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quote:"Though no daemon I, I feel in my bones that it might prove inauspicious to utter my own name overmuch in my own voice, lest I may be summoned and bound - by hostile human forces. Therefore, I shall become he. I, Jaq Draco, will tell the story of Jaq Draco as witnessed by a fly upon the wall, committing Jaq Draco's experiences to this data-cube in the hopes that the masters of the Ordo Malleus or the Inquisition itself may authenticate the truth of what I report and determine to take action." Ian Watson is a word wizard.
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Nov 6, 2019 19:05
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that sucks
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Nov 6, 2019 20:29
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Arcsquad12 posted:Ian Watson is a word wizard. That looks like some corny rear end sci fi poo poo.
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Nov 6, 2019 23:41
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"Jaq Draco" is a real NaNoWriMo kind of name. ed: 40k lol
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Nov 6, 2019 23:58
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Genre fiction or not, Ian Watson's prose is like that for the entire novel and it is a treasure. Prose so bad it comes back around to being amazing.
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Nov 7, 2019 00:05
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I wish the narrator in Proust's In Search of Lost Time had committed his experiences to a data-cube rather than whatever nerd poo poo he was doing
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Nov 7, 2019 00:14
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Arcsquad12 posted:Ian Watson is a word wizard. this reads like a D&D player who's only read fantasy novels trying to ad-lib elevated speech
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Nov 7, 2019 16:10
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Ian always brings a real energy to the table and i appreciate that even though he made Jaq Draco a half-elf rogue, he didn't minmax his stats
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Nov 7, 2019 16:12
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i enjoyed this read and thought it fitting for this thread: https://www.nytimes.com/1985/12/15/books/in-defense-of-purple-prose.html
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Nov 15, 2019 00:35
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Lex Neville posted:i enjoyed this read and thought it fitting for this thread: https://www.nytimes.com/1985/12/15/books/in-defense-of-purple-prose.html Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 07:28 on Nov 15, 2019 |
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Nov 15, 2019 07:20
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chernobyl kinsman posted:that sucks really surprising that "edgy cartoons for manbabies"-man writes poo poo prose
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Nov 15, 2019 14:29
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Sham bam bamina! posted:that hardly invalidates the idea of someone larding their prose up with useless gimcrack. I don't think West is arguing against that. Anyway, yeah, the term has become lit 101 but I don't think it was as hollow in the 80s yet. I thought the following was an interesting take: "When it isn't just showing off, purple is phrase coining"
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Nov 15, 2019 14:42
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I would argue that that's just a description of good prose, no matter how elaborate. Purple prose is "just showing off" by definition; it's a pejorative. It doesn't become a compliment or even neutral just because it gets applied to undeserving targets. The article's description of Absalom, Absalom! as a "purple masterpiece" is an oxymoron. But again, if the fashion in the '80s was to use it for anything with a metaphor too many, it makes sense that someone would question its validity as a pejorative.
Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 15:05 on Nov 15, 2019 |
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Nov 15, 2019 15:02
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Here's some cool imagery from the final chapter of Mircea Cartarescu's Blinding vol. 1quote:“The path descended, and it couldn’t do otherwise, because the fibers of space themselves went down, as though deformed by a revolting, difficult suffering. The transparent insects, with thousands of glassy anatomical details under the shells of their teguments, became larger and more aggressive. With a strange movement of their legs, the spiders spat jets of saliva at us, trying to pull us into the spools of their sparkling webs, where you could see the dried skeletons of bats, axolotls, and children. The mineral mosaics on the walls seemed to continuously change their colors, and bizarre icons appeared in unexpected combinations of marble, pyrite, porphyry, and quartz. Vasilica, I saw Saint George across an entire wall, wearing a purple mantle, as we know him, but thrown from his horse, with a yellow fear in his eyes and holding up his right hand in defense, pierced by the lance of the bile-green dragon, which triumphantly, with fire pouring from his nostrils, spread his wings over the world. I saw a woman nailed to a cross with spikes of zirconium nails, and three men in black garments crying at the foot of the cross and kissing her last curls of hair, red as copper wire. And I saw a man with wonderful brown eyes, holding a girl on his lap who was only a few years old, naked and plump, giving a blessing with two fingers. All of these ghosts merged one into the other like the waters of a cotton vestment …
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Nov 22, 2019 23:49
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i'm reading tyhe street of crocodiles and it owns Thus my mother and I ambled along the two sunny sides of Market Square, guiding our broken shadows along the houses as over a keyboard. Under our soft steps the squares of the paving stones slowly filed past—some the pale pink of human skin, some golden, some blue-gray, all flat, warm and velvety in the sun, like sundials, trodden to the point of obliteration, into blessed nothingness. And finally on the corner of Stryjska Street we passed within the shadow of the chemist's shop. A large jar of raspberry juice in the wide window symbolized the coolness of balms which can relieve all kinds of pain. After we passed a few more houses, the street ceased to maintain any pretense of urbanity, like a man returning to his little village who, piece by piece, strips off his Sunday best, slowly changing back into a peasant as he gets closer to his home. The suburban houses were sinking, windows and all, into the exuberant tangle of blossom in their little gardens. Overlooked by the light of day, weeds and wild flowers of all kinds luxuriated quietly, glad of the interval for dreams beyond the margin of time on the borders of an endless day. An enormous sunflower, lifted on a powerful stem and suffering from hypertrophy, clad in the yellow mourning of the last sorrowful days of its life, bent under the weight of its monstrous girth. But the naïve, suburban bluebells and unpretentious dimity flowers stood helpless in their starched pink and white shifts, indifferent to the sunflower's tragedy.
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Nov 22, 2019 23:56
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A human heart posted:Here's some cool imagery from the final chapter of Mircea Cartarescu's Blinding vol. 1 boy and i thought codreanu was the best romanian writer
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Nov 22, 2019 23:57
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I remember somebody dissing the English translation of Bruno Schulz and some academic doing a new one, but the old read really well, so i don't care if there are skipped or mistranslated words in there
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Nov 30, 2019 18:11
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Big Man Herm posted:[...] but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like Wickliff's sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over.
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Dec 18, 2019 11:51
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surprising no one the thread for good writing has almost dropped into the archives, nice work all. here's a cool bit from miklos szentkuthy's praequote:What is exciting about mornings, however, is that nothing at all new starts in them, but the past has remained: at dawn, if one opens one's eyes, the initial feeling, having cast a glance at one's surroundings, is that yesterday's feelings are totally valid today as well, and that one's past, like a safe gilt-edged stock, has not lost half-a-percent of its value, nothing has changed. All that is new is that one has a past, that one can pronounce the word 'yesterday' intelligibly, but even that rather means that all of one's actions are turned to yesterday, and, if it were up to us, we would press the whole of today into the tight box of yesterday, and the only reason for living in the today is that, due to physical circumstances, one has been squeezed out of yesterday like out of an overcrowded bus: "the next bus is right behind."
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Jan 10, 2022 11:21
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That is neat, but frankly all the "ones" make it a real slog imo. There's even a "we" already in there! I'll follow it up with some actual bad prose: quote:Not only was Judson Perry's best evidence of the reality of love, he was such an appealing and well-regulated youngster, nearly as smart as Perry and much better able to sleep at night, that Perry sometimes wished that he, Perry, were his little brother. Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen - line breaks mine, should be indents Lex Neville fucked around with this message at 17:23 on Jan 10, 2022 |
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Jan 10, 2022 13:45
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quote:Not only was Judson Perry's best evidence of the reality of love, he was such an appealing and well-regulated youngster, nearly as smart as Perry and much better able to sleep at night, that Perry sometimes wished that he, Perry, were his little brother. I can almost smell the weed. From personal experience, if you're too high when you write, you end up with bizarre phrasings and/or needlessly tortured structures. Individual sentences are rewritten ten or fifteen different ways until you give up or settle on something that passes chiba-brain logic as "good". If the PoV in this segment had been high, that would have changed this from bad to good, but it seems like in the following paragraphs that he's painfully sober.
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Jan 11, 2022 18:59
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