Writers you hate

[luka]

i think the dilatory sentence of olden times are interesting too. i remember trying to read Hume at a-level and thinking does the full stop never arrive

 

[Benny Bunter]

Plus free verse isn't totally free in the sense you can just chuck down any old bollocks, it should have its own rhythms and internal logic

 

[luka]

although it doesn't if you read the 'poems' in eg, the LRB

 

[version]

Its the quivvering qualifiers, so much of writing before the late 1800' reads to me like this: 'craner, would you, and dont feel as if you cant say no, not that you are the type of man who needs reassuring in his abilty to speak his mind, like to come, if youre not already engaged, to my birthday party?'

The 'Hugh Grant talking to a woman in a rom-com' technique.

 

[Mr. Tea]

It is interesting, I wonder if that shift reflects a general change in the cultural values of the educated (the 1800s are at least stereotypically the age of reason/science, which might lead to a prose that is constantly qualifying and honing in on something more precise, whereas the 1900s sees the romantic movement, which is more about direct expression, and so on...

You're about a century out here, I think? The Enlightenment is generally considered the later 17th and 18th century, while the Romantic reaction to that happened in the 19th century.

 

[luka]

corpsey with his masters in english lit getting correcting by a spoddy scientist how humiliating

 

[Mr. Tea]

*spod spod spod*

 

[Corpsey]

Oh yeah wrote 1800s/1900s

Constantly struggle to remember that the 18th century is 1700s, 19th is 1800s etc.

Hazards of being thick

 

[shakahislop]

I was saying something similar earlier in the thread about screens destroying our concentration. But it's not just that, I think the rot must have set in much earlier with the decline in education standards and methods. I doubt many students are taught or encouraged to committ literature to memory nowadays. The decline in religious teaching too must be a big factor, learning prayers and hymns and passages from the bible by heart through repetition and belief.

Its not just a weakened memory thing though. In fact Im not sure its a weakend memory thing at all because as I was saying earlier writers stopped writing this way in the late 1800s. Its a change in stylistic preference. Ulysses is harder to follow than Moby Dick but easier to understand at the structural level of the sentences, for me at least.

It is interesting, I wonder if that shift reflects a general change in the cultural values of the educated (the 1800s are at least stereotypically the age of reason/science, which might lead to a prose that is constantly qualifying and honing in on something more precise, whereas the 1900s sees the romantic movement, which is more about direct expression, and so on... And of course it's a time when "gentleman" are the authors and readers of literature and operating by this punctilious code of manners) or if it's to do with the growing literacy of the population and a shift in the function of writing.

Probably both, a bit.

one thing i've been circling around recently is the idea, that feels self-evident when you start to notice it, that all these forms are only possible for a comparatively short period of time. where the world is assembled in a way that makes it feasible for someone to write these extravagant sentences, coz you have the audience who get it, an education system etc that can create people who can do something like that, stylistic preference thats a la mode etc etc. once a form is invented there's a window where it can be produced, it's temporary rather than permanent.

there's something quite anti-modernist in that idea i think

 

[linebaugh]

Anyone who can parse this Wyndham Lewis sentence is a better man than me:

"Would this boy have met death with the exultation of a martyr rather than give up his picture of an old and despondent mountebank—like some stubborn prophet who would not forgo the melodrama forged by his orderly hatreds—always of the gloom of famine, of cracked and gutted palaces, and the elements taking on new and extremely destructive shapes for the extermination of man?"

The way the dashes are used is really confusing as it makes you think its some aside sandwiched in to a larger thought contained on either side of the dash, but really the thought ends just before the first dash and everything after the words 'despondent mounteank' is just him describing the behavior of a 'despondant mountebank.'

 

[linebaugh]

one thing i've been circling around recently is the idea, that feels self-evident when you start to notice it, that all these forms are only possible for a comparatively short period of time. where the world is assembled in a way that makes it feasible for someone to write these extravagant sentences, coz you have the audience who get it, an education system etc that can create people who can do something like that, stylistic preference thats a la mode etc etc. once a form is invented there's a window where it can be produced, it's temporary rather than permanent.

there's something quite anti-modernist in that idea i think

What do you mean by anti modernist?

 

[shakahislop]

What do you mean by anti modernist?

the idea of linear progress where things get better and better all the time, people figure out how to do things better and build upon the past, that stuff

 

[luka]

i dont associate modernism with linear progression particularly. in literature its a sense of a ruined europe and a shattered culture and trying to salvage something from the rubble

 

[entertainment]

i think of it more as a belief in language as a technology to get to the bottom of things. post-modernism as a reaction to the failure of that project.

