Because it's pretentious as frick. And if the bloated vocabulary wasn't enough to prove that whoever wrote that was a hack, Art Nouveau and Art Deco are on complete opposite ends of the Art spectrum.
>that's pretentious! >but hey let me correct you on this useless, parasitic idea of categorization by which useless, parasitic academics attempt to latch onto things they'll never be capable of themselves creating
The duality of man
>no, no... you're STUPID if you don't want to categorize the items!!!! you just don't get it!!!!!!
1 month ago
Anonymous
No, you're right, you're not stupid. You're a crayon-eating fricking mongoloid.
You don't believe in "categories"? Do you not believe in names, either? Dipshit.
1 month ago
Anonymous
regardless of the value of the categorization itself he is correct to say that you are employing it uselessly and "parasitically," that is to say to falsely validate your self-worth. scanning a whole page of prose you couldn't possibly produce yourself to find some trivial issue that allows you to dismiss the whole thing is very much the psychological move of a bugman desperate to find reasons for the achievements of others to "not count." grow a soul
1 month ago
Anonymous
You're trying to say that a) using more words/ uncommon words equates better prose, b) that I'm not a good writer in my own right and c) that me pointing out that a contradiction is somehow me pedantically adhering to some esoteric category that no one else would care about, when the difference between Art Nouveau and Art Deco is very clearly defined and very well known. Your argument is flawed on multiple levels, and that's why you're a dumbass.
1 month ago
Anonymous
Not the anon you responded to, but I have an opinion on your first point:
>a) using more words/ uncommon words equates better prose
While you're right (that it isn't true uncommon words means better prose), pretentious is your own opinion and it says nothing about quality. I've read many Cormac M, Nabokov, and Joyce passages I've found "pretentious", but I know that doesn't make them bad writers.
The author, Calder, was inspired by Angela Carter, who herself had a penchant for uncommon vocabulary. Personally, if given a choice between someone like Hemingway and someone who uses more creative, archaic descriptors, I'd choose the latter.
You are correct about Art Deco and Art Nouveau being two different things. Though the novel is written in first person perspective and takes place in the future (I think 2090), so maybe the character is wrong or the education system got history wrong.
Shitting on a writer because of one page and without knowing the proper context is a weird thing to do.
1 month ago
Anonymous
homies itt don't know that the entire book isn't written like this.
>place in the future (I think 2090)
Yep. It's a Sci-Fi novel written in 1997 and the protagonist spends the first part in a place like Thailand or some shit. There's a lot of futuristic slang.
https://i.imgur.com/KF6Zo6Y.png
Another snippet.
Right there: The stench of the Klong.
1 month ago
Anonymous
>Though the novel is written in first person perspective
Isn't the protag an uneducated criminal in his 20s? Why is he speaking like Stephen Dedalus on LSD?
1 month ago
Anonymous
I know I'm a homosexual for saying this but the author is a Jungian extroverted intuitive.
He jumps between ideas without having a full picture. He wants his city to be everything all at once. He wants include as much dense vocabulary and arcane knowledge as possible, but only for it's own sake, or so people will think he's an intellectual. As pointed out there isn't a reason for the character to speak like this. He wants to write Snow Crash/Neuromancer in the style of Joyce, but instead of expanding upon ideas like Joyce would, he backtracks and contradicts himself. He swerves left and right without driving a straight line forward.
There is no reason for him to write 3 novellas
https://i.imgur.com/KofiMre.jpg
[...]
Yeah. It's part of a trilogy.
rather than one big book.
1 month ago
Anonymous
A unique word can be found in every 12 words of Moby Dick yet few of the words needed to be looked up in a dictionary.
I guess if the author's intention is to make the reader really strained and tired after a page he achieved his goal. I also concur with him who says that this is pretentious: hitting readers over the head with extremely flowery language indicates that you are indeed beyond their mental capacities, because otherwise you would not feel the need to do it. So when it turns out that youre just doing meaningless, pretentious word play without an intellectual scaffolding to back your words up, e.g. lacking critical insights into artstyles, then you just come off as a pretentious dummy.
