’ve ever read. But, boy howdy does he struggle with coming up with a good ending.
I don't read much so I say this as kind of an outsider but I get the impression that the people who declare novels 'great' are increasingly out of touch with audiences and spend most of their time up each other's assholes.
In the movie 'Almost Famous' the vocalist declares that he has done a deep study of rock and roll and discovered that the great stuff and the popular stuff are one and the same. I sympathize with this as a general rule. The movie takes place right before the rise of Prog Rock (such as it was) which is rock music for people who are musically sophisticated or trained enough to appreciate the difficulty and technique and composition, more than actually enjoy it.
I find it implausible that no one born after 1945 has written a good novel.
I don't know. I don't read enough fiction to be an authority. I've looked up a few supposedly great 20th century novels that I have heard of and they are all pre baby boomer.
Orhan Pamuk won a Nobel prize for literature. He’s Turkish but looks like a regular white guy. I’ve read several of his books. I really liked “The Black Book.” Born in 1952.
He got into serious trouble for mentioning the Armenian Genocide.
The promotion of Ta-Nehisi Coates is an interesting case. He was wildly praised by all left-of-center white men (Jeffrey Goldberg, David Remnick, Chris Hayes, Stephen Colbert), but after 10/7 the Jewish ones have clammed up about him. Meanwhile scumbag Hayes (I believe half Irish, half Italian) still had him on his show, treated him like an old buddy, and tossed softball questions at him.
Ta-Nehisi Coates leveraged his prestige as a literary genius into selling scripts to Marvel Comics. (The opposite career trajectory to that planned by Stan Lee, who said that he was saving his real name for when he wrote a prize-winning novel.)
With American Jews, there are two factors acting at the same time - one is of course DEI. But just as strong is the dilution of the blood stock. Outside the modern orthodox or even more frum streams, there is 50% outmarriage per generation since at least 1960s. So even with people who are by definition halachically Jewish (maternal grandmother ticks the box) a lot are just 50% or even just 25% in terms of DNA.
Obviously, this is different with Israeli Jews because of much less outmarriage.
There is always a trade-off in outmarriage - what one gains in heterosis (hybrid vigor) and diverse immunity genes one loses in the surplus of intelligence. Even if one finds smarter than average mates. Regression to the mean and all that...
One can see it with Nobel prizes. I would estimate the ratio of half-bloods to full bloods during the 20th century was like 0.4-0.6 : 1, but there were much lower number of Nobel prizes for the former so far. It is only in Hogwarts that Half-Blood Princes like Tom Riddle or Severus Snape are particularly powerful.
IIRC the original "Tiger Mom" - Amy Chua of the "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" Fame - is married/has kids with a Jewish guy. And yes, Mark Zuckerberg is also married with someone Chinese.
Yes! I'm a HUGE Amy Chua fan--- I keep a copy of her novel The Golden Gate checked out from the library just so I can have a little Chua in my living room.
A lot of women really dislike Ms. Chua, another reason she makes me all heart-skippy.
I've thought about this quite a bit, if only because my subconscious midlife plan has been derailed by this development. (I even hoarded the money to retire early and avoided procreation--I should have just sucked it up and knocked up that Asian gal. Oh well.)
Genre fiction hasn't been completely wokified yet, particularly in things like military sf, some more macho fantasy genres like sword and sorcery, and true crime. I don't think the majors are taking new straight white male authors though--I think they can just point to their existing list (including the amazingly prolific Brandon Sanderson) and say "See? White men are still on top!"
There are new genres like litRPG, where a character is reborn into an MMORPG-like world, complete with character classes and statistics. One more humorous example, Dungeon Crawler Carl, has turned into a continuing series and been so successful tradpub bit the bullet and published him. Most successful male authors these days start as indies.
