This essay really sums up how I feel about a tremendous plurality of writing these days, and why I feel like I've retreated from fiction generally
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Wow. I tend to avoid anything labelled as literature - I tend towards favoring "workmanlike prose" - and that article really did a good job of summing up why I so dislike "literary writing". So many of those samples were just so attrocious. Like this:
[They] walked off in separate directions through the chaparral to stand spraddlelegged clutching their knees and vomiting. The browsing horses jerked their heads up. It was no sound they'd ever heard before. In the gray twilight those retchings seemed to echo like the calls of some rude provisional species loosed upon that waste. Something imperfect and malformed lodged in the heart of being. A thing smirking deep in the eyes of grace itself like a gorgon in an autumn pool. (All the Pretty Horses) To me, that is all "literary writing". It's "gorgons in autumn pools" and other nonsense that makes you cringe. I don't understand how these people take themselves seriously. Honestly, I think it's an Emperor's New Clothes effect. I think the more appreciative of a line like "gorgons in
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Well, you're better off not trottin' that around me. I grew up on Jim Thompson (and am willing to admit that quite a few of his books suffer from leaden prose, especially women's dialogue), and still love him. Even The Killer Inside Me, which is full of bizarely terrible moments, has such an incredible plot and such a sense of pacing that I can totally ignore the often clumsy or cliche points. And Pop. 1280 is such an incredibly well-set story, the humor is so dry and, I dunno, exists without needing to announce HERE IS A PUNCHLINE, that I can't help but go back to it over and over. The deadpan bit that it opens with, describing how he could hardly finish his, what, 12 strips of bacon and eight eggs or somesuch is so goddamned economical and smart that I'd take it over any number of bullshit stories that I've seen in the last five years.
Pop. 1280 is in my top five for best books of all time. That book is freaking amazing.
I didn't mean to imply I thought Thompson was hack genre writer. I think he's one of the most important writers of all time, I was just echoing the damning criticism I've read of him in more "highbrow" sources. Or sometimes you get these critics who damn him with faint praise, as if it were somehow strange that a lowly crime fiction writer could produce such art.
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[They] walked off in separate directions through the chaparral to stand spraddlelegged clutching their knees and vomiting. The browsing horses jerked their heads up. It was no sound they'd ever heard before. In the gray twilight those retchings seemed to echo like the calls of some rude provisional species loosed upon that waste. Something imperfect and malformed lodged in the heart of being. A thing smirking deep in the eyes of grace itself like a gorgon in an autumn pool. (All the Pretty Horses)
To me, that is all "literary writing". It's "gorgons in autumn pools" and other nonsense that makes you cringe. I don't understand how these people take themselves seriously. Honestly, I think it's an Emperor's New Clothes effect. I think the more appreciative of a line like "gorgons in ( ... )
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I didn't mean to imply I thought Thompson was hack genre writer. I think he's one of the most important writers of all time, I was just echoing the damning criticism I've read of him in more "highbrow" sources. Or sometimes you get these critics who damn him with faint praise, as if it were somehow strange that a lowly crime fiction writer could produce such art.
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