It is very tiresome to read these lines. The style isnt the problem itself, its the fact that it is completely overdone, if every sentence has this grandiose, highly verbose and ultimately meaningless vocabulary it is as though the reader is mentally preparing himself to give great importance to every sentence, but it turns out there is nothing in it but obscure verbage. So how do discern what is important? Nobody in real life thinks that way, I am autistic and while my sensations are probably already differing from those of others, I have a hard time believing that anyone could function if they went around making these mental notes of everything. It sort of feels like people who become super good at copying photos and then call it drawing, they can't draw in fact, they are not draughtsmen, they just copy photos; the language here gives the same impression, the same lack of honesty. These are not real impressions but photographed memories, as though someone took video evidence of their life and described every single detail to the utmost of their mental faculties. It would be interesting but ultimately pointless because you can just show people the film instead.
>These are not real impressions but photographed memories, as though someone took video evidence of their life and described every single detail to the utmost of their mental faculties. It would be interesting but ultimately pointless because you can just show people the film instead.
this is not an apt comparison. first because of the fact that he actually doesnt have anything other than his memory and notes to go into the past and secondly there were no video cameras at that point. I meant my point quite literally. Nowadays even fine artists who make "real" art work almost exclusively from photographic reference, the excerpt OP posted feels either like useless rambling or like that, the textual form of photographic reference.
How the frick did you know? I googled phrases and couldn't find shit.
https://i.imgur.com/8qh54xK.png
How come more people don't write like this?
I 100% guarantee if you presented this work to someone and slapped on the name Faulkner or Alasdair Gray, they would praise the slop and call this gibberish genius.
The style + the imaginative power and use of metaphors and the imagery (eg the telephone/communication lines as black octopus and weaving around the world with it and how it works with the rest of the themes).
Because it's exhaustingly verbose for absolutely no good reason. There's nothing interesting in putting such overeffort into describing such mundane things. Also, I am 72% certain that I remember Gubsin describing a helicopter using language extremely similar to >steel-hulled dragonflies
which makes this guy a lazy ripoff artist in addition to being a bad writer.
It's riding the rails of maximalist prolix, but the visuals are good. More parataxis would sell it better, but for scifi this is what Gibson aped at but failed in prose-- it has lyricism and movement, where properly purple is visually, orally, and mentally turgid. OP pic could lose a lot of commas, but it's building a determinate sense of place.
Maybe I'm wrong, but the simile in the third sentence is confusing: The buildings are waterlilies (nenuphar) that spill sap (light) into the sea (klong)? I feel like he wanted to say the buildings are tall, but he used the word nenuphar to describe them. Waterlilies stay in the water, but the buildings are on land. In the next part he refers to "sunken temples" protruding from the water; shouldn't those temples receive the 'nenuphar' metaphor?
>A luminous gas, a gasoline-menthol smog
couldn't the luminous gas part be omitted? And which 'humble steeples' is he referring to? The nenuphar or the sunken temples?
>glow of underwater road signs
The city can't be underwater since there is a limo driving on a road. Is he referring to the klong again? Are the signs in the klong? If so, why didn't he mention them along with the sunken temples?
>peasouper
An odd choice for the narrator to use when compared to the rest of the vocabulary.
>Again, the pall greenness descended
Does he mean reappeared, since it was gone for an instant with the flash of lightning?
>then the rain began
The passage ends with rain starting. Why not introduce the rain at the beginning and say the "nenuphar" sap light onto the "flood"? If the narrator is setting an ominous mood, why not start with rain? Then the "amphibious" metaphor would work too.
Because it's pretentious as frick. And if the bloated vocabulary wasn't enough to prove that whoever wrote that was a hack, Art Nouveau and Art Deco are on complete opposite ends of the Art spectrum.
>that's pretentious!
>but hey let me correct you on this useless, parasitic idea of categorization by which useless, parasitic academics attempt to latch onto things they'll never be capable of themselves creating
The duality of man
>useless, parasitic idea of categorization
are you being stupid on purpose?
>no, no... you're STUPID if you don't want to categorize the items!!!! you just don't get it!!!!!!