 

[entertainment]

Why write like that?

It's like saying why did people wear such pretentious clothes back then. Literary sensibilities were different weren't they.

There is undoubtedly an elegance to sentences like that which you can still appreciate if you suspend the immediate judgement. Also for me there is a cognitive pleasure in it, like solving a little riddle in your head.

 

[luka]

also its funny and fun. all that kind of suspension, tightrope stuff is inherently fun and funny. you get it in music too where resolution is deferred

 

[HMGovt’s Glorious Return!]

Oh yeah wrote 1800s/1900s

Constantly struggle to remember that the 18th century is 1700s, 19th is 1800s etc.

Hazards of being thick

No-one’s that thick outside of TV game shows, are they?

 

[HMGovt’s Glorious Return!]

We are, all of us, mental dwarves compared to even the most recondite village idiot of 150 years ago (i.e. the 1870s, @Corpsey )

 

[HMGovt’s Glorious Return!]

Like your stout 14th century yokel could draw a longbow and send an arrow right through a French noblemen with such force it barely touched the insides. Today's combat archers would be unable to trouble the skin of a rice pudding. Same thing with words and concepts and that.

 

[Corpsey]

The Five Longest Proust Sentences

Previous posts have discussed Proust’s In Search Of Lost Time (best English translation here). Marco76UK asks “Out of curiosity, what is the third longest sentence?” I’ll do you two better and give…

nathanbrixius.wordpress.com

But I had seen first one and then another of the rooms in which I had slept during my life, and in the end I would revisit them all in the long course of my waking dream: rooms in winter, where on going to bed I would at once bury my head in a nest, built up out of the most diverse materials, the corner of my pillow, the top of my blankets, a piece of a shawl, the edge of my bed, and a copy of an evening paper, all of which things I would contrive, with the infinite patience of birds building their nests, to cement into one whole; rooms where, in a keen frost, I would feel the satisfaction of being shut in from the outer world (like the sea-swallow which builds at the end of a dark tunnel and is kept warm by the surrounding earth), and where, the fire keeping in all night, I would sleep wrapped up, as it were, in a great cloak of snug and savoury air, shot with the glow of the logs which would break out again in flame: in a sort of alcove without walls, a cave of warmth dug out of the heart of the room itself, a zone of heat whose boundaries were constantly shifting and altering in temperature as gusts of air ran across them to strike freshly upon my face, from the corners of the room, or from parts near the window or far from the fireplace which had therefore remained cold — or rooms in summer, where I would delight to feel myself a part of the warm evening, where the moonlight striking upon the half-opened shutters would throw down to the foot of my bed its enchanted ladder; where I would fall asleep, as it might be in the open air, like a titmouse which the breeze keeps poised in the focus of a sunbeam — or sometimes the Louis XVI room, so cheerful that I could never feel really unhappy, even on my first night in it: that room where the slender columns which lightly supported its ceiling would part, ever so gracefully, to indicate where the bed was and to keep it separate; sometimes again that little room with the high ceiling, hollowed in the form of a pyramid out of two separate storeys, and partly walled with mahogany, in which from the first moment my mind was drugged by the unfamiliar scent of flowering grasses, convinced of the hostility of the violet curtains and of the insolent indifference of a clock that chattered on at the top of its voice as though I were not there; while a strange and pitiless mirror with square feet, which stood across one corner of the room, cleared for itself a site I had not looked to find tenanted in the quiet surroundings of my normal field of vision: that room in which my mind, forcing itself for hours on end to leave its moorings, to elongate itself upwards so as to take on the exact shape of the room, and to reach to the summit of that monstrous funnel, had passed so many anxious nights while my body lay stretched out in bed, my eyes staring upwards, my ears straining, my nostrils sniffing uneasily, and my heart beating; until custom had changed the colour of the curtains, made the clock keep quiet, brought an expression of pity to the cruel, slanting face of the glass, disguised or even completely dispelled the scent of flowering grasses, and distinctly reduced the apparent loftiness of the ceiling.

There's something special about a long long sentence that works, some sense you have as a reader of being captured, held in a state of anticipation.

Yeats does this in his poetry. Maybe not the best example here but an example—where the sentence stretches out over a stanza or multiple stanzas, and builds to a sort of crescendo.

And yet they too break hearts—O Presences
That passion, piety or affection knows,
And that all heavenly glory symbolise—
O self-born mockers of man's enterprise;


VIII

Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?