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tclancy 5 hours ago [-]
He is a completely flawed man. The books are borderline flawless (will admit when I reread them now I skip the last 2 or 3 because he clearly felt the creep of time and started killing off characters I loved deeply).
>O’Brian as “an artificer” whose work lacked the “frisson” one finds “in the presence of creative greatness”
Absolutely zero idea what that even means. The books are wonderful as escapist superhero stuff, as an entry into British history and as a study of human relationships. "Jane Austen on the high seas" isn't far from the truth. The books track an incredible friendship, a couple of hard-won marriages and the meaning of work. A lot of what I learned/ think about the management of multi-person projects is influenced by Jack Aubrey: you don't necessarily have to be right, but you have to decide if you're going to lead. And trying to manage a team larger than can fit in a longboat is a hard road to choose.
The article skips my favorite funny line, "Your friend has a singular genius for striking the wrong note."
ekelsen 3 hours ago [-]
I think the quoted sentence is basically saying his work is workman like and doesn't cause the chills that reading something truly great does.
(I don't agree)
wahern 1 hours ago [-]
I think she's betraying that her knowledge of his personal character colors her interpretation and experience of his work:
> Why, then, does his work not give me the ultimate frisson I get when I feel I am in the presence of creative greatness, and which constantly moves me as I read the pages of Leo Tolstoy? I think it is because in Tolstoy I know I am confronting fundamental truths, expressed in fiction that has grown organically out of human life, out of history, and out of the author's heart. In O'Brian, on the contrary, I am reading the work of an artificer, a contriver of genius and, well, a liar.
I think the article is not doing a good job quoting the person who said that. You can more here and most of what she says is actually in appreciation of the work itself.
> It might well be argued that if the 20 volumes of the Aubrey-Maturin cycle were to be telescoped into one book, it really would rival War and Peace as a supremely grand historical novel. O'Brian's attention to detail is astonishing, his invention never flags, his characters are rounded, his plots are compelling and he is often wonderfully merry. His saga ranges the world through many years of history, and his prose can be beautiful.
I also recognized Jack’s incredible management skills! He knows exactly how to get the best work out of people and especially how to correct them without making them feel inferior or resentful.
magicmicah85 7 hours ago [-]
I loved the Peter Weir adaptation and was always hopeful there would be more, particularly with that ending leaving it open like that. I picked up the first book recently so that I could read through it on vacation. I do tend to agree with Jan Morris in that only people who knew the author have reason to care about his personal life. Of course there are limits, and given the author has been dead for 26 years and the events he is accused of happened 70+ years ago, O'Brian can no longer atone for his past misdeeds. I'm not certain if knowing that O'Brian was a horrible family man will change my enjoyment of the first book, but that remains to be seen. I may not even get through reading it due to other factors, anyway.
I was curious if his family ever wrote about him and his son Richard Russ did in below article. I think this gives a good insight into how his son felt about his father, and particularly how his mother felt until her death.
I haven't read Master and Commander and likely never will after reading this article. I couldn't get over the bad taste in my mouth I don't think. Fortunate for you to have read the book before the article.
Too many good novels that weren't written by dispicable people.
defen 40 minutes ago [-]
I think it's a mistake to dismiss them just for that reason. He's been dead for 26 years, and you can get the books second-hand, so it's easy to acquire them while ensuring no money goes to him or his estate if that's what you're worried about. They're an absolutely fantastic set of novels, full of joy and adventure and excitement and humor and astonishing erudition.. Tom Stoppard admired him (as mentioned in the article) and Thomas Pynchon even wrote him into a brief scene in Mason & Dixon.
magarnicle 6 hours ago [-]
I think the best heuristic for separating artist from their work is: How much does the artist try to put their own personality into it?
Woody Allen films are very much soaked through with Woody Allen. I don't get the sense that O'Brian's books are to the same degree.
dwd 6 hours ago [-]
You have to question what of the person filtered through to their works.
As a teen I voraciously read my way through the Belgariad, and later the Malloreon, Elenium and the Tamuli.
