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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 81.155.23.15
Posted on Wednesday, January 20, 2010 - 11:15 pm:   

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/jan/20/1

I've no idea who's added a comment referring to Nemonymous. But perhaps good on them. :-)
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 81.155.23.15
Posted on Thursday, January 21, 2010 - 10:13 am:   

This seems to be an incredible rant by Susan Hill, central to all fiction-writerly concerns, I would have thought, on whichever side you're on.
As editor of Nemonymous, I suppose my side is obvious. But it's not clear-cut.
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Nathaniel Tapley (Natt)
Username: Natt

Registered: 11-2009
Posted From: 78.144.205.110
Posted on Thursday, January 21, 2010 - 11:00 am:   

I think it is pretty clear-cut. Ageing, insecure novelist who wrote some excellent stuff thirty years ago wilfully misunderstands charity's gesture to rant about asylum seekers and political correctness to an appreciative audience comprising a large number of right-wing hacks.

It's amazing how professional artists don't at all seem to feel threatened by the Royal Academy's 'Secret' exhibition every year. To do similar in prose isn't to suggest that all of the entries will be of equal quality, but to play a parlour game that encourages people to read all of the stories in order to place them with their authors.

For someone who seems so sure that her English degree (when they were proper), 50 years' publishing experience, and 45 books elevate her prose unquestionably, she seems oddly unsure that people will be able to distinguish her prose from that of someone whose has English as a second language.

(Whatever they taught her in her difficult English degree, it wasn't punctuation.)
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Zed (Gary_mc)
Username: Gary_mc

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 81.96.240.106
Posted on Thursday, January 21, 2010 - 11:15 am:   

I think there are some valid points in her argument, but she expresses them badly and does indeed come across as being a bit insecure.
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Nathaniel Tapley (Natt)
Username: Natt

Registered: 11-2009
Posted From: 78.144.205.110
Posted on Thursday, January 21, 2010 - 12:16 pm:   

Whatever valid points she may have, though, have nothing to do with what she was asked to do. That she hasn't understood what was being asked is clear from the beginning.

She claims that the point of the exhibit is that 'names are invidious'. Of course, it isn't. The point of this is a semi-amusing exhibit in which people will be reading and discussing lots of short stories, and trying to assign authors to them.

The answers don't go next to crosswords not because the editors of a newspaper think answers are invidious, but because it would spoil the game.

She then proceeds to set up a massive straw man, consisting of post-structuralists, asylum seekers, democratisers, the marginalised, children from failing schools, and no one she gives any existence exists outside her head. She's quaking at the approach of an imaginary world.

Of course, even her valid points could apply just as well to why we should still be writing in Latin, or court French. Maybe reading and writing should be a fenced-off enclave, to which access is given only once you have proved your credentials. Maybe we wouldn't be any worse off without people who weren't professional authors - Emily Dickinson and Nathaniel Hawthorne spring to mind - and only had access to the works of those with a long, successful publishing history: Jeffrey Archer, Jackie Collins, Katie Price.

Maybe the punctuation wasn't the most glaring omission from her English degree. Maybe it was comprehension.
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Huw (Huw)
Username: Huw

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 220.138.166.84
Posted on Thursday, January 21, 2010 - 12:19 pm:   

Like Gary, I think there are some valid points in her 'rant'. Standards are more important than ever in an age in which so many untalented, semi-literate would-be authors are having their stuff published, on the internet or even (*shudder*) in real books.
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Zed (Gary_mc)
Username: Gary_mc

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 81.96.240.106
Posted on Thursday, January 21, 2010 - 12:40 pm:   

I agree, Huw. Perhaps Hill has used the wrong soapbox from which to make her points, though.
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Nathaniel Tapley (Natt)
Username: Natt

Registered: 11-2009
Posted From: 78.144.205.110
Posted on Thursday, January 21, 2010 - 02:27 pm:   

I don't think anyone would disagree when she says: "The highest standards really matter and I will defend them while I have breath." but that's not what she is doing here.

