deadken posted:
im fuckign, fuckign, frederic jameson

sweet, tie this in w/conspiracy theory and you really go places

The writer who cares chiefly or exclusively about language is poorly equipped for novel-writing in the usual sense because his character and personality are wrong for writing novels. Those who inordinately love words as words are of a character type distinct enough, at least in broad outline, to be recognizable almost at a glance. Words seem inevitably to distance us from the brute existents (real trees, stones, yawling babies) that words symbolize and, in our thought processes, tend to replace. At any rate, so philosophers like Hobbes, Nietzsche, and Heidegger have maintained, and our experience with punsters seems to confirm the opinion. When a man makes a pun in a social situation, no one present can doubt—however we may admire the punster and the pun —that the punster has momentarily drawn back, disengaging himself, making connections he could not think of if he were fully involved in the social moment. For example, if we are admiring the art treasures of a family named Cheuse and the punster remarks, "Beggars can't be Cheuses!" we know at once that the punster is not peering deeply and admiringly into the Turner landscape at hand. The person profoundly in love with words may make an excellent poet, composer of crossword puzzles, or Scrabble player; he may write novel-like things which a select group admires; but he will probably not in the end prove a first-rate novelist.

For several reasons (first, because of his personality, which keeps the world of brute existence at arm's length), he is not likely to feel passionate attachment to the ordinary, mainstream novel. The novel's unashamed engagement with the world—the myriad details that make character come alive, the sustained fascination with the gossip surrounding the lives of imaginary beings, the naive emphasis on what happened next and what, precisely, the weather was that day—all these are likely to seem, to the word fanatic, silly and tedious; he feels himself buried in litter. And no one is much inclined to spend days, weeks, years, imitating an existence he does not really like in the first place. The word fanatic may love certain very special, highly intellectual novelists (Stendhal, Flaubert, Robbe-Grillet, the Joyce of Finnegans Wake, possibly Nabokov), but he is likejy to admire only for their secondary qualities novelists whose chief strength is the hurly-burly of vividly imitated reality (Dickens, Stevenson, Tolstoy, Melville, Bellow). I do not mean that the person primarily interested in linguistic artifice is blocked from all appreciation of good books whose main appeal comes from character and action; nor do I mean that, because by nature he distances himself from actuality, he is too icy of heart to love his wife and children. I mean only that his admiration of the mainstream novel is not likely to be sufficient to drive him to extend the tradition. If he's lucky enough to live in an aristocratic age, or if he can find the sanctuary of an aesthetic coterie—a walled enclave from which the great, fly-switching herd of humanity is excluded— the artificer may be able to work his quirky wonders. In a democratic age served largely by commercial publishers, only extraordinary ego and stubbornness can keep him going. We may all agree (and then again we may not) that the specialized fiction he writes is worthwhile; but to the extent that he suspects that his time and place are unworthy of his genius, to the extent that he feels detached from the concerns of the herd, or feels that his ideal is either meaningless or invisible to most of humanity, his will is undermined. Not caring much about the kind of novel most experienced and well-educated readers like to read, and not deeply in love with his special coterie—since ironic distance is part of his nature, perhaps even deep, misanthropic distrust like Flaubert's—he manages to bring out, in his lifetime, only one or two books. Or none.

The writer with the worst odds—the person to whom one at once says, "I don't think so"—is the writer whose feel for language seems incorrigibly perverted. The most obvious example is the writer who cannot move without the help of such phrases as "with a merry twinkle in her eye," or "the adorable twins," or "his hearty, booming laugh"—dead expressions, the cranked-up zombie emotion of a writer who feels nothing in his daily life or nothing he trusts enough to find his own words for, so that he turns instead to "she stifled a sob," "friendly lopsided smile," "cocking an eyebrow in that quizzical way he had," "his broad shoulders," "his encircling arm," "a faint smile curving her lips," "his voice was husky," "her face framed by auburn curls."

