“It’s all poets, now”

June 13, 2024 12:23 PM

When, last year, I saw in my prose that falseness and false formality, I wondered where it had come from. I seemed to be a few minutes away from using whence. I seemed to be searching for a rhythm that wouldn’t come, and reading over tatters of drafts later, I realized I was attempting to write prose in what was basically iambic pentameter, as if this classic formal constraint contained within it the key, the one key, to a sense of writing well, a sense so rare that year for me to find at all. From whence this sense of language-pressed-through-sieve? from I Cannot by Lucy Schiller [The Paris Review; ungated]
posted by chavenet (15 comments total)

i just can't even
posted by HearHere at 12:38 PM on June 13 [1 favorite]

Perhaps formality—and this is another tic of the formal writers, by the way, the hopping, birdlike, never-settling perhaps—perhaps formality is simply a symptom of a writer seeing depth and gesturing toward it, but not really plumbing it, which would be messy, and uncertain, and risky. Not yet.

I think this is true but incomplete; if we talk about depth, we need to be talking about the spatial. Internet speech comes in two varieties, tweets--snappy, succinct, concise--and things that require a tl;dr. Plumbing that depth requires space, but we are terrified of wasting that space, taking it up, forcing someone to fill that brief terror as they scroll down a bit to see how much more there is to go. You need (it feels) to be able to deserve your space, and the question of how to fill it up leads naturally to that fearful falseness. (Which is basically me saying I wish she had let this essay be twice as long, because she's onto something but then didn't go into real depth about it!) (Also I had never seen that garage door thing before, and now I can't stop watching it. Behold, the Aristotelian three-act structure!)
posted by mittens at 12:57 PM on June 13 [6 favorites]

Ain't nothin' wrong with the odd whence or whereupon. That's a tic of mine in songwriting. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn't.
posted by limeonaire at 2:00 PM on June 13 [5 favorites]

Well it's the Paris Review, innit?

But no, yeah I'm familiar with this neurosis. I couldn't say for sure if something has actually changed, but when writing fails for other reasons, style starts to stick out more.
posted by jy4m at 3:25 PM on June 13 [1 favorite]

The first time I met my friend Jay, he told me that he has learned the word whence from the seek(3) man page. I had learned it from The Hobbit.
posted by novalis_dt at 4:54 PM on June 13 [4 favorites]

I used the word "whippersnapper" in a text today, but, of course, I was being sarcastic. I am (fortunately, I guess) unaware of the type of writing she's talking about. "Attire?" People use words like this unironically? I don't get it, and I would decry it, like she does, if I did.
posted by kozad at 5:13 PM on June 13 [1 favorite]

make little cards
and write little things
to strangers
about your life
posted by winesong at 8:14 PM on June 13 [3 favorites]

Basically all beginning writers go way too formal when they start out, because they're scared, and they're especially scared of not sounding educated enough, or not knowing the right words to fit in with the real writers. I don't know if there's a similar fear response going on in what Schiller describes. I do think that when she mentions internet language, there's something there - how many of us are swimming every day in Twitter and Tumblr and TikTok and all their particularities of language use, and it often feels like I need to get that language out of my head in order to be able to write anything serious. Or - without getting too much into the weeds of "what does it even mean to have an authentic voice," I feel like my authentic voice has been formed by mid-00s Livejournal as much as anything, but I also have a horror of writing like a person who was on Livejournal in the mid 00s.

Patricia Lockwood's "No One Is Talking About This" came closer than any other book I know to capturing what it is like - linguistically and emotionally - to be a terminally online human being in this day and age, and it's a book I like very much, but I have no idea how it'll hold up in five years or ten years - or even now, now that Twitter is a shell of what it once was.
posted by Jeanne at 9:01 PM on June 13 [6 favorites]

> Basically all beginning writers go way too formal when they start out, because they're scared, and they're especially scared of not sounding educated enough<>

butts.

> I feel like my authentic voice has been formed by mid-00s Livejournal as much as anything, but I also have a horror of writing like a person who was on Livejournal in the mid 00s

lol.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 10:02 PM on June 13 [5 favorites]

From whence

Girl “whence” don’t need a “from”, the “from” is contained within. That’s like saying “to whither”.
posted by Hypatia at 5:38 AM on June 14 [6 favorites]

I'm so glad someone said it.
posted by limeonaire at 10:53 AM on June 14 [3 favorites]

I write in this way, indeed given a small drink and the right setting I will witter on in this way unstoppably and the honest answer as to why is that I am a huge fan of Flann O'Brien aka Myles naGopaleen aka Brian O'Nolan whose prose style has seeped into my brain and cannot be extricated. There is just something about an overly formal style, particularly when applied to quotidian matters, that I love and will never give up. Oh and archness and allusion and deliberate use of the cliche where it clangs out of tune the most. Look at me, I am using language and words and I care about how I express myself a little bit too much while also not taking it seriously at all!

Being Extremely Online since Usenet has only reinforced this, of course.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 10:31 PM on June 14 [2 favorites]

a horror of writing like a person who was on Livejournal in the mid 00s

Research psychologists are rushing to my house to document the world's speediest development of a new phobia.
posted by mittens at 12:27 PM on June 15 [2 favorites]

Hmmm. She says that "ladies" was at its lowest point in 1978, but I remember its use everywhere in speech (or least among hippies or the hippie-adjacent) as a grander way of saying "girlfriend" or "wife" ("my old lady"), or even just "woman": Bianca Jagger being described in Rolling Stone as "Mick Jagger's lady" in or close to this exact year. Joni Michell's "Ladies of the Canyon". Dylan's "Lay Lady Lay." Was it really such a niche usage?

Sometimes having a long cultural memory means I want to argue from personal experience about everything.
posted by jokeefe at 3:21 PM on June 15 [2 favorites]

Also, what was so wrong about writing like someone on Live Journal in the 00s? I remember long personal essays that were often not only readable but very good indeed. People, mostly women, spending hours of their days describing their days and lives. Like many other internet phases, it faded away into memes and slick little phrases... but I spent many hours reading over the thoughts of people whose names I don't even remember, and I don't count it lost time.
posted by jokeefe at 3:27 PM on June 15 [1 favorite]