[ExI] Joyce (was: John C. Wright Interview)

[John K Clark]

"PJ Manney" <pjmanney at gmail.com>

> And I still maintain that just because Harry Potter is popular (and why
> not, with a writing style which allows even the most attention-deficit
> brain to follow the action when she tells you what the character will do,
> tells you what the character is doing and then,
> just in case you didn't catch it, tells you what the character did,
> scene after scene, after scene

Why not? You ask why not?! Well PJ, if it's so easy why don't you write a
book that sells 400 million copies then you could become the second
person in the history of Homo Sapiens  to make a billion dollars from a
novel. People like Joyce are a dime a dozen, but someone like Rowling
only comes along once or twice a century; And I would maintain that is
an objective fact that can be backed up with hard numbers and is
independent of your subjective enjoyment of the book or of mine.

At this point I know how I'd respond to the above if I were you, I'd say
"Well John, if dazzling literary types is so easy why don't you write such
a book and win the Nobel Prize in literature, then you could join such
immortals as Sully Prudhomme." The reason I don't is that to call my
writing ability mediocre is a vast overstatement, my writing sucks. I will
freely admit that both Joyce and Rowling have far more ability than I do,
one of them astronomically more.

By the way have you ever heard of Sully Prudhomme? In 1901 they could
have given the very first Nobel Prize in literature to Mark Twain but
decided he was too popular and just wrote children's books so they gave
it to Sully Prudhomme. He was pretty obscure even then but today after
107 years history has made its judgment and he is more than obscure,
he is almost completely unknown even by college professors. Few had
heard of Grazia Deledda either when she won the Nobel in 1926 and today
things are no different, nobody remembers her. But I'll bet you've heard
of Mark Twain and his children's books.

>> why does he cling to  the bourgeois convention of putting spaces
>> between words?
>> heshouldhavewrittenanentirebooklikethiswhatajoythatwouldbetoread

> Because Gertrude Stein got there first.

I should have known! I was trying to be as ridiculous as I could but clearly
I am out of my league in this area. The depths of such idiocy remain
unplumbed.

  John K Clark