The trouble with such language is not only that it is cliché (worn out, overused); but also that it is symptomatic of a crippling psychological set. We all develop linguistic masks (arrays of verbal habits) with which to deal with the world; different masks for different occasions. And one of the most successful masks known, at least for dealing with troublesome situations, is the Christian Pollyanna mask embodied and atrophied in phrases like those I've mentioned. Why the mask turns up more often in writing than in normal speaking—why, that is, the art of writing becomes a way of prettifying and tranquilizing reality—I cannot say, unless it has to do with how writing is taught, in our early years, as a form of good manners, and also perhaps with the emphasis our first teachers give to the goody-goody (or taming) emotions fashionable in school readers. In any event, the Pollyanna mask, if it cannot be torn off, will spell ruin for the novelist. People who regularly seek to feel the bland optimism the Pollyanna mask supports cannot help developing a vested interest in seeing, speaking, and feeling as they do—with two results: they lose the power to see accurately, and they lose the power to communicate with any but those who see and feel in the same benevolently distorted way. Once one has made a strong psychological investment in a certain kind of language, one has trouble understanding that it distorts reality, and also trouble understanding how others—in this case those who take a more cautious or warily ironic view—can be so blind. No one with a distorted view of reality can write good novels, because as we read we measure fictional worlds against the real world. Fiction elaborated out of attitudes we find childish or tiresome in life very soon becomes tiresome.

The Pollyanna mask is only one among many common evasions of reality. Consider a few lines by a well-known science fiction writer:

It's not often people will tell you how they really feel about gut-level things. Like god or how they're afraid they'll go insane like their grandfather or sex or how obnoxious you are when you pick your nose and wipe it on your pants. They play cozy with you, because nobody likes to be hated, and large doses of truth from any one mouth tend to make the wearer of the mouth persona non grata. Particularly if he's caught you picking your nose and wiping it on your pants. Even worse if he catches you eating it.

This is not the Pollyanna style favored by hack writers of the twenties and thirties but the hack-writer style that superseded it, disPollyanna. Sunny optimism, with its fondness for italics, gives way to an ill-founded cynicism, also supported by italics ("It's not often people will tell you how they really feel"), and "broad shoulders" give way to "gut-level things," or worse. Sentence fragments become common (a standard means of falsely heightening the emotion of what one says), and commas disappear ("grandfather or sex or how obnoxious you are") in rhetorical imitation of William Faulkner, who was also on thin ice. (Dropping commas is all right except if one's purpose is to increase the rush of the sentence and thus suggest emotion not justified by what is being said.) Instead of giving "friendly lopsided smiles" people "play cozy with you," which means that they're false, unreal, not even the owners (just the wearers) of their mouths. (The same stock depersonalization of human beings gives cheap detective fiction one of its favorite rhetorical devices, the transformation of "the man in the gray suit" to "Gray Suit," and the man in the sharkskin to "Sharkskin," as in "Gray Suit looks over at Sharkskin. 'Piss off,' he says." This tends to happen even in fairly good detective fiction. It's hard to rise above your class.) Crude jokes and images, slang phrases borrowed from foreign languages, are all stock in disPollyanna fiction—in an attempt to shock prudes. No one is shocked, of course, though a few may misread their annoyance as shock. One is annoyed because the whole thing is phony, an imitation of things too often imitated before. The problem with such writers, it ought to be mentioned, is not that they are worse people than those who wrote in Pollyanna. They are almost exactly the same people: idealists, people who simple-mindedly long for goodness, justice, and sanity; the difference is one of style. This same science fiction writer's character Jack the Ripper reacts in howling moral outrage when he learns how the Utopians have made him their plaything:

A psychopath, a butcher, a lecher, a hypocrite, a clown.
"You did this to me! Why did you do this?"
Frenzy cloaked his words. . . .

A young writer firmly hooked on bad science fiction, or the worst of the hard-boiled detective school, or tell-it-like-it-is so-called serious fiction, fashionably interpreting all experience as crap, may get published, if he works hard, but the odds are that he'll never be an artist. That may not bother him much. Hack writers are sometimes quite successful, even admired. But so far as I can see, they are of slight value to humanity.

Both Pollyanna and disPollyanna limit the writer in the same ways, leading him to miss and simplify experience, and cutting him off from all but fellow believers. Marxist language can have the same effects, or the argot of the ashram, or computer talk ("input"), or the weary metaphors of the businessand- law world ("where the cheese starts to bind"). When one runs across a student whose whole way of seeing and whose emotional security seem dependent on adherence to a given style of language, one has reason to worry.

lungfish posted:
I read On Writing but it didn't really help me much. Can't say I agreed with his pet peeves either. His emphasis on writing all the time discourages me too, because few people have the obsession with writing he's had since a young age.

At the end of the day Stephen King's writing doesn't inspire me a whole lot so I don't know why I read a book by him on how to write.