For a professional writer she's being desperately inarticulate, failing to provide evidence (even interesting anecdoctes) to support her pre-digested prejudices.

And, even were what she said true, that still wouldn't be supporting 'the highest standards'. It's monstrously obvious that writers of her generation don't have the technical command of the language that authors typically did at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Their use of contractions, the dangling of their participles, and haphazard placement of prepositions would have shocked people in the past as being close to illiterate. I don't think it's unreasonable to think that the easy mastery of language of Waugh, Wodehouse, Wilde, and Saki is being lost with the benefits of a decent classical grounding (in particular in Classical Greek), and no number of 'difficult English degrees' from red-brick universities will make up for it.

You see, we can all be snobs. It doesn't require skill, or talent, or standards, just a desire to belittle other people's achievements.

If we're defending 'the highest standards' we should probably stop anyone reading anything but Milton. Anything else is a drop in standards after that.

You'll notice, of course, when I tried to show how much better the past was, I chose people who were actually good. The fact is, and has always been, that a lot that gets published is not good. The satires of magazine short stories from Wodehouse, and Waugh, show that they were not above taking a good swipe at the pulp entertainments of the day themselves. There's a lot of rubbish out there, and there always has been. It's just that their rubbish was better phrased than ours.

And I think she's wrong about where this decline in standards comes from. It doesn't come from asylum seekers, well-meaning liberals, or post-modernism, it comes from (whisper it) underinvestment in schools. As the market provides what people want, if they don't demand excellent prose they won't get it; if they can't recognise good stories, they won't get them. If they want ghost-written celebrities, they'll get them.

Not that I believe that publishers can't change what the market expects, but it's always safer to follow the herd than to lead it. Even if you follow it straight into the abbattoir. The argument that free-market policies are causing the 'democratisation' of things (because markets don't repect values or standards) rather than the woolly-headed political correctness police probably wouldn't have gone down too well in The Spectator, though.

In short, if I have to choose only in the future reading those things produced by someone without an English degree or those with one, I'll side with the Brontes, George Eliot, Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Jane Austen, and Shakespeare every time, thanks, Susan.

(Although I will miss Milton, though...)
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Zed (Gary_mc)
Username: Gary_mc

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 81.96.240.106
Posted on Thursday, January 21, 2010 - 02:31 pm:   

You fancy her, don't you.
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Nathaniel Tapley (Natt)
Username: Natt

Registered: 11-2009
Posted From: 78.144.205.110
Posted on Thursday, January 21, 2010 - 02:33 pm:   

A little bit. I'd get her all warmed up by muttering things like 'textspeak', 'diversity quotas', and 'disabled asylum lesbians'...
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Zed (Gary_mc)
Username: Gary_mc

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 81.96.240.106
Posted on Thursday, January 21, 2010 - 02:35 pm:   

Ah, so it's angry sex you're after.
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Nathaniel Tapley (Natt)
Username: Natt

Registered: 11-2009
Posted From: 78.144.205.110
Posted on Thursday, January 21, 2010 - 02:38 pm:   

Is there any other kind?
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.152.176.3
Posted on Thursday, January 21, 2010 - 02:49 pm:   

Standards of talent and practical craft in fiction-making should be upheld via a means of elitism (a loaded word) but an elitsm that somehow manages both to exclude the sub-standard and to enable the work of the many talented writers who are not named writers. In theory at least and in its own small experimental way, Nemonymity and Nemonymous have always seemed to me to fit this bill - but I would say that!
As to Ms Hill's self-styled 'rant', I suppose it is necessarily strident but also very defensive. I agree with a lot she says, however.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 81.157.23.22
Posted on Thursday, January 21, 2010 - 03:00 pm:   

Um, I think she's mostly right! Her problem isn't with anonymity but rather lack of skill, I think.
I do think, however, that what she was asked to join in with was a piece of fun more than anything, and could have gotten into the spirit of it somewhat.
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Nathaniel Tapley (Natt)
Username: Natt

Registered: 11-2009
Posted From: 78.144.205.110
Posted on Thursday, January 21, 2010 - 03:01 pm:   

Yes, but I'd argue that it's only possible to agree with her because she's being so vague. It's the equivalent of spending a page saying: "Bad is worse. I can't play in an orchestra. And it's all asylum seekers' fault."

