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I'm extremely suspicious of claims to "timelesness" as applied to works written within living memory. You're a generation, perhaps two, away from these authors... they speak in the register of your parents and grandparents, and tell stories that would have seemed perfectly current to them. That's not timelessness, that's a nostalgic affection held for the subjects of sepia photographs. Maybe there's something at the core of their stories that will survive the ages, but to the modern youth the language they used and the values in their works are already at as far of a remove as Victory Hugo and Mary Shelley would have been to you. Entertaining, perhaps, for their distance from the present-- but otherwise largely inapplicable to their current concerns.
As for the Vorkosigan Saga and the Dresden files-- I've checked both out, and they were okay, but they also had this unnameable and unpleasant millenial quality. As when my older nerd friends have variously tried to get me into star wars, monty python, doctor who, etcetera... I could understand what once made those works appealing, and yet found myself feeling mostly cold in their aftermath. I can't even blame anything reasonable like dialog, or pacing, or plot structure, for my aversion... I think it's something much more granular in the storytelling, that sits below my conscious awareness and yet blares like a some sort of chronometric siren for unwanted time-travel.
That argument doesn't really make much sense to me, considering that Hugo and Shelley are considered classics of literature that many people (young or otherwise) enjoy to this day.
Given the ever-dropping number of young and old readers, I would say that this isn't the argument you think it is. "Everyone I know who saw the supergirl movie is woke!" "Everyone I know who likes books is fine with reading old ones?"
Well, who are you catering too?
I do not see how this reply is relevant to what I said. Your argument that I responded to (paraphrased) was "those books are old, comparable to [other old books], therefore kids are going to be disinterested". But books being old has never precluded interest in them before, even from kids. Therefore, books from the 20th century being old doesn't seem likely to preclude interest in them now.
This is factually wrong and you know it. You can defend the bailey that people will not lose literally all interest in a novel simply because it is old, but cannot defend the motte that a novel's age has literally no relationship to the amount of interest people have in it. Yes, kids aren't going to be totally disinterested in old books-- but in proportion to the age and irrelevance of the novels they find on shelves, they will less interested.
You have reversed the positions of motte and bailey. The motte is the more defensible claim, as the literal motte was the stronger fortification to retreat to if the literal bailey fell.
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He has a much stronger factual basis than you realize. You see it a lot more in music where older things are more popular than current things. Also very true with movie stars where it feels like we haven’t had a new movie star in 20 years. There are areas in the arts where we basically decided to freeze in time.
Personally I feel like most of the books I’ve read in my life are older. But in general the current popular book are aimed at the mass market which would exclude most people here. For the top 5-10% intellects you likely do need to read the great novels.
I think our respective preferences for media and novelty are just going to make it impossible for us to see eye-to-eye here. I mostly watch new movies, and while I almost never delete new songs from my spotify consistently 90% of the stuff I add was released in the past 5-10 years. (It helps that I have an affinity for screechy electronica created by trans autist furries born post-2005.) I can't categorically deny that men have a preference for older media, and I can't categorically deny that that has zero impact on buying patterns and therefore the propensity of publishers to target men... but the fact that you are asserting this via personal anecdotes instead of providing me proof via data makes me suspect that this effect, if it exists, is small and hard to measure... and consequently strongly dominated by the effect I have proposed, which I can back with independently-replicated statistical results. (Someone else in this thread wrote a script to filter profiles and feed them to their ai for judgement and binning on gender.)
@hydroacetalene this is also a response to your comment here https://www.themotte.org/post/3884/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/470522?context=8#context
What data are you proposing?
There have been plenty of articles out over the last decade showing people are listening to older music. Articles have been written about the aging moving star for a decade to the point it’s a cliche now. Tom Cruise is still the leading action movie actor now and he’s 64. I am lazy to look up the data but it’s out there. You also didn’t quote data.
One example article. Maybe Chalamet is breaking out now, but I’ve never watched one of his movies.
https://www.theguardian.com/focus/2023/may/28/why-film-stars-are-getting-older-and-what-it-tells-us-about-hollywoods-new-struggle
I would be very interested in seeing this if it's based on some kind of empirical data. However, with reference to the actor claim:
This sounds like a vibe check someone came up with for clicks, not a data-driven insight. Especially given that we arguably have a greater proportion of people occupying themselves with the output of young thespians ever-- they're just disproportionately engaged in reaction videos, prank videos, toy unboxing videos, etc. instead of relatively highbrow hollywood movies. I say "arguably" because I know that my opinion on this is equally driven by unsubstantiated vibe checks, but again, that's my exact point... that we can find endless amounts of anecdotes or just-so stories in either direction, but that numerically it's hard to find worthwhile information.
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I know no such thing. I think you are way off base, though I wouldn't go so far as to say it is a fact you are incorrect as I don't have hard evidence. But neither have you provided a basis in fact for your claim, so I guess we are just going to have to agree to disagree here.
Before we agree to disagree... can we actually agree on what we're disagreeing on? Do you deny any of the following statements:
?
These are the statements that I derive my assertions about popularity being at least linked to (though not wholly determined by) currency.
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