No, you're right, you're not stupid. You're a crayon-eating fricking mongoloid.
You don't believe in "categories"? Do you not believe in names, either? Dipshit.
regardless of the value of the categorization itself he is correct to say that you are employing it uselessly and "parasitically," that is to say to falsely validate your self-worth. scanning a whole page of prose you couldn't possibly produce yourself to find some trivial issue that allows you to dismiss the whole thing is very much the psychological move of a bugman desperate to find reasons for the achievements of others to "not count." grow a soul
You're trying to say that a) using more words/ uncommon words equates better prose, b) that I'm not a good writer in my own right and c) that me pointing out that a contradiction is somehow me pedantically adhering to some esoteric category that no one else would care about, when the difference between Art Nouveau and Art Deco is very clearly defined and very well known. Your argument is flawed on multiple levels, and that's why you're a dumbass.
Not the anon you responded to, but I have an opinion on your first point:
>a) using more words/ uncommon words equates better prose
While you're right (that it isn't true uncommon words means better prose), pretentious is your own opinion and it says nothing about quality. I've read many Cormac M, Nabokov, and Joyce passages I've found "pretentious", but I know that doesn't make them bad writers.
The author, Calder, was inspired by Angela Carter, who herself had a penchant for uncommon vocabulary. Personally, if given a choice between someone like Hemingway and someone who uses more creative, archaic descriptors, I'd choose the latter.
You are correct about Art Deco and Art Nouveau being two different things. Though the novel is written in first person perspective and takes place in the future (I think 2090), so maybe the character is wrong or the education system got history wrong.
Shitting on a writer because of one page and without knowing the proper context is a weird thing to do.
homies itt don't know that the entire book isn't written like this.
>place in the future (I think 2090)
Yep. It's a Sci-Fi novel written in 1997 and the protagonist spends the first part in a place like Thailand or some shit. There's a lot of futuristic slang.
Right there: The stench of the Klong.
>Though the novel is written in first person perspective
Isn't the protag an uneducated criminal in his 20s? Why is he speaking like Stephen Dedalus on LSD?
I know I'm a homosexual for saying this but the author is a Jungian extroverted intuitive.
He jumps between ideas without having a full picture. He wants his city to be everything all at once. He wants include as much dense vocabulary and arcane knowledge as possible, but only for it's own sake, or so people will think he's an intellectual. As pointed out there isn't a reason for the character to speak like this. He wants to write Snow Crash/Neuromancer in the style of Joyce, but instead of expanding upon ideas like Joyce would, he backtracks and contradicts himself. He swerves left and right without driving a straight line forward.
There is no reason for him to write 3 novellas
rather than one big book.
A unique word can be found in every 12 words of Moby Dick yet few of the words needed to be looked up in a dictionary.
>Because it's pretentious as frick.
But enough about Moby Dick
Uh, in my art book light-dark was in the beginning, and post-modernism was at the end. I disagree.
>Art Nouveau and Art Deco are on complete opposite ends of the Art spectrum
How?
>Art Nouveau
long, flowing lines, no sharp edges, heavy incorporation of nature motifs.
>Art Deco
short, straight lines with hard, sharp edges
I guess if the author's intention is to make the reader really strained and tired after a page he achieved his goal. I also concur with him who says that this is pretentious: hitting readers over the head with extremely flowery language indicates that you are indeed beyond their mental capacities, because otherwise you would not feel the need to do it. So when it turns out that youre just doing meaningless, pretentious word play without an intellectual scaffolding to back your words up, e.g. lacking critical insights into artstyles, then you just come off as a pretentious dummy.
It is very tiresome to read these lines. The style isnt the problem itself, its the fact that it is completely overdone, if every sentence has this grandiose, highly verbose and ultimately meaningless vocabulary it is as though the reader is mentally preparing himself to give great importance to every sentence, but it turns out there is nothing in it but obscure verbage. So how do discern what is important? Nobody in real life thinks that way, I am autistic and while my sensations are probably already differing from those of others, I have a hard time believing that anyone could function if they went around making these mental notes of everything. It sort of feels like people who become super good at copying photos and then call it drawing, they can't draw in fact, they are not draughtsmen, they just copy photos; the language here gives the same impression, the same lack of honesty. These are not real impressions but photographed memories, as though someone took video evidence of their life and described every single detail to the utmost of their mental faculties. It would be interesting but ultimately pointless because you can just show people the film instead.