It's not strident, it's not even an argument. A rant demands that you substantiate what you're saying, rather than erecting a gigantic straw man 'The Left think the aborted foetuses they love so much are as good at stories as me' (based on nothing that anyone has ever said or done), and then failing to demolish it.

She has decided that the other stories to be included would be written by the list of hateful shibboleths she reels off. She takes a non-event (and when someone explains to me why this is any different to the RCA Secret Exhibition, or anything more than a parlour game for charity I might change my view), and turns it into a dog-whistle attack on the (her words) 'disadvantaged' and 'discriminated against'.

Yeah, give those disadvantaged a good kicking. Aim for the difficult targets, why don't you, Susan?

Some people might argue that anonymous fiction creates exactly that 'elitism' you speak of, Des, where the only judgement of quality is to be found in the work itself. An elitism of quality is to be desired, but that's not what she wants.

She wants an elitism based on her past achievements (which are considerable), her academic qualifications, an elitism of biography.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 81.157.23.22
Posted on Thursday, January 21, 2010 - 03:04 pm:   

That's true. She could have been clearer. It did feel fuzzy, like a little person trying to shoot one person with a big heavy machine gun but ending up shooting loads.
Bit like that sentence.
Yes, I agree with you, now, Nathan. Never scan-read, eh?
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 81.157.23.22
Posted on Thursday, January 21, 2010 - 03:06 pm:   

BTW I think a lot of the errors you mention in writing in the sixties and seventies were experimentation, albeit sometimes handily used to cover up little probs with skill by others.
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Ramsey Campbell (Ramsey)
Username: Ramsey

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 195.93.21.74
Posted on Thursday, January 21, 2010 - 03:18 pm:   

I agree with quite a few of Susan Hill's points - indeed, the musical comparison is one I've been making for years (in my case it's a cello, not a violin).
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 81.157.23.22
Posted on Thursday, January 21, 2010 - 03:26 pm:   

My wife went to an amatuer choir thing recently in Gateshead. Huge concert orchestra, venue etc. She hasn't sang outside an amdram panto, and at this place sang the Alleluja chorus with a few hundred people. It was absolutely beautiful.
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Nathaniel Tapley (Natt)
Username: Natt

Registered: 11-2009
Posted From: 78.144.205.110
Posted on Thursday, January 21, 2010 - 03:36 pm:   

I still don't think she made any points. She uttered truisms: 'Some people are less good than other people at things' and had a good snipe at a few Spectator hate-figures.

If anything, her argument (such as it is) is wounded by the ineptitude of her attack. If that's how they taught her to think and argue during her difficult English degree she should have asked for her money back.

Just another sign of declining standards, I fear...
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Nathaniel Tapley (Natt)
Username: Natt

Registered: 11-2009
Posted From: 78.144.205.110
Posted on Thursday, January 21, 2010 - 03:47 pm:   

To be clear, Tony, I don't regard the stylistic tics I listed as errors. I think they are evidence of a less-formal prose style that has - gasp! - enriched literature. Experimentation with form is vital and exciting.

However, that wouldn't stop it representing a clear decline in standards to those of a more classical bent. I was trying to highlight that the world may be going to hell in a handbasket, but then it always has been...
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 81.157.23.22
Posted on Thursday, January 21, 2010 - 03:50 pm:   

You're right. Henry James reckoned literature was heavy, over-lengthy, oft-unreadable stuff till such-a-point.
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Craig (Craig)
Username: Craig

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 75.4.244.105
Posted on Thursday, January 21, 2010 - 04:49 pm:   

Elitist. That's all I walked away with, from reading her article.