There's a movement on to produce new right-wing *literary* fiction, such as Dan Baltic's Nutcrankr, Samuel Finlay's Breakfast with the Dirt Cult, and most prominently Delicious Tacos' stories and one short novel, Finally, Some Good News, many of which involve newly right-coded pursuits like trying to get laid as a straight man in the 21st century. A well-known right-wing short story author is Zero HP Lovecraft (collection: They Had No Deepness of Earth), who has explored some of the nastier possible influences of the technologies we're getting ourselves into.
(I've also enjoyed Jared Dillian's Night Moves, a bunch of stories by a retired finance guy, and Spencer Weedman's Egregore, a supernatural gothic horror novel that stays just this side of Lovecraft.)
As an aside, Walt Bismarck's produced some very un-PC songs you all should listen to.
Guys like Savage notice the erasure of Jews and then all whites from academia and so on but ignore that his tribe is disproportionately represented in the politics that enabled this in the first place. Much has been made of the rightward shift of young men, and I would be curious to know how pronounced that is with young Jewish men since despite some paths being narrowed, they will still ultimately be disproportionately well off and influential over the course of their lives.
I am actually fairly optimistic the woke dragon will be slain, but it is going to require harder hearts from segments of society that have traditionally been soft on racial redistribution. One valuable thing that government reform efforts could focus on is stripping tax exempt status from obviously partisan non-profits, including those affiliated with major religious groups like Jews, Lutherans, Catholics and the black church.
The ur-text of the all-girl literary world is of course “Cat Person”, which is actually about combing through the Facebook and Instagram accounts of the younger and skinnier ex-girlfriend of the boringly non-toxic MFA-type guy you hooked up with. (The actual guy ended up killing himself or ODing a few years later.) There is a good story to be told about how this literary culture is parasitic upon the toxic male gaze it exists to decry.
I believe that's been discussed here and elsewhere.
"In contrast, men like arguing with men over greatness."
That part. Yeah, for the most part it really is the truth. Especially over things that men tend to care a great deal about.
Like sports.
Women are much more conformist than men. Go along to get along. Men can argue with each other, get a little heated, and all's well tomorrow. Two women who argue won't forget for weeks, years or even life.
This is so true that it's hurts my soul. I am a more disagreeable woman but I have to tamp it way down in order to maintain friendships.
I respect your honesty. My wife gets along better with men because she can argue and let it go like a man does.
For the most part that's true. However there are exceptions. IF two men were arguing over a business deal, and one party believes that he was cheated out of major amounts of money....then yes, that grudge will carry over perhaps for a lifetime.
So it does and it can happen, albeit it isn't the majority of times.
Sure. I remember Kenny Stabler circa 1984 said he'd bury the hatchet with Al Davis....right between the shoulder blades.
Fondly recall your Roth vs. Updike column!
https://www.takimag.com/article/roth-vs-updike/
Also, a lot of female written fiction is the much despised "genre" fiction. Frankly, "literary" is becoming shorthand for an overwritten novel, that would be sneered at if it didn't appeal to the prejudice of an upper-middle class female.
It's an interesting question whether male writing tends to transition from genre to literary. E.g., Hammett, Chandler, and Cain were considered genre writers in their own time but over the generations have risen to being American classics, in part due to film directors like Huston, Altman, and the Coen Bros. returning to them.
Dickens’ literary career started out when he was hired to write captions to a series of sporting cartoons. It became “The Pickwick Papers”.
Poe & Conan Doyle certainly took gumshoe stories to amazing heights.
Male literary lions whose early work had recognizable antecedents in genre fiction include: Defoe, Dickens, Collins, Melville, Hawthorne, London, Conrad, Greene (thrillers) Waugh (boarding school stories), Hugo, Balzac. Gay males like James, Proust and Forster seem to have focused more on social character dramas from the beginning. There are a few classics by females using genre tropes like “Frankenstein” (gothic romance/early sci-fi) and “Silas Marner” (romance/fairy tale).
