No safe landing
1 week ago
“Such are the perfections of fiction...Everything it teaches is useless insofar as structuring your life: you can’t prop up anything with fiction. It, in fact, teaches you just that. That in order to attempt to employ its specific wisdom is a sign of madness...There is more profit in an hour’s talk with Billy Graham than in a reading of Joyce. Graham might conceivably make you sick, so that you might move, go somewhere to get well. But Joyce just sends you out into the street, where the world goes on, solid as a bus. If you met Joyce and said 'Help me,' he’d hand you a copy of Finnegans Wake. You could both cry.” – Gilbert Sorrentino, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things
4 comments:
"samuelcooney.wordpress.com is probably written by a female somewhere between 51-65 years old. The writing style is personal and happy most of the time."
pretty accurate. had to paste it as a comment to a recent Rumpus piece where the first commenter accused me of ignoring women writers. so thanks for making me feel absolutely and falsely better with the urlai thing.
I dunno; it seems to me that just means that you're possessed of the androgynous mentality that Virginia Woolf claimed all writers should have. I, however, am just simply old, pretentious and horribly male. I'm clearly not happy though--that's just wrong...
Wham bam thank you Man!
nikitavanderbyl.com is probably written by a male somewhere between 66-100 years old. The writing style is academic and happy most of the time.
I think the jig is up! It's either wrong, or I really do write and think like a man.
Holy geriatric solidarity, Mr. Stintson!
...which is to say that I'm honoured to have been included in the same 66 - 100 (!) y.o. age bracket as yourself.
Their doubtless super-sophisticated gender-recognition algorithm (pink vs. blue prose) yielded 'male' for me, although to my infinite chagrin they also substituted 'academic and 'happy' for 'personal' and 'upset'.
Lawn-bowls at my place next Saturday, or shall we just say, predict the weather with our joint pain?*
(*Agist stereotypes disavowed in backsliding footnote.)
Best,
-Mal
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