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Topic: Retelling (Read 3284 times)
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Lara Jones
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I liked Tsipi Keller's story, especially this part:
"Occasionally, like Elsbeth, I experienced moments of clarity when I felt that a certain profundity was accessible to me, that some fundamental secret would be revealed if I concentrated long enough. But as soon as I began to grope for formulations to capture whatever I thought I understood, the feeling vanished, and I concluded that such flashes of profound understanding were purely mechanical, caused by certain, perhaps accidental, synaptic clashes. Profundity, I recalled reading somewhere, never clarified the world, but clarity looked more profoundly into its depths."
You go girl!
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el lerpa
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on this website. the contributors and editors would do well to ponder the following masterful sentence, which closes out chapter 9 of charles bukowski's 'pulp' --
"I hit the button and waited for the fucking elevator to come on up."
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Gerry Dodge
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yes, but you must not forget that Faulkner is considered America's greatest novelist. Everyone has a different style. Damn important to remember that.
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the lerpa
Membrissimo
Posts: 23
life is gay
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to clarify, i am reacting to tsipi keller's writing. i would argue that her style is overly literary and stilted. can you imagine this stuff being read aloud? it's laughable. i call out for particular scorn the very sentence you cite in your homepage intro, "The air hung heavy, hot and steamy, and whatever breeze there was before was now stilled."
read that out loud and try not to laugh. better yet, call a friend and do something like this:
you: hey, jack, you wouldn't believe what happened to me at the a&p yesterday.
jack: do tell, friend, do tell.
you: well, i was walking to the a&p to get some bananas, right?
jack: right.
you: and it was pretty muggy out. i mean, the air hung heavy, hot and steamy, and whatever breeze there was before was now stilled.
jack: fag.
now, i'm not saying that all fiction is meant to be read out loud, but it shouldn't make people question your sexuality when it is.
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« Last Edit: May 24, 2006, 09:53:20 PM by the lerpa »
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Gregor Milne
Administrator
Poster Monkey
Posts: 72
The best friend I ever had
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Thanks for your feedback, lerpa.
To clarify, if you are calling Tsipi Keller a homosexual, you have HER sex wrong. Tsipi is a woman.
I did hear her read, at Deutches Haus last Friday. If I'm absolutely honest, she was the only tolerable reader there.
In answer to your initial post - some of our authors aren't to everyone's taste, like Mr. Dodge said. However--we're a non-denominational zine, and I try not to impose my taste too much. Even when I edit work, I work to get the best out of the author, without imposing myself. Read about Keats' negative capability, and apply that to editing.
Having a problem with a single work, doesn't make "a lot."
I shop at Shoprite by preference. They do great danishes - the best in the New York Metro area. I recommend the apple. The staff are also of a higher caliber than at the A&P. But that is just my preference, see.
This from publisher's weekly in a review of Keller's novel Retelling, from which the excerpt on PL is taken:
This opaque yet beguiling novel showcases the work of a talented and original writer.
All comments, even negative ones are welcome on PL. I'd like the author to maybe answer her critics.
Also - PL doesn't support the stereotyping of sex or sexuality. Maybe the lerpa would like to rephrase his argument in a style more suited to lit crit?
I suggest my rant on Ekphrastic poetry as a model.
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Mr. Pony
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Posts: 20
Hello!
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I think it's kind of stereotypical to suggest that all homosexuals are male. Some of my best friends are female homosexuals.
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Gregor Milne
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Posts: 72
The best friend I ever had
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the lerpa used the word "fag" I was trying to avoid that. "Fag" is specifically a derogatory word for male homosexual.
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the lerpa
Membrissimo
Posts: 23
life is gay
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first off, i didn't call anyone a fag, this character i invented, jack, did. i don't approve of what he did, but, like the lord god, i instill all my characters with free will, and if they choose to use it in the advancement of sin, so be it.
also, i posted that last bit before reading gerry dodge's post. to be fair, if we substituted some faulkner line about a muggy day into the 'jack and you' dialogue, the result would be equally stupid. yes, faulkner wrote some purple shit himself. e.g., the second sentence of his short story, old man stretched on for an agonizing page. but then, his style was original, if bloated, and he also wrote some great lines, such as the last sentence of old man: "'Women, shit,' the tall convict said."
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Gregor Milne
Administrator
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Posts: 72
The best friend I ever had
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lerpa - are you admitting that you are an "automatic writing" kind of fella
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Mr. Pony
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Posts: 20
Hello!
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Yes, but I have some friends who are lesbians
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Gerry Dodge
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I understand lerpa's point, but I also think that there is a huge difference between narration and dialogue. What the author wrote was narration. A page and a half of one sentence in dialogue is far different than a page and a half of one sentence of narration. Faulkner took some risks, but he did take risks, and that is the whole point. He revolutionalized narration and, I think, for the better. Today I think readers are impatient with words. Raymond Carver may be responsible for that, but if he were alive, he would still genuflect Faulkner, I can assure you.
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Gregor Milne
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Poster Monkey
Posts: 72
The best friend I ever had
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Ok so we have a realism issue here.
