Good Prose vs. Bad Prose: "that sucks" shitpost followed by the "u mad"

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > Good Prose vs. Bad Prose: "that sucks" shitpost followed by the "u mad"

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Mel Mudkiper: Jan 19, 2012; At this point, Mudman abruptly ends the conversation. He usually insists on the last word.

"no, you see calling crying a 'lacrimal event' is a way to defamiliarize the audience with crying," he says as he is dragged to the pit of obscurity

# ? Jan 25, 2019 17:28

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# ? May 6, 2024 13:36

Mel Mudkiper: Jan 19, 2012; At this point, Mudman abruptly ends the conversation. He usually insists on the last word.

like legit I am so pissed right now that this mother fucker is like "clearly you aren't smart enough to see the genius of calling crying a lacrimal event" and its like being insulted by a dude who subsists only on red meat and infowars supplement bars

# ? Jan 25, 2019 17:32

Arc Hammer: Mar 4, 2013; Got any deathsticks?

suspendedreason posted:

Cool! There's a lot of really half-baked, overconfident opinions getting thrown around here, which makes it easy to go through and knock them down systematically.

Why would he do this??? So weird, right??? Definitely autistic. Or maybe like, he's trying to put an emotional distance between himself and what his body is doing? "Crying" won't get you there, but a lacrimal event, that's something that happens to you. Crying's something you do. This is part of his larger project of defamiliarization, in the Russian formalist sense, so that something so overworn as a good cry can be seen anew, in different light.

In fact, that's what his entire project is. In the Whitmanian walker-in-the-city tradition, he defamiliarizes and processes the familiar, and his prose matches that project. If you don't care about that project it's ok, defamiliarization is for big kids who can handle a little strangeness without falling back onto deontological wah-wah's they read in Strunk and White.

You wanna cut the detail about the octopus being tenderly massaged to death in brine, and say "woah weird we eat these smart creatures"? Isn't that uh, 1/ "telling" and not "showing" (if we wanna get deontological), and 2/ missing the point through synopsis yet again. The animal decorates its lair, which is to say it has an aesthetic sense. It has been observed at complicated play, implying not just intelligence but an ability to engage in pleasurable exploration of its environment. Spoiler: Ben Lerner is describing himself and his own project, and comparing it to what stupid octopuses do.

Which is all to say that this passage is self-aware. Ben is a really established poet. You can slam his sensibility but the verbosity is deliberate, both mocking and not mocking the "literary," both partaking and distancing the author from its mode. Ben Lerner both loves and hates the lyrically decadent. This is absolutely foundational to the outlook of the book as a whole, and all its thematic/meta-textual/philosophic crises/contradictions/"how can I have it both ways?" is getting set up from the first page.

This is just wrong, things dimly gleam all the time, what are you talking about? "1 : to shine with or as if with subdued steady light or moderate brightness." Sounds like the brightness of a "gleam" is definitionally ambiguous, and Ben Lerner specified.

You guys gotta step up your game.

Creative Convention is over here, Ben Lerner.

# ? Jan 25, 2019 17:47

Bonaventure: Jun 23, 2005; by sebmojo

"lacrimal event" is a phrase that i would find hilarious if it were a joke and the joke was that an author is using the phrase "lacrimal event."

# ? Jan 25, 2019 17:49

Mel Mudkiper: Jan 19, 2012; At this point, Mudman abruptly ends the conversation. He usually insists on the last word.

Let this moment be a self-reflexive penetrative event for you, you subsapient matriarchal polyamorist

see, I know you probably get told to "go gently caress yourself you dumb motherfucker" a lot so I ~defamiliarized~ it so you might be forced to reinspect how you should go gently caress yourself, you dumb motherfucker

# ? Jan 25, 2019 17:49

Sleng Teng: May 3, 2009

suspendedreason posted:

Cool! There's a lot of really half-baked, overconfident opinions getting thrown around here, which makes it easy to go through and knock them down systematically.

# ? Jan 25, 2019 17:57

Mel Mudkiper: Jan 19, 2012; At this point, Mudman abruptly ends the conversation. He usually insists on the last word.

Sleng Teng posted:

imagine going through life looking like the guy in a teen comedy who invites the protagonist to a beach party to meet chicks and doesn't get laid

# ? Jan 25, 2019 18:03

Mrenda: Mar 14, 2012

Arcsquad12 posted:

Creative Convention is over here, Ben Lerner.

Your words can hurt.

