some suff I thought while washing up that everyone needs to know
note to hypothetical essay-writing self: American writing of the early nineteenth century and/or English writing of the late nineteenth/early twentieth century is candid and stylish in perfect measures. Read more.
corroborative points off the top of my sleepy-hollow-addled head:
washington irving
thomas hardy
edgar allan poe
katherine mansfield
henry james
presumably wilkie collins, haven't read im can't spell his name
and on foreign fronts: karen blixen
jean cocteau
colette maybe, it's been a while...I'm not grasping so much as culling from such a broad field that for all it is blooming my scattered approach gleans a fairly disparate bunch, but that is beside the point...
(non-corroborative points: Shakespeare. The choicer literary output of antiquity, Chaucer, etc but arguably to the modern reader these are rather more impenetrable on the page, the point of this list being writers whos work is both great and accessible. I'm not a fan of dickens but only on some long-forgotten principle or other like 'he's a smug twat and I don't like him'. The schoolgirl bookworm's equivalent of 'he's hot but he knows it'. In short I held him to be congratulating himself on every rave review to come for the next century and a half as he wrote. Not fair and probably not true, so stick him in the ayes as well why not)
by the time of the bloomsbury set it's splitting off into the inaccessiblly vs the facile and though I think we've pulled it back pretty well, we've never quite regained our ease with the polysyllabic vernacular or the necessarily convoluted senctence. Indeed, the very fact that the word 'convoluted' when it pertains to syntax is pejorative demonstrates our continued disdain for such prose. I might say that one of those little mindfuck bottles was marvellously, magically convoluted, but in saying so and in continuing into a second or even thrid clause I run the risk of being accused of writing in a convoluted style. True and in my case truly a crime, but I'm sure there are still members of our species capable of what writiers in previous centuries achieved at ease if not necessarily with it.
Will self comes to mind. Funny voice, bit serious, but he's not afraid to run the gamut of english prose potential. Anyway, I'm going back to sleepy-hollow; it's marvellous. Sorry for the interruption and b'bye again x
corroborative points off the top of my sleepy-hollow-addled head:
washington irving
thomas hardy
edgar allan poe
katherine mansfield
henry james
presumably wilkie collins, haven't read im can't spell his name
and on foreign fronts: karen blixen
jean cocteau
colette maybe, it's been a while...I'm not grasping so much as culling from such a broad field that for all it is blooming my scattered approach gleans a fairly disparate bunch, but that is beside the point...
(non-corroborative points: Shakespeare. The choicer literary output of antiquity, Chaucer, etc but arguably to the modern reader these are rather more impenetrable on the page, the point of this list being writers whos work is both great and accessible. I'm not a fan of dickens but only on some long-forgotten principle or other like 'he's a smug twat and I don't like him'. The schoolgirl bookworm's equivalent of 'he's hot but he knows it'. In short I held him to be congratulating himself on every rave review to come for the next century and a half as he wrote. Not fair and probably not true, so stick him in the ayes as well why not)
by the time of the bloomsbury set it's splitting off into the inaccessiblly vs the facile and though I think we've pulled it back pretty well, we've never quite regained our ease with the polysyllabic vernacular or the necessarily convoluted senctence. Indeed, the very fact that the word 'convoluted' when it pertains to syntax is pejorative demonstrates our continued disdain for such prose. I might say that one of those little mindfuck bottles was marvellously, magically convoluted, but in saying so and in continuing into a second or even thrid clause I run the risk of being accused of writing in a convoluted style. True and in my case truly a crime, but I'm sure there are still members of our species capable of what writiers in previous centuries achieved at ease if not necessarily with it.
Will self comes to mind. Funny voice, bit serious, but he's not afraid to run the gamut of english prose potential. Anyway, I'm going back to sleepy-hollow; it's marvellous. Sorry for the interruption and b'bye again x