Copy What You Like (2006)(paulgraham.com) |
Copy What You Like (2006)(paulgraham.com) |
All that in context, this would make a great inscription on a whisky flask:
>A guilty pleasure is at least a pure one.
That's not what I got from the essay. PG is actually saying that a lot of works out there are blessed by the authoritative elites as good and worthwhile but what you actually like and enjoy is also authoritative as well. Rather than get sidetracked on what others think is important, what you truly like can be a better guide to avoid wasting time.
Therefore, the things you like may not necessarily change over the years (e.g. always liked Harry Potter) but your self-confidence in holding that opinion is now solidified (e.g. I now know that liking JKR "Harry Potter" more than Joyce's "Ulysses" doesn't mean there's something wrong with my brain. If I choose to write my own novel, I won't feel inadequate just because my writing style is closer to JK Rowling rather than James Joyce.)
Oh, I do wish people wouldn't bash on Ulysses as much... there's some nonsense in the book to sift through, yes, but there's also some truly wonderful stuff as well. One of my favorite passages:
>"and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the posadas 2 glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."
The novel's moments of beauty are worth working for, I think.
But you're still entitled to your opinion. :)
To use a less controversial and difficult field than art, literature or philosophy as an analogy: in food, what you "like" before you have any taste, is sugar. (If one tries to extract PG's tastes from this essay, they look a little like sugar: in literature, funny stories or page turners with lots of action; in pictures, "brilliant colors".)
Authorities are not always corrupt or unimaginative; sometimes, they're educated and there is something to learn from them. Fads exist of course (esp. of the "latest" kind); but authors or artists who have been considered the greatest for a long time, probably are.
Yeah, this is definitely one of the aspects of PG's writing that I enjoy and admire the most. Though there is a danger that that kind of simplicity can become misleading. Regardless, I think that there really is an important lesson to be learned here. I work in an artistic field and have been having something of a philosophical crisis over the past week, but this essay (and a few similar ones from other authors) helped pull me out of it. Life is short and getting inducted into the canon of "great works of art" seems to depend mostly on random factors. I'm trying to work myself towards a view now where the only things that matter are a) whether I like my work, and b) whether there's an audience that likes my work, critics and academics be damned.
And it's funny to see such a pompous comment with almost zero substance. "Kitsch cross-stitch"? Please. It's a simple personal blog post, nothing more, nothing less. It's not meant to be some peer reviewed paper, or some kind of refined George Steiner essay. You can find way more kitschy stuff in "high brow" works (and I'm not even a fan of PG myself).
>It's not about "copying what you like" it's about "finding yourself first" - and, even then, there's no guarantee self-actualization will put food on the table or pay medical bills.
Copy what you like is still valid advice, and much more actionable than the trite "find yourself" (which is not even advice, it's an end goal).
It's also not necessary for self-actualization to "put food on the table" -- that's what jobs are for.
In other words, it is the quest to "find a mission" and not just your live on a day-to-day basis. I think this is what most of us strive for, but don't have the guts to pursue, because it means taking time of your day job, reading books, talking to people etc. And even if you find your mission there is no guarantee that you'll fulfill another necessary condition: earning enough money for you and your family.
I truly believe that if more of us would start a journey to "find themselves", find a mission and drive the human race forward with their skills we'd be better off. However, the opportunity cost for this approach can be quite high, which is probably the reason just a few follow their heart and instead spend 1/3 of their lifetime (8 hrs per day) working for soulless corporates with no (or prentened) mission.
"The only difference between crazy and eccentric is the size of the bank account."
It wouldn't even be worth making this comment, except that PG seems to consider himself some sort of authority on writing (http://www.paulgraham.com/talk.html) - and for him, the one and only rule of style seems to be simplicity. I'll agree, simple beats overwrought, but c'mon. Great writers have a style that makes you want to copy it, which is something that PG doesn't seem aware of even as an aspiration.
He also talks about how his feelings towards storytelling changed after he started doing it as his primary income source instead of a hobby he had during childhood. Very interesting stuff.
Don't try to trick your readers by trying to use fancy words and then fail.
Brutal honesty written in an understandable manner has a real weight not to be underestimated.
You don't need to write like you're talking to a child at all, but you shouldn't reach out for words and expressions just because they sound fancier.
