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Notes -
Cultural war and cultural revolution continues, as it should.
Revolution has a beginning, but it has no end.
And the newest battle is the most ancient, Homer's - and Christopher Nolan’s - Odyssey.
Many are happy, many are unhappy, and among the latter is world's richest man, as expected.
Elon was unhappy so much that he promised to rifle through his pockets for some spare change and give Mel Gibson $100 million to remake Odyssey in fully authentic and historically accurate way, with Greek actors and spoken in proper Homeric Greek.
Then, the next day, he changed his mind. Directors - and actors - are as obsolete as draft horses, Grok can do it all alone and cheaper.
If it happens, would it make a difference? Elite Mottizen human capital had been talking and daydreaming for a long time about potential of money to change the world. If only we were rich men!
The real life billionaire and centi millionaire activism is not encouraging but we can always dream how we will do it right!
edit: links
My hot take is that The Iliad and The Odyssey just aren't very good. I'm sure they were great works for their time, but we are so much better at storytelling nowadays. Not to mention that poetry in translation is uniformly awful.
Speaking of storytelling, have I ever posted my "modernism is self-limiting" take on the declining quality of art? The reason modern stories are bad is exactly because we are so much better at storytelling nowadays.
I don’t recall, but I agree, so link to it or post it!
Since the search turned up nothing, this is the idea in a gist:
Premodern people were unselfconscious creators. They drew images, told stories, played music without thinking why one work was better than the other. Memetic evolution ensured that only the best examples survived till present.
Later, people started thinking about art on a meta level. Call this change the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, or modernism, but no matter the name, people started thinking about their cultural output in terms of analysis and synthesis. What are the common traits all these stories have? Why is this image more lifelike that that one? What makes this song so catchy? Why does every culture have fertility rites? You tease apart works of art, you learn their overall structure, the nature of every link, and then you can create the best story or song or image ever by picking the best option at every stage.
This approach identifies the truth, but not the whole truth about the quality of art. This is why, when you consciously maximize the quality of each part of your movie, you first end up with Star Wars, and then with a summer blockbuster. Can you make a better movie than the latest capeshit? Sure you can, but you can't do it by consciously following the same blueprint.
Postmodernism is the highbrow answer to this problem. Instead of trying to write a 99.99% perfect story to top a 99.9% perfect story, you simply write a story that is deliberately, obviously imperfect. You take the same blueprint that everyone uses, and remove something previously considered load bearing. Bam, you've masterfully executed the blue ocean strategy, your work of art is now completely novel and novelty is as good as quality these days.
Where does this leave us? Our only hope is people that don't know what they are doing, that don't follow existing paths or deliberately tread on the grass. They simply create what they want, and the result might be a point in the space of possibilities that is both good and hitherto unexplored! Can art theorists come up with a new theory that lets us identify these points in advance, some kind of TRIZ for art? I don't know, but I want to see them try. If they succeed, we'll be able to use AIs to create truly novel and good art, instead of them trying to climb the same mountain of modernism as humans.
Related: my opinion that GRRM's failure to end ASOIAF undermines his positioning the work as a critique of Tolkien. You can write the beginning of an interesting story that deals with "Aragorn's Tax Policy" and the grimdark of a fantasy setting...but you can't write the ending, because a satisfying ending to the work GRRM began is impossible, it's ultimately sterile in that way.
I disagree. Joe Abercrombie did it (and then he wrote three superb follow-up spinoffs, and then for an encore he did it again). I think you could argue Tad Williams did it before Martin ever put pen to paper.
I think the actual problem is that GRRM is just undisciplined and demoralized (and tbf, if I was in his position I would be as well), having written himself into a much more pedestrian corner involving too many loose plot threads rather than anything to do with the thematic aspect of his work. Another problem is that GRRM isn't actually all that grim dark. ASOIAF can be quite cynical and/or "realistic" at times, but it is shot through with a heavy strain of romanticism and that undermines critique-of-Tolkien angle. He can't square the circle between what he wants to write and what he has written thus far implies.
I think he had an idea, back at the very start, of what he wanted to do and where he wanted to go. Worldbuilding is not his forte so he didn't stress too much about "how do seasons/dragons/magic work?"
Then as he went along over the years, he started writing side-quests and new characters (because I do think he gets bored trying to stick to the outline) and that meant he wrote himself into several corners, with no idea how to get out of them, and the original ending is now badly outdated but he can't create a new one because he's tangled up with too many plot threads and new characters.
He did give an unmerciful hostage to fortune with that crack about Aragorn's tax policy, even if it was meant as a joke, because dude. You can't even figure out how your damn seasons work, and that's more important than tax freakin' policies. He was trying to say he would be more realistic (translation: write the smexy with rape and incest and bare boobies all over the place and also gory violence and torture, just like Real Adult Writing) than Tolkien's work, but that only works if you the reader need descriptions of bare boobies and gut-ripping every five pages or you get bored.
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