Any honest successful writer of any kind, deep down, knows that there IS some degree - I didn't say all, I didn't say most - SOME degree of luck, that has contributed to the success of a successful writer; and without which the success of the successful writer would not have occurred.

It's not ALL about how "good" you are. And this demand to not be amongst the "rabble" (the only reason she's not doing it, having said it's not about money, being paid adequately for the time she feels she's put in to achieve her level of craft, etc. - perfectly fine reasons to opt out, by the way!); but to say droolingly she'd do anything to be amongst the other "lucksters," as she does in her closing paragraph... this is an elitist attitude I, frankly, find unseemly.
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Zed (Gary_mc)
Username: Gary_mc

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 81.96.240.106
Posted on Thursday, January 21, 2010 - 06:46 pm:   

I see your point, Craig. But I also see Hill's. It hurts my arse sitting on this fence.
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Steveduffy (Steveduffy)
Username: Steveduffy

Registered: 05-2009
Posted From: 86.156.102.61
Posted on Thursday, January 21, 2010 - 08:33 pm:   

Well, I agree that the maintenance of standards is important when evaluating literature (anonymous or otherwise). Unfortunately, this belief is at the heart of my not particularly high opinion of Ms Hill's oeuvre.
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Huw (Huw)
Username: Huw

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 61.216.200.223
Posted on Friday, January 22, 2010 - 04:48 am:   

I must confess, when reading some of what gets published in various small presses (or POD outfits) these days, I give up after just a couple of pages. The very least I expect when reading a piece of writing is that the writer have a basic grasp of grammar. I honestly can't remember how many times I've cringed at things like "the old woman, smiled at me with a evil look that would have made Medusa herself, turn to stone." (okay, I made that one up, but it's the kind of thing I've seen time and again on the net and even in published books). I would not buy (or even listen to) a song played by a band who consistently played chords using the wrong notes, so why would I want to read a piece of fiction by someone who can't even adhere to the most fundamental rules of grammar?

But even more important, to me, is the natural feel for language, something that I believe all good writers must possess. When I read something by Robert Aickman or Fritz Leiber (just to name two writers who really knew how to write) I'm immediately swept up in the rhythm of their prose. Their are many 'writers' around today who simply seem to lack this feeling for language, and I find this truly dismaying. What makes it worse is that if someone lacks a real sense of the rhythm of language, how to construct it so that it feels and sounds beautiful or powerful or sensuous (or whatever effect the author may be striving for), how then are they to be aware of this while writing and, indeed, while editing their work? The fact that many books apparently bypass any editing/proofreading stages altogether just makes the situation even more depressing.

Thankfully there are still enough talented and able writers out there to make me want to keep buying and reading new books, but I have to admit that I quite often turn to older work by writers (like Leiber and Aickman) who knew what they were doing.
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Huw (Huw)
Username: Huw

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 61.216.200.223
Posted on Friday, January 22, 2010 - 04:51 am:   

"Their are" should be "there are", dammit! Talk about bad writing...
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Stephen Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 82.17.252.126
Posted on Friday, January 22, 2010 - 11:06 pm:   

Huw, I agree with you 100%
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 81.157.23.22
Posted on Saturday, January 23, 2010 - 09:16 am:   

Sigh - I'm increasingly aware of my shortcomings lately. The bits you read that you thought good of mine Stephen really come with difficulty to me. I look at my fave authors with real dismay sometimes, and sometimes feel literature is dead and that we are all going through motions, pretending.
How to study grammar? It's my biggest failng. It just doesn't sink in, and getting older as I am I don't think it ever will.
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Joel (Joel)
Username: Joel

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 91.110.202.184
Posted on Saturday, January 23, 2010 - 10:42 am:   

'I honestly can't remember how many times I've cringed at things like "the old woman, smiled at me with a evil look that would have made Medusa herself, turn to stone."'

