if_i_could_write_like_you uow i wouldn't have to write like me 040926 ... f You bind me, and I tear away in rage to open out into air, a round brightness, a candlepoint, all reason, all love. I'm not saying this right. 040926 ... god i'd use a different piece of paper than that. 040926 ... Syrope there'd be less backspacing and more explaining 040926 ... endless desire never compare yourself. 040926 ... soulsearcher endless desire, never compare yourself 041107 ... neesh i would write millions of incredibly life-like, moving, powerfully paced, gripping, oddly american sounding dialogues, and never get bored of it because they'd all be brilliant. and then every now and then i'd write a thought-provoking, purely elegant poem in perfect rhyme and pentameter, making judicial use of classical poetic constructs (of which i'd know practically everything), for total contrast, just because i'd be able to. sigh, but i'm me, so i have to settle for fables and twisted monologues. not that i dislike those things, just that everyone wants to be able to do what they can't. really loves your writing 041107 ... oldephebe boy if i could write like samuel baldwin or norman mailer or don dellilo or david foster wallace or sylvia plath or david mamet or dickens, or gee there's too many to name, fyn gula, mtree, pd, some guy named phil, mon, ed, sports writer bill lyon...and on and on.. ... 041108 ... (z) (you cannot. but you can write like oldphebe. that is unmistakable.) 041109 ... oldephebe yeah. t'anks Z. Although sometimes I'm not sure if that's virtue or dubious distinction. 'Cause yeah sure in these post-modern times style, style, and or idosyncrasy becomes the meat of the matter and not what's in the core of meaning, I mean style is the substance these days. we recreat meaning and identity based soley on an aesthetic of style. blech ... ... 050403 ... neesh that's a very interesting point. we could of course argue that there's nothing new to say, only new ways of saying it, and so style has had to take predominance in postmodern times. we could even extend this to much earlier times, why not. new styles have been cropping up to say the same things for a loooong long time (take milton's claim to the english epic, or pope's parody of it; better still, take shakespeare's break away from the unities). on the other hand, pope did say "the sound must seem an echo to the sense", and maybe the core of the matter is that style is tied deep into meaning. the same "meaning" in a different style maybe means something different. for example take the deeper message "love is absolute" and look at something like an_arundel_tomb by larkin, where the notion of love outlives lives and fashions and the passers-by and is something as timeless as the rocks of the world (being literally cast in stone), and maybe compare it to king lear, where everybody suffers and dies for their love (cordelia loves lear and is banished/hanged, lear loves cordelia and dies heartbroken, ditto gloucester for edgar, the wicked sisters die over edmond, kent and the fool love lear), and you get the same message but in a different picture entirely, and the same words "love is absolute" take on a completely different meaning. they are in a tragedy, and the words become no less tragic, in the larkin poem we get something cynical and conversational (as larkin always is after his early works) and here that typically bleak voice is caught out, almost, by the "sharp, tender shock" of everlasting love. if we look at something like a midsummer night's dream, a comedy, we see the way everybody is ruled by love, but here by the follies of love, and here "love is absolute" means something more like "aren't we silly?". another thing we ought to consider is that different styles appeal to different people, and spring from different people. you won't get ts eliot sounding like milton or vice versa because their styles very much don't appeal to each other (or at least, eliot didn't like milton's; milton never had the pleasure of reading eliot). naturally one would read a style that they like (given the choice), and a style that fits with their way of thinking. so while what is said may be the same, the reader will be different, and will be able to relate to and understand what is said rather more from one writer than another. (i clearly miss writing literary essays.) if i could write like anyone, i'd love to be able to write like jeanette winterson, because the style i naturally fall into, the one that fits my mind and heart is the one she writes, only she does it a hell of a lot better than i do. 050403 ... oldephebe Sheesh neesh! I gotta say I'm not quite up to addressing your mini-essay accept to say thank you for giving me some things to think about. I mean yeah there are some stylistic innovations in various creative and aesthetic expressions that when wed to what is wrought from the writers soul yields something new, something that infuses the language with a new means of encountering and expressing the existential. Great stuff But God there are some movements in art, I mean new genre's or modes (usually facile) expression that are to me merely the uninspired forcing together of constructions of consumption that you know you could go to any land fill and see the same statement made. Perhaps I should try to stay away from broad sweeping statements. I have to come back to this page when I'm able to organize my thoughts into a more cohesive and specific exposition. ... 050404 ... oE What about photo galleries of body parts preserved in formaldahyde? How is that kind of morbid contemplation equivalent to any kind of aesthetic or art? I mean this is objectification in it's purest form. It's dehumanizing. ... 050404 ... oldephebe but then maybe that sculpture is merely shaping or revising a new means for us to contemplate the commodification of our lives and the mountains of detritus it/we leave in our ceaseless perambulating cow cod chewing aquisitive consumptive lives. Maybe the guy who forces together such tableaus is merely a textural realist? wasn't this about writing anyway? what about Checkhov? When i encountered his melancholy voice (Chekov) i was awestruck at what lay on the page. I was thunderstruck at this palpable sense of dread, this sense that seems to say: "There is a black wave towering over me and I have weathered many blows and many years i have borne this life upon these gnarled knees. For the life of me I cannot understand why I won't surrender my spirit to Him holding his scythe, cowled unknowable, and or impel myself beyond this. Why haven't I slipped into madness? Instead I have watched others more dearer to me than my life, those who are loved and cherished by many..I have seen these lives slowly dessciated by dementia, disease and watched in protracted agony... I knew the penalty fixed for me a pennance, a debt a price I would groan to pay, for be shaped out of shadows and never rise above that, to clutch the crypt crying in my chest, to groan in the long night only to awake almost ruefully only to live another day alive to live another day...is to deny that wings can be grafted onto stone and lift my dead hearts curse - for you see when young loves old dream visits you and you think how can I endure it w/o bursting into flames, w/o becoming a brittle column of ash? God every time she lay her head, as her golden hair cascaded down my torso it staggered me, every time she lay her head on my young heart it staggered me. So you keep contending even though every breath comes like a bludgeon, you keep contending until every breath doesn't. I want no more maudlin ministrations just let me wear away alone." I mean that's what the great existential novelists seem to say or help me say to my own soul, they have become tutors to helping me articulate my own despair. ... Geez. I really was in a good mood when I started writing this. I really enjoy your informed and educated contributions to bl a th er neesh. ... 050405 ... blah mass media recreates reality, recreates meaning, assigns meaning to surface and superficial things...blech this the post-modern currency... .... 050405 ... z not all art is about meaning. some is exclusively about form, or the experience of the artist, or the nature of the materials or the frame that it creates to surround and channel the reciever's attention and sometimes it is solely created to produce a reaction in the viewer. you might want to look up post-structuralism in combination with lit-crit. the deconstruction of an idea/subject/artifact/tradition is frequently essential to modern works. read l'ecrit by lacan. 050405 what's it to you? who go blather from