Tuesday, June 27, 2006

Writing = Garbage?

In browsing through Jon Winokur's delicious The Portable Curmudgeon, my imaginary big toe just stubbed itself on this bit of a boulder in the shoe we now call blogging:

All writing is garbage. People who come out of nowhere to try to put into words any part of what goes on in their minds are pigs. -- Antonin Artaud

Um, Mr. A.A.? That would me moi. Oink. OINK! And the rest of us, I s'pose.

I don't know Artaud's works except for a riveting essay about him by the late Susan Sontag around 1973 in The New Yorker. You could look it up (as Casey Stengel said, and sources say HE was actually mimicking an earlier quote). My anal-rententive mind works that way. (Did you ever see the great T-shirt in Wireless, the public radio catalog, that says something like, "Is anal retentive hyphenated?") I remember Artaud as an anarchist French playwright. I guess. But, whew, how prescient could one be?

...to put into words any part of what goes on in their minds...

That be us, Artie.

Winokur's little gem of a book offers just two more quotes on writing. Here they are:

If you can't annoy somebody, there's little point in writing. -- Kingsley Amis.

That's Martin's Da, the author of Lucky Jim, a fine satire. (I love Martin Amis's Money, as well as other works. I know, not on my Favorites. Who cares.)

And:

If I didn't have writing, I'd be running down the street hurling grenades in people's faces. -- Paul Fussell.

And now a word from our irredeemably shameless sponsor:

Why not hurl slogans in people's faces instead of grenades? Go to The Laughorist Store on the sidebar. (Ain't nothin' like it anywhere else. Lucky us.)

3 comments:

Afz said...

Yup, amazing what one blog can do.. and u got a nice blog going on here. Who are these people who say writing is worthless? You never know, what we are writing now, can forever be recorded and history.
We might even be famous, but of course, we most probably be dead by then...
Let's say, link each other? I'll link u in a lil while(read tomorrow), right now, I am so darn sleepy..ZzZZZzZzZzZzZz

jbwritergirl said...

"All writing is garbage. People who come out of nowhere to try to put into words any part of what goes on in their minds are pigs."

Now that's a quote I'll send to my editor who is likely to be ousted at any moment.

Of course you know for a fact that everything on my site it fully factual and dependant on your copywriting...copy writing (did we ever figure out if that was one word or two?) skills.

Just remember I'm watching you.

Ta,
JB

Anonymous said...

2 and JBWG,
Thanks and harumph, respectively. Whatever the freak that means. Let's see, you're watching me. I like that. Does that make me a voyee? Or just an oi vey?

off to work

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