This may be my personal opinion, but I have no stomach for literature that is written with dishonest intentions.
Case in point, They'll sneer and look down upon you for buying the 10$ jeans (that are the same or better quality as 100$ jeans!), or a refurbished 2 year old 150$ android phone, that works perfectly and has everything you could ever need. They'll hate on you for buying 2nd hand excellent products at low prices. I could care less what they think, but nevertheless, it still impacts how they interact with you.
Reminds me of a quote told to me by a very successful entrepreneur: "The best idea I ever had was someone else's"
At the very best, grosssly incomplete and misleading.
After rejecting what other people like, the best pg can come up with is ... to follow what you like. That's an equally fraught heuristic, though it may be more avaialble for observation and examination.
Realise that what works does so regardless of appeal. But that there's a great deal which has (near-term) appeal which doesn't work (long-term). Sometimes it's a false start, sometimes it's a fad, sometimes it's cargo-culting, sometimes it's an establishment of common ground which facilitates communication or understanding but not effectiveness.
I'd suggest instead:
Look at what is being practiced, and ask why?
In the case of the short story: the history of literacy, amusement, entertainment, postal delivery, publishing and printing technology, advertising, bundling concepts, and the lack of subsequent alternatives (radio, television), increased literacy, and free time, made the short story a popular format. Different dynamics brought forth the radio serial, soap operas (first on radio, then television, now the White House), sit-coms, movie serials, blockbuster movies, space operas, and comic-book franchise preboot requels.
Funding environments can create entire classes of research or application -- surveillance capitalism, AI, national security, moon shots, abstract art COINTELPRO.
I'm the last space alien cat to ask what you should do that leads to success, though my own heuristic has been to look for fundamental questions, ask a lot of why, and question premises. Going back to roots and history can make a lot of foundations look far less firm. There may or may not be opportunity there.
I'd also focus very hard on being lucky.
Sure, maybe he came to realize depressing, moody short stories weren't his thing, but I damn near guarantee his imitation of said stories was crucial to his learning how to write half-way decently. The vast majority of philosophers are not good writers. A few stand out as fine men of letters, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Cioran, and some others, but the vast majority of them are more concerned with the clear step-wise elucidation of an argument which, while important, rarely leads to an enjoyable or noteworthy result in the domain of literary style and is frequently bland and dry. There is some special enjoyment one derives out of the works of the like of Russell and Frege, but it relates to the crystalline nature of their ideas, not the genius of their literary style.
Take for instance the rhetorical technique Paul utilizes in the first graph--the repetitions of Mistake n. x. Mistake n. x. Mistake n. x...etc. That sort of structure, and indeed the casual tone, is pretty rare in academic philosophy, and in academic computer science. Where is it more common? In the efforts of short story writers, informal essayists and other such literary folk.
I do agree that its natural to imitate what you like, and beneficial, but there's something to be said for imitating things you are averse to as well--they present more of a challenge because you have to overcome your natural dislike for the thing and really evaluate it--you have to question your own opinion of it, have to see if you can uncover any diamonds in the muck, have to see if, even if you dislike it, you have the chops to pull it off. In short, you grow as a person. Sure, the same thing happens when you make an easy picnic of your studies and imitations, but its silly to discount the value of forcing yourself to engage with views opposite your own, or things you are naturally disinclined toward.
I think Paul makes the mistake of assuming his conclusion in this essay before reaching it. He seems to have decided that none of his history copying these things he didn't like was valuable from the start, when, if he reflected a bit more, I'm sure he'd be able to find that, in fact, those were important links in the chain in some sense, and not total wastes of time.
That being said, he is correct that we need to determine value for ourselves and to come up with our own metrics and schemes of judgement. However, there is still value in the old pantheon--in the recommendations of all the men who walked before us, in all those stuffy critics and analysts babblings. After all, giants are giant for a reason. While it's important, as Paul says, to get over blindly accepting as good or special what everyone else considers good or special, it's just as important to be able to understand why these things are considered special in a particular domain. You have to learn your own predilections--but you also have to learn the rules, the history, the techniques, and the value scales coupled with a field of art--the master is he who can bridge the two, he who engages in tradition while changing it, he who plays by the rules while making his own.
I've often read things I haven't enjoyed (or even understood) until much later.
