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Have been thinking about this all morning. I partly agree, but I also wonder whether repulsion is sometimes correct: we often recognize bad writing because it's ugly. Is it also consistently true? Did original audiences find Ovid or Keats, say, ugly? Is beauty always "minor"?
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From Adam Kirsch's 2008 Slate review of Roberto Bolano's 2666:
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Also interesting that for "ugly" you considered "repellant" and Acker's work. I think the words are loaded but we don't have agreed-upon definitions. It's as if I know what Proust is talking about, but it's not the right words. I need an essay, not a tweet, let alone a word.
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I think of Reznikoff's poems like this--on the sentence level dull, deliberately ugly legal writing--but very much ethically effective because of these things. It's the use of documentary ugliness (the ugly fact) in poetry that makes you have to consider its meaning.
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