Questions/comments for sighyoung

[slide_into_first]

1) Why do Eudora Welty and Cormac McArthy say "could have" when narrating, but "could of" when quoting a redneck character? The redneck doesn't know the correct grammar and it makes the audience thing "could of" is proper.
2) Why does Jack London seem so ancient and F Scott Fitzgerald seem modern, although their careers overlapped? Why do great writers drink themselves to death?
3) Charlotte Bronte- aw, hell naw.

I had some others but can't remember them now.
Oh, yeah-
4) Why do some people think Sir Walter Scott was anti-Semitic? Rebecca in Ivanhoe was a wise and heroic character.

TIA

[heyzeus]

I would also like to know what, as Mayor of GRB, he intends to do about the rampant pee smell.

[slide_into_first]

Why did Saul Bellow win a Nobel prize when Bernard Malamud was a far better writer and did not?

[Maclowery]

Who's your animated .gif pusher?

[go birds]

sup with white women and drinking while taking painting classes

[heyzeus]

Why does Jonathan Franzen think he's a better writer than David Foster Wallace was?

[sighyoung]

1) Why do Eudora Welty and Cormac McArthy say "could have" when narrating, but "could of" when quoting a redneck character? The redneck doesn't know the correct grammar and it makes the audience thing "could of" is proper.
2) Why does Jack London seem so ancient and F Scott Fitzgerald seem modern, although their careers overlapped? Why do great writers drink themselves to death?
3) Charlotte Bronte- aw, hell naw.

I had some others but can't remember them now.
Oh, yeah-
4) Why do some people think Sir Walter Scott was anti-Semitic? Rebecca in Ivanhoe was a wise and heroic character.

TIA

1) Welty and McCarthy are using "eye dialect"--the purposeful misspelling of pronunciation--to emphasize the strangeness of other groups--in this case, lower-class Southerners. The same thing happens when writers represent rural African American speech. If the audience thinks it's proper, well, the audience is stupider than the characters.

2) First-generation American naturalist writers such as Jack London and Stephen Crane and Frank Norris are really pretty mediocre as a group. Although London's writing is being reassessed, by the end of his life he was a raging alcoholic living well beyond his means, and churning multiple pages out each day without even revising.

Fitzgerald is part of the second generation of American naturalists (including Hemingway and Faulkner), and is simply a better writer. He also writes about the allure and threat of the American Dream--a theme that is still influential today. It also could be that the time he compared male endowment size with Ernest Hemingway in a Paris bathroom (true story, according to Heminway in A Moveable Feast) make Fitzgerald a beloved writer for millions.

3) Yeah, Bronte ain't makin' it.

4) I hadn't heard Scott was anti-Semitic. The Romantic writers were often strongly nationalist, and at this time, race and nation had become connected, so that the British believed that their culture was inherited. Perhaps he believed that Jews could never be sufficiently British. Scott heavily influenced the chivalric culture of the South--another biologically based set of ideas about social hierarchy--so maybe there's that.

[sighyoung]

Why does Jonathan Franzen think he's a better writer than David Foster Wallace was?

Because Franzen has the ego the size of a Western mountain range.

Who's your animated .gif pusher?

Trying to eliminate the middle man, eh?

Here's one site I recently checked out: http://pricklylegs.tumblr.com/

And another: http://rrrick.tumblr.com/

[sighyoung]

sup with white women and drinking while taking painting classes

How else could Liz Rizzo get her make-up on?

[sighyoung]

I would also like to know what, as Mayor of GRB, he intends to do about the rampant pee smell.

We try to be charitable about Radbird and his Depends around here. But I wish he would stop eating asparagus.