Yes, I find Dickens unreadable too.

Tony, get a copy of a standard pocket-sized guide to copy-editing (e.g. Collins). Or if you want more depth and a rationale for it all, read Fowler's classic Modern English Usage. His chapter on the comma is so lucid it makes you wonder how so many people get it wrong.
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.159.145.130
Posted on Saturday, January 23, 2010 - 10:49 am:   

I expect he went to Ox,ford.
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Joel (Joel)
Username: Joel

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 91.110.202.184
Posted on Saturday, January 23, 2010 - 10:51 am:   

Let's not go there.
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Joel (Joel)
Username: Joel

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 91.110.202.184
Posted on Saturday, January 23, 2010 - 11:02 am:   

I suspect my views on the Oxford comma have been slightly misrepresented (by me). I don't feel the Oxford comma is 'wrong', just that its use should depend on circumstances and should not be mandatory. Sometimes it is helpful, sometimes it is intrusive. I use it in certain lists where it assists clarity – these tend to be in non-fiction rather than fiction. It's a good idea in legal or technical documents, where the appeal of the prose is far less important than the need to avoid ambiguity. It's rather like the way a sofa is useful in the lounge but unnecessary in the kitchen. The underlying principle should be logical clarity of expression rather than formal consistency.
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Joel (Joel)
Username: Joel

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 91.110.202.184
Posted on Saturday, January 23, 2010 - 11:04 am:   

And last year's OED declared the hyphen to be obsolete. Which demonstrates conclusively that they are a bunch of space cadets.
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.159.145.130
Posted on Saturday, January 23, 2010 - 11:09 am:   

What about the em and en dashes? They remain healthy little side-slashes, thank goodness.
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Huw (Huw)
Username: Huw

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 61.216.51.133
Posted on Saturday, January 23, 2010 - 02:43 pm:   

Joel, I've never read anything by Dickens that I considered badly written. Then again, I haven't read that much of his work. Surely he didn't misplace commas in the way I indicated in my crappy writing example? I, certainly hope not.

Tony, I can't remember whether I've said this before but I really liked your story in All Hallows. You are too hard on yourself sometimes, I feel (I'm like that too).
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Gary Fry (Gary_fry)
Username: Gary_fry

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.0.114.254
Posted on Saturday, January 23, 2010 - 02:52 pm:   

My English teacher once showed us a passage of Dickens which would definitely fail a GCSE because of its . . . idiosyncratic punctuation. Whether that's a criticism of the curriculum or the author, I leave for others to decide.

Personally I think Dickens lurches from the magnificently regal to the mawkishly ridiculous (often in the same page).
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Huw (Huw)
Username: Huw

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 61.216.51.133
Posted on Saturday, January 23, 2010 - 02:56 pm:   

Well, it's been an age since I read Dickens (not since high school, I suspect!) but I can't recall his work being littered with grammatical errors. Machen often championed Dickens as one who had a deep understanding of human nature.
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Gary Fry (Gary_fry)
Username: Gary_fry

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.0.114.254
Posted on Saturday, January 23, 2010 - 02:58 pm:   

I think he just broke rules according to his 'genius', Huw. Grammar is for wimps.
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Gary Fry (Gary_fry)
Username: Gary_fry

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.0.114.254
Posted on Saturday, January 23, 2010 - 02:59 pm:   

I reread Hard Times last year and found it, by turns, magnificent, sentimental, overly moralistic, rich, simplistic, irritatingly eccentric and touching.
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Gary Fry (Gary_fry)
Username: Gary_fry

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.0.114.254
Posted on Saturday, January 23, 2010 - 03:01 pm:   

Prefer the 'realism' of Flaubert or George Eliot, personally. But Dickens is certainly an interesting writer.
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.159.145.130
Posted on Saturday, January 23, 2010 - 03:04 pm:   

My ancient edition of 'David Copperfield' has this passage:

'Oh, go-roo!' (it is really impossible to express how he twisted this ejaculation out of himself, as he peeped round the door-post at me, showing nothing but his crafty old head;) 'will you go for fourpence?'


