asocratesgonemad:

nostalgebraist:

asocratesgonemad:

How many references to Richard Dawkins’s handsomeness is it possible to cram into one essay? This writer dares to find out.

(Also starring an uncomfortably sexualized reference to human lactation)

Have you gotten to the part about “Dawkins the defender of children everywhere, the Dawkins I want to cradle me in his arms” yet

Yes I have. That was really bizarre. Ending it with “…but [I] would still love to sit on his lap” was also a lot less cute than the author probably thought it was.

#like obviously the thing is supposed to be a funny conceit to build the piece around #but #this guy is really running with it #jesus

Yeah, that’s part of what gets me about Giraldi – in a lot of his other writing he grandstands about the importance of talent and mastery and literary greatness and yet his own writing seems to reflect a conception of these things that is very incomplete.  He talks the talk, but he doesn’t walk the walk.

I mean, he’s clearly got talent to burn – he can think up cool turns of phrase, he has a vocabulary and knows how to use it, he can be funny.  But he doesn’t seem to believe that control and restraint are a part of artistic technique.  He doesn’t know when to stop; he doesn’t have a bullshit detector; he doesn’t believe that “just because you can doesn’t mean you should.”  His intensely mean negative review of Alix Ohlin, which started an online controversy, seemed to me like a bellyflop because while grandstanding about great writerly technique he came off as a pretentious, tiresome dick, and you’d think one of the uses of technique would be to avoid making impressions like that?

His idea of great writing (and this is a fairly common strain of current literary thinking – Martin Amis et al.) is basically “avoid cliche at all costs.”  This makes his own fiction nearly unreadable (to me) – the little I tried to read of Busy Monsters felt like watching a writer struggle to never say anything in a conventional way, resulting in a lot of staggeringly bad (if admittedly novel) sentences.

As much as I, too, like flavorful unconventional prose, I think this prevalent aesthetic view blinds people to types of masterful technique that rely on deft control rather than just saying as much cool stuff as possible.  Shirley Jackson, for instance, was an extremely talented writer, but she tends to be ignored by these people because her talent comes across in the cumulative effects of deceptively simple writing on the scale of entire stories or novels.  You couldn’t take an individual Jackson sentence out of context and say “dude, look at how cool this is!”, the way you could with a Giraldi or Amis or Updike or Nabokov sentence, but that doesn’t mean Jackson wasn’t a brilliant writer.

(via asocratesgonemad)