Posted on 11/25/2008 2:19:07 PM PST by stan_sipple
Remember the Universal Translator? Peter Wood, in like manner, provides a useful guide to translating regular English prose into the style of Nobel-prizewinning author Toni Morrison, probably the most frequently assigned writer on US college campuses. The basic rules:
Misuse common phrases Embrace inconsistency Omit words to create more forceful expression Mix up parts of speech Chop in self-conscious micro-sentences He provides some wonderful examples. For instance, this office memo:
Just to remind you, I will be out of the office Tuesday to meet with our supplier, Acme Explosives. Please finish your work on the 2Q budget and let the account rep know that Mr. Coyote’s order will be shipped Thursday.
becomes
The reminding can’t wait the hurry of it. I explain. I know you know of Tuesday, I and Acme Explosives is soon together meet. You can please work, perhaps, the budget’s second quarter, and knowledge the account rep of Mr. Coyote’s Thursday shipment.
Wood also reminds us that Morrison is “the undisputed master of wandering verb tenses” and that she “knows how deftly to insert evocative foreign terms.”
But it is the anachronistic little details that are Morrison’s signature. My favorite occurs late in the book: “Ice-coated starlings clung to branches drooping with snow.” This is the 1690s, two centuries before the eccentric bird lover Eugene Schiffelin introduced starlings to the U.S. by releasing sixty of them in Central Park.
Schiffelin had no idea how the birds would proliferate, crowd out native species, and form enormous squawking, twittering, whistling flocks that seem to fill up whole forests. Starlings seem to propagate as fast as clichés and to descend like clouds of effusive blurbs on overpraised books.
Write like Toni Morrison. Speak like Robert “Sheets” Byrd.
All right, now you've done it. I absolutely love the study of literary style, so now I'm forced to go out and actually read some Toni Morrison.
But fear not. I'll do it at the library. (She won't receive a penny of my money.)
Writers get a lender’s fee when their work is taken from the library don’t they?
ill need to check more carefully the trash schools make our kids read
And since (apparently) I'm a glutton for punishment, which Morrison novel do you think is the best (worst) for a one-hour perusal?
I can't say if Toni's a good writer or not. I can't even figure out what she's saying much of the time, and when I can it doesn't seem that compelling.
But the only reason I can read books by Faulkner is because generations of critics have done all the hard work for me, so I know what's the book's about before I pick it up.
Will Morrison be ranked anything like so highly? Or does it even matter, because that sort of thing belongs to the past?
At her best, Morrison is a good writer. Sula and Song of Solomon are much better than the overrated Beloved.
Of course I'll actually have to READ Toni to get the idea of how she writes, which is probably worse than Bulwer-Lytton.
Where's Snoopy when you need him?
Except that the "Write like Toni Morrison" from the above blog is obviously satirical. There seems to be agreement that Toni Morrison is an incompetent writer.
Now that can't be said of William Faulkner. To me at least, he often employed a syntax that rewarded the reader at the end of the sentence, yet it was still decidedly lucid.
I've not read any Toni Morrison. But if this satirical blog is any indication, she appears to have no command over basic syntax.
Thanks for the recommendations. I’ll keep an open mind and give ‘em a looksie.
The hype and hyperbole over Morrison is a perfect example of literary snobbism. This book is incomprehensible, therefore, that small group that either understands it [or pretends to] struts and preens and deem themselves to be the arbiters of taste for American literature. "Beloved" is overdone, overused, overwritten, overhyped and is turning a generation of college students into book haters by stuffing this down their throats in English class. If you need me, I'll be reading books with a plotline and a point.
It’s much like what Tom Wolfe pointed out about much of modern art. It it weren’t for professors and critics explaining it and pontificating about how terrific it is no one would pay much attention to it and if the criticism and teaching of it does not last, neither will it.
I agree song of Solomon is better than Beloved. When I read Beloved I thought what the heck . . she’s not even trying at this point. Why they made us read this slop in grad school is beyond me. I always recommend Walker Percy—he’s one of my favorite southern writers.
Toni Morrison - America’s Vogon Poet!!
You’re thinking of Maya Angealou (however you spell it)...
whatever happened to the film version of “the moviegoer?”
You can say the same thing about older obscure writers like Edmund Spenser.
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