# ? Jan 25, 2019 18:07

Carthag Tuek: Oct 15, 2005; Tider skal komme,
tider skal henrulle,
sl�gt skal f�lge sl�gters gang

Mel Mudkiper posted:

Let this moment be a self-reflexive penetrative event for you, you subsapient matriarchal polyamorist

see, I know you probably get told to "go gently caress yourself you dumb motherfucker" a lot so I ~defamiliarized~ it so you might be forced to reinspect how you should go gently caress yourself, you dumb motherfucker

# ? Jan 25, 2019 18:12

Jrbg: May 20, 2014

suspendedreason posted:

Sounds like the brightness of a "gleam" is definitionally ambiguous, and Ben Lerner specified.

Ok let's play the 'get the dictionaries out' game, then

OED posted:

terrible, adj.
2a Causing a feeling similar to dread or awe

beauty, n.
1 That quality or combination of qualities which delights the senses or mental faculties

Given delighting the mental faculties can still inspire dread or awe, beauty also definitionally allows for terribleness, (and terrible beauty most definitely did exist in Easter 1916, and exists at any important turning point in history, according to Yeats) yet terrible beauty is still an oxymoron. But it doesn't even matter anyway:

Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms posted:

oxymoron (plural -mora)
A figure of speech that combines two usually contradictory phrases in a compressed paradox. ... Oxymoronic phrases, like Milton's 'darkness visible' (um but technically surely darkness is visible anyway?!?!?), were especially cultivated in 16th- and 17th-century poetry.

They don't have to be completely mutually exclusive to work. All oxymorons do is exploit the ambiguities in language to make words that seem like they don't fit actually fit together. Me saying 'dimly gleam' is an oxymoron is something of a compliment, oxymorons are [/i]nice things[/i], it's an example of me being charitable to gentle Ben

# ? Jan 25, 2019 18:29

CestMoi: Sep 16, 2011

Sleng Teng posted:

the doughiest man

# ? Jan 25, 2019 18:30

CestMoi: Sep 16, 2011

ben lerner: farinal event

# ? Jan 25, 2019 18:35

Mel Mudkiper: Jan 19, 2012; At this point, Mudman abruptly ends the conversation. He usually insists on the last word.

Cest, as our resident dude who likes poetry how do you respond to the guy arguing his prose was influenced by his being a great poet

# ? Jan 25, 2019 18:36

Lex Neville: Apr 15, 2009

I am kidding and I am not kidding when I say that, as I sat and looked at him, sitting and looking, I intuited an alien intelligence in his countenance, his outrageously curvaceous frons seemingly rising further upwards as the succession of adverbial phrases continued, and even though, properly speaking, it was impossible for them to physically tread beyond their carefully allotted cranial real estate, I could not turn my gaze away from the coastline paradox of his brows.

# ? Jan 25, 2019 19:07

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

suspendedreason posted:

Spoiler: Ben Lerner is describing himself and his own project, and comparing it to what stupid octopuses do.

He's saying that meat is murder you dip

# ? Jan 25, 2019 19:14

Stuporstar: May 5, 2008; Where do fists come from?

Mel Mudkiper posted:

Let this moment be a self-reflexive penetrative event for you, you subsapient matriarchal polyamorist

see, I know you probably get told to "go gently caress yourself you dumb motherfucker" a lot so I ~defamiliarized~ it so you might be forced to reinspect how you should go gently caress yourself, you dumb motherfucker

# ? Jan 25, 2019 19:14

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Seriously, I'm going to break this down because I can't believe that someone who stumps so hard for this guy can't manage to puzzle out the one idea he's trying hardest to pound into the reader's head:

quote:

We had ingested the impossibly tender things entire, the first intact head I had ever consumed, let alone of an animal that decorates its lair, has been observed at complicated play.

How the hell do you read this and think he's calling the octopus stupid? He says he's eating an intact head and delays even specifying that it's an animal's until the next clause, emphasizing it as the seat of thought and emotion and downplaying that it's anything "less" than human. Then, when he does say that it's an animal, he again highlights its anthropomorphic qualities of thought and emotion: It's strange to eat heads, things that think and feel, let alone those that think and feel as well as an octopus does. He's going as far as he possibly can to make you feel sad for this cruelly slaughtered baby animal, and the message you take away is that it's subhuman? Are you Patrick goddamn Bateman?

quote:

We sat and watched the traffic and I am kidding and I am not kidding when I say that I intuited an alien intelligence, felt subject to a succession of images, sensations, memories, and affects that did not, properly speaking, belong to me: the ability to perceive polarized light; a conflation of taste and touch as salt was rubbed into the suction cups; a terror localized in my extremities, bypassing the brain completely.

