Drab Prose

The novelists I find myself attracted to are those who cannot resist the extra adjective, the additional image, the scale-tipping clause. It feels necessary to assert and celebrate this, for we are living in puritanical times. The contemporary preference seems to be for the economical, the efficient, for simple precision (though there is of course such a thing as complex precision). Books, it appears, should be neat and streamlined. Language shouldn’t be allowed to obscure a good story. There is a craving for easily relatable and sympathetic characters. Among critics and reviewers, the plain style is more likely to be praised than the elaborate or sprawling. Embellished prose is treated with suspicion, if not dismissed outright as overwritten, pretentious or self-indulgent. Drab prose is everywhere.

-- Ben Masters at The New York Times

Drab Prose

The novelists I find myself attracted to are those who cannot resist the extra adjective, the additional image, the scale-tipping clause. It feels necessary to assert and celebrate this, for we are living in puritanical times. The contemporary preference seems to be for the economical, the efficient, for simple precision (though there is of course such a thing as complex precision). Books, it appears, should be neat and streamlined. Language shouldn’t be allowed to obscure a good story. There is a craving for easily relatable and sympathetic characters. Among critics and reviewers, the plain style is more likely to be praised than the elaborate or sprawling. Embellished prose is treated with suspicion, if not dismissed outright as overwritten, pretentious or self-indulgent. Drab prose is everywhere.

-- Ben Masters at The New York Times

Red vs. Blue

Our political culture is threatening to get a little out of hand.

Let's just hope that we don't start having drive-by shootings, or that someone gets beaten with canes in the Senate.

(Source: News-LJ)

Red vs. Blue

Our political culture is threatening to get a little out of hand.

Let's just hope that we don't start having drive-by shootings, or that someone gets beaten with canes in the Senate.

(Source: News-LJ)

O. J. Simpson

It has been a while sinc we have heard anything O. J. Simpson. You might expect him to fade away in his ignominy, but this is America. There is a lurid story that he is trying to make millions of dollars selling the knife he supposedly used to kill his wife. It's from the National Enquirer, so it may be more fictional than real, but, hey, let's relive a little the days of that sensational trial of the 90s.

( Read more... )

O. J. Simpson

It has been a while sinc we have heard anything O. J. Simpson. You might expect him to fade away in his ignominy, but this is America. There is a lurid story that he is trying to make millions of dollars selling the knife he supposedly used to kill his wife. It's from the National Enquirer, so it may be more fictional than real, but, hey, let's relive a little the days of that sensational trial of the 90s.

( Read more... )

Camelot

Jackie and John Kennedy (1953)

Camelot

Jackie and John Kennedy (1953)

"The Bathroom Wall of the U.S. Psyche"

The biographer of David Foster Wallace informs us that, not long before Wallace's suicide, he considered the Internet to be "the bathroom wall of the U.S. psyche", going by a story he was working on, titled "Wicked", but never finished.

_ _ _

In its pages, he returns to the great theme of "Infinite Jest": the lethal power of media. Only this time, he posits that the locus of our self-annihilation has moved online. The plot of "Wickedness" centers on a tabloid reporter named Skyles who, dying of cancer of the mouth, is trying to shoot pictures of Ronald Reagan beset by Alzheimer’s for the Web site Wicked.com. ... The issue of the media’s increasingly ferocious invasions of privacy was one that Wallace felt acutely after the publication of "Infinite Jest." In "Wickedness," the old tabloids—The Star, The News of the World—repulsive as they were, are depicted as playing by rules, but the new ones do not. "Despite all the hoopla about populism and information," Wallace writes of the Web, "what it really was was the bathroom wall of the U.S. psyche." He invented for the story the sites Latrine.com, 10footpoll.com, and filth.com, which will stop at nothing to publish humiliating photos of celebrities.

-- D. T. Max

_ _ _

I kind of like the nip-slips and the upskirt shots myself.

"The Bathroom Wall of the U.S. Psyche"

The biographer of David Foster Wallace informs us that, not long before Wallace's suicide, he considered the Internet to be "the bathroom wall of the U.S. psyche", going by a story he was working on, titled "Wicked", but never finished.

_ _ _

In its pages, he returns to the great theme of "Infinite Jest": the lethal power of media. Only this time, he posits that the locus of our self-annihilation has moved online. The plot of "Wickedness" centers on a tabloid reporter named Skyles who, dying of cancer of the mouth, is trying to shoot pictures of Ronald Reagan beset by Alzheimer’s for the Web site Wicked.com. ... The issue of the media’s increasingly ferocious invasions of privacy was one that Wallace felt acutely after the publication of "Infinite Jest." In "Wickedness," the old tabloids—The Star, The News of the World—repulsive as they were, are depicted as playing by rules, but the new ones do not. "Despite all the hoopla about populism and information," Wallace writes of the Web, "what it really was was the bathroom wall of the U.S. psyche." He invented for the story the sites Latrine.com, 10footpoll.com, and filth.com, which will stop at nothing to publish humiliating photos of celebrities.

-- D. T. Max

_ _ _

I kind of like the nip-slips and the upskirt shots myself.

Daily Fun

Paul Newman, photographed by Sanford Roth for "Somebody Up There Likes Me" (1956)

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Daily Fun

Paul Newman, photographed by Sanford Roth for "Somebody Up There Likes Me" (1956)

( Read more... )