5 ms·
There's boredom, then there's freedom from distraction. I'm free from distraction when walking the dog in the woods by myself. I'm bored when stuck in line at
by Vivtek 15y ago
There's boredom, then there's freedom from distraction.
I'm free from distraction when walking the dog in the woods by myself. I'm bored when stuck in line at Meijer's behind the guy whose credit card expired yesterday. The latter is excruciating and exhausting.
But aside from that: Scott Adams has a weird way of mixing some decent insight, like his thesis here, with some really inane stuff that sounds like late-night college freshman bullshitting. I mean really: "You might see the best-seller lists dominated by fiction "factories" in which ghostwriters churn out familiar-feeling work under the brands of famous authors. Got it." Has he never heard of Charles Dickens? Probably not, actually. But those fiction factories have existed since books got cheap enough for the mass market.
Not saying he's wrong - I guess I'm saying he's got nobody in his life willing to shoot down his pretty arguments before they hit the Wall Street freaking Journal, and that's a little sad.
- gruseom 15y agoDickens wrote every word of his own stuff. And walked something like 20 miles a day, too -- often all the way out of London and all the way back. There was no "fiction factory" about him, just prodigious genius, and a whole lot of the best English ever written. Adams is talking about stuff like this (chosen at random): http://www.amazon.com/Against-All-Enemies-Tom-Clancy/dp/0399157301 http://www.amazon.com/Against-All-Enemies-Tom-Clancy/dp/0399.... Note the critical little "with" on the cover. Dickens' success as a bestseller proves Adams' point, not yours. If you want an example of yours, pick Stratemeyer.
- Vivtek 15y agoMy God, you're right! I hate it when my memory doesn't match reality. Pretend I said "Alexandre Dumas", then.
- gruseom 15y agoWell, now I've learned something. I had no idea that Dumas wasn't the sole author of his novels. (I'm not sure how he did it qualifies as a "factory", but perhaps it does.) Not only that, I had no idea that Dumas was the grandson of a Haitian slave. Or that Chirac had his body exhumed in 2002 and moved to the Pantheon. Best Wikipedia learnage I've had in some time! Edit: there's one interesting point about how Dumas worked. He relied on collaborators to come up with the basic plots and characters. Then he did the detailed writing and stylistic fluorish. That's exactly the opposite of how most ghostwriting works, or so I imagine.
- meric 15y agoBy definition, he was a famous ghostwriter.
- perfunctory 15y ago> he's got nobody in his life willing to shoot down his pretty arguments before they hit the Wall Street freaking Journal what about wsj's editors?
- Vivtek 15y agoThey're selling his name, not his content.