This is where I admit I can be completely humorless at times, because that video sets my teeth on edge. (Plei pointed out that part of my annoyance at it is that in a way, I think of Ray Bradbury in the same way I do as Clovis, so of course that song/video would make me cranky.)

My teeth are with Jilli's.

For what it is worth, there are pictures on the net of Bradbury watching that vid and really getting into it.

For what it is worth, there are pictures on the net of Bradbury watching that vid and really getting into it.

Oh, I know! And I'm very glad he was amused by it. That doesn't change the fact that it raises *my* hackles.

Style over content is a bad goal for any art, probably, but writing particularly.

There is no such thing as "style over content." The style - the aesthetic choice the creator made in putting the work together - is the content.

The content of that painting is lilies. How the person painted it makes it a Monet.

The fact that you can synopsize a plot does not make that the content of the book. It is no more the book than my spleen is me. Style is not a cup that holds the hot sweet content of coffee. Style is not icing you spread around the top of the content-cake. It is the what the cake is made of.

I can give five different directors the same screenplay and the same budget and they will come back with five radically different works.

If I gave the script for Chinatown and an $80 million dollar budget to David Fincher the movie that he makes will be very different from the movie that Martin Scorsese would make. Or David Lynch. Or Woody Allen. The style - the aesthetic choices - of cinematography, score, casting, editing, costuming, set design, lighting would all be different, would all succeed or fail in different ways. Those are five completely different movies.

All of the choices that Dave Eggers makes in writing A Staggering Work...are the things that constitute that book. The self consciousness, the irony, the footnotes. That is what the book is made of.

People did not cry about Little Nell's death because she was some random child in a story that died. They cried because of the way that Dickens wrote her and built the narrative. The rhythm of his prose, his word choice, the dialogue he created. The book is only composed of the text so what you get out of it - what you are asserting is the content - is the effect of all the stylistic choices.

How it moves you is dependent on how Dickens wrote it.

If you went to an academic conference on literary theory and tried to talk about style separate from content they would look at you as if you'd gone to a medical conference and talked about balancing the humours.

I can give five different directors the same screenplay and the same budget and they will come back with five radically different works.

Of course that's true. I never said it wasn't. That's voice. Stephen King and Charlotte Bronte would have told/written Jane Eyre in completely different ways, even if the facts of the story remained constant. I get that.

All of the choices that Dave Eggers makes in writing A Staggering Work...are the things that constitute that book. The self consciousness, the irony, the footnotes. That is what the book is made of.

In my mind, part of that content is empty calories, then. More than a third of that book was Eggers loving himself and his own brilliance without actually adding to his narrative. Maybe your point is that he's adding to his narrative in a particular and purposeful way.

I'm maintaining that a lot of *that* content was a pointless, sucky distraction.

All discussion of literature, or any art, is subjective. I think Scrappy said it best -- a fresh and beautiful mix of style and content marks work that really stands out. But I'm always going to take a really good story, even one told plainly, over gorgeously or creatively structured language that bores me or doesn't move me.

I don't disagree that style is what the book is made of. I just don't necessarily agree that a classic definition of "good" style, which basically seems to mean putting words together in a pretty way, is the only style worth appreciation. Asimov has a very distinct style - it's efficient, to the point, and shows a sense of wonder with the universe he is creating.

But then, I actually do believe that Star Wars is a great film, despite silly writing, mostly mediocre acting, and a variety of other problems. I don't care that it's not perfect on every level - I care that it's extraordinary in at least one.

I just read back through this whole conversation, and I think my real opinion is simple: Asimov isn't only in the canon because he was influential. He's in the canon because plenty of people, including a lot of people in this thread, obviously, continue to find his stories and novels enjoyable and mesmerizing, even 50+ years after most of his books were written. The fact that his stories and novels are enjoyed by so many definitely means he has a style that is accessible and pleasurable, if not literary. It is unfair to compare him to Richardson, as you did, because Asimov's works aren't just important - they're good.

I think you'd have to read Asimov if you were trying to read Great Works of SF because of history, yes, but that's not the only reason he gets recommended. Lots of people really like him.

All discussion of literature, or any art, is subjective.

While there isn't one set of objective standards for art, you can delineate all the different ways a work succeeds or doesn't succeed just as you can look at a drawing and say: the proportions are off, the composition is poorly balanced, they don't use white space well, it's static rather than dynamic, they don't understand perspective, these colors are ill-suited for this subject etc.

At a certain high level of competence any writer should have mastered a similar skill set.

I just don't necessarily agree that a classic definition of "good" style, which basically seems to mean putting words together in a pretty way

Style is not about curlicues and figurative language and flowing sentences. There is no such thing as "no-style." Even the writing which is cited as being particularly direct, non-figurative, with short sentences in plain English represents a particular kind of style. In fact, writers who are held up as exemplars of particularly plain style such as Hemingway or Raymond Carver are the very ones who look the most stylized after their era.

The style which is most easily digestible/readable in any era is going to be prose which seems the most familiar. That is, it's sort of a mash of the most popular works of the preceding twenty years. And when you are reading books from a different era - particularly if it's also from a different culture - that easily readable style isn't easy at all. Because you're not familiar with Victorian popular fiction tropes and all the little short-hands a writer can use by alluding to things which were once common currency.

Strunk and White's book is called Elements of Style not because they want fancy/pretty writing. It's because the elements of style are what constitute writing itself.

Fine. Then I humbly disagree that Asimov is a shitty writer. He is an excellent writer of tight, plain prose that gets out of the way and lets the reader fall in.