Shocked to learn that Eddings and his wife were both convicted and jailed for child abuse prior to writing those novels.
ChrisMarshallNY 5 hours ago [-]
I still like those books, and, for some reason, that didn't affect me. Other people, however, have. Science fiction/fantasy has a long, turgid history of weird and unsavory authors. I tend to ignore that.
I think books have a firewall between the author and the characters on the page. Actors, however, are a different matter. They are the medium.
jay_kyburz 4 hours ago [-]
I've always enjoyed H P Lovecraft and was disappointed to learn about his racism and xenophobia. AI tells me its was way beyond what was normal at the time.
wombatpm 4 hours ago [-]
I stopped after Malloreon more because my interests changed. Finding out their history hasn’t changed anything for me. But Marion Zimmerman Bradley for some reason has and I have no desire to read any of her books ever again.
move-on-by 5 hours ago [-]
I read Atlas Shrugged recently. I went in not knowing anything about the book or author. I liked it for maybe half way through and despised it by the end. Reading about the author after finishing the book, it had a lot of her personality in it.
ridgeguy 5 hours ago [-]
Sometime in the mid-90s, after I'd read M&C and the two following books, I heard Patrick O’Brian interviewed on the radio as I was driving to work in Sunnyvale. The interview included about 20 minutes of his reading from M&C.
After listening to him read for about 30 seconds, I pulled onto the shoulder of 101 around Ames lab, shut down my car and just listened to him. I'd never before heard someone give voice to the English language in what sounded to me as such a profoundly perfect form. I remember thinking that I'd love to have heard him read Shakespeare.
I appreciate the post. I had no idea he was such a flawed person, and it's illuminating to learn that. But it doesn't affect my happy memory of hearing my native tongue (if I may claim that, even though I'm American) employed with such superlative skill.
Maybe I should look into training an AI in the audio style of Patrick O’Brian and have it read Shakespeare for me.
4 hours ago [-]
nabbed 5 hours ago [-]
>And then it all went bad. The Daily Telegraph, following up on biographical discrepancy in a BBC documentary, uncovered proof that Patrick O’Brian…was not Patrick O’Brian.
About 15 years ago, I decided to know as little as possible about the musicians/artists/writers whose work I was consuming, because I didn't want my enjoyment of their work to be influenced or spoiled by what I knew about them (even superficial things, e.g., how they looked).
I remember mentioning that to a co-worker, when discussing a band I had just learned about and enjoyed, and he pointed out that by insisting on maintaining ignorance, I could be funding a very bad person. I figured if the person was bad enough, the information would get to me somehow.
JoeDaDude 3 hours ago [-]
The "human connection to the artist" is believed to be important by some, but I disagree. People tend to create an image of a musician and are too often disappointed because, for example, they disapprove of the musician's lifestyle (the expression sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll exists for a reason), or because of disagreement with the social or political causes the musicians support. Occasionally, fans follow an artist for their commitment to their art later to discover they sell out, like their style changes to pursue mass appeal, or they sell their work to become a jingle for sugar pops or similar.
I think it is best to appreciate an artist's creation and leave it at that. To quote a film, I think it is best to "separate the art from the artist".
Nursie 3 hours ago [-]
I don't, especially when the artist flows into the art.
Take H.P. Lovecraft. Very big name in supernatural horror, created Great Cthulu and various other tropes that survive and are influential to today. Famously misogynistic and racist. Particularly on the racism side it's not really even fair to say he was 'of his time', it seems to go beyond that.
And it's all there in the fiction. Fear of the other, racist tropes about clothing and appearance and mistrust of women. The works are pretty amazing, he spins an atmosphere so well. His ideas of horrors beyond time and space are well realised (with a lot of emphasis on what is not seen) and his dreamy fantasy sequences really work and draw me into a dreamlike state. But they're all run through with racist stereotypes about people (or demons) with darker skin or racialised features.
Does this mean no Cthulu for anyone? I don't believe that's a good answer either, but I also don't believe one should consume the art in ignorance.