Not sure I get this. Doing good work would seem to go along with being an outsider in a corrupt economy.
I am going to type something amazing that might get me downvoted.
Vive la difference!
I never understood this claim. I have to assume that people are letting their judgement of the content affect the judgement of the writing style. Plenty of canonical philosophers were absolutely beautiful writers - Plato, Hume, Nietzsche. Modern analytic philosophers are almost fanatical in their adherence to simple, straightforward language. The result might not be beautiful, but I certainly don't think you can call it "bad" either. Some philosophers may be bad writers (Hegel is a pain), but on the whole they seem to be mostly good writers. It's all that they do, after all.
>After all, giants are giant for a reason.
Well... are they? All of them? I think you can make this claim with a good deal of confidence about math and science, because we have a pretty strict set of rules for evaluating good and bad work. But do you really think that everyone in the artistic canon has a good reason to be there? What about all the still-living artists who have only recently been "canonized" via a flurry of academic attention (writers like DeLillo and Pynchon would be good examples). Are we confident that we'll still be talking about those guys 200 years from now? If not, how far back in time do we have to go before we can confidently say, "these giants have a reason to be giants?"
I'm not endorsing pure aesthetic relativism, nor am I saying that none of the canonical artists deserve to be there. I'm just saying that I've never heard a convincing explanation of why the canon is a good judge of, well, anything.
By contrast, the problem with Nietzsche is that he was such a good writer that no one can agree on what it is he actually said or meant: the same colorful metaphor and ambiguity that makes Nietzsche fun to read also makes his writings a mirror into which people can see anything they want. Which is entertaining, but doesn't make for great philosophy.
That's why contemporary philosophy doesn't pay much attention to Nietzsche, especially by comparison with his stature in the public consciousness: they just can't decide what, if anything, he was actually saying.
So perhaps I'd revise the claim to something like, most philosophers are not good stylists (that is, they don't frequently engage in play at the level of language, as a skilled poet or essayist might)
As to your second point yes. There is always a reason. You can question that reason--i.e. you may think the reason is simply that academics were bored and decided to laud the first sap whose writing they came across that day--but this is a pretty absurd claim. You'd essentially be stating that a whole domain of tradition, practice, and procedure which organically grows and evolves, and I might add, in almost logical progressions at times, was ousted by the whims of one foppish professor who gamed everyone into liking something he liked simply because he liked it and was impassioned enough about it. When you plunge into a field of art, technique is often the criterion and leveling factor. For instance, you say you have never heard a convincing argument as to why Pynchon would be considered worthy of canon status--well, I'm not going to be so absurd as to claim he'll still be there in 200 years, but if you have knowledge of literary craft the reasons why he's there now are pretty clear--his maximalism is both well crafted and unique and his style is a turn away from the still dominant style of american literature (Hemmingway based minimalism) which is positively refreshing (the same could be said for DFW, who was consciously, I believe, rejecting the minimalistc style--I recall he wanted to move away from his maximalism too around the time of his unfortunate death). It's because he utilizes traditional structures and devices in a unique way--but in a way that is importantly still comprehensible under the lens of this tradition. Take for example the dawn of the unreliable narrator--it utilized a familiar technique in the field of literature, namely the narrator, and modified it in such a way as to generate interest--as to who gets the credit for such developments--well, it probably comes down to luck and knowing the right people. Yes, all these aesthetic considerations are ultimately conventional and wispy--as all human values tend to be--but they nonetheless obtain, and traditions develop, evolve, die, or persist. There are indeed plenty of 'rules' when it comes to art forms--that is how, at the most basic level, for instance, I know that something is a painting and not a piece of music--the medium and form follow particular restrictions (and then we have great fun blending and challenging these notions).
That's why any critic worth his salt often delves into art history, the artists personal development over a series of works, and analysis of form and technique over simple and baseless value judgement. I may wretch at every Jackson Pollock piece I come across, but if I am educated in the discipline of painting, its history, and its techniques, I can understand where his pieces fit into the narrative of painting history, what they challenge, what they change, and ultimately how unique his forms are and what they communicate within this context. If I dislike it, if I find it shouldn't be considered art--well I have to argue it from this perspective, from within the game of homo sapiens art history. This is why anyone who makes a snap judgement against such artistic efforts and says things like "anyone could do that, it's not art" always comes off sounding dumb and uncultured--they are treating the work entirely out of context and clearly lack an appreciation for the medium as a whole--unless of course they provide reasons which leverage knowledge of this medium.
