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.

I dunno, David... Seems "block that metaphor"-worthy to me.

Well, we don't have the rest of the book to compare it to. Extracting a few lines to highlight her metaphorical bent will necessarily emphasize the juicier examples.

Besides, there's nothing wrong with this line:

“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.”

Since I have been in Dillard's house, I can report that she does indeed live by the words in the Ginger quote (or did, in 1989). Not a cheese ball in sight.

Besides, there's nothing wrong with this line:

I did like the clam line. It was Lorrie Moore-esque.