(And I very much enjoyed reading Lovecraft Country a few years back)
magarnicle 2 hours ago [-]
The interesting thing about Lovecraft is that, despite all those racist tropes you mentioned, he actually tried to make horror that wasn't about fear of falling down the evolutionary ladder. This idea was absolutely everywhere for at least 100 years, and Lovecraft definitely perpetuated it sometimes. But he did actually try to find horror in completely different ideas.
So, despite his own extreme personal racism, he probably managed to shift the culture away from at least one very racially-loaded trope.
the_af 2 hours ago [-]
Some authors are indeed very hard to separate from their work, and Lovecraft is one of them.
I still enjoy reading him, but I always struggle reading his passages about mongrels, halfbreeds or dark skinned people being evil or deceitful, because that's what he truly believed. So yes, it flowed into what he wrote.
A much less odious -- and better! -- writer who I also had trouble with was Jack London, who also wrote some racist descriptions of blacks and Native Americans, doubly troubling because he was a socialist.
bigstrat2003 2 hours ago [-]
> he pointed out that by insisting on maintaining ignorance, I could be funding a very bad person.
I don't consider that to be something worth worrying about. On the contrary, I find the obsession that some have with moral purity and not ever supporting the wrong type of person to be a serious mark of immaturity. Every person, without exception, is a collection of both good and bad traits. I believe that the adult thing to do is to encourage and reward the good, while discouraging and punishing the bad. When I support an artist's work, I do not thereby endorse everything that person does. I think that the desire to reduce everyone to "good guy" or "bad guy" (and acting towards them accordingly) is literally the sort of thing one would expect from a child, not an adult who has learned to have some nuance in thinking.
tecoholic 53 minutes ago [-]
Someone pointed it out to me that, if a person does something bad and faces the consequences by law, then that should be the end of it. Applying a personal punishment individually like avoiding anything they have involved in, is pointless or even unfair.
It can’t apply to all scenarios. But that struck me as an important thing to consider. Sometimes people get out of the consequences by using the riches they accumulated by being bad.
Nursie 1 hours ago [-]
I think the desire to not have to be accountable for ones choices and their effect on the world is also childlike, personally.
One of the powers we have in this capitalist world is to decide where our money goes. If there's a decent chance it'll end up perpetuating something I find massively objectionable, it's my choice not to fund that.
Beyond that it's not just about reducing everything to good or bad, it's also about understanding the context of the works you're consuming. Sometimes the author's life, prejudices and mores seep into the work, and put a new spin on the characters and scenarios.
teddyh 20 minutes ago [-]
> One of the powers we have in this capitalist world is to decide where our money goes. If there's a decent chance it'll end up perpetuating something I find massively objectionable, it's my choice not to fund that.
“I believe that almost everyone fails to completely understand how badly they need the people they can’t stand.”
Eh, I'm not watching a video to see a quote from someone I've never heard of and have no particular reason to value.
And whatever he might have to say, I'm not reliant on the work of a specific author, which is the context here.
Nor do I buy into "you can't survive without relying on/funding some people you disagree with therefore you shouldn't seek to act consistently with your own ethics in any regard" as a philosophy.
teddyh 12 minutes ago [-]
Your loss.
SanjayMehta 4 hours ago [-]
> he pointed out that by insisting on maintaining ignorance, I could be funding a very bad person
I liked Master and Commander, I still prefer C.S. Forrester’s “Hornblower” books.
Forrester is the Andy Weir of naval warfare with sailing ships. Even the tiny technical details are well researched.
BLKNSLVR 50 minutes ago [-]
I'm slowly collecting this set of novels from various second-hand book shops, and I'm looking forward to reading them in order, most likely some time in retirement. I'm happy not to know anything about the author, reading is all about the suspension of disbelief, so I will continue to let myself have that outlet.
The movie is one of my all time favourites.
DHPersonal 4 hours ago [-]
I had a similar author shock when I learned James Herriot’s books were not the autobiographies I thought they were but instead were the fictionalized compilations of stories from multiple veterinarians. I had such a great time reading the books as a young man and was dismayed to learn they weren’t authentic. I appreciated learning the truth but wondered if perhaps believing the lie would’ve been better for something relatively unimportant.
