Horrible Story (HorribleStory.mp3)
I read a horrible story. Should have stopped. Knew I should have stopped. But I thought it has to get better than this. It can't be this bad. It has to go somewhere. The words are decent. Too many people think writing is about putting words together. They end up being copy editors, or their flunkies. And they comment on good and bad writing not having a clue about it in their own mind.
It reminded me of people who live horrible stories. Not horrible experiences; those are most often great stories. Horrible lives are those lives of pretense. They walk around in their delusion of a world wearing a body condom that does little more than slowly suffocate them to their death. They point out how inappropriate the world is. How inappropriate you are. While they live their perfect lives filling up their couch with their own body fat as they watch Oprah and Dr. Phil.
They don't fuck. Probably because nobody enjoys fucking them. And they gasp when they hear dirty words, and even though they don't fuck, the mindless tedium of their job drives them like cattle to fucking co-workers because they are too cheap to pay prostitutes or too lazy to buy someone a drink and they call this making love. And those are their stories. Their prophylactic plotlines. They call it postmodern because corporate America is defining their slob of a self. But it's only an excuse for being too lazy to have a personality.
The story and these lives go nowhere though the words are pretty. Maybe if you use pretty words, maybe if you take Gertrude Stein's advice and not write anything inaccrochable, life would be grand. No. Another collector with pretty pictures, pretty words, and no substance. A story that goes nowhere and desperately searches for another life to feed on, to touch through a barrier of plastic.
4 comments:
Where is this horrible story you read? I want to see it, if possible.
Pretty pictures, pretty words and no substance. This comment reminded me of a movie I watched this morning, an indie movie that took itself too seriously and wanted to be precious and quirky. All the tropes were there: the music, the offbeat characters, the camera angles, the mysteries of life, blah blah blah.
Ingrid, I couldn't do that to the writer and say which story I'm talking about. All I'll say is that it has appeared in a current issue of a popular magazine.
hm ...thinking it over and over again but I´m just too pig-headed to get it... critizing postmodern authors in sentences that could be directly taken out of a novel by Bret Easton Ellis or a movie like Trainspotting.
- & + = ... never been good in math... but then again: pretty words!!
LEeLOo, Trainspotting would be Irvine Welsh.
I'm not exactly criticizing postmodern authors. Here I am criticizing a very particular story and by that perhaps criticizing the author of that story. I am briefly being critical of the entire postmodern movement.
Elsewhere I am extremely critical of the entire postmodern philosophy and where this philosophy has spilled over into art in general and writing in particular. My biggest criticism is the tendency to accept that reality is defined by external forces; this might be called an observational distancing from the subject matter.
My style is an attempt, perhaps not always successful, at relative realism, or defining reality through individuals.
Your statement seems reasonable in comparing my words to a contemporary postmodern author. My counter would be to question your definition of postmodernism. I don't think the style, or any other style for that matter, exists in mere word arrangement. Most word arrangements have occurred in every style throughout history.
What matters in defining a school of thought in writing is how meaning is conveyed through those words. Because this post is expository in nature and lacks story, I find it impossible to state what literary school of thought this post might belong.
Relative realism is my own terminology, and I am not sure if anyone else has or is using a classification like this. Many contemporary writers I believe already have one foot in this style and maybe one foot still back in postmodernism.
I would actually classify Franz Kafka as a relative realist. Those that argue he was postmodern, I would state, they don't really get his underlying philosophy.
Ellis is still heavily postmodern, and while I won't say he is a bad writer, I will say I'm not fond of him.
Welsh, on the other hand, I have a great deal of respect for. He conveys a strong sense of relativism in his writing.
And of course there are many writers I still enjoy despite them being from different schools of thought. Even some that have little thought behind their work.
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