This link has been bookmarked by 42 people . It was first bookmarked on 03 May 2008, by FruFru FourOne.
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28 Sep 11
thegorgon gorgonAn attack on the growing pretentiousness of American literary prose
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20 Jan 10
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19 Jan 10
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"I thought it was forceful and impressive ... There's something about German names, the German language, German things. I don't know what it is exactly. It's just there. In the middle of it all is Hitler, of course."
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"Some people put on a uniform and feel bigger, stronger, safer"?
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Is the passage meant to be banal, in order to trap philistines into complaining about it, thereby leaving the cognoscenti to relish the irony on some postmodern level?
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Like DeLillo, Auster knows the prime rule of pseudo-intellectual writing: the harder it is to be pinned down on any idea, the easier it is to conceal that one has no ideas at all.
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This is for people who know only that nominalism has something to do with names. In fact the nominalists argued that just because words exist for generalities like humanity doesn't mean that these generalities exist. What does that have to do with Uncle Victor's talk?
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t the 1999 National Book Awards ceremony Oprah Winfrey told of calling Toni Morrison to say that she had had to puzzle over many of the latter's sentences. According to Oprah, Morrison's reply was "That, my dear, is called reading." Sorry, my dear Toni, but it's actually called bad writing. Great prose isn't always easy, but it's always lucid; no one of Oprah's intelligence ever had to wonder what Joseph Conrad was trying to say in a particular sentence.
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You don't even need to read each word, because everything comes around twice anyway: "Protean, shape-shifting"; "in twos and threes ... in twos and threes"; "complaining it was too hot with the mask on, Hey, I'm really hot!"; "as their parents tarried behind, grownups following after"; "in the costumes of televised superheroes ... kids decked out as ... superheroes."
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what Philip Larkin wanted readers of his poetry to feel: "Yes, I've never thought of it that way, but that's how it is."
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As Christopher Isherwood once said to Cyril Connolly, real talent manifests itself not in a writer's affectation but "in the exactness of his observation [and] the justice of his situations."
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25 Dec 08
Russell HannekenWhy is the most highly esteemed literature in America so boring, pretentious, and badly written?
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Clumsy writing begets clumsy thought, which begets even clumsier writing. The only way out is to look back to a time when authors had more to say than "I'm a Writer!"
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27 Oct 08
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22 Oct 08
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25 Sep 08
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Luckily for Proulx, many readers today expect literary language to be so remote from normal speech as to be routinely incomprehensible. "Strangled ways," they murmur to themselves in baffled admiration. "Now who but a Writer would think of that!"
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This may get Hass's darkly meated heart pumping, but it's really just bad poetry formatted to exploit the lenient standards of modern prose. The obscurity of who's will, which has an unfortunate Dr. Seussian ring to it, is meant to bully readers into thinking that the author's mind operates on a plane higher than their own—a plane where it isn't ridiculous to eulogize the shifts in a horse's bowels.
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It is a rare passage that can make you look up, wherever you may be, and wonder if you are being subjected to a diabolically thorough Candid Camera prank. I can just go along with the idea that horses might mistake human retching for the call of wild animals. But "wild animals" isn't epic enough: McCarthy must blow smoke about some rude provisional species, as if your average quadruped had impeccable table manners and a pension plan. Then he switches from the horses' perspective to the narrator's, though just what something imperfect and malformed refers to is unclear. The last half sentence only deepens the confusion. Is the thing smirking deep in the eyes of grace the same thing that is lodged in the heart of being? And what is a gorgon doing in a pool? Or is it peering into it? And why an autumn pool? I doubt if McCarthy can explain any of this; he probably just likes the way it sounds.
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This is the sort of writing, full of brand names and wardrobe inventories, that critics like to praise as an "edgy" take on the insanity of modern American life. It's hard to see what is so edgy about describing suburbia as a wasteland of stupefied shoppers, which is something left-leaning social critics have been doing since the 1950s.
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This sort of patronizing nonsense is typical of Consumerland writers; someone should break the news to them that the average shopper feels nothing in a supermarket but the strong urge to get out again.
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In other words, this is an America that Andy Warhol began commenting on in the 1960s, and in far more coherent fashion. Warhol even wrote better, for God's sake. But then, where would Notable New Fiction be without the willing suspension of cultural literacy?
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This is the irony of Consumerland fiction: its fans are even more helpless in the presence of authoritative posturing, and even more terrified of saying "I don't understand," than the shoppers they feel so superior to.
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It is telling that the same cultural elite that never quite "got" the British comic novel should split its sides at this.
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Like DeLillo, Auster knows the prime rule of pseudo-intellectual writing: the harder it is to be pinned down on any idea, the easier it is to conceal that one has no ideas at all.
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This is what the cultural elite wants us to believe: if our writers don't make sense, or bore us to tears, that can only mean that we aren't worthy of them.
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This is typical of today's reviewers, who shy away from discussing prose style at length, even when they are praising it as the main reason to buy a book. The reader is either told some nonsense about sentences that "slither and pounce" or given an excerpt in its own graphic box, with no commentary at all. The critic's implication: "If you can't see why that's great writing, I'm not going to waste my time trying to explain." This must succeed in bullying some people, or else all the purveyors of what the critic Paul Fussell calls the "unreadable second-rate pretentious" would have been forced to find honest work long ago. Still, I'll bet that for every three readers who finished Passaro's article, two made a mental note to avoid new short fiction like the plague. Even a nation brainwashed to equate artsiness with art knows when its eyelids are drooping.
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Clumsy writing begets clumsy thought, which begets even clumsier writing.
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08 Aug 08
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07 Aug 08
Barbara Fister"The lesson for today's literary community is so obvious that it may seem patronizing to bring it up. But if our writers and critics already respect the novel's rich tradition—if they can honestly say they got more out of Moby-Dick than just a favorite se
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28 Jul 08
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07 Jul 08
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26 May 08
Yvonne FrindleClumsy writing begets clumsy thought, which begets even clumsier writing. The only way out is to look back to a time when authors had more to say than "I'm a Writer!"
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03 May 08
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19 Mar 08
Guy PurseyImportant article on the state of (post)modern fiction.
literature novel taste writing culture fiction criticism reading myers
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29 Jan 08
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30 Dec 07
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05 Oct 07
Brady RussellThe most important essay I've ever read.
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30 Sep 07
J. DunnEverything written in self-conscious, writerly prose is now considered to be "literary fiction"—not necessarily good literary fiction, mind you, but always worthier of respectful attention than even the best-written thriller or romance.
culture culture.literature.authors culture.literature culture.commentary culture.literature.reviews ideas ideas.schadenfreude ideas.absurdity ideas.psychology ideas.psychology.madnessofcrowds ideas.skepticism philosophy philosophy.aesthetics
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08 Sep 07
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01 Sep 07
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18 Aug 07
Jason SwadleyNothing gives me the feeling of having been born several decades too late quite like the modern "literary" best seller. Give me a time-tested masterpiece or what critics patronizingly call a fun read—Sister Carrie or just plain Carrie. Give me anything,
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17 Aug 07
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