Good prose stylist: Tom Ewing
Bad prose stylist: Nick Southall
― the pinefox, Monday, 9 September 2002 07:16 (twenty-one years ago) link
Good prose stylist: The cool stay of your right breast, face down, your soft hardness, its soft allowance. Your soft allowance – that you didn’t shake and stutter and rip an arm from a socket.
― david h (david h), Monday, 9 September 2002 15:08 (twenty-one years ago) link
― Alex M., Monday, 9 September 2002 15:26 (twenty-one years ago) link
― Martin Skidmore (Martin Skidmore), Monday, 9 September 2002 18:11 (twenty-one years ago) link
― Andrew (enneff), Tuesday, 10 September 2002 01:00 (twenty-one years ago) link
"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
― nory (nory), Tuesday, 10 September 2002 03:42 (twenty-one years ago) link
― Martin Skidmore (Martin Skidmore), Tuesday, 10 September 2002 16:51 (twenty-one years ago) link
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
― youn, Wednesday, 11 September 2002 03:13 (twenty-one years ago) link
― Nick Southall, Thursday, 12 September 2002 20:56 (twenty-one years ago) link
― the pinefox, Thursday, 20 February 2003 15:47 (twenty-one years ago) link
― Nick Southall (Nick Southall), Thursday, 20 February 2003 15:52 (twenty-one years ago) link
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
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