Nope, nothing smart about an "alien intelligence" at all! Feeling kinship to the octopus, putting himself in its place by imagining its unique sense perceptions and taking them on as his own... this is how he knows that he's no better than a mindless animal, not that the animal has as much claim as he not only to life but to the things with which he stakes his own claim. I'm almost starting to like this passage purely out of the contrast of its blatant message to your monstrous reading of it.

Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 05:09 on Jan 26, 2019

# ? Jan 25, 2019 19:37

lost in postation: Aug 14, 2009

I actually liked Angle of Yaw a lot when I read it 10 years ago or so, and as far as I can remember the prose poems were really snappy and pared-down, basically the opposite of this. I don't really know what happened to him in the meantime.

# ? Jan 25, 2019 20:21

Benson Cunningham: Dec 9, 2006; Chief of J.U.N.K.E.R. H.Q.

I like fantasy and sci-fi because I am a subsapient matriarchal amorist.

Frank Hurbert, Children of Dune posted:

Slowly, as befitted the mother of a god, Jessica moved out of the shadows and onto the lip of the ramp.

That imagery. Gravitas abounds. Jessica is a space witch and mother of the Muad'Dib, the space Jesus. You are reminded that the protagonists are more akin to the revelers on Mt. Olympus than those living in the city in its shadow.

Gene Wolfe, The Shadow of the Torturer posted:

�I have said that I cannot explain my desire for her, and it is true. I loved her with a love thirsty and desperate. I felt that we two might commit some act so atrocious that the world, seeing us, would find it irresistible.�

The speaker is Severian, an apprentice in a guild of torturers. Here he describes his relationship with a prisoner he's raping. What for her is a monstrous act of survival is for him a beautiful, poetic thing. He has no self awareness, lies all the time, and is generally a poo poo person. What makes Book of the New Sun so good is that if you don't constantly pause to consider what's really happening, if you just gloss over the words, you'll miss the entire story.

Seth Dickinson, The Monster Baru Cormorant posted:

�Absolutely.� Baru scuffed her boots on the marble, tugged her belt, adjusted her collar, and shot her cuffs. �It�s time to reward them for their return to our care. Ease off the lash. Give them a little��slack on their chains��honey for their table.�

Good prose doesn't settle for bad verbs. gently caress. It looks so easy, but I think anyone who has ever tried writing knows it isn't. If your discipline slips for just a second, you're done. The enemy of good prose is the vague, the non specific.

Hopefully this is acceptable prose discussion and not just masturbatory quoting. I tried!

# ? Jan 25, 2019 20:36

Ccs: Feb 25, 2011

Regarding the octopus argument, if the writer is comparing his project of defamiliarization to a 'stupid' octopus playing, isn't he cheapening the whole project? Even if the project is self-aware, even if it's both mocking and not mocking the 'literary', at the end of the day it's just something with a bit of intelligence playing around and it's unimportant.

Whereas if he was elevating the idea of the octopus playing, saying that was a symbol of a great intelligence worthy of study, then his project has merit? Did you sabotage your own argument by calling the octopus stupid?

# ? Jan 25, 2019 21:30

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Benson Cunningham posted:

Hopefully this is acceptable prose discussion and not just masturbatory quoting. I tried!

All the quoting in this thread is masturbatory, but that is pretty unwarranted masturbation.

# ? Jan 25, 2019 21:40

Bonaventure: Jun 23, 2005; by sebmojo

Sham bam bamina! posted:

All the quoting in this thread is masturbatory, but that is pretty unwarranted masturbation.

you didn't want to rub one out to that thing with the torturer-rapist going all "I have such beautiful pain to show you, Kirsty"?

more like

Marquis de sad.

120 days of boredom.

# ? Jan 25, 2019 21:54

poisonpill: Nov 8, 2009; The only way to get huge fast is to insult a passing witch and hope she curses you with Beast-strength.

The dead octopus limb being analogous to the �dead� branch of the New York transit system that was converted into the High line is decent enough. But the way he writes about it strangles the idea to death for no good reason.

# ? Jan 25, 2019 22:02

Lex Neville: Apr 15, 2009

ahem, "literally massages" :colbert:

# ? Jan 25, 2019 22:05

Bonaventure: Jun 23, 2005; by sebmojo

JERRY: You're crying! Admit it, George, you're crying! She made you cry!

GEORGE: I'm not crying! This isn't crying! ... It's a lacrimal event!!!

# ? Jan 25, 2019 22:49

Ras Het: May 23, 2007; when I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child - but now I am a man.

This forum is truly mad when it tries to discuss lit at a more elaborate level than "im reading this 1920s slovakian nazi" "he'll, same". Not saying these posts are bad but they're definitely kinda nuts

# ? Jan 25, 2019 23:30

A human heart: Oct 10, 2012

suspendedreason posted:

Cool! There's a lot of really half-baked, overconfident opinions getting thrown around here, which makes it easy to go through and knock them down systematically.