Well you're a pathetic and useless idiot so that figures!

babyfinland posted:
lungfish posted:
I read On Writing but it didn't really help me much. Can't say I agreed with his pet peeves either. His emphasis on writing all the time discourages me too, because few people have the obsession with writing he's had since a young age.

At the end of the day Stephen King's writing doesn't inspire me a whole lot so I don't know why I read a book by him on how to write.


Well you're a pathetic and useless idiot so that figures!

certum est quia impossibile

i disagree

babyfinland posted:

The writer who cares chiefly or exclusively about language is poorly equipped for novel-writing in the usual sense because his character and personality are wrong for writing novels. Those who inordinately love words as words are of a character type distinct enough, at least in broad outline, to be recognizable almost at a glance. Words seem inevitably to distance us from the brute existents (real trees, stones, yawling babies) that words symbolize and, in our thought processes, tend to replace. At any rate, so philosophers like Hobbes, Nietzsche, and Heidegger have maintained, and our experience with punsters seems to confirm the opinion. When a man makes a pun in a social situation, no one present can doubt—however we may admire the punster and the pun —that the punster has momentarily drawn back, disengaging himself, making connections he could not think of if he were fully involved in the social moment. For example, if we are admiring the art treasures of a family named Cheuse and the punster remarks, "Beggars can't be Cheuses!" we know at once that the punster is not peering deeply and admiringly into the Turner landscape at hand. The person profoundly in love with words may make an excellent poet, composer of crossword puzzles, or Scrabble player; he may write novel-like things which a select group admires; but he will probably not in the end prove a first-rate novelist.

For several reasons (first, because of his personality, which keeps the world of brute existence at arm's length), he is not likely to feel passionate attachment to the ordinary, mainstream novel. The novel's unashamed engagement with the world—the myriad details that make character come alive, the sustained fascination with the gossip surrounding the lives of imaginary beings, the naive emphasis on what happened next and what, precisely, the weather was that day—all these are likely to seem, to the word fanatic, silly and tedious; he feels himself buried in litter. And no one is much inclined to spend days, weeks, years, imitating an existence he does not really like in the first place. The word fanatic may love certain very special, highly intellectual novelists (Stendhal, Flaubert, Robbe-Grillet, the Joyce of Finnegans Wake, possibly Nabokov), but he is likejy to admire only for their secondary qualities novelists whose chief strength is the hurly-burly of vividly imitated reality (Dickens, Stevenson, Tolstoy, Melville, Bellow). I do not mean that the person primarily interested in linguistic artifice is blocked from all appreciation of good books whose main appeal comes from character and action; nor do I mean that, because by nature he distances himself from actuality, he is too icy of heart to love his wife and children. I mean only that his admiration of the mainstream novel is not likely to be sufficient to drive him to extend the tradition. If he's lucky enough to live in an aristocratic age, or if he can find the sanctuary of an aesthetic coterie—a walled enclave from which the great, fly-switching herd of humanity is excluded— the artificer may be able to work his quirky wonders. In a democratic age served largely by commercial publishers, only extraordinary ego and stubbornness can keep him going. We may all agree (and then again we may not) that the specialized fiction he writes is worthwhile; but to the extent that he suspects that his time and place are unworthy of his genius, to the extent that he feels detached from the concerns of the herd, or feels that his ideal is either meaningless or invisible to most of humanity, his will is undermined. Not caring much about the kind of novel most experienced and well-educated readers like to read, and not deeply in love with his special coterie—since ironic distance is part of his nature, perhaps even deep, misanthropic distrust like Flaubert's—he manages to bring out, in his lifetime, only one or two books. Or none.

The writer with the worst odds—the person to whom one at once says, "I don't think so"—is the writer whose feel for language seems incorrigibly perverted. The most obvious example is the writer who cannot move without the help of such phrases as "with a merry twinkle in her eye," or "the adorable twins," or "his hearty, booming laugh"—dead expressions, the cranked-up zombie emotion of a writer who feels nothing in his daily life or nothing he trusts enough to find his own words for, so that he turns instead to "she stifled a sob," "friendly lopsided smile," "cocking an eyebrow in that quizzical way he had," "his broad shoulders," "his encircling arm," "a faint smile curving her lips," "his voice was husky," "her face framed by auburn curls."

