River ,'Objects In Space'
There's more to life than watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer! No. Really, there is! Honestly! Here's a place for Buffistas to come and discuss what it is they're reading, their favorite authors and poets. "Geez. Crack a book sometime."
I regret to have to say I dislike Annie Dillard's prose style enough that I wasn't able to make it through that famous book she wrote.
Oh, good, I was sitting here thinking, "Oh, dear, there goes my literary sophistication, that's some fairly overwrought stuff."
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. (I just went and looked it up.)
I am more an E. B. White kind of prose style fan.
Yeah, Annie Dillard is a little ... well, overwrought is as good a word as any. For me, anyway.
Roger Zelazny would go off into flights of twisting imagery, but he used it to describe a specific event/process/proceeding, and it was easy to skip if I wasn't in the mood for a verbal acid trip.
I like the way she wroughts!
Though admittedly "prose stylist" is a kind of back handed compliment comparable to "writer's writer."
But I am not the type of reader who insists that prose be transparent, a clean glass pane. I often prefer the stained glass window approach.
This surprises us not at all.
My favorite Annie Dillard quote:
I don’t do housework. Life’s too short and I’m too much of a Puritan. If you want to take a year to write a book, you have to take that year, or the year will take you by the hair and pull you toward the grave. Let the grass die. I let almost all my indoor plants die from neglect while I was writing the book. There are all kinds of ways to live. You can take your choice. You can keep a tidy house, and when St. Peter asks you what you did with your life, you can say, I kept a tidy house, I made my own cheese balls.
Oh, good, I was sitting here thinking, "Oh, dear, there goes my literary sophistication, that's some fairly overwrought stuff."
I'm glad it wasn't just me. I mean, I do like a poetic turn of phrase every now and then, but I don't think I like to be bombarded with it. And it's not really the way I write, I guess. My style seems to be more about sentence structure and the arrangement of words. If I have a style.
But I like Ginger's Dillard quote.
This surprises us not at all.
What are you implying, madame? That I have a steam powered Mark IV Purple Enprosenator running 24-7 in my basement at all times? That I praise linguistic maximalists to the spiraling tops of the clustered cumulus and damn the spindle shanked minimalists to the dreary mini-malls of puttering indifference? Is that what you're saying?