Posted on 06/28/2011 12:51:29 PM PDT by Borges
Frankly, I think they missed the best one, from Alexander Pope, as a couplet in a stanza addressed to a contemporary who thought rather too highly of himself (from “To the Author of a Poem Entitled Successio”:
“Wit pass’d through thee no longer is the same,
As meat, digested, takes a different name”
Too bad she didn’t behave that way on the tube. She kept repeating her same, lame point over and over, and kept looking around as if she had no idea what was going on and why anyone dared disagree with her.
I’ve read a handful of novels and she really does a small handful of themes that she harps on again and again. She even uses the same imagery! I don’t think she’s even aware of it. ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ said everything she has to say in a succinct manner. It’s all the Atwood any one needs to read.
LOL - great post, Borges.
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15. William Faulkner on Ernest Hemingway
“He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.”
14. Ernest Hemingway on William Faulkner
“Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?”
I teied to read several of hers and just bogged down—her style reminded me of Robertson Davies without the wit, and without that, you ain’t got much.
Danielle Steel on Danielle Steel: “I studied literature design and fashion design.”
Maybe it’s my age, and my resultant loss of hearing, but I could hardly understand a word either said. Each was too busy trying to talk over the other.
IMHO, that essay insults Larry, Curly and Moe.
There have been daring people in the world who claimed that Cooper could write English, but they are all dead now -- all dead but Lounsbury. I don't remember that Lounsbury makes the claim in so many words, still he makes it, for he says that "Deerslayer" is a "pure work of art." Pure, in that connection, means faultless -- faultless in all details -- and language is a detail. If Mr. Lounsbury had only compared Cooper's English with the English he writes himself -- but it is plain that he didn't; and so it is likely that he imagines until this day that Cooper's is as clean and compact as his own. Now I feel sure, deep down in my heart, that Cooper wrote about the poorest English that exists in our language, and that the English of "Deerslayer" is the very worst that even Cooper ever wrote.
I may be mistaken, but it does seem to me that "Deerslayer" is not a work of art in any sense; it does seem to me that it is destitute of every detail that goes to the making of a work of art; in truth, it seems to me that "Deerslayer" is just simply a literary delirium tremens.
A work of art? It has no invention; it has no order, system, sequence, or result; it has no lifelikeness, no thrill, no stir, no seeming of reality; its characters are confusedly drawn, and by their acts and words they prove that they are not the sort of people the author claims that they are; its humor is pathetic; its pathos is funny; its conversations are -- oh! indescribable; its love-scenes odious; its English a crime against the language.
Counting these out, what is left is Art. I think we must all admit that.
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