The first smiley / emoticon in history?

For me, however, Dickens can do no wrong.
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.159.145.130
Posted on Saturday, January 23, 2010 - 03:05 pm:   

That passage also reminds me that in his day there were Fourpenny Bits!!
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Nathaniel Tapley (Natt)
Username: Natt

Registered: 11-2009
Posted From: 78.144.205.110
Posted on Saturday, January 23, 2010 - 03:58 pm:   

Can we not keep both Dickens and Eliot?

And can we not agree that if you are ranting abot declining standards in the writing of prose, it's best not to have included a sentence like this: "But in the mad world of those with well-meaning but lunatic desires for egalitarianism in absolutely everything my fifty years writing 43 books, learning my trade and re-learning it, practising my craft, hoping to improve, reading the best to learn from them, putting out words in a careful order every day of my life, working with the talent I was given by God - none of that matters a jot."

or:

"But language is already democratised, each of us claims to be part of that great free world of speaking words every time we open our mouth."

She can hardly utter sentence without having parts of speech fall over themselves, and each other, to express her inchoate rage. Standards certainly have declined when this is an acceptable way for a columnist on the website of a major national periodical to express themselves. On the evidence of that column, Susan, many amateur bloggers who can provide sources, references, sentences that make sense, and top them with amusing imagery are better than you.

I was reminded of this thread again last night when finishing off The Master and Margarita, when Koroviev and Behemoth are asked for their writers' ID cards, and Koroviev says: "A writer is defined not by any identity card, but by what he writes."

Susan Hill is arguing for a system of approved writers, with the right background or training. She wants people to be acknowledged as writers not for what they write, but for their CVs.

Perhaps not wanting to be judged by what you write is a side effect of writing unexceptional-to-poor crime novels for half a decade.
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Joel (Joel)
Username: Joel

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 91.110.163.66
Posted on Saturday, January 23, 2010 - 07:07 pm:   

"...working with the talent I was given by God"

When your talent is given to you by God, how dare benighted secular critics force you to be judged by your work like some ordinary mortal?
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Nathaniel Tapley (Natt)
Username: Natt

Registered: 11-2009
Posted From: 78.144.205.110
Posted on Saturday, January 23, 2010 - 07:23 pm:   

"As opposed to the talent other people might display, which could have come from Satan, Lidl, or worse, abroad..."
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Carolinec (Carolinec)
Username: Carolinec

Registered: 06-2009
Posted From: 82.38.75.85
Posted on Saturday, January 23, 2010 - 08:12 pm:   

>>"As opposed to the talent other people might display, which could have come from Satan, Lidl, or worse, abroad..."<<

I think my talent comes from Lidl - it's cheap and not very good quality.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 81.157.23.22
Posted on Sunday, January 24, 2010 - 09:19 am:   

Des - on that deleted thread I mentioned that I still have some of the old coins somewhere. Threepenny bits were like pirate money, weren't they?
I also mentioned that filling your pockets with said coins might send you back to the early seventies when it felt like the world was ending for the simple reason things weren't happening often enough anymore.
Hard more point and sparkle on the other thread, though.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 81.157.23.22
Posted on Sunday, January 24, 2010 - 09:22 am:   

Also, threepenny bits, like the words beaver and cock, can't be said anymore when used in their original meanings. The magazine The Beaver over in Canada has had to change its name apparently.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 81.157.23.22
Posted on Sunday, January 24, 2010 - 09:26 am:   

http://www.cbc.ca/arts/story/2010/01/12/mb-beaver-magazine-name-change-winnipeg. html
I think it's really sad. Been round 90 years it has.
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.159.145.130
Posted on Sunday, January 24, 2010 - 09:28 am:   

Thanks, Tony. I listed some of the old money here yesterday;

with one possible joke. :0
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 81.157.23.22
Posted on Sunday, January 24, 2010 - 09:34 am:   

Ooh - I haven't got the florin!
Some of these coins were massive - real character they had, the sizes being so radically different to one another.
Changes; in the old days us kids would pick up any coin we saw. Now kids throw away handfuls of copper and five pence pieces when they get given them as change.
And they say times are hard.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 81.157.23.22
Posted on Sunday, January 24, 2010 - 09:35 am:   

Oh, I DO have the florin!