Ellroy, Pelecanos, Lehane, (perhaps even Rankin, Coben, Connelly and Child) are all "current" transcendent genre fiction writers who have moved into movie and tv. I say current as it is being kindly to describe them as middle aged, yet they were all first published to success in their twenties and thirties.
I'd love to know who and where the writers in their twenties to fifties are. It strikes me that the change must have been well underway before anyone noticed for these guys well into their fifties and beyond to be the last cohort.
At the same time, I happily read Blyton and Crompton before London and Hawthorne and Christie and Conan Doyle before Chandler, while Highsmith is up there with Cain and the MacDonalds (Ross and John D) so I am not adverse to female literary lionesses by any means
1984 and animal farm were genre novels to begin with (science fiction and fantasy) and now considered part of the literary canon (I think?)
No, Orwell was a political writer and wrote both books as political allegories. Orwell's greatest fear was the whole world becoming a Soviet style police state but with different camps. Yes, they are a part of the literary canon, were almost immediately revered as great books.
I think my point is that these works both transcended their respective genres. Animal farm is a fairy story that uses the farm animals suffering as allegory for the early Soviet collectivizations at least that was my reading of it, 1984 uses a sci-fi setting (the hi-tech future) to write about the totalitarianism that was going in the present (1948 when he wrote it), there were aspects not just of Soviet government propaganda but also the wartime British government propaganda that influenced his novel 1984. I believe Orwell did not live to see his books become a great financial success either and it was not until the 1950s with a bbc movie that 1984 began to become popular.
Whole lotta ladies in the Library of America series, though I was too lazy to count:
https://www.loa.org/writers/
How you keep coming up so consistently with “sleights of hand” that I completely either fail to notice or never even began to suspect…well it’s pure beauty to me as someone who would’ve failed statistics if I hadn’t cheated…(in order to get that BS she admitted embarrassingly). I understand maths implications-I’m just lousy at calculating them. I’m grateful you’re so good at it “Count”🧛🏽♂️
Perhaps my most valuable One Weird Trick is assuming that what we ought to learn from observing daily life and what we ought to learn from academic analysis is one and same, that there aren't different Gnostic levels of reality, there's just the real world.
Perhaps;)
Rod Dreher on his substack yesterday mentioned that he was told that publishers don't even look at writing submitted by white males. Pretty damned sad. Almost every important American writer has been a white male from Washington Irving to Tom Wolfe. Perhaps Elon Musk could start his own publishing house and publish the work of white men.
As for the Jews, I wonder what percentage of traders on the floor of Wall Street are Jewish. I don't think Wall Street has any real quotas. If you make it on the floor, you have talent. I'd guess that Jews are a large percentage of Wall Street traders because they've earned it.
I heard through the grapevine it has been declining over the last 30 years. Maybe dilution of the bloodstock as everywhere else.
In the past women used male pseudonyms to get published. Times change but techniques survive.
I have only superficial knowledge of finance but I don't 'on the floor' is necessarily where Jews excelled. I'd be more interested in percent Jews among quants.
Which is an example of the kind of assumption, or perhaps error, I take issue with in the quoted article-- the idea that the measures of prestige/success from the recent past remain valid today.
I am sure that you know more than I do of the world of Wall Street finance. My clumsily written post just wants to explain that Wall Street is a place of intelligence and talent and not some sort of quota joyride.
I used to work at a major prop trading shop in the 2010s. We had around 40 traders. Roughly half asian and half white(zero that weren't white or asian; two women-one Chinese-American and one Indian national). Roughly two thirds of the "white" traders were Jewish.
Very informative post. Thanks.
but not 'on the floor'? Doesn't that mean the guys who are physically at the exchange shouting and throwing up secret ninja hand signals?
"on the floor" is basically obsolete. the place I worked at had 3 traders on the floor at the exchanges and all 3 were non jewish white guys.
