“There are not many American writers for whom style really
is content. We’re too earnest a nation, too attached to making our art about
messages or lessons, and usually, easily digestible ones. The American authors
who take style as something close to an ethics of writing are quite often the
most elegant. Think of W. M. Spackman’s slim comedies of erotic manners, the
bespoke mordancy of Frederick Seidel’s verse, or of Raymond Chandler, whose
style fought it out with his moralism and beat it two falls out of three.
Southern, whose elegant prose exists amid the chaos and rut it’s describing, is
such a stylist. Saying the right thing — even if it is the most outrageous or
obscene thing — in exactly the right way is the only morality at work in his
work.” —Charles Taylor, reviewing a novel by Terry Southern, LARB 1-26-2021
Or as Shakespeare put it: “Good pasture makes fat sheep.”
Or as señor Vladimir Nabokov put
it: “Lolita, luz de mi vida, fuego de mis entrañas.”
(It wasn’t until I’d gotten home from the library that I
realized I’d checked out a Spanish translation of the novel. Because I’m a
pathetic monolingual loser, only fluent in one language, I got less out of it
than I’d hoped, and it got less out of me. There was the time, monolingual fool
that I am, when, after dinner she says she would like me to stay the night. I
don’t understand French, so I respond in English: “Well, I have to be getting
home.”)
Tarfia Faizullah said of one of her published pieces: “I
decline to explain or contextualize this poem. If you, reader, get something
from it—that’s all that matters.”
I thought I was being tough when I manifestoed: “I am
opposing and flouting centuries of tradition by making this declaration: If
there are any websites, magazines or other platforms who wish to publish my
writing, simply email me (randystare@yahoo.com) and I will return to you
a selection of work from which you may choose. What I am pretty much going to
STOP doing is cold submitting work to random venues—which are diminishing
anyway, fallout from the covid quarantines. In other words, contact me if you
want some work for your site or magazine and I’ll be happy to respond
immediately. Otherwise, reading my work can easily be accessed at www.randystark.com and http://writeuptheroad.com/.”
A Review in Verse:
To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, by Jenny Han, 2014
There’s Something about Sweetie, by Sandhya Menon, 2019
Too life affirming for my liking.
Magically multicultural
But otherwise like watching "Saved By the Bell."
Watching "Saved By the Bell" and eating French toast.
And finally, I recommended reading Meg Elison, especially The
Book of the Unnamed Midwife, the first of her trilogy, a franchise with
female protagonists driving it. Somebody blurbed: “Elison offers a troubling
yet hopeful vision of the future.” Uh, excuse me, no, she doesn’t. This is
post-apocalyptic despair at its best. I live in the same shithole city she once
did, and I drive the same make and model car as she does. This may or may not
be a lost planet, I don’t know, but maybe we drank at the same bar, if she
drinks.
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino.
