I’d been meaning to write something about writing today. After a few long months of real struggle to get anything on the page, I had a good week, thanks to Jason Lambright. He’s been my writing buddy this week, introducing a bit of accountability and counselling to the process.
One writing job looming over me like the black wave of destiny was finding something to do for today’s ASB column that wasn’t even remotely political. I had decided to do a simple, funny column, but it’s been so long since I’ve done one that I wasn’t even sure where to start. There’s a way of framing your thoughts that allows you to do that sort of work, and I was out of practice.
Man, this was a good get. I can’t imagine many people besides me reading the entirety of his self-defence piece at The Graun. Probably it was read multiple times by a few hundred people in publishing and ignored by everyone else.
But it is a cracker. It’s not well written. One of the odd effects of satirising somebody else’s prose is that you understand its structure and flaws on a much deeper level. And this thing has some deep structural defects.
But that makes my job easier. Thanks, Hughesy.
I won’t go into deets here. The whole thing is free to read over at The Boob.
After writing it and seeing some responses to both my bit and the source material, one thing that occurred to me was a realisation, or maybe just a suspicion, that Hughes has fallen prey to modern lit-fic’s post-modern relativism. There’s a heap of it in his defence, and it all boils down to the idea that there are no new ideas and everything is just everything else chewed up and regurgitated in a never-ending stream of content.
It’s not a trap that genre writers fall into. We might tell the same stories repeatedly, but the SPLOSIONS are fkn splodey and new every time.
Since its release in 1986, Top Gun has been universally accepted as the homoerotic story of a pilot whose “inverted” flying style puts him at odds with the straight-shooting patriarchal value system of the US Navy. Yet while the past three decades of film criticism have reaffirmed this interpretation, recent study suggests that subtle layers of heterosexuality pervade the text. As unlikely as it seems, a closer reading reveals a romance between a cocky male pilot and his female instructor.
The whole thing just reeks of pseudo half read , half assed post modernist academia. That sad old chestnut that nothing is original and it's all copied, along with death of the narrative defies actual reality.
Much like post modern thought defies reality, especially the absolute bollocks of perception is reality and there is no objective truth.
A bunch of sociologists got together and tried super hard to make their subject seem relevant and instead downgraded it to be easy to digest rubbish with a load of French smug scepticism dolloped on top. Every time in the art world someone gets caught out for copying the pomo excuse of appropriation and originality is rolled out to the cheers of lazy assed badly taught academics, lazy arts writers and the cargo cult conga line of suckholes. If narrative is dead, then why are feature films, novels and story telling music still so popular?
It amazess me that the post-modernists that you mention never stop pontificating long enough to notice all of the actual, delightfully new ideas that people do come up with, all the time. They're like the venerable Jorge denying Aristotle's Poetics: "there is no progress in the history of knowledge merely a continuous and sublime recapitulation."
Of course there is also a lot of not-very-interesting or new work too. The law of large numbers pretty much guarantees Sturgeon's Law, but the corrolary is that there's 10% that's really good.
Speaking of splodey stuff, I wish whomever is including Metal Storm references in those ghost written Clive Cussler books would actually unleash said stormy goodness sometime. Oh and also a decent sex scene. 😉
bahaha. Look, personally i think your book should have gone with August or maybe January depending on which side of the equator you want to sell the book, as blue tends to invoke cold and winter. But now i have mentioned it you can't bloody use it alright! I'm keeping my eyes on you Birmingham (making motions of fingers to eyes and then in your direction)
So here goes my attempt at a post modern relativistic comment . Which may fall flat on its face even to me. The problem with trying to come up with something new and original is that stories , theatrical or literary, must use language to convey their meaning. Language is structured . Be it a sentence or paragraph or script . Beginning and end . Just like life . There’s my 2 cents.
The whole thing just reeks of pseudo half read , half assed post modernist academia. That sad old chestnut that nothing is original and it's all copied, along with death of the narrative defies actual reality.
Much like post modern thought defies reality, especially the absolute bollocks of perception is reality and there is no objective truth.
A bunch of sociologists got together and tried super hard to make their subject seem relevant and instead downgraded it to be easy to digest rubbish with a load of French smug scepticism dolloped on top. Every time in the art world someone gets caught out for copying the pomo excuse of appropriation and originality is rolled out to the cheers of lazy assed badly taught academics, lazy arts writers and the cargo cult conga line of suckholes. If narrative is dead, then why are feature films, novels and story telling music still so popular?
It amazess me that the post-modernists that you mention never stop pontificating long enough to notice all of the actual, delightfully new ideas that people do come up with, all the time. They're like the venerable Jorge denying Aristotle's Poetics: "there is no progress in the history of knowledge merely a continuous and sublime recapitulation."
Of course there is also a lot of not-very-interesting or new work too. The law of large numbers pretty much guarantees Sturgeon's Law, but the corrolary is that there's 10% that's really good.
Speaking of splodey stuff, I wish whomever is including Metal Storm references in those ghost written Clive Cussler books would actually unleash said stormy goodness sometime. Oh and also a decent sex scene. 😉
now do Patterson's rant about no one is publishing 52 year old white men.
I can't because something something discrimination.
Have you been keeping tabs on anybody possibly plagiarising your human surging wave line?
I have a law firm on retainer for this
bahaha. Look, personally i think your book should have gone with August or maybe January depending on which side of the equator you want to sell the book, as blue tends to invoke cold and winter. But now i have mentioned it you can't bloody use it alright! I'm keeping my eyes on you Birmingham (making motions of fingers to eyes and then in your direction)
I was thinking November but it wasn’t Octoberry enough
So here goes my attempt at a post modern relativistic comment . Which may fall flat on its face even to me. The problem with trying to come up with something new and original is that stories , theatrical or literary, must use language to convey their meaning. Language is structured . Be it a sentence or paragraph or script . Beginning and end . Just like life . There’s my 2 cents.