SanjayMehta 4 hours ago [-]
A practising vet introduced me to Herriot. He told me they were like PG Wodehouse but with animals.
Surely the enjoyment they provided was that counts: why stress out over "authenticity."
(Banksy comes to mind for some reason: he vandalises property over various causes and no one questions his authenticity. Does anyone think he's suffered like the caricatures he depicts?)
DHPersonal 4 hours ago [-]
I think they remain enjoyable even as fictional; I just would’ve preferred having them described that way to me at the start rather than the pretense of them being autobiographical.
the_af 2 hours ago [-]
I dunno. In the case of Herriot, whose books I utterly love, I only half believed in my teenage years they were truly autobiographical (too funny, too neat to be true), and I wasn't surprised when I found they weren't. Well, they have some tidbits from his actual life, but yeah, a blend of multiple stories, some from others, some made up.
I still believe they are undiminished as books and enjoy them from time to time.
Some things hit harder when you know stuff from his real life, for example those stories about depressed people (I remember the story of the young man who takes his own life when his dog dies, and how cheerful he seemed) and then I read the real Herriot suffered from depression. So I guess he was somewhat writing about himself?
Also, somewhat contradicting what I said above, the stories might be fictional but they ring true of the English countryside and the farmers of the transitional time Herriot describes. That the stories aren't literally true doesn't detract from that. It's a bit like what American author Tim O'Brien explores in his writings, that verosimilitude can be as important, if not more, than actual truth.
SanjayMehta 30 minutes ago [-]
I don't know if Herriot was a vet in real life. If he was and suffered from depression it wouldn't surprise me.
I have seen statistics which state that vets more likely to commit suicide than GPs.
And the story about the young man and his dog rings true. A close friend always breaks up when he remembers how he had to put down his dog due to cancer.
ChrisMarshallNY 5 hours ago [-]
That can be difficult, depending on who the "author" may be.
I still love Apple, even though Steve Jobs was a ... shall we say ... complicated ... man; but I have a problem, watching certain movies or TV shows, because the actors or producers got up to some unsavory hijinks.
SoftTalker 2 hours ago [-]
Pretty much every single person whose name is commonly known or read about in history books is complicated in that way. Some clearly have no saving graces but most have some mix of admirable and unsavory qualities, especially if you judge them in their own time.
devindotcom 7 hours ago [-]
Excellent books, full of understated spectacle and really excellent wordplay. If you get into them you may want to pick up "A Sea of Words" as a guide to some of the more esoteric terminology. Pretty much guaranteed you'll be stumped quite a few times in every book.
Insanity 6 hours ago [-]
One of the great things about reading on the Kindle is that you can just highlight the esoteric words and the dictionary will explain it to you. Or you can use wikipedia if you need more info.
It's genuinely a great feature, especially when reading in non-native languages. (Can also translate the words then as needed)
WalterBright 3 hours ago [-]
I've rarely read anything that had so many words I had never heard of!
BLKNSLVR 31 minutes ago [-]
I started reading the first book (and since stopped as I wasn't ready for the detailed nautical terminology), but one thing really jarred me was, in this section of very dry terminology when setting up a ship for sail, the use of the 'olde' terminology for 'cut splice'.
It's great that he uses the time specific terminology, but it threw me because I really wasn't expecting that word at that time.
It's become my favourite knot to reference though, because I'm still a child.
qsera 3 hours ago [-]
I want to know, or care, about zero details about an artist, except their name, (so that I can find their other works). period.
jvandonsel 5 hours ago [-]
Despite reading the entire series twice, I never understood the porcupine line. Can someone ELI5?
tclancy 4 hours ago [-]
It’s Jack talking through his hat again. I think he’s trying to determine if a woman is married or not and when it turns out they having a roving eye, he conflates “porcupine” (no idea what a porcupine-lay might be) with “concubine”.
