The World Beyond BetterMost > The Culture Tent
In the New Yorker...
Jeff Wrangler:
The Oct. 5 article about the poet Kenneth Goldsmith bored and baffled me, except for one thing that I think sounds like fun. It's an avant garde technique called N+7, where a poet--really, anybody could do it--takes a text, removes certain words from it, and replaces each word with the seventh word that follows it in the dictionary. The article gives as an example a poet named Rosmarie Waldrop, who used this technique on the Declaration of Independence, and ended up with something that begins, "We holler these trysts to be self-exiled." ;D
serious crayons:
From the Sept. 21 issue:
"Blah blah blah [paraphrasing]," Todd Haynes, in whose Safe (1995) and Far From Heaven (2002) Moore has given two of her greatest performances, said.
What are style rules for if not to make writing clearer, smoother or more graceful? Or, if they must for whatever dumb reason prohibit declarative sentences in which the verb precedes the subject (tradition, I suppose, like their insistance on spellings like reëlection), how about just splitting it into two sentences?
"Blah blah blah," Todd Haynes said. Moore gave two of her greatest performances in Haynes' Safe and Far From Heaven.
That's still a little clumsy, but not laughably so. I highly doubt David Remnick wrote weird-ass sentences like the top one above when he was a reporter at the Washington Post.
Maybe the writers all find that style rule ridiculous and keep pushing it further and further into ludicrousness in hopes of forcing the magazine to change the rule.
Front-Ranger:
After reading that article I had the distinct impression that the author didn't like Julianne Moore very much. :-\
Jeff Wrangler:
--- Quote from: Front-Ranger on October 09, 2015, 06:26:11 pm ---After reading that article I had the distinct impression that the author didn't like Julianne Moore very much. :-\
--- End quote ---
I came away from it feeling that she might be a fine actor, but I wouldn't be much interested in knowing her personally.
Jeff Wrangler:
So. Gloria Steinem was Christian Bale's stepmother (Oct. 19). I didn't know that.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version