Digest whorl.v010.n045

Bjjp2 · 08 Nov 1999, 15:08 · from whorl-v0010.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: Bjjp2 at aol.com
Subject: (whorl) Re: Digest whorl.v010.n045
Date: Mon, 8 Nov 1999 10:08:28 EST
Message-ID: <whorl-v0010-0153 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/whorl/archives/v0010/0153.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

>I think that criticisms of John Clute's style ignore
>the fact that he is (unlike most critics) an original
>prose stylist. His innovative, if sometimes contorted,
>writing has vastly enriched SF criticism, not only
>because of his cogent insights, but because he has
>unlocked a critical vocabulary equal to the complete
>expression of those insights. He has his clumsy and
>inattentive moments, but I'd rather have him review
>OBW than leave the task to pedestrian hacks like the
>authors of certain other published reviews cited on
>amazon.

I read Clute's review and was very surprised at the poor writing.  I know,=20
who am I to criticize, but c'mon:  "They are, to begin with, each of them,=20
regardless of the number of volumes they were broken into for easy=20
publication, a single novel."  Three clauses between "they are" and "a sing=
le=20
novel"? Using the adjective "vast" twice in the same sentence (and three=20
times in the review)?  Perhaps college freshmen who get a "D" on their=20
English papers can say,  "But professor, you don't understand.  I am 'an=20
original prose stylist.'"

*This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun.
*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.moonmilk.com/whorl/
*To leave the list, send "unsubscribe" to whorl-request at lists.best.com
*If it's Wolfe but not Long Sun, please use the URTH list: urth at lists.best.=
com

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net