How we stack up against late-18th-century Germans
We seem to require more than three turns of phrase, but to have relaxed the standards for wit to a shocking degree; perhaps we don't look for lies any longer, but that is only a middling credit, if it is any (nothing wrong with a lie or two, in its season, and as Lichtenberg says, Wir haben genug an den alten [Wahrheiten] zu verdauen, und diese würden wir schlechterdings nicht vertragen können, wenn wir ihnen nicht zuweilen mit Lügen den hohen Gout gäben
). Perhaps the most that can be said is that one does not become an author these days by such means straightaway; one is instead first solicited by editors who, one presumes, might yet turn one down. Call it even.
Though I'm baffled that any editor not paid hourly or on a piecework basis would be interested in someone capable of turning out this paragraph:
It [the Literature of the FUCHA!!] will spring from the iMac-fettered keyboards of the young, challenging, Facebook-and-MySpace-addled minds that you have so hastily jettisoned as literary jetsam, from those who see and comprehend, still to the delirious ignorance of the villainous Powers That Be, incalculable brands of grade-A terror being perpetrated unabashedly both by those whom we trust and those whom we loathe.
"Incalculable brands"? Do abashed people generally perpetrate terror? If you comprehend that terror is being perpetrated by those whom you trust, oughtn't you temper your faith just a bit? "jettisoned … jetsam" probably seemed a good idea at the time, but they're really far too close together; the effect is one of trying very hard to be Literary, and this is probably one case in which hoary advice applies. I am, I confess, simply unable to make sense of the "still to the ignorance ..." clause: are young minds comprehending to the ignorance of the PTB? (Is that like dancing to a waltz?) Does he mean that the PTB are ignorant of the young minds? Using "to s.o.'s ignorance" like that is not in my idiolect—it's not like "to s.o.'s shame". (Nor would transferring the object of the ignorance to the terror being wrought help.) What makes them villainous? Are they the same Powers that work this terror? If so, they presumably aren't ignorant of it. Why are the keyboards fettered to the iMacs? Is a USB cable a chain? Isn't it, in the end, painfully obvious that this is the sort of absolutely bad writing that only someone who really wants to write Well can come up with?
This bit is pretty kind of amusing, though the lapdog-like obsequiousness complaisance on display is kind of sick-making (there's such a thing as coming on too strong, and I'm one of those people who doesn't enjoy extravagent displays of self-abasement—probably because my self got locked in a basement when I was young): …when he so impeccably communicated the longing for, the necessitation of that transcendent Great Post-9/11 Novel: “the bracing, wide-screen, many-angled novel that will leave a larger, more definitive intellectual and moral footprint on the new age of terror,” he writes so consummately.
Convenient when what you long for's also been necessitated, I guess, but isn't that a completely conventional (one way for something to be consummate, I guess) description of what one would expect from any capitalized Novel, that basically anyone could write without much thought? Not to mention: Tense change!
In short, everything is ridiculous.
Comments
on 2008-07-19 12:52:55.0, Paul Gowder commented:
It's true. Les enfant terribles (oh god my french is horrible) of the literary past are probably twitching in their graves by now. Can you imagine Byron in his Childe Harold days ever writing anything that barbaric? Or Rousseau? Wilde? Genet?
and, further, on 2008-07-19 12:53:25.0, Paul Gowder commented:
enfants, that is. I think. See above re: horrible french.
and, further, on 2008-07-19 0:37:31.0, caldwellian commented:
I feel rather sleazed, though heaven knows I have no idea what that person was talking about.
Also: it's those adverbs: "impeccably", "consummately" (nay, "so impeccably" and "so consummately", in fact, that "so" making the whole business vastly worse), which are, as they say, really the kicker. On occasion I observe this turn--where "this" is that "lapdog-like obsequiousness"--in academic writing, and I shake my head sadly (or, if I am working, get out that red pen with a perhaps overcritical fury); for it does seem that people confuse slavering praise with argumentation.