At root our aesthetic explanations and investigations ultimately boil down to our base value judgements of simply "I like this thing or don't"--but artistic forms exist because there are elements of these traditions a large number of people can generally agree they appreciate, can describe with a common language, and can critique in comparative ways.
Thus the cannon isn't a good judge of anything other than what your precursors believed should be appreciated. It's essentially the historical development of a shared value judgement, or a shared human prejudice. So of course you can repudiate the whole thing. But at that point you are no longer even engaging in that art form--or at best you are engaging with blinders on, and any aesthetic mastery you manage to pull off is largely lucky and unconscious. You are starting from a different base. you are playing your own game. Thus you shouldn't be too upset when other people don't appreciate what you do, or your work isn't considered interesting. You're not even speaking their language.
It's funny to compare different advice on reading material in this context. Faulkner suggested you ought to read everything. Schopenhauer suggested bad books ought to be avoided like poison--the old garbage in garbage out principle. Both work, but if you forget your contexts and say, suggest to a film critic that the marvel movies rival Citzen Kane, they won't even begin to agree unless you layout a sophisticated argument that appeals to the criterion generally recognized by adherents to the art form, elements of cinematography, the quality of the script, etc. etc...
Wittgenstein's notion of language games, I think, is very informative when applied to the realm of aesthetics.
Sorry for the lengthy reply. You got me on a role. Good stuff.
The fine essay is a delicate balance between style and clarity.
Besides, PG is not lecturing some third world sneaker factory workers. His audience is startup founders and/or developers, that, as a rule, don't live "hand to mouth".
And the particular advice (whether right or wrong) applies to all income levels. Even if you're a starving artist It can be good to "copy what you genuinely like" as a way to progress (artistically, if not financially).
I mean, take this argument and apply it to something like theology. "Are you really going to say that an entire tradition, one which has produced innumerable great thinkers and has proceeded on a logical progression towards truth, is entirely mistaken in its most fundamental assumptions?" It turns out that, yeah, I would say that. Sometimes people make mistake. Sometimes lots of people make lots of mistakes and the mistakes go on for thousands of years.
>For instance, you say you have never heard a convincing argument as to why Pynchon would be considered worthy of canon status--well, I'm not going to be so absurd as to claim he'll still be there in 200 years, but if you have knowledge of literary craft the reasons why he's there now are pretty clear--his maximalism is both well crafted and unique and his style is a turn away from the still dominant style of american literature (Hemmingway based minimalism) which is positively refreshing
But this is exactly the issue. What does it mean for writing to be "well crafted", what does it mean for writing to be "positively refreshing"? If we can't give rigorous, verifiable definitions for these concepts, then we're just saying "he's good because he's good".
>It's because he utilizes traditional structures and devices in a unique way
Originality has at least the hope of being a more objective metric, although originality is clearly a very slippery concept. If I take a famous novel and change one word, the result may be a work that has never existed before, but that's not originality. If I use a computer to generate a completely random image, then again, that image may have never existed before, but that's not originality. So it's very hard to define. But I at least see the hope of a project there.
>I can understand where his pieces fit into the narrative of painting history, what they challenge, what they change, and ultimately how unique his forms are and what they communicate within this context. If I dislike it, if I find it shouldn't be considered art--well I have to argue it from this perspective, from within the game of homo sapiens art history.
I can certainly appreciate and enjoy playing games, since some games are very beautiful. But this "game", the game of "make an original contribution to art history and get academics to talk about it", seems to have no rules! What good is a game if no one can tell you the rules? The judges of the game can gesture towards criteria like "originality" that might conceivably give you some guidelines on how to play, but no one can definitively prove that one person deserved to win and another didn't.
>artistic forms exist because there are elements of these traditions a large number of people can generally agree they appreciate
Yes, I agree. But if we tried to submit the works of the canon to an analysis of this kind, to see how many of them contain "artistic forms that people agree they can appreciate", how many of them would survive? Some would, I'm sure. I think Shakespeare and Homer, for example, are still legitimately appealing to people today, if they can work past the archaic language. But exactly how many works of the canon would survive this analysis? Does Schoenburg's music have "forms that people agree they can appreciate"? If not, then what does that say about the validity of Schoenburg's status as a great canonical composer? (I happen to enjoy a lot of Schoenburg's music, but I don't think someone is stupid if they don't).
