Michael Tolkin's Blog - Posts Tagged "distraction"
Mary McCarthy
This is also on my FB fan? page.
I wanted something to read and pulled Mary McCarthy's "Memoirs of a Catholic Girlhood" off the shelf. Her preface, many pages long, is in italics, so I kept expecting it to last another page instead of another twenty. When I was learning to read I thought italics leaned to the right to say that word they pointed to was more important than the word that pointed. So thirty pages of italics looks to me like a loud scream to get to the regular print. That said... she writes so beautifully, a modern English - fully recognizable vocabulary, but with deep imagery that comes, I imagine, from less distraction. By this I also mean that David Foster Wallace is in a race against distraction. Most everyone writing now is stuck with that problem, a noisy world crowding the desk with shiny junk, and the dilemma of readers who may start reading a book with excitement, but find after a hundred pages that no matter how compelling it is, Talkingpointsmemo is moreso.
I wanted something to read and pulled Mary McCarthy's "Memoirs of a Catholic Girlhood" off the shelf. Her preface, many pages long, is in italics, so I kept expecting it to last another page instead of another twenty. When I was learning to read I thought italics leaned to the right to say that word they pointed to was more important than the word that pointed. So thirty pages of italics looks to me like a loud scream to get to the regular print. That said... she writes so beautifully, a modern English - fully recognizable vocabulary, but with deep imagery that comes, I imagine, from less distraction. By this I also mean that David Foster Wallace is in a race against distraction. Most everyone writing now is stuck with that problem, a noisy world crowding the desk with shiny junk, and the dilemma of readers who may start reading a book with excitement, but find after a hundred pages that no matter how compelling it is, Talkingpointsmemo is moreso.
