Prose Stylist

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Am I the only one who thought this thread was about hiphop?

― Andrew (enneff), Tuesday, 10 September 2002 01:00 (twenty-one years ago) link

from http://www.wam.umd.edu/~mturn/WWW/dutton.html:

"It may look easy to write, but that is part of the trick of classic prose. It is efficient and precise, and seems utterly spontaneous. However, that natural sound is not the sound of speech...it is the sound of writing...The classic prose stylist therefore never descends to grinding persuasion; an unobstructed view of things is always enough."

It's a pretty decent excerpt by Denis Dutton, I think saying that effectual prose styling is writing in which the author manages to sound very natural and real (i.e., Lorrie Moore, Richard Russo)without being completely authentic (i.e., Irvine Welsch, etc.).

― nory (nory), Tuesday, 10 September 2002 03:31 (twenty-one years ago) link

Come to think of it, Irvine Welsh is a bad example, except for in regards to his dialogue. I'll try to think of a better one...

― nory (nory), Tuesday, 10 September 2002 03:42 (twenty-one years ago) link

Nory, that is surely only one type of good prose. Some of those I mention, such as Updike and Harrison, fail on that criterion, but I still think their prose is beautiful and striking. I think suggesting that there is only one kind of good prose, one good style, is akin to saying that only soul singing can be good singing, or prog has the only good guitar playing. And, come to that, what is said there is almost prescribing good prose without a style (if you believe that is possible at all).

― Martin Skidmore (Martin Skidmore), Tuesday, 10 September 2002 16:51 (twenty-one years ago) link

Martin--Oh, I didn't mean to imply that Irvine Welsh wasn't an example of good prose (though, to be completely honest, I never could get into him, but I see why others do). Good prose, I think, comes in all sorts of varieties. I was just trying to get back to the original question in this thread, re: what do the critics mean when they label someone a "good prose stylist." My guess would be that they're going w/ more of a "classic prose" definition, as I mentioned above. But that's just me making assumptions about the minds of literary critics, which is probably a futile pastime.

Seems like prose without style (if such a thing exists) would be very, very difficult to read, wouldn't it?

― nory (nory), Tuesday, 10 September 2002 18:35 (twenty-one years ago) link

"Herzog's insistence on enacting the central metaphor of the film, that is, actually moving a ship over a South American mountain, delayed the film's completion by four years." Europe Since 1945: An Encyclopedia

the sentence would have been better without 'actually', but it made me smile anyways.

― youn, Wednesday, 11 September 2002 03:13 (twenty-one years ago) link

I never was very stylish. My girlfriend chooses my clothes.

― Nick Southall, Thursday, 12 September 2002 20:56 (twenty-one years ago) link

five months pass...

Notion of a book (of a text) in which is braided, woven, in the most personal way, the relation of every kind of bliss: those of "life" and those of the text, in which reading and the risks of real life are subject to the same anamnesis.

― the pinefox, Thursday, 20 February 2003 15:47 (twenty-one years ago) link

Am I still bad at this then?

― Nick Southall (Nick Southall), Thursday, 20 February 2003 15:52 (twenty-one years ago) link

two weeks pass...

When critics and readers praise DeLillo they often speak about his sentences, as if sentences were what he wrote, rather than words or phrases or paragraphs or books. The cue comes from DeLillo himself who in Mao II (1991) has a writer say that he's always seen himself in sentences, that he's 'a sentence-maker, like a doughnut-maker only slower', and that 'every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it.' This last sentence is manifestly not itself true, and although DeLillo does write wonderful sentences, like the one quoted above about 'massive and unvaried ruin', some of the others can get a little sticky, like doughnuts only more talkative: 'A hollow clamour begins to rise from the crowd, men calling from the deep reaches, an animal awe and desolation.' 'The deep discordance, the old muscling of wills, that unforgiving thing in the idea of brothers'. 'Longing on a large scale is what makes history.' Er . . . maybe. 'When people tell rat stories, the rat is always tremendous.' Now there's a sentence.

In fact the most interesting syntactic unit in Underworld is the paragraph, or more precisely the evoked image or moment, instantly intercut with another image or moment. All of DeLillo's stories in this novel run in parallel with other stories, restlessly zig-zagging from one time or place or connection to another. This is true even of conversations, which are always conducted on several fronts, non sequiturs being retrieved by sequels, sequels beings interrupted by new non sequiturs. Here's a simple example:

At home we wanted clean healthy garbage. We rinsed out old bottles and put them in their proper bins...

He never committed a figure to paper. He had a head for numbers, a memory for numbers.

We fixed her up with a humidifier, the hangers, the good hard bed and the dresser...

The first 'we' is a mother and two boys, in the old days in the Bronx. 'He' is the absent father. The second 'we' is one of the boys and his wife, and the 'her' is the mother - the time is now the Nineties. The whole narrative relies on our hanging onto stories in our heads, being ready for their return - the effect is about as close to simultaneity, or a split-screen, as one could get on pages that run in lines and have to be turned over one after another.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v20/n03/wood01_.html

Cor!

― the pinefox, Thursday, 6 March 2003 16:14 (twenty-one years ago) link

five years pass...

http://onewaystreet.typepad.com/one_way_street/2008/03/on-beautiful-se.html

― the pinefox, Wednesday, 26 March 2008 11:12 (sixteen years ago) link

actually, that's not very good

― the pinefox, Wednesday, 26 March 2008 11:14 (sixteen years ago) link

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