>Thus the cannon isn't a good judge of anything other than what your precursors believed should be appreciated.
All that effort, and this is the conclusion we're left with!
>It's essentially the historical development of a shared value judgement, or a shared human prejudice. So of course you can repudiate the whole thing. But at that point you are no longer even engaging in that art form--or at best you are engaging with blinders on, and any aesthetic mastery you manage to pull off is largely lucky and unconscious. You are starting from a different base. you are playing your own game. Thus you shouldn't be too upset when other people don't appreciate what you do, or your work isn't considered interesting. You're not even speaking their language.
Ok, this is a really interesting paragraph. You say it's the development of a "shared value judgement", but who, exactly, shares this value judgement? We have, on the one hand, a comparatively small community of academics who share the value judgement that Proust and Melville are wonderfully nourishing authors who deserve to be read again and again by new generations, and on the other hand, we have hundreds of millions of people who would just as soon throw Proust and Melville in the trash so they could go watch the latest Marvel movie or listen to the newest Justin Bieber song. Taking your comment about the "historical development of value judgement" seriously, what can we say by looking at this concrete historical moment? What can we say about what that value judgement has become? What authority can the university canon possibly have in the face of this sheer numerical onslaught? You say that "you shouldn't be too upset when other people don't appreciate what you do, or your work isn't considered interesting. You're not even speaking their language," but who exactly are the artists who are being appreciated these days? Who is speaking the language that most people find congenial? It's certainly not the academics or the purveyors of "high culture", the defenders of the "artistic tradition". MoMA exhibits of great theoretical sophistication are laughed at while Jay-Z packs stadiums. Your warning applies much more to all those who would play that slippery, ephemeral game known as "art history", rather than those who would simply "copy what they like".
All that being said, I do think the notion of a "canon" could be saved, but it has to be grounded in genuine, verifiable scholarship. With Shakespeare, for example, we could do research on his influence on the English language, his influence on other artists, his continuing popular appeal, etc, and come to the conclusion that his plays constitute a major accomplishment. But this game of "aesthetic criticism", or declaring this or that work to be beautiful or enlightening or whatever, that doesn't need to be done in universities. People can do that on their own time. Like I said above, a game where you can't even know the rules can't hold your attention for very long. You're better off playing Go or doing math. At least there you can know that you're winning.
I know before you said you weren't totally advocating aesthetic relativism, but I think you should go ahead and take the plunge! I think you're most of the way there, and why not commit to the position? Why not elucidate it? Examine it, explore it? I think you'd be a fine proponent.
Anyway, I'd love to continue this discussion, but I don't want to clog the thread here since we are getting a bit far away from PGs essay at this point--my email is in my profile. Shoot me one if you're interested. Otherwise, you can be certain I'll be mulling over your reply for the next few days.
BTW it reminds me of Flaubert who did shout out loud every sentences he would write.
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=mPpydgyUSKQC&pg=PA244&lp...
PS: I actually don't mind stream of consciousness, but people don't actually think like that passage.
It would be old hat if someone wrote like Joyce today.
But it is particularly unfortunate when such an experiment escapes into the wild, and a clique seizes upon it as a test for tribal identification.
It's okay to dislike "great literature" and enjoy "pablum for the lowest common denominator" or "escapism for immature minds". I don't really find a whole lot of value in critiquing other people's preferences. If you don't like a specific artwork, you should just keep sampling until you find something you do enjoy, no matter who else likes it. You're not going to make yourself happy by forcing yourself to like something just to fit in to a social group; you're far better off being honest with yourself. After all, you never really know if it's an Emperor's New Clothes situation until someone speaks up and says "I hated every word of this book, and I have no idea why anyone would think it's a masterpiece."
It may well be that will be followed up by "I only said I liked it so that you guys would think I was intelligent and cultured", "I read it in bed because it was such a reliable way to make me fall asleep", "I only read like a third of Gravity's Rainbow, and faked the rest of the way through for book club".