3 compared to 40 or so in the office..of the 40 in the office about 30 were trading on the screen and another 10 were "broker traders" that were trading on the phone(the screen traders were the top of the food chain because the broker traders and floor traders relied on the screen traders to set the price curve)
A lot of the funds and quant shops have heavy DEI. It came a bit later, but swept through the banking industry just as it did high tech. However, another factor is that Jewish people just don't tend to be at the top of doing math - even if you argue they themselves are on average better, there are only a few million of them compared to billions of Chinese and Indians. The importance of making deals at the golf club is gone, now it's all about raw brainpower. An Indian or Chinese genius will fill the DEI quota *and* be able to produce results.
Very interesting.
It is more likely they obtained their positions via nepotism. How did Jeffrey Epstein go from being a math teacher to a partner at Bear Stearns in just four years? Maybe he was just super talented, maybe he just had connections thanks to his ethnic nepotism.
Dreher admits that he does not read fiction or watch many movies despite having been a movie reviewer at one time. What Dreher really does not like is women, homosexuals, black, Hispanics being considered the equals of white men.
I have found Dreher quite liberal on racial matters and homosexuality. He has even written that homosexual writers like Douglas Murray and Andrew Sullivan are friends of his who should be supported by conservatives. Although Dreher opposes large-scale immigration, I have yet to read him denigrate Hispanics. I have never read him denigrate women only individual women. He is Orthodox, a religion that doesn't have female priests so perhaps you consider that anti-women.
Even after Obergefell, Dreher wants to find a way to eliminate same sex marriage. And if one looks at his writings, he supports conversion therapy. And we really hates most women other than trad wives who are obedient to their husbands unlike his ex-wife.
Same sex marriage is still an absurdity so Dreher is correct. His church doesn't support same sex marriage and neither does mine. As for Dreher's personal life, I believe it is foolish to comment on someone else's marriage. Marriages are intricate affairs where two people have tens of thousands of events in common that are special just to them.
What creative endeavors are white men engaging in, those who would have at one time been authors or artists? I think you'd find the a similar pattern of fewer and fewer white male painters and sculptors. Are men deprived of creative outlets?
I'm pretty sure that a lot of male interest these days goes into things like sports betting and video gaming, which suck up the time and energy that might otherwise be used for creative endeavors.
Video games (which are becoming increasingly woke). Quite a few write nonfiction but that's a different skillset. I suspect a lot of them wind up complaining in long screeds on 4chan and, increasingly, Substack. You can jump around and find lots of white male writers on politics here, for instance.
There's indie publishing, which rarely has the impact but does have the missing authors. There are genres that didn't even exist before like litRPG, where someone gets transported into a World of Warcraft world, essentially. They often have numerically listed statistics and progression systems. There was one series, Dungeon Crawler Carl, by Matt Dinniman, that did so well tradpub picked it up.
Men remain as creative as ever. I expect in ten years we will look back and see they came up with the next big genre or medium. Maybe it will be something in VR. The big difference between now and the past is that things are far less concentrated. It used to be everyone was familiar with the same small set of hits across all media. These days? Andy Warhol got it slightly wrong-- in this future everyone is famous to fifteen people...or a large number of people are famous to 15,000 people.
Men are not being deprived of the creative outlet of writing.
They are being deprived of publication and the opportunity to make a living by writing.
Centaur Write Satyr on Substack at @UndergroundDesigns is one of the guys who will buck this trend.
Has anyone Boomer-age or younger ever written a great novel?
How 'bout a good novel?
I can't think of any.
FWIW, the Nobel Prize committee apparently can't think of many either. (Only ten Nobels for writers born after 1945, only one for a white male [Norwegian Jon Fosse.])
Also, in the scarce boomer Nobel literature prizes, it's hard not to notice a certain woke sensibility in many of the award statements:
"... society's clichés and their subjugating power ..."
"... landscape of the dispossessed ..."
"... hallucinatory realism ..."
"... monument to suffering ..."
"... crossing of boundaries ..."
"... effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee ..."
"... confronts historical traumas ..."