BLKNSLVR 39 minutes ago [-]
I think "lay" might be as literal as we would use it now.
I'm afraid the examples of 'his finest comedy' are so 'dry' I'm missing it completely. My loss I guess.
BLKNSLVR 43 minutes ago [-]
You're not the only one.
I have read somewhere that there is a whole separate book that explains the nautical terminology used in the books, which was recommended as a reference to keep by ones side whilst reading the books. I wonder if it also applies to porcupine-lay or roving line.
As a percentage, most of my 'reading' has been outputs of frontier AI models. Need to increase my ratio of consuming human-written and human-produced text. Sometimes I fear drifting away from the 'core reality' of everyday life here in the US Midwest given how much I use AI.
msla 5 hours ago [-]
Forgetting the infelicities of Patrick Russ is reasonable because he's both dead and his estate isn't (to my knowledge) funneling money from the sale of his books to odious causes. Would that I could say the same about other authors.
jimbob45 3 hours ago [-]
I had no idea floccinaucihipilification was a real word. I saw it in a fake spelling bee for a commercial decades ago and assumed it was just a comically long fake word.
genghisjahn 7 hours ago [-]
[removed] made the mistake of assuming the contents of the article before reading it. My comment does not apply.
nine_k 7 hours ago [-]
To comfortably indulge in all that, inherit old money.
SV_BubbleTime 2 hours ago [-]
I find it difficult to understand the immaturity of not being able to separate the art and artist. It’s really not difficult. I think some of it is performative for signaling to one’s peers that they are on the “right side” of some issue or imagined virtue.
delis-thumbs-7e 26 minutes ago [-]
What you are doing is not maturity, but compartmentalisation. If you simply refuse to hear a single piece of evidence of, say, Michael Jackson’s pedophilia, or Roman Polanski’s repeated rape accusations, you are choosing willful ignorance, especially since often the artist’s status and fame make their criminal behaviour possible and provides them shelter from prosecution.
I myself am far from innocent of this. For more than 20 years Polanski has been, and in many ways still is, my favourite film maker. Repulsion, Tenant, Chinatown etc. are masterpieces of cinema. But they are inherently, even on plot level (at least in the case of Chinatown) intertwined with the horror of his actions. There is no virtue signalling in my personal connection to his set of work (who would even care anyway), but for me to continue pretend I know nothing about his behaviour or that it doesn’t directly inflect upon his work would be deeply dishonest.
munchler 2 hours ago [-]
It's not about immature people being unable to separate art from artist because it's difficult. The issue is whether it's the right thing to do.
I feel pretty confident that I could describe to you a case (either real or hypothetical) where you would reject an artist based on their personal behavior, rather than their art. You would find it quite difficult in such a case to separate the two.
So the question is where to draw the line, and everyone answers that question differently.
>O’Brian as “an artificer” whose work lacked the “frisson” one finds “in the presence of creative greatness”
Absolutely zero idea what that even means. The books are wonderful as escapist superhero stuff, as an entry into British history and as a study of human relationships. "Jane Austen on the high seas" isn't far from the truth. The books track an incredible friendship, a couple of hard-won marriages and the meaning of work. A lot of what I learned/ think about the management of multi-person projects is influenced by Jack Aubrey: you don't necessarily have to be right, but you have to decide if you're going to lead. And trying to manage a team larger than can fit in a longboat is a hard road to choose.
The article skips my favorite funny line, "Your friend has a singular genius for striking the wrong note."
(I don't agree)
> Why, then, does his work not give me the ultimate frisson I get when I feel I am in the presence of creative greatness, and which constantly moves me as I read the pages of Leo Tolstoy? I think it is because in Tolstoy I know I am confronting fundamental truths, expressed in fiction that has grown organically out of human life, out of history, and out of the author's heart. In O'Brian, on the contrary, I am reading the work of an artificer, a contriver of genius and, well, a liar.
From https://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/sep/03/biography (link posted elsewhere, though not before I had to resort to using ChatGPT to dredge it up).
