Peter T. Daniels:
> Anton Shepelev:
> > Peter T. Daniels:
> > > Anton Shepelev:
> > >
> > > > not all that [Ambrose Bierce] has written in
> > > > "Write it Right" is obsolete.
> > >
> > > In case that's true, you as a non-native are
> > > in no position to distinguish what is from
> > > what isn't obsolete.
> >
> > As one who reads old and modern literature, and
> > many sorts of internet sites including those
> > written in abominable business-speak, I can dis-
> > tinguish between different styles. It is not a
> > matter of "positions" ->
>
> I have no idea what you're talking about. Are you
> still moaning because you misunderstood what some-
> one (not me) said about your "here second"?
Why can't you restrain youself from insults even
when they are least expected? My reply addresses
the quoted paragraph and nothing else. Have another
try.
> > -> but a simple fact which is true regardless of
> > whether you deny me the right to express my
> > opinion or not.
>
> What is "a fact"? That Bierce is outmoded?
Surely not. Are you a troll to suggest things so
obviosly contrary to all I have written?
> > For example, from the first few paragraphs I
> > recognised that Thomas Ligotti's "The Last Feast
> > of Harlequin" was a fathful tribute to Love-
> > craft.
>
> I have no idea who that is or why anyone would
> think it a good idea to pay tribute to Lovecraft.
Yeah, so what? You have missed the whole point. It
was an example of my sense for style.
> > > Doubtless Bierce would have despised Hemingway
> > > (and perhaps loved Faulkner),
> >
> > You are in no postion to make such predictions
> > because, as far as I dare assume, you are not a
> > medium and neither have you consulted one in
> > preparation for this post.
>
> I know how Bierce wrote. I know how Hemingway
> wrote. They are different.
So you despise everybody different from yourself?
> > I have only heard some Hemmingway in Russian on
> > the radio. He extolled animal cruelty gloating
> > over the death throes of a rhinoceros he had
> > wounded on a hunt in Africa. To me, that was
> > disgusting.
>
> So you can't even distinguish style from content?
I most certainly can, but you missed the point
again: I explained how I became disappointed in Hem-
mingway, even if too easily. (ObAUE: I think tense
shifting ("had become") is optional here).
> And you have in fact no idea what "Hemingway's
> style" means, either in general or in the context
> of American literature?
No, not a whit of it, so I asked that of you (quoted
below), but you didn't attempt an answer:
> > > but it's Hemmingway who showed the way to con-
> > > temporary American style.
> >
> > What is "contemporary American style" and who
> > are its prophets? Fitzgerald? Joyce? Shirley
> > Jackson?
>
> Um, do you even know where James Joyce was from?
Mea culpa. I was so focused on the unhale and un-
pleasant that I forgot he was not only merely "from"
Ireland but right into it.
> > The hale and pleasant prose of late (alas, in
> > both senses) Ray Bradbury is, meseems, much bet-
> > ter an example of modern American style. He did
> > not write only sci-fi and fantasy (if that mat-
> > ters).
>
> "Hale and pleasant." Two utterly meaningless at-
> tributes.
Only for a total ethical and esthetical relativist.
> Perhaps I was spoiled by seeing the *Twilight
> Zone* version of "An Occurrence at Owl Creek
> Bridge" as a small boy, decades before reading the
> story.
Or maybe, as Stephen King put it, the muscles of
your imagination have grown weak? Whose prose af-
fects you on the deepest, gut, emotional level?
What writers thrill you literally?
> It's an example of a filmed version being far, far
> better than the original written version. (Which
> is also true for every Agatha Christie story that
> was ever made into a movie.)
Not that I disagree with you here, but why do you so
often make such bald statements without so much as
preperding them with "I think that..." Is it con-
sidered polite in English?
> > His war stories are keenly realistic and
> > someties reminded me of Tolstoy's battle scenes.
> > Did you notice how the landscape and terrain
> > play a (and often the) decive part in their
> > plots?
>
> Again you are confounding content with style.
I was not talking specifially about style, but men-
tioned realism in the sense of Hi-End in music re-
production -- a quality of delivery allowing the
perceiver to immerse into a work of art so as com-
pletely to bypass the imperfections of the medum and
to feel the artist's mind and emotions without con-
scious effort or analysis.
In true art, style is only a means of expressing
content, and you shall not feel any realism if the
artist has not the talent to convey it (if he have
things to convey to begin with), just as you shall
not fully enjoy a landscape by viewing it through a
tiny hole fitted with muddied glass (hence Ansel
Adams's f.64 club, no pun intended), or a movie by
watching it on your cell phone.
Style is therefore subservient to the artist's mes-
sage, and if he lets his message naturally express
itself by not hampering it with his inaptitude, his
style is like clear glass through which the message
reaches the perceiver undistorted.
If you analyse content and style in mutual isolation
then you are missing the greatest secret of the Uni-
verse -- that of how the whole exceeds the sum of
its parts. As Gandalf said:
He that breaks a thing to see what it is has left
the path of wisdom.
Stephen King agrees:
I think there are few if any descriptive passages
in the English language that are any finer than
this; it is the sort of quiet epiphany every
writer hopes for: words that somehow transcend
words, words which add up to a total greater than
the sum of the parts. Analysis of such a para-
graph is a mean and shoddy trick, and should
almost always be left to college and university
professors, those lepidopterists of literature
who, when they see a lovely butterfly, feel that
they should immediately run into the field with a
net, catch it, kill it with a drop of chloroform,
and mount it on a white board and put it in a
glass case, where it will still be beautiful...
and just as dead as horseshit.
> As for content, they're all pretty much the same:
> proto-O. Henry irony for the most part.
Is the nominal plot all that interest you? As Akira
Kurosawa said in an interview, it is not the plot,
but the execution of the plot that matters.
The same is true of music. It is not not skeleton
of the musical score (which has only formal, mathe-
matical beauty) but the flesh of the beautiful tim-
bers and, most importantly, the soul of the emotions
the director and the musicians put into the perfor-
mance, that causes the listener to experience in-
tense, elevating feelings and leave the concert hall
a better man.