Take out the wokies, and how many are left?
Three: all men, one each Norwegian, Turkish, and Japanese.
The Japanese is the Conrad-esque Kazuo Ishiguro, who immigrated to Britain as a child and became culturally more British than the British.
The Turk, Orhan Pamuk, was born in Istanbul, on the western side of the Bosporus, so he's arguably European too (plus he has a Circassian grandmother). On the other hand, his Nobel award came at the same time as he was facing some government censorship problems in Turkey, so perhaps the Nobel committee put a thumb on the scale to help him out and to flatter themselves by "taking a stand".
Pamuk is my favorite contemporary novelist and I think he fully deserved his Nobel even if he got it at a time when he was dealing with problems over his discussion of the Armenian genocide.
I completely agree.
See my comment on Pamuk above. He’s a good writer.
I am a big Neale Stephenson fan, I think his books are better and more thoughtful than average SciFi
Also Amor Towles books are excellent especially a Gentleman in Moscow.
I like Neal Stephenson very much; his System of the World trilogy is one of the best things I’ve ever read. But, boy howdy does he struggle with coming up with a good ending.
I don't read much so I say this as kind of an outsider but I get the impression that the people who declare novels 'great' are increasingly out of touch with audiences and spend most of their time up each other's assholes.
In the movie 'Almost Famous' the vocalist declares that he has done a deep study of rock and roll and discovered that the great stuff and the popular stuff are one and the same. I sympathize with this as a general rule. The movie takes place right before the rise of Prog Rock (such as it was) which is rock music for people who are musically sophisticated or trained enough to appreciate the difficulty and technique and composition, more than actually enjoy it.
I find it implausible that no one born after 1945 has written a good novel.
> "the great stuff and the popular stuff are one and the same. I sympathize with this as a general rule."
I'm not unsympathetic either, but if there's a good boomer-written novel, what is it?
I don't know. I don't read enough fiction to be an authority. I've looked up a few supposedly great 20th century novels that I have heard of and they are all pre baby boomer.
Mosquito Coast
The Paperboy
Bel Canto
The Secret History
The Baroque Cycle
An Instance of the Fingerpost
Orhan Pamuk won a Nobel prize for literature. He’s Turkish but looks like a regular white guy. I’ve read several of his books. I really liked “The Black Book.” Born in 1952.
He got into serious trouble for mentioning the Armenian Genocide.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orhan_Pamuk
The promotion of Ta-Nehisi Coates is an interesting case. He was wildly praised by all left-of-center white men (Jeffrey Goldberg, David Remnick, Chris Hayes, Stephen Colbert), but after 10/7 the Jewish ones have clammed up about him. Meanwhile scumbag Hayes (I believe half Irish, half Italian) still had him on his show, treated him like an old buddy, and tossed softball questions at him.
Ta-Nehisi Coates leveraged his prestige as a literary genius into selling scripts to Marvel Comics. (The opposite career trajectory to that planned by Stan Lee, who said that he was saving his real name for when he wrote a prize-winning novel.)
With American Jews, there are two factors acting at the same time - one is of course DEI. But just as strong is the dilution of the blood stock. Outside the modern orthodox or even more frum streams, there is 50% outmarriage per generation since at least 1960s. So even with people who are by definition halachically Jewish (maternal grandmother ticks the box) a lot are just 50% or even just 25% in terms of DNA.
Obviously, this is different with Israeli Jews because of much less outmarriage.
But I wouldn't think they've been marrying dim or unambitious Gentiles for decades.
There is always a trade-off in outmarriage - what one gains in heterosis (hybrid vigor) and diverse immunity genes one loses in the surplus of intelligence. Even if one finds smarter than average mates. Regression to the mean and all that...
One can see it with Nobel prizes. I would estimate the ratio of half-bloods to full bloods during the 20th century was like 0.4-0.6 : 1, but there were much lower number of Nobel prizes for the former so far. It is only in Hogwarts that Half-Blood Princes like Tom Riddle or Severus Snape are particularly powerful.