> It might well be argued that if the 20 volumes of the Aubrey-Maturin cycle were to be telescoped into one book, it really would rival War and Peace as a supremely grand historical novel. O'Brian's attention to detail is astonishing, his invention never flags, his characters are rounded, his plots are compelling and he is often wonderfully merry. His saga ranges the world through many years of history, and his prose can be beautiful.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/sep/03/biography
I was curious if his family ever wrote about him and his son Richard Russ did in below article. I think this gives a good insight into how his son felt about his father, and particularly how his mother felt until her death.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/nov/28/fiction.film
Too many good novels that weren't written by dispicable people.
Woody Allen films are very much soaked through with Woody Allen. I don't get the sense that O'Brian's books are to the same degree.
As a teen I voraciously read my way through the Belgariad, and later the Malloreon, Elenium and the Tamuli.
Shocked to learn that Eddings and his wife were both convicted and jailed for child abuse prior to writing those novels.
I think books have a firewall between the author and the characters on the page. Actors, however, are a different matter. They are the medium.
After listening to him read for about 30 seconds, I pulled onto the shoulder of 101 around Ames lab, shut down my car and just listened to him. I'd never before heard someone give voice to the English language in what sounded to me as such a profoundly perfect form. I remember thinking that I'd love to have heard him read Shakespeare.
I appreciate the post. I had no idea he was such a flawed person, and it's illuminating to learn that. But it doesn't affect my happy memory of hearing my native tongue (if I may claim that, even though I'm American) employed with such superlative skill.
Maybe I should look into training an AI in the audio style of Patrick O’Brian and have it read Shakespeare for me.
About 15 years ago, I decided to know as little as possible about the musicians/artists/writers whose work I was consuming, because I didn't want my enjoyment of their work to be influenced or spoiled by what I knew about them (even superficial things, e.g., how they looked).
I remember mentioning that to a co-worker, when discussing a band I had just learned about and enjoyed, and he pointed out that by insisting on maintaining ignorance, I could be funding a very bad person. I figured if the person was bad enough, the information would get to me somehow.
I think it is best to appreciate an artist's creation and leave it at that. To quote a film, I think it is best to "separate the art from the artist".
Take H.P. Lovecraft. Very big name in supernatural horror, created Great Cthulu and various other tropes that survive and are influential to today. Famously misogynistic and racist. Particularly on the racism side it's not really even fair to say he was 'of his time', it seems to go beyond that.
And it's all there in the fiction. Fear of the other, racist tropes about clothing and appearance and mistrust of women. The works are pretty amazing, he spins an atmosphere so well. His ideas of horrors beyond time and space are well realised (with a lot of emphasis on what is not seen) and his dreamy fantasy sequences really work and draw me into a dreamlike state. But they're all run through with racist stereotypes about people (or demons) with darker skin or racialised features.
Does this mean no Cthulu for anyone? I don't believe that's a good answer either, but I also don't believe one should consume the art in ignorance.
(And I very much enjoyed reading Lovecraft Country a few years back)
So, despite his own extreme personal racism, he probably managed to shift the culture away from at least one very racially-loaded trope.
I still enjoy reading him, but I always struggle reading his passages about mongrels, halfbreeds or dark skinned people being evil or deceitful, because that's what he truly believed. So yes, it flowed into what he wrote.
A much less odious -- and better! -- writer who I also had trouble with was Jack London, who also wrote some racist descriptions of blacks and Native Americans, doubly troubling because he was a socialist.
I don't consider that to be something worth worrying about. On the contrary, I find the obsession that some have with moral purity and not ever supporting the wrong type of person to be a serious mark of immaturity. Every person, without exception, is a collection of both good and bad traits. I believe that the adult thing to do is to encourage and reward the good, while discouraging and punishing the bad. When I support an artist's work, I do not thereby endorse everything that person does. I think that the desire to reduce everyone to "good guy" or "bad guy" (and acting towards them accordingly) is literally the sort of thing one would expect from a child, not an adult who has learned to have some nuance in thinking.
