I believe that irony and sarcasm have little constructive value in the long run of a dialogue, and moreover that nine times out of ten the ironic or sarcastic comment is never as germane to an issue as the commenter thinks it is. But I love it when it's well-done, nonetheless. And in two particular fields I feel like blistering scorn are more than warranted. One is bad literary fiction, in which pretension deserves to be fought with righteous and emotional anger.
The other is football writing, where it never seems to make the slightest difference to the prime movers, any way. Supriya. On Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 8:44 AM, Udhay Shankar N <[email protected]> wrote: > Charles Haynes wrote, [on 8/7/2009 12:47 AM]: > > >>>> http://nymag.com/arts/books/reviews/58062/ > > > It's a bad review for a simple reason. Is the reviewer praising it or > > panning it? I can't even tell if they liked the damn book. > > It appears that the reviewer isn't very sure, but on balance, seems to > like it (extra irony points for the "too long" complaint): > > <quote> > > Imperial inevitably raises the big question surrounding much of > Vollmann’s work: Is it too long? It probably is. About halfway through, > I felt my patience begin to flag. I’d been carrying the book around for > a couple of weeks, wrestling it onto trains and out of bed, and my wrist > and lower back had mysteriously started burning. I grew suddenly hostile > toward WTV’s formerly lovable quirks: the clumsy sentences, the > digressive digressions, the gratuitously creepy metaphors (“the alfalfa > fields, fresh-shorn like a tropical girl’s cunt-stubble”), the > never-ending sarcastic exclamation marks. I found myself wishing that he > would redirect some of the massive energy he puts into legwork and > note-taking and poetic haunting to the less obviously heroic, more > social challenges of writing: synthesizing, pruning, polishing. But > that’d be like asking Keats not to get so carried away with the music of > vowels, or Dickens to stop writing about orphans. Excess, for Vollmann, > is exactly the point. I can’t help but read Imperial’s epigraph, from > the 1909 yearbook of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, as a sly little > meta-statement, a confession and a boast: “As long as a farmer has an > abundance of water, he almost invariably yields to the temptation to use > it freely, even though he gets no increased returns as a result.” That’s > the problem of Imperial, and the problem of Imperial: to get arid land > to bear fruit, you’re going to have to waste some water. “I write my > heart out on everything I do,” Vollmann has written. It’s a very rare > quality, and it should be subsidized, whatever waste might come along > with it. > > </quote> > > BTW, did you actually read the entire review, or are you reacting only > to the excerpt I posted with the URL linking to the entire thing? > > Udhay > -- > ((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com)) > > -- roswitha.tumblr.com
