Crap is a load of books

[imomus]

1. If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the

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Re: footnote

[imomus]

Well, Auchincloss, by being more extreme, in a sense, than any of the writers we're talking about today, reveals the position of our Overton Window, the limits of acceptable rebellion. We were looking at gleeful transgressors and the more reluctant kind who do it because they're realists and want to convey the language of the street. But Auchincloss simply stuck with a 19th century polished, poised, aristocratic articulacy:

LA: That my characters talk artificially? Well yes, because I don’t particularly care about having them talk realistically, that doesn’t mean very much to me. Actually, a lot of people speak more articulately than some critics think, but before the 20th century it really didn’t occur to many writers that their language had to be the language of everyday speech. When Wordsworth first considered that in poetry, it was considered very much of a shocker. And although I’m delighted to have things in ordinary speech, it’s not what I’m trying to perform myself at all: I want my characters to get their ideas across, and I want them to be articulate.