It can’t apply to all scenarios. But that struck me as an important thing to consider. Sometimes people get out of the consequences by using the riches they accumulated by being bad.
One of the powers we have in this capitalist world is to decide where our money goes. If there's a decent chance it'll end up perpetuating something I find massively objectionable, it's my choice not to fund that.
Beyond that it's not just about reducing everything to good or bad, it's also about understanding the context of the works you're consuming. Sometimes the author's life, prejudices and mores seep into the work, and put a new spin on the characters and scenarios.
“I believe that almost everyone fails to completely understand how badly they need the people they can’t stand.”
— Jason K. Pargin: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3GzrYI8Tj4>
- Kermit The Frog: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRZ-IxZ46ng>
Eh, I'm not watching a video to see a quote from someone I've never heard of and have no particular reason to value.
And whatever he might have to say, I'm not reliant on the work of a specific author, which is the context here.
Nor do I buy into "you can't survive without relying on/funding some people you disagree with therefore you shouldn't seek to act consistently with your own ethics in any regard" as a philosophy.
Does your friend use a smartphone?
He could be funding very bad people.
https://voiceofenvironment.com/2019/06/21/conflict-minerals-...
Forrester is the Andy Weir of naval warfare with sailing ships. Even the tiny technical details are well researched.
The movie is one of my all time favourites.
Surely the enjoyment they provided was that counts: why stress out over "authenticity."
(Banksy comes to mind for some reason: he vandalises property over various causes and no one questions his authenticity. Does anyone think he's suffered like the caricatures he depicts?)
I still believe they are undiminished as books and enjoy them from time to time.
Some things hit harder when you know stuff from his real life, for example those stories about depressed people (I remember the story of the young man who takes his own life when his dog dies, and how cheerful he seemed) and then I read the real Herriot suffered from depression. So I guess he was somewhat writing about himself?
Also, somewhat contradicting what I said above, the stories might be fictional but they ring true of the English countryside and the farmers of the transitional time Herriot describes. That the stories aren't literally true doesn't detract from that. It's a bit like what American author Tim O'Brien explores in his writings, that verosimilitude can be as important, if not more, than actual truth.
I have seen statistics which state that vets more likely to commit suicide than GPs.
And the story about the young man and his dog rings true. A close friend always breaks up when he remembers how he had to put down his dog due to cancer.
I still love Apple, even though Steve Jobs was a ... shall we say ... complicated ... man; but I have a problem, watching certain movies or TV shows, because the actors or producers got up to some unsavory hijinks.
It's genuinely a great feature, especially when reading in non-native languages. (Can also translate the words then as needed)
It's great that he uses the time specific terminology, but it threw me because I really wasn't expecting that word at that time.
It's become my favourite knot to reference though, because I'm still a child.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lay
See 3b under its noun definition.
I have read somewhere that there is a whole separate book that explains the nautical terminology used in the books, which was recommended as a reference to keep by ones side whilst reading the books. I wonder if it also applies to porcupine-lay or roving line.
I just ran it past an LLM and it provided a decent explanation. Also see @tclancy's reply to @jvandonsel: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49149969
As a percentage, most of my 'reading' has been outputs of frontier AI models. Need to increase my ratio of consuming human-written and human-produced text. Sometimes I fear drifting away from the 'core reality' of everyday life here in the US Midwest given how much I use AI.
I myself am far from innocent of this. For more than 20 years Polanski has been, and in many ways still is, my favourite film maker. Repulsion, Tenant, Chinatown etc. are masterpieces of cinema. But they are inherently, even on plot level (at least in the case of Chinatown) intertwined with the horror of his actions. There is no virtue signalling in my personal connection to his set of work (who would even care anyway), but for me to continue pretend I know nothing about his behaviour or that it doesn’t directly inflect upon his work would be deeply dishonest.
I feel pretty confident that I could describe to you a case (either real or hypothetical) where you would reject an artist based on their personal behavior, rather than their art. You would find it quite difficult in such a case to separate the two.
So the question is where to draw the line, and everyone answers that question differently.