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 - Norman Mailer

ENL 505 - Stylistics
Norman Mailer Assignment

It was just a college relationship in the big scheme of things. A million begin and end every day. But a big scheme of things needs details to matter at all.

Shannon was drunk again but Patty was just as drunk. Mitchell was the third wheel for a while but he loved to drink. Shannon and Patty rode their bicycle of booze all the way to the end of a night that involved stumbling, fighting with calls of “fucking whore” and “fucking asshole,” and the kind of gutless attempt at sex that can only be committed by people so desperate for some version of love or attention or mattering that they are willing to drunkenly fumble around till one pukes out a window and the other urinates the bed.

One time, Carrie, Patty’s roommate, flat out told Shannon that Patty was lying to him, that she’d been calling Josh all summer long and talking to him. Shannon had drank more than a few beers and so told Carrie that he was going to break up with Patty. He drove Carrie home and after he parked, they talked from the front seat of his car about Patty - the kind of person she was, and how it hurt them both. Carrie looked at Shannon and wanted to take a petty revenge on Patty by fucking Shannon, right there in the car if need be. Shannon let it go because he knew, just hours after saying he would break up with Patty, that he couldn’t do it. Even when Patty admitted talking to Josh, through his tears and the anguish in his heart, he couldn’t do it. Patty never even got mad at Carrie because she knew the relationship would never be in danger, Shannon being the way he is. Besides, Patty had to take friends any way she could get them, even backstabbing ones, on account of her fears.

Another time Patty slapped Shannon so hard on his face she left a purple-black bruise like a jellyfish covering his cheek. Patty had played high school softball and tried out for OU but said something about the coach playing favorites or being committed to the scholarships. She had a good arm, so it hurt. But there was nothing he would do, Shannon being the way he was, other than suffer it.

The heavy drinking and fights were almost nightly and the screaming bothered Patty’s roommates. One of the roommates, Rebecca, had been calling home, telling her father it was getting in the way of her doing her schoolwork. At one point, they were in couples therapy at the school’s counseling center. This was before the first break-up. Per the plan drawn up by the therapist, Patty agreed to limit the drinking on weekdays and they both agreed that before even going out to the bars, to come home after a pre-established number of beers. Shannon, excitedly and honestly, expected Patty to abide the plan they’d worked on with the therapist. Then one weeknight out, Patty starts flirting with a guy right in front of Shannon, smiling and bumping his hip as they all played pool. When Shannon said, “it’s time to go, you remember the agreement,” Patty just said, “I changed my mind,” as if she’d told a waiter she wanted the soup instead. Shannon couldn’t fathom what she’d done, what she’d said. Her roommates were there and saw it all go down. Before Shannon left alone in shame, for some reason he felt the need to tell them “I’m not a bad guy.”
            In one sense, it was the beginning of the end, but in the big scheme of things, there never was a beginning to have an end.

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Word Count: 618

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.

Style: Norman Mailer (specifically, The Executioner’s Song)