Why would he do this??? So weird, right??? Definitely autistic. Or maybe like, he's trying to put an emotional distance between himself and what his body is doing? "Crying" won't get you there, but a lacrimal event, that's something that happens to you. Crying's something you do. This is part of his larger project of defamiliarization, in the Russian formalist sense, so that something so overworn as a good cry can be seen anew, in different light.

In fact, that's what his entire project is. In the Whitmanian walker-in-the-city tradition, he defamiliarizes and processes the familiar, and his prose matches that project. If you don't care about that project it's ok, defamiliarization is for big kids who can handle a little strangeness without falling back onto deontological wah-wah's they read in Strunk and White.

You wanna cut the detail about the octopus being tenderly massaged to death in brine, and say "woah weird we eat these smart creatures"? Isn't that uh, 1/ "telling" and not "showing" (if we wanna get deontological), and 2/ missing the point through synopsis yet again. The animal decorates its lair, which is to say it has an aesthetic sense. It has been observed at complicated play, implying not just intelligence but an ability to engage in pleasurable exploration of its environment. Spoiler: Ben Lerner is describing himself and his own project, and comparing it to what stupid octopuses do.

Which is all to say that this passage is self-aware. Ben is a really established poet. You can slam his sensibility but the verbosity is deliberate, both mocking and not mocking the "literary," both partaking and distancing the author from its mode. Ben Lerner both loves and hates the lyrically decadent. This is absolutely foundational to the outlook of the book as a whole, and all its thematic/meta-textual/philosophic crises/contradictions/"how can I have it both ways?" is getting set up from the first page.

This is just wrong, things dimly gleam all the time, what are you talking about? "1 : to shine with or as if with subdued steady light or moderate brightness." Sounds like the brightness of a "gleam" is definitionally ambiguous, and Ben Lerner specified.

You guys gotta step up your game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DV1fUwKMdAI

# ? Jan 25, 2019 23:33

suspendedreason: Dec 5, 2018

Sham bam bamina! posted:

He's saying that meat is murder you dip

I know. But things do and mean multiple things at once. You can like, kid and not kid simultaneously? He's definitely asking questions about whether it's ethical to eat octopuses. But the person I responded to wondered why he didn't just sum it up as "so weird we eat these intelligent creatures," and I was showing why: because the way he investigates the ethical allows him to also make a fun, undercutting jab at his own project. And the 10:04 project is nothing if not trying to be both ironic and serious simultaneously, both self-deprecatory and deluded with grandeur.

EDIT:

quote:

The dead octopus limb being analogous to the �dead� branch of the New York transit system that was converted into the High line is decent enough.

Yeah, it's super cool. There are like six different things happening with the octopus description. Also I love that you guys all think I'm Ben Lerner, keep going I'm so close.

suspendedreason fucked around with this message at 05:14 on Jan 26, 2019

# ? Jan 26, 2019 00:30

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Shut up, Ben.

# ? Jan 26, 2019 02:02

Benson Cunningham: Dec 9, 2006; Chief of J.U.N.K.E.R. H.Q.

Guys, this very day, for the first time, Ben Lerner taught me that eating things that have thoughts and feelings might be wrong.

Like, woah.

Woah.

# ? Jan 26, 2019 04:57

Tree Goat: May 24, 2009; argania spinosa

Ras Het posted:

This forum is truly mad when it tries to discuss lit at a more elaborate level than "im reading this 1920s slovakian nazi" "he'll, same". Not saying these posts are bad but they're definitely kinda nuts

this was also my impression

# ? Jan 26, 2019 05:32

gay guy: Dec 26, 2012

J_RBG posted:

In that passage I really cringed at 'dimly gleaming'. It could work in a different context (like most prose sins), but something about how it's tossed in there makes it sound like as if it's only in there because Lerner thinks it sounds nice, not because it does something. As it stands the effect is: there's an oxymoron that sounds weird ... and then we move on. It's a weird approach, like just throwing stuff at a wall and seeing if it sticks.

it helps the cadence of the sentence a lot, but its insane because the rest of it is just hopeless metrically

# ? Jan 29, 2019 12:48

gay guy: Dec 26, 2012

"The city had converted an elevated length of abandoned railway spur into an aerial greenway" messes with me. theres rhythm there. there's subdrama. velar frictive, dental consonant, beat, space, beat, then it's smooth dipthongs riding out from the spurs into the modern world.

but then it keeps going

gay guy fucked around with this message at 13:16 on Jan 29, 2019

# ? Jan 29, 2019 13:03