>These are not real impressions but photographed memories, as though someone took video evidence of their life and described every single detail to the utmost of their mental faculties. It would be interesting but ultimately pointless because you can just show people the film instead.
this is not an apt comparison. first because of the fact that he actually doesnt have anything other than his memory and notes to go into the past and secondly there were no video cameras at that point. I meant my point quite literally. Nowadays even fine artists who make "real" art work almost exclusively from photographic reference, the excerpt OP posted feels either like useless rambling or like that, the textual form of photographic reference.
Another snippet.
Embarrassing
Dead Girls by Calder Richard
Yeah. It's part of a trilogy.
Will check it out. Thanks.
How the frick did you know? I googled phrases and couldn't find shit.
I 100% guarantee if you presented this work to someone and slapped on the name Faulkner or Alasdair Gray, they would praise the slop and call this gibberish genius.
because they don't know how.
IMO inexperienced writers write like this. They cover lack of substance with style.
What is this from? I Googled a few lines but Google isn't what it used to be, so I got nothing.
>How come more people don't write like this?
I remember having a similar epiphany reading the first part of Vollman's Europe Central.
The scope or the prose?
The style + the imaginative power and use of metaphors and the imagery (eg the telephone/communication lines as black octopus and weaving around the world with it and how it works with the rest of the themes).
Because it's exhaustingly verbose for absolutely no good reason. There's nothing interesting in putting such overeffort into describing such mundane things. Also, I am 72% certain that I remember Gubsin describing a helicopter using language extremely similar to
>steel-hulled dragonflies
which makes this guy a lazy ripoff artist in addition to being a bad writer.
>Gubsin
I don't know how the frick it came out like that. Gibson.
And yet you're here on IQfy critiquing real writers.
>Because it's exhaustingly verbose
You must hate Dickens.
Nah, Dickens had talent unlock the schlock posted in OP
It's riding the rails of maximalist prolix, but the visuals are good. More parataxis would sell it better, but for scifi this is what Gibson aped at but failed in prose-- it has lyricism and movement, where properly purple is visually, orally, and mentally turgid. OP pic could lose a lot of commas, but it's building a determinate sense of place.
Probably the only opinion in the thread so far that's worth a damn. Well said.
yikes
utting gold flakes on a a turd doesn't make it stink less. This is unnecessary, irritating and pedant verbose crap
reminds me of the dude who wrote cloud atlas. Too busy trying to sound intelligent.
First sentence is fine.
>I stared, unblinking
redundant
Maybe I'm wrong, but the simile in the third sentence is confusing: The buildings are waterlilies (nenuphar) that spill sap (light) into the sea (klong)? I feel like he wanted to say the buildings are tall, but he used the word nenuphar to describe them. Waterlilies stay in the water, but the buildings are on land. In the next part he refers to "sunken temples" protruding from the water; shouldn't those temples receive the 'nenuphar' metaphor?
>A luminous gas, a gasoline-menthol smog
couldn't the luminous gas part be omitted? And which 'humble steeples' is he referring to? The nenuphar or the sunken temples?
>glow of underwater road signs
The city can't be underwater since there is a limo driving on a road. Is he referring to the klong again? Are the signs in the klong? If so, why didn't he mention them along with the sunken temples?
>peasouper
An odd choice for the narrator to use when compared to the rest of the vocabulary.
>Again, the pall greenness descended
Does he mean reappeared, since it was gone for an instant with the flash of lightning?
>then the rain began
The passage ends with rain starting. Why not introduce the rain at the beginning and say the "nenuphar" sap light onto the "flood"? If the narrator is setting an ominous mood, why not start with rain? Then the "amphibious" metaphor would work too.
I liked your analysis.
>English_degree.txt
Faulkner mogs
Holy Macbook Thesaurus, Batman!