The 505 - Last Assignment

ENL 505 - Stylistics

Reflection On Style Assignment

Style is the way a person engages and reflects the world. This is my understanding as of mid-February 2019.
Or maybe...style is better understood as how one perceives THE world but/then reflects THEIR world. Like digestion, what goes in is NOT what comes out. An “objective” world is sensed but a subjective world reflected. Whittle this down to literary style and we might come to the consensus that literary style is the process by which a writer (and ergo a reader) engages the world and reflects that world in or through the act of writing (and ergo reading).
But, as Ben Yagoda painfully points (alliteration) out: style IS the person. Style is not a person/attitude/culture/genetic/geographic/generation neutral proposition. So you’ll (shift to 2nd person) have to accept that you’ll never be Joshua Ferris or George Saunders or Toni Morrison or Tim Kreider but deep down in places you don’t like to talk about at cocktail parties, you knew this. Oh you knew it all right. You, of all people, rail against the mundacity (neologism [mundane+audacity=mundacity]) of tautological utterings practically day in and day out (“it is what it is”) as the most boring, offensive offerings of words for the sake of words. And there is nothing as tautologous as you not being someone you aren’t. No, what you don’t like about style being the person, is the person you are.
And nothing, NUH-theeng, has changed over the course of 14 weeks of learning about style. Should it have? Maybe (hypophora). What really changed is that I’ve learned, even more concretely, I am more still incapable of change. And this is dreadful. Depressing, truly (anastrophe). So very awful. And so it goes.

Dude: “What was that?”
Bro: “What?”
Dude: “What do you mean what?”
Bro: “What do YOU mean what? From earlier, ‘what.’”

Interlocutor Emeritus: Enough! We all heard it you dopes! It’s obvious. Shannon is waxing on again about facticity. He’s got a complex or some shit.

You are stuck with you and you can’t change. Not a bit. Human all too human as Nietzsche said...but

You. Can. Write about it.

Engage the world and reflect that engagement WITH WORDS on the damn page. String sentences together and have end-focus and throw in some rhetorical figures and learn grammar rules so that you can bend em’ and try the upper, middle, and low styles and use Latinate and be colloquial and imitate the authorial silence of Capote or try your best for some powerful status details a la Didion (a lone, dusty, plastic poinsettia adorned his desk - no pictures of children dressed in Halloween costumes) and don’t you dare argue - instead dramatize, the way Mailer would and don’t forget to try to Tom Wolfe-it and just throw everything against the page and see what sticks...but you’ve got to, must, put SOMETHING on the page.
You know you are special, right? You know that spatio-temporally you are unique in all the universe and yet you are going to NOT write for fear of, fear of what? Criticism? Did I mention that you have a point of view unrepeatable in space/time? I did (hypophora). What are you waiting for?
Style be damned!
Humanity be damned!
Inability cursed, brainpower (or lack thereof) ba!
Forget ALL that.
Do I have to quote that puke-green skinned, Dagobah swamp residing, jangly-toothed Jedi, Yoda and tell you that you must unlearn what you have learned?
Style is the person but your fallacy is thinking only the styles of others matters. Maybe write till you do matter or maybe write because writing matters...to you.

Maybe when we talk about style we are really talking about what matters to you.
I could be wrong and my opinion may not be worth a hill of beans in this crazy world but I do have a question. Tis a simple one:

What matters to you?

Your style is what you care about, what you value, what...matters to you; if you are afraid of what others think about what matters to you, it doesn’t REALLY matter to you and you aren’t done learning your values. No sin there. And good news, you can write about it.

What are you waiting for?
Either way, write. Right?

(Psst! I lied about tautologies. I fucking love tautologies. Not really. But…)

***

Word Count: 716

Please compose a brief (500-750) word reflection on this semester and your understanding of style, fourteen weeks later.

The 505 Tom Wolfe

Tough assignment from the 505: write a la Tom Wolfe.

Ooof.

But...I read Wolfe's The Electric-Kool-Aid Acid Test and Style As Argument by Chris Anderson.

I tried to capture, somewhat, this idea that elite musicians are channels for something greater. That the music comes THROUGH them, not FROM them. I first heard this reading Plato, regarding the poets. Then oddly enough, after Stevie Ray Vaughan died and Eric Clapton talked about SRV's playing:

Eric Clapton I don't think anyone has commanded my respect more, to this day. The first time I heard Stevie Ray, I thought, "Whoever this is, he is going to shake the world." I was in my car and I remember thinking, I have to find out, before the day is over, who that guitar player is. That doesn't happen to me very often, that I get that way about listening to music. I mean, about three or four times in my life I've felt that way, in a car, listening to the radio, where I've stopped the car, pulled over, listened, and thought, I've got to find out before the end of the day, not, you know, sooner or later, but I have to know NOW who that is.
...and I remember being fascinated by the fact that he never, ever seemed to be...lost in any way...It was as though he never took a breather...or took a pause to think where he was gonna go next, it just flowed out of him. It's going to be a long time before anyone that brilliant will come along again.
I didn't get to see or hear Stevie play near often enough, but every time I did I got chills and knew I was in the presence of greatness.He seemed to be an open channel and music just flowed through him. It never seemed to dry up.
I have to tell this story: We played on the same bill on his last two gigs. On the first night, I watched his set for about half an hour and then I had to leave because I couldn't handle it!. I knew enough to know that his playing was just going to get better and better. His set had started, he was like two or three songs in, and I suddenly got this flash that I'd experienced before so many times whenever I'd seen him play, which was that he was like a channel. One of the purest channels I've ever seen, where everything he sang and played flowed straight down from heaven. Almost like one of those mystic Sufi guys with one finger pointing up and one finger down. That's what it was like to listen to. And I had to leave just to preserve some kind of sanity or confidence in myself.

ENL 505 - Stylistics

Tom Wolfe Assignment

An infinitesimal minority hear the calling. Of those, few heed the call. The heeders? Many fall by the wayside; rolled over and tumbled in the wake of doubt, or block, or aesthetic attrition.
You and me? The most boring mortals never hear the call... a call. No brrinnnggg brrinnnggg for us!

But there are sentient savants among us, and they offer us, oh just: vicarious prodigy, vicarious transcendence, vicarious peak experience. We can’t have these...on our own. Pshaw!
It’s no one’s fault. Blame is moot. Why try to explain the inexplicable? Got some sort of Sisyphus complex, do ya? Why fret when you can live vicariously?

Face facts! Few will ever possess and only a few more will ever understand, remotely, the genius. Can you think of a more overused word than genius? Gawd! But it is genius proper in these carnate gods. They possess, in spades, a shrug-your-shoulders, don’t look at me, holy schnikes kinda genius. The kind of wunder mensch, beyond talented, kinda brain that can juggle sense data out the yin yang in a nanosecond over a corpus callosum thick as nautical rope:

Right Brain
            ::::left fret hand
            ::::hammer-on index-middle-pinky finger succession
            ::::low e string frets 3-5-7
            ::::low a string frets 3-5-7
            Index-middle-ring::::low d string frets 4-5-7

Left Brain
            ::::right pick hand
            ::::index finger low e (dampen strings below e with remaining palm)
            ::::index finger low a (dampen strings below a with remaining palm; thumb dampen e above)
            ::::index finger low d (dampen strings below  with remaining palm; thumb dampen a & e above)

Whole Brain
            ::::hear but don’t listen-don’t play but be played-imagine ahead-hear the notes a priori-sing the notes in your mind’s voice-feel for the bass line-feel for the drummer-feel for the chords-feel for the crowd...feel…
...with your sixth sense.
Or seventh or eighth sense...or ad infinitum sense.

Do it...ALL AT THE SAME TIME!

Unless you’ve tried to play an instrument, you can’t really fathom the magic that elite musicians pull off. You just watch in awe as the rabbit isn’t only pulled out of the hat but is ejected into the aural stratosphere and explodes to fill your existential/aesthetic void with
je ne sais quoi but something you needed!

Unless you’ve played an instrument and tried to master it to the level of even pro-am status, you’ve no clue the voodoo that they do when they do what they do indeed do. But done it is.

Maybe you’ve near-mastered something in your life. Hell! maybe back in high school you were capable of going from a back handspring into a full-fledged flip and as a result, have an immense appreciation every time the summer Olympics roll around and you watch agape the floor routines as human springs bound and coil and twist with needle-threading precision but never tire or dizzy or seem anything but unbound, untethered, unREAL.

But this isn’t even about mastering. Mastering is B-O-R-I-N-G. This is NOT run of the mill, hey hey kid’s got some talent, second place in some High School Gong Show. This is NOT even about impeccably gifted musicians who can earn a meager life-on-the-road living, performing music. Not even the same ballpark, area code, universe.
This is about those musicians that when you hear, you know...when you are in the presence of...and… when there are no words that pop up, come to mind, do justice -there just aren’t. We don’t need a vocab when we slide into aesthetic nirvana like melting into a hot bath. Seeking is suffering. Epistemic justification is as worthless as justifying epistemology.

But it is certain, oh as certain as 2+2=4. We know because we are changed; certain because we are accosted, held hostage, raptured with an aesthetic drug in our blood, as formless, metaphysical, righteous beauty fills, no sates! us...still; immobile, wordless, clean and cleansed, we cannot reckon...but reckoning is soooo beneath us now.

These musicians are pregnant with god, however defined, in eternal artistic labor, their past dedication and practice serving as the dilation that allows the deity to be delivered but never, ever, apart...always attached via an umbilical of equal reciprocity: each possessed and nurtured by the other.

We mortals never hear the call but we can always hear the music.

***

Word Count: 702

Write: For this assignment, take a brief piece (500-750) you have written and revise/ write in the style of the featured author. In other words, revise so as to mimic the style

of the featured author. You can, as well, compose a brand new piece in this style.