Love the restructured syllabus. Sad to lose some Whitman/Dickinson and was looking forward to spending a leisurely Christmas vacation reading Moby-Dick again, but was secretly dreading that many transcendentalists tbqh, and very excited to read or reread those 20c authors.
I am with you on absolutely hating phonetically written dialogue, there's nothing worse than being jerked out of the flow of a book because you have to squint to make it out. But almost nothing gives me more pure pleasure than the great American dialogue tradition that runs through Mark Twain, Charles Portis, George V. Higgins, the Coen Brothers, Deadwood, Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster in The Sweet Smell of Success (my favorite movie) -- that unique set of regionalisms, wisecracks, tough talk, comebacks etc. Eloquence mixed with earthiness. If you ask me it's an American contribution to world culture as good as baseball or jazz.
Thanks! Yes, I'm convinced we're going to have more fun with Pound and Faulkner et al. than with several weeks on the Transcendentalists! I am only half-literate in the dialogue tradition you mention—I've never seen The Sweet Smell of Success, for one thing!—but I see what you mean in invoking Twain, the Coens, etc. Hemingway in dialogue-heavy stories like "The Killers" is also in this line, I think, hence why he's been cited as an influence on or forerunner of Tarantino, and in parts of Bellow too.
You gotta! It's an incredible film both visually and verbally, I've shown it to people who would never watch black and white anything and they've been blown away.
Yes, definitely Hemingway too, and Hammett etc. Also the extreme deadpan of DeLillo or Joy Williams is, in its own way, in that same tradition. And I picked up this book of Best American Sports Writing of the Century the other day and it has that same great feeling of brash, conversational eloquence in those midcentury magazine pieces by Gay Talese, Hunter S Thompson, Tom Wolfe etc (it's great even if you don't like sports). For me it all makes 20c America one of the high peaks of verbal color and creativity in English, up there with Shakespeare's time.
Thank you, hope you enjoy! (Loved your Botticelli piece, btw. Given my academic background, I confess I'd only really looked at the Renis, so it was illuminating.)
Love the restructured syllabus. Sad to lose some Whitman/Dickinson and was looking forward to spending a leisurely Christmas vacation reading Moby-Dick again, but was secretly dreading that many transcendentalists tbqh, and very excited to read or reread those 20c authors.
I am with you on absolutely hating phonetically written dialogue, there's nothing worse than being jerked out of the flow of a book because you have to squint to make it out. But almost nothing gives me more pure pleasure than the great American dialogue tradition that runs through Mark Twain, Charles Portis, George V. Higgins, the Coen Brothers, Deadwood, Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster in The Sweet Smell of Success (my favorite movie) -- that unique set of regionalisms, wisecracks, tough talk, comebacks etc. Eloquence mixed with earthiness. If you ask me it's an American contribution to world culture as good as baseball or jazz.
Thanks! Yes, I'm convinced we're going to have more fun with Pound and Faulkner et al. than with several weeks on the Transcendentalists! I am only half-literate in the dialogue tradition you mention—I've never seen The Sweet Smell of Success, for one thing!—but I see what you mean in invoking Twain, the Coens, etc. Hemingway in dialogue-heavy stories like "The Killers" is also in this line, I think, hence why he's been cited as an influence on or forerunner of Tarantino, and in parts of Bellow too.
You gotta! It's an incredible film both visually and verbally, I've shown it to people who would never watch black and white anything and they've been blown away.
Yes, definitely Hemingway too, and Hammett etc. Also the extreme deadpan of DeLillo or Joy Williams is, in its own way, in that same tradition. And I picked up this book of Best American Sports Writing of the Century the other day and it has that same great feeling of brash, conversational eloquence in those midcentury magazine pieces by Gay Talese, Hunter S Thompson, Tom Wolfe etc (it's great even if you don't like sports). For me it all makes 20c America one of the high peaks of verbal color and creativity in English, up there with Shakespeare's time.
Novel ordered, I look forward to reading.
Thank you, hope you enjoy! (Loved your Botticelli piece, btw. Given my academic background, I confess I'd only really looked at the Renis, so it was illuminating.)
Thanks, John, I’m happy to hear that.