Job Discussion Forums

[johnslat]

Dear buravirgil,

Don't get me wrong - I usually enjoy your posts. But I must admit that sometimes I do find them difficult to understand.

So, perhaps the fault lies with me. If so, I apologize if you've been offended by anything I've written.

Regards,
John

[buravirgil]

[Sashadroogie]

So much double talk/think on this thread! I love it!! Bravo!!!

Carry on, please.

[Sashadroogie]

To try to steer us a little back to the offending article that was the topic of this thread, I wonder if we believe that Selfie has read any of the vernacular literature from the Celtic fringe? Do we think his claims of mediocrity would stand up there?

And how about his stereotypical imperialist Piggie view of the non-Anglo elements of the UK!

[wangdaning]

Sasha is colonizing Russia with his German philosophy.

[fluffyhamster]

Self has something of a Vince Cable manner about him - all blinking and hot air. Last I read of him he was all over the newspapers complaining about being stopped on a London to Whitby death march/suspected child abduction. Good thing he was "famous" enough (Shooting Stars, for pity's sake) that the police soon let him go, though whether he'll attain the stature of George Orwell remains to be seen.

Anyway, another very edifying thread. Of course all the other drivers must be wrong for tooting at you when you're driving the wrong way down what would otherwise be a smooth one-way street.

[Dedicated]

Will Self is a controversial character but is scarcely a non-entity. He has written 9 novels now translated into 22 languages, and his novel, Umbrella, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2012.

He previously won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in 1991, the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction in 1998 and the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize in 2008. He now writes for the Guardian, Harpers, the New York Times and London Review of Books.

He is Professor of Contemporary Thought at Brunel University.

He has just said " I like Orwell's writing as much as the next talented mediocrity".

[buravirgil]

[johnslat]

Mr. Self strikes me as someone who could be a tad self-absorbed:

"Will Self, the novelist, critic and broadcaster, has chiselled a successful career out of being a sesquipedalian. This, as Self noted in 2012, means "a lover of obscure words" and is brandished more often as an insult than a panegyric. Self's engorgement on verbiage is often accompanied by a concomitant commitment to berating dull language. In his latest broadside against the limits of plain speaking and tedious writing, he takes to task that "talented mediocrity" George Orwell.
The centre of Self's objections is Orwell's 1946 essay, "Politics and the English Language", which argues: "Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble." These bad habits include allowing words to become phrases, the unnecessary use of foreign idioms and idle use of "dying metaphors" such as Achilles heel.

Orwell's despair at "the slovenliness of our language" conceals for Self "old-fashioned prejudices against difference itself". In the article for the BBC, he adds that Standard English is a fossil that has long been superseded by African American Vernacular English, which "offers its speakers more ways of saying more things – you feel me?"

Finding more ways of saying more things could describe Self's entire oeuvre (sorry, George). Why use one syllable when 23 might do? As he once said: "I'd observe that English, being a mishmash of several different languages, had a large and exciting vocabulary, and that it seemed a shame not to use it – especially given that it went on growing all the time, spawning argot and specialist terminology as freely as an oyster does its milt."

From the first, quite ordinary sentences would suddenly scoot off the page thanks to Self's striking coinage. "Ward 9", from his first book of stories, The Quantity Theory of Insanity, contained this sentence: "Tom rolled his lovely eyes back in their soft, scented sockets as if picturing the psychiatrist's matitudinal routine." My Kindle and Word dictionaries both drew a blank at matitudinal. Luckily, Nabokov's "matitudinal swoon" helped me discover that the word derived from "matin, an ecclesiastical duty performed early in the morning". In Cock and Bull, another character "stopped and looked at me, slope-shouldered, ectomorphic". Frankly, the online Encyclopaedia Britannica wasn't much help: "A person is classed as an ectomorph if ectomorphy predominates over endomorphy and mesomorphy in his body build..."

Self shows little sign of slowing his pace. In his new novel, Shark, his gush of a narrative flow blends all manner of registers into an unbroken multi-consciousness (or something): "He re-experiences this metempsychosis [transmigration of the soul] now: the hydrocephalic [swollen due to water on the brain] brow of his foetal self, its vestigial [atrophied, functionless due to evolution] limbs, its premature thumb-suck and the neon-blue delta of arteries worming over its fontanelle [the soft spot between the cranial bones of an infant's skull]."

Even Self's blog requires a decent dictionary and set of cultural references. The upthrusting Shard is "a teasing a la recherche de priapisme perdu". The book festival is a phenomenon because "serried municipalities have figured out that, as desperate writers will do almost anything for no money whatsoever, it's a cheap way of inculcating their miserable and isolate burghs with a little kulturkampf".

It is easy to mock Self's mockery of Orwell – ridiculously easy if yesterday's reader comments are anything to go by. "Self suffers from verbal diarrhoea which obfuscates rather than illuminates his meaning," wrote one outraged poster. Yet his exultation in and celebration of English as a living language that swoops from the medical to the Anglo-Saxon, from the Latinate to the phonetic ("Waa-waa-waaa! W'waaa") is bracing at a time when most novels are in thrall to the cat-sat-on-the-mat school of prose.

Perhaps it's because of spellcheck or the exigencies of global business English, perhaps it's because we read on the bus rather than in the armchair, perhaps it's because IQs are falling, but this is an age that misunderstands Hemingway's terseness as simplicity and one in which James Patterson is the world's best-selling novelist: "Dressed now in a black leather jacket, black jeans, black polo shirt, and black harness boots, Marcus Sunday hurried..."

Come on, James. Why not make that jacket obsidian, the jeans melanoid, that shirt atramentous, those boots stygian? Here's to Will."

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/how-to-read-will-self-9704979.html

Regards,
John

[buravirgil]

I remember reading that George Bernard Shaw would critique his own work with a pseudonym to generate interest in his work.

I've posted to this thread an interpretation of the article in question to support my own, but I don't accept (despite this criticism posted) that the thrust of Self's piece was that Orwell was mediocre.

[johnslat]

Dear buravirgil,


" . . . but I don't accept (despite this criticism posted) that the thrust of Self's piece was that Orwell was mediocre.:

Probably not- but I don't think it was just a gratuitous throw-away line, either.
Mr. Self is likely schooled enough in the ways of the media to realize and take advantage of the fact that a "sound-bite" in which he put down one of the "revered authors" on British Lit would ensure that his opinions got very wide coverage.

Regards,
John

[Sashadroogie]

Talentless hack, taking a swipe at a real writer to bolster his own career. Will be forgotten in a few years, whereas Orwell won't.

[Capt Lugwash]

And his lack of talent was even recognised by the judging panels for all the prizes outlined by Dedicated.

I wish I was that talentless.

[Sashadroogie]

Judges, and the prizes they bestow, are not the best measure of talent. Where is Joyce's Nobel prize, or instance?

[Capt Lugwash]

Neither I would suggest are you and I. However his being completely devoid of talent (according to you) probably means he has a few more bob in the bank than we do.