 - Last login: 5 hours agoMrgrum
- mrgrum is a 43 year old guy from Bellingham, Washington, USA.
- Likes 7,812 pages, 590 videos, 547 photos • 196 fans • Received 33 reviews
- Member since Nov 20, 2004
"The castrati are exceedingly haughty and scarcely know how unruly their behavior is."
A, no doubt, well deserved warning from Johann Adolph Scheibe in 1737. Haughty castrati can be quite a handful, so to speak...
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FIRST THINGS: A Journal of Religion, Culture, and Public Life
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May 5, 12:43pm
1 review
•http://www.firstthings.com/article.ph...
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From the page: "To the living, we owe respect; to the dead, only truth," Voltaire once opined. It's a good line: high-minded, confident, sententious in the way only enlightened French philosophes could manage with any aplomb. But it also feels exactly backward, particularly about those we knew and loved. To squabble with our vanished parents about how they lived their lives seems more than a metaphysical nullity. It is, in fact, a moral failing."
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"It's as though our authors have all been forced to absorb something as exquisite as, say, Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, a book of semi-mystical nature observation that's been mandatory at writers' workshops for years. And once an author's been annie-dillardized, the prose gets finer and finer, and the subject gets smaller and smaller. In a column for the Wall Street Journal, I once described Alice Munro--whose collection of stories, The Love of a Good Woman, had just won the National Book Critics Circle award--as having a prose so fine it can barely lift anything heavier than a small cup of tea. There's a description of a china cupboard in her story "Cortes Island," for instance, so beautifully detailed and so profoundly pointless that it has to be read to be believed."
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"The American memoirs from the middle of the twentieth century were still story-driven, or, at least, anecdote-driven--still confident enough in the completeness of the universe to assume that narrative is a motor by which truth can run. The newer memoirs are detail-driven instead. They have their own set of moral certainties, of course: some worse, and some better, than their predecessors'. Their prose, however, always tends to convey events with floods of particular circumstance rather than a storyline--using details like a great and inarticulate ocean, throwing wave after wave of sharply observed fact against the shore in the hope of washing down to sea a stranded meaning.
And why exactly shouldn't we use this technique? Indeed, how could we use any other, these days? Details exist, in a way that stories don't, apart from moral judgment. They swim beneath the messy world of virtue and vice, down in the clear, clean waters of the purely physical, as though what confronts us in memory is not the assailant's pistol but merely molecules of blued steel arranged by some chance in a deadly way.
If stories are just about stories and contingent facts just about contingent facts--if, in other words, the moral order of meaningful narrative and the physical order of pure information can no longer be truthfully aligned--then honest writers have a responsibility to speak about only the fine details. "
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