Two sides to this author
For any of you who have been in a writing workshop or an art class, you know what it is like to have your work critiqued. Two of the people who's opinions and talent I already respect the most wrote two very different reviews of the peice I just submitted. One of them was the proffesor, a published author whom I already thought was an excellent workshop teacher.
Responce #1:
"Everything is so abstract and when things are concrete, they usually add up to nothing. I find them boring because there is nothing to latch on to... no reason to care. I really didn't like the first 18 pages of this thing. Everything feels contrived and convoluted, and the novelty of the premise wears thin all too quickly."
Responce #2:
"Because you observe so well, the subtleties and serpentine twistings and shiftings of your observartion of primal conciousness achieve a kind of universality for anybody who can follow your train of thought-- or for anybody who can and also has the patience to slow down for a narrative made of such tiny increments of epistemological growth and change. You have an extraordinarily well developed habit of self-scrutiny; and you have the words for it... there is an originality and stubborn drive to find exactly the right language to convey subtle shifts of consciousness that nothing but you can explain. It's a real talent. I find your passages most fresh and absorbing when what you are representing seems to be the origins of consiousness itself, where it comes from, whether it needs to have language to be aware of itself, how memory organizes consciousness but also brings anxiety, how language is (or isn't) the instrument of all this; whether anything is there before consciousness. I like very much the way you use and mix two kinds of language for this, usually with remarkable control and imagination."
Heheh. thats life I guess. The second response was two pages long, and the first was only one, which is one of the reasons why I included more of the second one. I'm sure anyone who reads this can guess at other reasons.
Responce #1:
"Everything is so abstract and when things are concrete, they usually add up to nothing. I find them boring because there is nothing to latch on to... no reason to care. I really didn't like the first 18 pages of this thing. Everything feels contrived and convoluted, and the novelty of the premise wears thin all too quickly."
Responce #2:
"Because you observe so well, the subtleties and serpentine twistings and shiftings of your observartion of primal conciousness achieve a kind of universality for anybody who can follow your train of thought-- or for anybody who can and also has the patience to slow down for a narrative made of such tiny increments of epistemological growth and change. You have an extraordinarily well developed habit of self-scrutiny; and you have the words for it... there is an originality and stubborn drive to find exactly the right language to convey subtle shifts of consciousness that nothing but you can explain. It's a real talent. I find your passages most fresh and absorbing when what you are representing seems to be the origins of consiousness itself, where it comes from, whether it needs to have language to be aware of itself, how memory organizes consciousness but also brings anxiety, how language is (or isn't) the instrument of all this; whether anything is there before consciousness. I like very much the way you use and mix two kinds of language for this, usually with remarkable control and imagination."
Heheh. thats life I guess. The second response was two pages long, and the first was only one, which is one of the reasons why I included more of the second one. I'm sure anyone who reads this can guess at other reasons.