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How can English be so boring?
Mar. 6th, 2011 07:41 pmHow can people who presumably love language enough to devote years of their life to it write so much that is so utterly boring?
I just spent half an hour reading something I'm sure could be said in three sentences, yet they took pages and pages and pages. They took an entire paragraph to say, basically, 'I have a little theory, nobody else believes it yet but I think it explains a few things.' Then a page more to explain, as far as I can see, that his theory is this is how theories always start, nobody else believes them but they explain a few more things than the last theory and eventually lots of people believe it, but not the bosses because they got to be boss by believing the old thing. So that's an entire page devoted to 'nobody listens to me and my boss doesn't understaaaaaand'.
The basic idea of the half hour reading so far is: If there is only One True Reading then critics are digging away trying to get that One Truth, and it's like Scholarship. But with the amount of people publishing, and having more thoughts, and publishing some more, then it becomes apparent that in practice nobody believes in One True Reading, they all believe their reading is a good contribution to the heap. They can't then be hunting the same one truth. So what they're doing instead is rewriting, taking the text they study and turning out a text inspired by that, much the same way fanfic does only with a lot more sodding endless polysyllabic verbiage and usually less sex. Critics are just another sort of rewriter, like translators and film adaptation and all the rest.
I can go with that. That works out. We all writing what comes into our heads in response to that text. True enough to be getting on with.
But you will notice it did not take you half an hour to read it. Because I rewrite it for them. It works better this way.
I keep doing reading for a class I thought was going to be interesting and it keeps on being oh so sodding boring and taking forever to say the blindingly obvious or things that we've already covered in class several times over the past few years.
I have to rewrite Romeo and Juliet. Today I think it could be done as a choose your own adventure. One option on each page would have to be 'commit suicide', and the reader strategy of skipping straight to the choices would perfectly replicate the amount of attention our teenage protagonists pay to anyone else. If you manage to survive until the end of the book you get to live in inglorious anonymity as you spend the rest of your lives realising you don't know each other and love isn't very terribly much like sonnets, at least not the ones Romeo was reading. Or at least the next fourteen years are like that, until their daughter gets to be Juliet's age...
I just spent half an hour reading something I'm sure could be said in three sentences, yet they took pages and pages and pages. They took an entire paragraph to say, basically, 'I have a little theory, nobody else believes it yet but I think it explains a few things.' Then a page more to explain, as far as I can see, that his theory is this is how theories always start, nobody else believes them but they explain a few more things than the last theory and eventually lots of people believe it, but not the bosses because they got to be boss by believing the old thing. So that's an entire page devoted to 'nobody listens to me and my boss doesn't understaaaaaand'.
The basic idea of the half hour reading so far is: If there is only One True Reading then critics are digging away trying to get that One Truth, and it's like Scholarship. But with the amount of people publishing, and having more thoughts, and publishing some more, then it becomes apparent that in practice nobody believes in One True Reading, they all believe their reading is a good contribution to the heap. They can't then be hunting the same one truth. So what they're doing instead is rewriting, taking the text they study and turning out a text inspired by that, much the same way fanfic does only with a lot more sodding endless polysyllabic verbiage and usually less sex. Critics are just another sort of rewriter, like translators and film adaptation and all the rest.
I can go with that. That works out. We all writing what comes into our heads in response to that text. True enough to be getting on with.
But you will notice it did not take you half an hour to read it. Because I rewrite it for them. It works better this way.
I keep doing reading for a class I thought was going to be interesting and it keeps on being oh so sodding boring and taking forever to say the blindingly obvious or things that we've already covered in class several times over the past few years.
I have to rewrite Romeo and Juliet. Today I think it could be done as a choose your own adventure. One option on each page would have to be 'commit suicide', and the reader strategy of skipping straight to the choices would perfectly replicate the amount of attention our teenage protagonists pay to anyone else. If you manage to survive until the end of the book you get to live in inglorious anonymity as you spend the rest of your lives realising you don't know each other and love isn't very terribly much like sonnets, at least not the ones Romeo was reading. Or at least the next fourteen years are like that, until their daughter gets to be Juliet's age...