Showing posts with label The Sentence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Sentence. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 15, 2015
Sunday, September 11, 2011
Vintage Ad Pitches from William Sunners’ 1949 American Slogans
 |
| Courtesy of: Radium and You. |
A-D E-L M-R Q-Z.
Quality beyond the call of duty (Nunn-Bush Shoes).
Quality in tires is the key to safety (U. S. Rubber).
Quality tells, economy sells (Red & White Food Stores).
Quality you can taste (Adhor Dairy).
Racy, embracy story of a gal who lived and yearned, The (movie)
Ralston’s puts the B-1 in breakfast (cereal).
Red and blue make white (Gilbert Paper).
Red by chance and READ by choice (Redbook Magazine).
Refresh! Rejoice! Remember! Pabst gets the call (Beer).
Refrigerator you hear about, but never HEAR (Electrolux).
Regal guy deserves a Regal tie, A (Regal Ties).
See also: Advertising Slogans on Wikiquotes.
Sunday, February 20, 2011
What Happens in Vagueness Stays in Vagueness by Clark Whelton
Source.
My friend Sophie posted this on Facebook. While I get that the argument is that of the grammatical imperialist throwing up his hands before the neigh victorious barbarians (usage is bad! the empire declines!) the thing also reads like a stylistic points guide to mumblecore.
My friend Sophie posted this on Facebook. While I get that the argument is that of the grammatical imperialist throwing up his hands before the neigh victorious barbarians (usage is bad! the empire declines!) the thing also reads like a stylistic points guide to mumblecore.
Sunday, February 6, 2011
Friday, August 20, 2010
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Gary Lutz Online
Fiction on Web del Sol.
Gary Lutz is a writer I have grown acquainted with from the Internet. The sentences he writes are often of technical interest in the most surprising ways. A brief (but in no way comprehensive) survey of elements at play in his work which I find enjoyable and/or poignant:
- All his torturing with grammar, the micro-attentiveness to the materiality of language are echoed lock-step with thematic concerns. This is experimental writing that is *about something.*
- For all its self-referentiality and playfulness with the expectation and outcome of a sentence, his fiction is tempered by deep human concern. It is also very sad.
- If I were to suggest provisionally what the main concern is, my guess might be that Gary Lutz is attuned to how the grammatical elements that define our linguistic present come to be; that there may be social analogies that can shed some light on the most virulent of them.
- One gets a sense in Lutz of everything shrinking. In the strictly ruled micro-lives of Gary Lutz's highly ritualized characters, work is omnipresent but it holds no human purpose. Play, on the other hand, is omnipresent but banal, joyless, attended to with mechanic compulsion.
- The architecture of this world is inescapable, descriptions of it haunted by terminology of the office-place, playground, corporate campus, elementary school no matter what landscape or interior is being described.
- Sentences are often without subjects. Objects move from one place to the other, with the deliberate suppression of any descriptive window into the human agency normally involved. Or else the usual relationship between subject and object, animate and inanimate noun, is reversed. Tables operate on the people sitting at them, etc. The quality and duration of what one human life can hope to impress upon another is about that of warmth as imprinted by a hand on a fridge door.
- Unlikely parts of grammar function emotionally; conjunctions, articles.
- Familiar objects, especially objects whose name and use implies an institutional, domestic or office-like existence, often are transformed into verbs.
- A character's subjectivity might become another wholly unrelated subjectivity without the conventional attendant struggles and developments to get there.
- Human relationships are basically procedural. The basic condition between two subjects trying to relate is akin to a form of social autism.
- Any word, especially a neo-logism or buzz term, especially if it has functionalist or mechanistic overtones, any word that implies shrinking or further advances in technological discreteness is rejigged to describe the most private and intimate of activities.
- Industry-scale categorization permeates the smallest niche of human life.
- Micro attentiveness to the associative overtones of the smallest parts of language. i.e. the products of divorce become step-people. The prefix step- begins to govern their relationship will all other things.
- Instead of plot, lateral substitution of event for event, state for state, without emotional release or forward (or even backwards) movement on the subject's part. Things become other things, hopelessly, endlessly, over and over. Neither epiphany nor transcendence follows. Just an ever-plateauing state of change.
- Notable, Lutz's use of elements akin to what in film is Mumblecore: bad grammar, deliberately tortured grammar, generalization to the point of coyness, kid-like reductions in word and phrase complexity, some of which even anticipates twitter-speak.
- I might guess some literary sources for this style include Samuel Beckett, Gertrude Stein.
Gary Lutz is a writer I have grown acquainted with from the Internet. The sentences he writes are often of technical interest in the most surprising ways. A brief (but in no way comprehensive) survey of elements at play in his work which I find enjoyable and/or poignant:
- All his torturing with grammar, the micro-attentiveness to the materiality of language are echoed lock-step with thematic concerns. This is experimental writing that is *about something.*
- For all its self-referentiality and playfulness with the expectation and outcome of a sentence, his fiction is tempered by deep human concern. It is also very sad.
- If I were to suggest provisionally what the main concern is, my guess might be that Gary Lutz is attuned to how the grammatical elements that define our linguistic present come to be; that there may be social analogies that can shed some light on the most virulent of them.
- One gets a sense in Lutz of everything shrinking. In the strictly ruled micro-lives of Gary Lutz's highly ritualized characters, work is omnipresent but it holds no human purpose. Play, on the other hand, is omnipresent but banal, joyless, attended to with mechanic compulsion.
- The architecture of this world is inescapable, descriptions of it haunted by terminology of the office-place, playground, corporate campus, elementary school no matter what landscape or interior is being described.
- Sentences are often without subjects. Objects move from one place to the other, with the deliberate suppression of any descriptive window into the human agency normally involved. Or else the usual relationship between subject and object, animate and inanimate noun, is reversed. Tables operate on the people sitting at them, etc. The quality and duration of what one human life can hope to impress upon another is about that of warmth as imprinted by a hand on a fridge door.
- Unlikely parts of grammar function emotionally; conjunctions, articles.
- Familiar objects, especially objects whose name and use implies an institutional, domestic or office-like existence, often are transformed into verbs.
- A character's subjectivity might become another wholly unrelated subjectivity without the conventional attendant struggles and developments to get there.
- Human relationships are basically procedural. The basic condition between two subjects trying to relate is akin to a form of social autism.
- Any word, especially a neo-logism or buzz term, especially if it has functionalist or mechanistic overtones, any word that implies shrinking or further advances in technological discreteness is rejigged to describe the most private and intimate of activities.
- Industry-scale categorization permeates the smallest niche of human life.
- Micro attentiveness to the associative overtones of the smallest parts of language. i.e. the products of divorce become step-people. The prefix step- begins to govern their relationship will all other things.
- Instead of plot, lateral substitution of event for event, state for state, without emotional release or forward (or even backwards) movement on the subject's part. Things become other things, hopelessly, endlessly, over and over. Neither epiphany nor transcendence follows. Just an ever-plateauing state of change.
- Notable, Lutz's use of elements akin to what in film is Mumblecore: bad grammar, deliberately tortured grammar, generalization to the point of coyness, kid-like reductions in word and phrase complexity, some of which even anticipates twitter-speak.
- I might guess some literary sources for this style include Samuel Beckett, Gertrude Stein.
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