More changes; phone books in phone booths.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 81.157.23.22
Posted on Sunday, January 24, 2010 - 09:35 am:   

Er, they've gone.
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Steve Jensen (Stevej)
Username: Stevej

Registered: 07-2009
Posted From: 82.0.77.233
Posted on Sunday, January 24, 2010 - 03:12 pm:   

Really, Susan should look to her own writing - 'The Man in the Picture' was so incredibly lightweight, insubstantial. And I speak as an admirer of hers.
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Coral (Coral)
Username: Coral

Registered: 10-2008
Posted From: 90.215.237.82
Posted on Sunday, January 24, 2010 - 03:28 pm:   

How old are you, Tony? I remember diectories in phone boxes, but my only memory of old money is going home crying from the shop because the man wouldn't take my money and I couldn't have any sweeties! I'd have been four then.

Anyway, I don't remember if I said this before, but I looked after a teenage girl for a few days while her mother was in hospital, and had to supervise her homework.
In fact I cheated and wrote a small essay on fossil fuels for her while she did her maths and art.
She was asked by her teacher whether she had written the piece herself, and worried about being rumbled, instantly came out with, "no, I copied it from the internet".
She got full marks.
Plagiarism is now "research", and my dumbed down version was considered worth copying.
I was pig sick.
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Coral (Coral)
Username: Coral

Registered: 10-2008
Posted From: 90.215.237.82
Posted on Sunday, January 24, 2010 - 03:38 pm:   

OOPS and the moral of the tale is DON'T CHEAT or you'll find out things about the current education system that turn your hair white. Yes, I know I did wrong to write it for her, but she was having a very difficult time.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 81.157.23.22
Posted on Sunday, January 24, 2010 - 04:46 pm:   

It might have been better for her to have said that!
That's awful, Coral.
I'm 47, unfortunately. I remember decimalization as being the 'time of shiny coins'. I thought it was good.
The phone books; they went from being there, to being chained in, to not being there at all. Makes me quite sad, that. But I do remember my mum having to walk miles at night to call my dad who was late back from work. God, it was like The bloody Road back then, wasn't it?
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 160.6.1.47
Posted on Sunday, January 24, 2010 - 04:59 pm:   

Shutters on shop fronts too. When the moral barriers came down in our heads they sprouted outside them. Jarvis Cocker said last night that celebrity is a replacement for the idea of heaven. Matin Amis agreed. Probably true, then.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 81.157.23.22
Posted on Sunday, January 24, 2010 - 05:04 pm:   

Maybe the shiny coins were a sign of things to come. :-(
Thing is, maybe that's why we love films like the road; secretly we like walking miles to make a phone call.
We lost our heating over xmas. We had to conserve water and wear thick clothes and stuff, regulate lots of things. The minute the heating was fixed I'll swear my heart sank a little. I didn't have time to mull anything over during that time at all.
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Carolinec (Carolinec)
Username: Carolinec

Registered: 06-2009
Posted From: 82.38.75.85
Posted on Sunday, January 24, 2010 - 06:42 pm:   

Talking old money, eh?

I have LOTS of the old coins. My late grand-dad collected them and he constructed a wooden cabinet with individual trays in which to keep them all. When he and gran died, mum and dad wanted to know if I wanted anything of theirs - gramp's old coins and cabinet now sit in a corner of our spare room.

I'm afraid I never got the urge to collect coins like my grand-dad, but it's still a nice keepsake and reminder of all the times spent helping him with his collection when I was a kid.