The trouble with such language is not only that it is cliché (worn out, overused); but also that it is symptomatic of a crippling psychological set. We all develop linguistic masks (arrays of verbal habits) with which to deal with the world; different masks for different occasions. And one of the most successful masks known, at least for dealing with troublesome situations, is the Christian Pollyanna mask embodied and atrophied in phrases like those I've mentioned. Why the mask turns up more often in writing than in normal speaking—why, that is, the art of writing becomes a way of prettifying and tranquilizing reality—I cannot say, unless it has to do with how writing is taught, in our early years, as a form of good manners, and also perhaps with the emphasis our first teachers give to the goody-goody (or taming) emotions fashionable in school readers. In any event, the Pollyanna mask, if it cannot be torn off, will spell ruin for the novelist. People who regularly seek to feel the bland optimism the Pollyanna mask supports cannot help developing a vested interest in seeing, speaking, and feeling as they do—with two results: they lose the power to see accurately, and they lose the power to communicate with any but those who see and feel in the same benevolently distorted way. Once one has made a strong psychological investment in a certain kind of language, one has trouble understanding that it distorts reality, and also trouble understanding how others—in this case those who take a more cautious or warily ironic view—can be so blind. No one with a distorted view of reality can write good novels, because as we read we measure fictional worlds against the real world. Fiction elaborated out of attitudes we find childish or tiresome in life very soon becomes tiresome.

The Pollyanna mask is only one among many common evasions of reality. Consider a few lines by a well-known science fiction writer:

It's not often people will tell you how they really feel about gut-level things. Like god or how they're afraid they'll go insane like their grandfather or sex or how obnoxious you are when you pick your nose and wipe it on your pants. They play cozy with you, because nobody likes to be hated, and large doses of truth from any one mouth tend to make the wearer of the mouth persona non grata. Particularly if he's caught you picking your nose and wiping it on your pants. Even worse if he catches you eating it.

This is not the Pollyanna style favored by hack writers of the twenties and thirties but the hack-writer style that superseded it, disPollyanna. Sunny optimism, with its fondness for italics, gives way to an ill-founded cynicism, also supported by italics ("It's not often people will tell you how they really feel"), and "broad shoulders" give way to "gut-level things," or worse. Sentence fragments become common (a standard means of falsely heightening the emotion of what one says), and commas disappear ("grandfather or sex or how obnoxious you are") in rhetorical imitation of William Faulkner, who was also on thin ice. (Dropping commas is all right except if one's purpose is to increase the rush of the sentence and thus suggest emotion not justified by what is being said.) Instead of giving "friendly lopsided smiles" people "play cozy with you," which means that they're false, unreal, not even the owners (just the wearers) of their mouths. (The same stock depersonalization of human beings gives cheap detective fiction one of its favorite rhetorical devices, the transformation of "the man in the gray suit" to "Gray Suit," and the man in the sharkskin to "Sharkskin," as in "Gray Suit looks over at Sharkskin. 'Piss off,' he says." This tends to happen even in fairly good detective fiction. It's hard to rise above your class.) Crude jokes and images, slang phrases borrowed from foreign languages, are all stock in disPollyanna fiction—in an attempt to shock prudes. No one is shocked, of course, though a few may misread their annoyance as shock. One is annoyed because the whole thing is phony, an imitation of things too often imitated before. The problem with such writers, it ought to be mentioned, is not that they are worse people than those who wrote in Pollyanna. They are almost exactly the same people: idealists, people who simple-mindedly long for goodness, justice, and sanity; the difference is one of style. This same science fiction writer's character Jack the Ripper reacts in howling moral outrage when he learns how the Utopians have made him their plaything:

A psychopath, a butcher, a lecher, a hypocrite, a clown.
"You did this to me! Why did you do this?"
Frenzy cloaked his words. . . .

A young writer firmly hooked on bad science fiction, or the worst of the hard-boiled detective school, or tell-it-like-it-is so-called serious fiction, fashionably interpreting all experience as crap, may get published, if he works hard, but the odds are that he'll never be an artist. That may not bother him much. Hack writers are sometimes quite successful, even admired. But so far as I can see, they are of slight value to humanity.

Both Pollyanna and disPollyanna limit the writer in the same ways, leading him to miss and simplify experience, and cutting him off from all but fellow believers. Marxist language can have the same effects, or the argot of the ashram, or computer talk ("input"), or the weary metaphors of the businessand- law world ("where the cheese starts to bind"). When one runs across a student whose whole way of seeing and whose emotional security seem dependent on adherence to a given style of language, one has reason to worry.

stephen king wrote this?????