Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. (I just went and looked it up.)
I am more an E. B. White kind of prose style fan.
Buffy ,'Same Time, Same Place'
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."
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?
“in her company he wrapped himself in misery like a robe. Between them self-consciousness bulked as a river silts its channel.”
“His hot eyes cooled. Invisible clouds blocked the sky and its atmospheres where noises of people dissolve. The sea beside him, a monster with a lace hem, drained east.”
“Twice a day behind their house the tide boarded the sand. Four times a year the seasons flopped over. Clams live like this, but without so much reading.”
I dunno, David... Seems "block that metaphor"-worthy to me.