BTW I think the threepenny bits were my favourite! I love the shape, the weight and the general "feel" of them.
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Craig (Craig)
Username: Craig

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 75.4.246.167
Posted on Sunday, January 24, 2010 - 06:51 pm:   

The phone books; they went from being there, to being chained in, to not being there at all.

I like this image. This is how it is here, in California at least. The phone booths that were everywhere, are mostly gone. When you see one, you're amazed - well, if you can even see past the invisibility of it, because NO ONE is ever looking for a phone booth - hell, a phone booth? I mean phone thing-on-the-wall-outside-the-market! Phone booths are totally, totally, totally, gone gone gone.

Out here, we have/had call boxes along our freeways - highways. They were blue, they were every so many hundreds of feet, they were ubiquitous. Not no more: again, with the advent of cell phones, they were mostly removed, and I think the new ordinance is something like one a mile or less....

Remember TV antennas on houses? Remember telephone poles and power lines? Remember mailboxes on street corners? Neither do I.

Ever see the phenomenal documentary CRUMB? In that, R. Crumb shows a drawing he did of the evolution of a city intersection, if I remember it correctly, and it's gradually choked with wires and poles and whatnot, to show how technology had choked out nature and the rustic; how it was chokingly present, but invisible right in front of us.

Now, we're so technologically advanced, these sore-thumbs have vanished. But it's sad they're gone, in a weird way.....

Er - am I off-topic? (And don't anyone let me use the word choke again - wait, I just wrote choke again - doh!)
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Nathaniel Tapley (Natt)
Username: Natt

Registered: 11-2009
Posted From: 78.144.205.110
Posted on Sunday, January 24, 2010 - 06:52 pm:   

Threepenny bits were always our Christmas pudding money. To be swapped once you'd cracked a tooth on them, for a 20p...
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 81.157.23.22
Posted on Sunday, January 24, 2010 - 09:42 pm:   

Des! A 'coin'cidence in the news today!
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/5/20100124/tod-mcdonald-s-pounded-over-bob-menu-adv-870 a197.html
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.159.145.130
Posted on Sunday, January 24, 2010 - 10:03 pm:   

Yes, Tony, another one of those many coincidences that seem to haunt me and my friends since I published CERN ZOO. Thanks for letting me know.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 81.157.23.22
Posted on Monday, January 25, 2010 - 05:26 pm:   

And then this morning, I turn on the radio and they're only talking about Threepenny Opera...
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.159.145.130
Posted on Monday, January 25, 2010 - 05:38 pm:   

That, of course, is a 'vile' opera. Well, most operas are.

With Mack the Knife.
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Weber_gregston (Weber_gregston)
Username: Weber_gregston

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 194.176.105.56
Posted on Monday, January 25, 2010 - 06:47 pm:   

Its a shame about this.

What I've read of Susan Hill's I've really enjoyed. I'm The King of the Castle was a particular favourite of mine last year.

BTW she's only been writing crime novels for the last 5 years or so (not half a century as someone above claimed) - the Simon Serrailler series - not the best in the world but better than a lot of the dross you'll find in the crime section.
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Nathaniel Tapley (Natt)
Username: Natt

Registered: 11-2009
Posted From: 78.144.205.110
Posted on Monday, January 25, 2010 - 07:01 pm:   

I think you'll find I said 'half a decade', Weber. And I think 'I'm The King Of The Castle' is great, too.

"Perhaps not wanting to be judged by what you write is a side effect of writing unexceptional-to-poor crime novels for half a decade."
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Weber_gregston (Weber_gregston)
Username: Weber_gregston

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 194.176.105.56
Posted on Tuesday, January 26, 2010 - 10:58 am:   

Speed reading... soz
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 81.157.23.22
Posted on Tuesday, January 26, 2010 - 03:24 pm:   

She was a good author when she was surrounded by the strange and quiet 1970s. (I try to pretend it's the 70s when I'm writing; helps with focus.)

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