"Thesaurus carpet-bombings and long-winded sentences are commonly mistaken for fine writing because they feel authoritative and intellectual. But they’re just masks; effective writing is lean, clean, and easy to read."https://www.helpscout.net/blog/damn-hard-writing/ …
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Replying to @CathyReisenwitz
please replace this tweet with an impassioned/unhinged rant about the long-term damage the beatification of James Joyce has done to the last several decades of literature
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Replying to @CathyReisenwitz @palecur
i think Ulysses is good but the way any English department approaches it is virulent poison don't *analyze* the fucking thing, holy shit, you have to let go of systematization and read it like you're listening to a piece of music
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and not the way a goddamn musician listens to a piece of music either
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Replying to @chaosprime @CathyReisenwitz
how can anyone listen to music *not* like a musician, tho? it is possible I am misunderstanding your point. Basically I feel that experiencing music is itself musicianship; experiencing a story likewise has commonalities with creating one. Hm. Am I wrong about that?
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Replying to @palecur @CathyReisenwitz
the musicianly tendency i am polemicizing against is picking it apart into its components and thinking about and judging the technical choices instead of experiencing the damn thing
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Replying to @chaosprime @CathyReisenwitz
Ah! I call that 'reading for technique' when applied to novels, and I do it sometimes, but it's certainly not the default mode.
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Replying to @palecur @CathyReisenwitz
oh god i just realized something remember how in the Death's Gate books the Sartans locked the Patryns up in a death maze designed to be impossible to beat by being a badass but easy to beat by becoming a better person? and the Patryns responded by becoming INSANELY BADASS?
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James Joyce tried to write a novel so resistant to analysis that English departments would be anagogically forced to let go of systematization and *experience* a work again, and English departments responded by becoming INSANE SYSTEMATIZERS
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why are we all so afraid of the avant-garde
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if we couldn't encounter something new without breaking it down into pieces small enough that we can absorb them without changing anything about ourselves, who would we even be afterward
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End of conversation
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