Dear Steve,
I wrote:
>> Steve, maybe you don't really need the mediations, the 'lies,' of art
>> because you have the ability, or will, to tell your story in flat prose.
And then you wrote:
>I read, write, and care about both "fiction" and "non-fiction," Nor do I
>think either exists by itself in any human utterance, certainly not the
>things I write think or believe.
I recognize that you "read, write, and care about both 'fiction' and
'non-fiction,'" but I am puzzled by what you wrote after that. It seems to
me that at least some of your writing here lays claim to straightforward
veracity -- nothing invented at all. If I am mistaken, then you are more
fiendish an ironist by far than jy, who usually makes it fairly plain that
he's spinning yarns. I mean, it's not always clear, but _often_ it is;
whereas your posts here often seem to be not yarns at all, but quite
literally plain speech about stuff that is going on in your life, or that
you did, or that happened to you, in the past. Then you have a different
kind of writing that is stylistically quite different, and rather obviously
something other than 'plain speech.'
So while I don't want to impugn your artistic praxis, I find it difficult to
see your writing as jy-like, that is, as characterized by a predominant
characteristic of purposefully playing with the interpenetrability of
rhetorical modalities in the interface between fictional and nonfictional
discourse. [*koff!*]
There it is: [what I perceive as] your rather earnest, relatively irony-free
persona, prickly and a little combative, and your disarmingly direct
statements of How Things Are -- simple and profound -- whether
flesh-and-bone stuff or small details, well-observed.
mark
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