Game of Thrones begins....

[Admiral Yi]

I'll say this for Rushdie. His wife is seriously hot. No wonder he looks so pleased with himself.

Ew.  That nose didn't look good on Michael Jackson and it doesn't look good on this broad either.

[Gups]

I'll say this for Rushdie. His wife is seriously hot. No wonder he looks so pleased with himself.

Ew.  That nose didn't look good on Michael Jackson and it doesn't look good on this broad either.

Didn't really look above the neck but yeah, internet standards FTW

[Syt]

I think it achieves pretty much exactly what it was meant to be in fact. They are not going for Shakespeare.

I guess I don't think describing it as trashy is necessarily a huge negative. It can be both trashy and damn good, even trashy and sophisticated.

You cannot really argue though that a TV show that includes whores flashing their crotch at people, lesbian sex scenes, a couple instances of incest, and plenty of over the top violence is not trashy though.

I suppose if we simply re-define the concept "trashy" then GoT is trashy.  But so is every other series you named, because they appealed to emotion like GoT does.  They are less trashy than GoT by that measure, but still trashy.

Or, maybe, we should reject the concept of "trashy" as a valid measure of TV show quality and recognize that it is simply the label that a snob applied to work not like his own.  I think accepting Rushdie's labeling system adds nothing to the debate.  He is a smart guy but not very introspective, and certainly not a man who can complain about the fiction work of others; he wrote some very good philosophically-inclined  works, but he doesn't understand character or plot and I find the idea of him writing for TV or movies to be questionable, at best.

Is GoT deliberately over the top in places?  Sure.  Does that make it bad TV?  No, it makes it good TV, because TV is about showing and not telling, and GoT doesn't hold back when it comes to showing.  I think I enjoyed the show even more than the book, and I enjoyed the book a lot.

Well, with his:

It was garbage, yet very addictive garbage - because there's lots of violence, all the women take their clothes off all the time, and it's kind of fun.In the end, it's well-produced trash, but there's room for that, too.

I think he's saying that GoT is good entertainment, and that there's a market for this, but that it's not anything deep or life changing. His opinion seems snobbish and very discriminating and reminds me a lot of the rigid distcinction in Germany between E (ernst = serious, i.e. artistic and high culture pretences) and U (Unterhaltung = entertainment). I think  both miss the point that any media product (books/stories, movies, tv shows, music, games etc.) can merge those two distinctions and that some defy classification (especially games fall invariably into the "U" category in Germany).

[The Brain]

His criticism (if that's what it is) is pretty rich coming from an author whose claim to fame has nothing to do with the quality of his work.

[Gups]

His criticism (if that's what it is) is pretty rich coming from an author whose claim to fame has nothing to do with the quality of his work.

He was as famous before the fatwa as any other living lietrary writer.

[The Brain]

His criticism (if that's what it is) is pretty rich coming from an author whose claim to fame has nothing to do with the quality of his work.

He was as famous before the fatwa as any other living lietrary writer.

No.

[KRonn]

I just started reading Dance with Dragons. Too early to comment much but I like so far what I've read of the main characters.

[Gups]

Yes. Midnight's Children was massive. Huge sales, loads of awards (incluidng the Booker), tons of press attention and a lawsuit from Indira.

[Martinus]

Appeals to generally very base entertainment values, like sex and violence. Is largely driven by a very negative story, and the appeal is mostly about watching bad people doing nasty things to one another.

If that's what defines trash, then this also applies to the Illiad or Hamlet.

[Martinus]

Anyway, all of this proves that maybe we were wrong about Rushdie. Maybe the muslims want to kill him not because he is a blasphemer, but because he is a giant douche?

Let's see if he can dodge the fatwa from the Mountain that Writes.

[Syt]

Anyway, all of this proves that maybe we were wrong about Rushdie. Maybe the muslims want to kill him not because he is a blasphemer, but because he is a giant douche?

Hey, wait a sec.

my claim is that no matter what you think about Steve Jobs in terms of his greatness, his personality should not enter the picture at all

Shouldn't this apply to Rushdie, too?

[Martinus]

Anyway, all of this proves that maybe we were wrong about Rushdie. Maybe the muslims want to kill him not because he is a blasphemer, but because he is a giant douche?

Hey, wait a sec.

my claim is that no matter what you think about Steve Jobs in terms of his greatness, his personality should not enter the picture at all

Shouldn't this apply to Rushdie, too?

You are confusing two things here. Whether Rushdie is an asshole or not has no bearing on my judgement of him as a writer or an artist or a "great man" (or not). It may have bearing on me wanting him to be killed, though.

[Josquius]

GoT had a lot of violence?
If only it were so

[viper37]

Art? I don't know about that, but I can certainly list plenty of TV shows that were not as trashy as GoT.

Babylon 5. Firefly. Six Feet Under. Carnival. Frasier. MASH. Sports Night. News Radio. Hill Street Blues.

I could go on, those are just a few that pop into my head as being considerably less trashy than GoT, where the appeal is at least trying to be based on something a little bit more cerebral.

I wonder, if GoT is "trash", were would that leave Spartacus?

[Scipio]

Shame about Rushdie.  He used to appear more reflective, especially his acknowledgement that The Satanic Verses is a fucking terrible book, as a text.

GoT is pretty poorly written, especially considering how good Martin is as an editor and a writer for TV.  He needs an editor as good as he is an editor, to edit him.

Still, he's metric fucktons better than Jordan or Sanderson, whose supposed best book is so turgid I couldn't make it past the first ten pages.

And I read Stephenson, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky for fun.