From: ian@airs.com (Ian Lance Taylor)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.comics.misc
Subject: Re: Sandman Thoughts!!!
Date: 24 Jan 93 17:06:00 GMT
Organization: Infinity Development, Waltham, MA

arromdee@godel.cs.jhu.edu (Ken Arromdee) writes:

>In article <6285@comton.airs.com> ian@airs.com (Ian Lance Taylor) writes:
>>I can assert the truth of the Odyssey while denying the actual
>>existence of Odysseus, Penelope and Telemachus, to say nothing of
>>Polyphemus.

>I thought I covered this already.  In fact, I'm sure of it.  The kind of truth
>that you are talking about is not the kind of truth relevant to my criticism.
>If Sandman _is_ true in that sense, so what?  That doesn't mitigate the other
>problems.

I'm saying that the sense of ``true'' that you are using is not
relevant to Sandman.  You seem to be saying that the sense of ``true''
I am using is not relevant to your criticism, even though it hinged on
the notion of ``truth''.  So perhaps I do not understand your
criticism.  I just reread your previous posts with the same subject
line, and it did not become any clearer.

Basically, I think you're approaching the story in the wrong way.  I'm
trying to point out a way in which Sandman is not incoherent.  Your
response seems to be that under your definitions, it is incoherent.
Maybe I misunderstand, or maybe you are using the wrong definitions.

At the risk of being overly pedantic, consider The Autumn of the
Patriarch by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.  It combines fantastic elements
with mundane reality.  I read enough SF that while reading it I tried
to make sense of it, but, not surprisingly, I failed.  However, I
understood that I was looking at the novel the wrong way, and even
though I could not avoid this view, it did not spoil my enjoyment of
the novel at all.

In an earlier post, you said:

   You can _say_ "the world was created 5000 years ago, but was not
   created 5000 years ago", but the words, put together, don't _mean_
   anything.

I can think of a whole range of meanings for such a sentence, though
it is quite possible that none of them would satisfy you.

>>If this prevents you from enjoying the story, then you shouldn't read
>>the story.  Not everybody has to like everything.

>It's odd that when I criticize something like LSH, nobody tells me "if you
>don't like it, stop reading it, but shut up about it".  Yet I find it difficult
>to read the above as other than exactly that, applied to Sandman.  Why can I not
>continue to verbalize my problems with Sandman just as with any other comic?

You can, of course, and I apologize for any implication that you could
not.  Specifically, I did not at all say that you should shut up about
it.  What I said was that if you do not like it, if you find it
incoherent, if this spoils your enjoyment of the story, then you don't
have to read it.  If those premises are not true, then go right ahead
and keep reading it.  And if you don't like the story, but you do like
criticizing it, then go ahead with that too.

That is all obvious, of course, but I know that if many people like a
comic I often feel compelled to read it myself.  It can be very
difficult for me to acknowledge that sometimes I just don't like
things, even if they are considered to be good.  For example, it took
me a while to figure out that I don't like Mike Grell's work; once I
did, I simply stopped buying it.
-- 
Ian Taylor | ian@airs.com | First to identify quote wins free e-mail message:
``Never judge someone by who he's in love with; judge him by his friends.
  People fall in love with the most appalling people.  Take a cool,
  appraising glance at his pals.''