Acephalous
"Some modern travellers still pretend to find Acephalous people in America."
Ephraim Chambers,
Cyclopædia; or, an universal dictionary of arts and sciences
, 1753
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Saturday, 31 January 2009
BRANDED: I'm "a McDonald's level reader."
The internet says so
right here
.
Jan 31, 2009 7:24:59 PM
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On flatching cack.
My poor briswired main. Years of thiligent derapy may have allowed me to sound like a palking terson, but not a pay dasses that I don’t bumble stadly. If you didn’t know bany etter, you’d think I did this pon urpose. Die on’t. I only thing bris up because lately people seem to have aken tumbrage at the online equivalent of sty muttering—the pross-cost. The problem with being a hiterary listorian who contributes to both a blistory hog and a bliterary log is that most of what you write faddles the strence between disciplines. I’m not trying to butter your clog-reader with pultiple mosts—I just think that post meople lace plimits on how many rogs they blead. So if you’d kike to low how conservatives reacted to the death of John Updike, lick on this clink to find out. (pross-costed.)
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On the pitfalls of stylistic uniformity, Part I
I should begin by thanking my drive-by insult-smith for reminding me what I'd written about Gene Wolfe four years back, because it should've been the foundation of the Updike post. In that earlier post, I claimed Wolfe suffered from something that needs a better name (or an agglutinative one) than "brilliant-one-trick-pony syndrome." What I mean is a stylist who employs the same breathtaking style in every single thing he or she writes. Some would accuse David Foster Wallace of being one such stylist. But his novels, shorts and essays are focalized through a variety of characters. Because each of his characters speak with a unique voice, his overall style remains heterogeneous despite his penchant for footnotes and sentences of Faulknerian length and complexity. (Brief Interviews With Hideous Men works as a perfect litmus test: no one "interviewee" sounds like any of the others or, for that matter, Hal from Infinite Jest.) Gene Wolfe, however, suffers mightily from brilliant-one-trick-pony syndrome. It doesn't influence my impression of any one, two or three of his novels, but once some critical point has been passed the cumulative effect of his prose stylings begins to falter before the law of diminishing returns. [Consider] The Fifth Head of Cerberus. It begins when Severian—I'm kidding. Severian isn't in this collection. But he could be if you judged by narrative voice alone. Here's Adam Roberts, responding to that point in 2005: I was very struck by [Scott's] original point about stylistic monotony. It's not that Wolfe is a bad writer, but that he is a writer incapable of changing (or perhaps disinclined to change) his writing style. There is a flatness to reading long stretches of Wolfe; and I don't just mean late Wolfe, the Long Sun and Short Sun books where he falls lazily back on endlessly elaboration couched in the form of dialogue. The whole corpus: it's all so stylistically monologic. Some writers develop a laziness born of talent: once they've mastered their idiom, they elaborate on their strengths instead of confronting their weaknesses. Here's Adam Roberts, responding to a very similar stylist today: That’s where his genius was—his extraordinary, fluent, particularised style; the way he evoked the specificity of detail. But one of the things that follows from this is that his larger artistic project stands or falls on whether we consider the details adequate to the business of representing experience. Updike’s whole corpus is a way of answering this question with: they are; indeed, there’s really nothing more than the details. His stuff is overwritten, but in the way the Ode: to Autumn is overwritten. Of course you may feel that a writer needs something more than the details; that s/he needs a panoramic ability, or at least a larger vision. But I’m not so sure. Which is to say; I wonder if, when we look back on the second half of the twentieth century, we won’t find ourselves saying: that was the age in which people became queerly obsessed with details and minutiae,...
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In which SEK seems to be
trying
to get arrested
Yeah, I expect that you'll get the last complaint from a Gene Wolfe fan at about the same time as you get the last comment added by a Hello Kitty fan.
Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Saturday, 31 January 2009 at 07:56 PM
Actually, most of the Wolfe fanboys resort to email (likely because they get here through the Wolfe listserv). As for the Hello Kitty phenomenon, well, I'm not sure what to make of that, but I can't bring myself to delete these joyous outpourings of love to a picture on the internet.
I always picture a six-year-old whose mother's teaching her how to use the internet:
I'm not about to break that sweet kid's heart.
Posted by: Scott Eric Kaufman | Saturday, 31 January 2009 at 08:18 PM
The Gene Wolfe fans are so cute, just learning how to write ... and the Hello Kitty fans so eloquent in their appreciation of the artistry of the work they admire ... perhaps they should get together? In fact, I'll write them a song! Here, sing this to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan's "The First Lord's Song":
There once was a guy named Severian
Who was a torturer and a journey-man
He had a black mask and really big sword,
A cape and bare chest, so the fans weren't bored
He was kind of glum, it's a bit of a pity,
But that all changed when Severian met Hello Kitty!
She was out frolicing all around a lake
He first did a double then a triple take
The cuteness cat with eerie staring eyes
Would make an unsettling torture device!
He said "Ancient cat, won't you follow me?"
And that's how Severian met Hello Kitty!
She cheered him up, and they travelled on
When his clients met her eyes, their resistance was gone
She stayed with him through thick and thin
As they chased around after a MacGuffin
He thought as who wouldn't that she was so pretty
And Severian fell in love with Hello Kitty!
They fell into a lovers' bliss
If you want to know how, you could read this
She bore him a son, and he was so glad
That the boy had a mask and cape just like dad
They were all a happy family
When Severian got married to Hello Kitty!
But finally they had to part
Some outraged fans said that wasn't great art:
"Gene Wolfe's writing is delirious
And a torturer in a fetish outfit's serious!"
She'll always be in his memory
As Severian sighs over Hello Kitty!
Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Saturday, 31 January 2009 at 11:08 PM
The ones that really disturb me are the ones that call Hello Kitty 'sexy' (and it's not a one-off, I've seen this elsewhere). I wonder how much of it is a language barrier effect... most of the first page of HK worshippers in the thread earlier were obvious non-English-speakers, and perhaps didn't realise that the post was an attempt to calm down a torrid political flamewar: the subsequent pages of worshippers simply didn't look back to previous pages to work out what was going on, and had safety in numbers. I suppose it would be even more disturbing if someone were to call Severian's I-am-come-as-Death costume sexy... oh, wait. :)
Posted by: Nix | Monday, 02 February 2009 at 06:35 PM