Those high-IQ Jewish guys like those high-IQ Asian women! Like Margaret Cho joked about Asian women, "We can make Jews do ANYTHING."
IIRC the original "Tiger Mom" - Amy Chua of the "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" Fame - is married/has kids with a Jewish guy. And yes, Mark Zuckerberg is also married with someone Chinese.
Yes! I'm a HUGE Amy Chua fan--- I keep a copy of her novel The Golden Gate checked out from the library just so I can have a little Chua in my living room.
A lot of women really dislike Ms. Chua, another reason she makes me all heart-skippy.
I didn't know till now JD Vance and Vivek were two of her students <3
https://www.facebook.com/ChineseDiaspora/posts/on-inauguration-day-tiger-mother-amy-chua-%E8%94%A1%E7%BE%8E%E5%84%BF-will-be-in-washington-with-her-hus/910214051283654/
The world is small...
I'll always pronounce her name as one syllable, CHWAH.
The letter "vav" is by its nature an ambiguous semivocal - sometimes it is "v", sometimes a very short "u" as in w, and sometimes an "o" or a "u"
I've thought about this quite a bit, if only because my subconscious midlife plan has been derailed by this development. (I even hoarded the money to retire early and avoided procreation--I should have just sucked it up and knocked up that Asian gal. Oh well.)
Genre fiction hasn't been completely wokified yet, particularly in things like military sf, some more macho fantasy genres like sword and sorcery, and true crime. I don't think the majors are taking new straight white male authors though--I think they can just point to their existing list (including the amazingly prolific Brandon Sanderson) and say "See? White men are still on top!"
There are new genres like litRPG, where a character is reborn into an MMORPG-like world, complete with character classes and statistics. One more humorous example, Dungeon Crawler Carl, has turned into a continuing series and been so successful tradpub bit the bullet and published him. Most successful male authors these days start as indies.
There's a movement on to produce new right-wing *literary* fiction, such as Dan Baltic's Nutcrankr, Samuel Finlay's Breakfast with the Dirt Cult, and most prominently Delicious Tacos' stories and one short novel, Finally, Some Good News, many of which involve newly right-coded pursuits like trying to get laid as a straight man in the 21st century. A well-known right-wing short story author is Zero HP Lovecraft (collection: They Had No Deepness of Earth), who has explored some of the nastier possible influences of the technologies we're getting ourselves into.
(I've also enjoyed Jared Dillian's Night Moves, a bunch of stories by a retired finance guy, and Spencer Weedman's Egregore, a supernatural gothic horror novel that stays just this side of Lovecraft.)
As an aside, Walt Bismarck's produced some very un-PC songs you all should listen to.
Lots of pulp/genre writing in the younger right wing.
One really needs to provide a few cites and definitions to reinforce one's position.
Guys like Savage notice the erasure of Jews and then all whites from academia and so on but ignore that his tribe is disproportionately represented in the politics that enabled this in the first place. Much has been made of the rightward shift of young men, and I would be curious to know how pronounced that is with young Jewish men since despite some paths being narrowed, they will still ultimately be disproportionately well off and influential over the course of their lives.
I am actually fairly optimistic the woke dragon will be slain, but it is going to require harder hearts from segments of society that have traditionally been soft on racial redistribution. One valuable thing that government reform efforts could focus on is stripping tax exempt status from obviously partisan non-profits, including those affiliated with major religious groups like Jews, Lutherans, Catholics and the black church.
The ur-text of the all-girl literary world is of course “Cat Person”, which is actually about combing through the Facebook and Instagram accounts of the younger and skinnier ex-girlfriend of the boringly non-toxic MFA-type guy you hooked up with. (The actual guy ended up killing himself or ODing a few years later.) There is a good story to be told about how this literary culture is parasitic upon the toxic male gaze it exists to decry.