Think about the realism of speech, versus what someone - a specific character might write like. A woman of x age, y intelligence, z personality. Then imagine how she might write to the reader.
Dodge sums it up:
"there is a huge difference between narration and dialogue."
lerpa objects to the literary, which is fine. His quote from Bukowski, as an initial gut reaction, betrays his school.
I'm going to send the lerpa a copy of the novel, Retelling, and he can take it as a whole.
George Eliot and Flaubert revolutionized art - both stylistically and in terms of content and psychology. Faulkner et al merely built upon those foundations. Argue with that one 
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« Last Edit: May 19, 2006, 09:51:39 AM by Gregor Millen »
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the lerpa
Membrissimo
Posts: 23
life is gay
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i'm not a dogmatic realist. i like some purple writing. i wrote my thesis on absalom, absalom. i think martin amis' money is brilliant partly because it manages to be both purple and realistic.
it's just that if someone's writing is purple, i want it to be good purple (a matter of taste, of course, but one that can be argued on a case by case basis). or at least original purple.
what i really object to is phoniness, and the excerpt in question feels phony to me. it's a put-on, as far as i can tell, and not an intentional one, which might excuse it. now, if tipsi meant for the reader to judge this narrator as a phony, my apologies, but i don't think that's the case.
also, in the interest of full disclosure, i didn't read the full excerpt until now. there are some good lines in there, but i still feel they're far outweighed by overall stylistic error.
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the lerpa
Membrissimo
Posts: 23
life is gay
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(amendment: i'm sure you can find examples of stories i do like that are arguably, or even indisputably, phony, but like i said, these things need to be judged on a case by case basis. ie, a phony style could be saved by a good sense of humor or splendid observations of the goddamned human condition.)
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« Last Edit: May 19, 2006, 10:14:39 AM by the lerpa »
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AmandaH
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Epigastric poetry... urp? Speaking of turgid terminology...
Why has no one mentioned Hemingway? Leper? Poncy?
Anyway, what isn't phony? Seriously, we can't be making the innocent mistake of promulgating the "true" in writing?
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« Last Edit: May 19, 2006, 10:57:41 AM by AmandaH »
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the lerpa
Membrissimo
Posts: 23
life is gay
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i meant "phony" in the this-person-sounds-like-a-pretentious-twit-whom-i'd-like-to-punch-in-the-face sense, not the write-about-real-life sense.
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AmandaH
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I know how "phony" is being used. However, earlier posts suggest that the stylistic trop of "real-life-speech" (I paraphrase) is preferable to that of "literary" phrasing. I am simply pointing out that these are all stylistic masks, and the power of good writing is the mastery of the mask.
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the lerpa
Membrissimo
Posts: 23
life is gay
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like i said, i'm not a dogmatic realist. i think raymond carver's contrived "leanness" comes off as more pretentious than a lot of william faulkner's stuff.
i agree with you about the mask -- any style could conceivably work in the hands of someone who knows what he's doing. i think narration functions basically like a personality; you either like hanging out with and listening to this person, or you don't. and just as in life, part of that mysterious equation is your sense of whether said person is full of shit. when they are, you tend to dislike hearing their stinky brown maunderings. that's the sense i got of this narrator. it'd be different if, like, say, an oscar wilde narrator/character, she realized she was full of shit, and/or if, like that same wildean person, her full of shitness were eclipsed by the fact that she's smarter or wittier than you. i see no such mitigating factors in this piece.
that's what i was trying to get at, i think, with my little passion play before.
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« Last Edit: May 19, 2006, 03:31:11 PM by the lerpa »
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madox g.m.
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Hey! This 2006?  Who is this character equating style he/she doesn't understand with any kind of sexual tendencies?
Chuck Bukowski? Oh yeah... His your ideal type of writing? I don't mind. I don't care. Not mine anyway. I respect him, though, not for being a dirty old man but for having contributed something to Literature. In his time, which old as I am was still a few years before mine.
However, farting or burping in anyone's face is not exactly what I call literary criticism.
Now I should like to point out two things:
A) oral style and written style are not necessarily identical. In fact, overly oral expression has been for a long time and is still for many people as respectable as the ...whatever, considered slack and proof of weak craftmanship. So putting the written phrase in the mouth of two characters unrelated to the story is perfectly absurd.
B) This being said, the Tsipi Keller phrase quoted by the first poster does not excite my admiration: there are too many abstract words, in my point of view. I think one of the purposes of fiction is to make arrive at abstractions from an arrangement of words describing concrete situations, actual feelings. Rather than the Bukowski phrase quoted by the above-mentioned character, I would quote the last phrase of Mr Dodge's story "Turning over a new leaf". It is graphic, but apt and gives a kicking end to the story (no pun intended) .
Purple for purple's sake is - in my way - childish and reminiscent of school lavatories.
Now I should like to say that the phrase that sparked the topic is the only one that I did not like immensely in Tsipi Keller's text...
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« Last Edit: June 15, 2006, 04:18:49 PM by madox g.m. »
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