mauve

[Jochen Stremmel]

Until now I think nobody said nothing about literary art, certainly not
Leonard.

The Johnson sentence reveals nothing about weather, in my eyes, it's a
wonderful detailed description of the waves – direction, shape, color,
action – little else.

And the Musil beginning, well, if that is not the most ironic reference to
the cliché then I don't know. (You could even say that this is, more than
Leonard's rule, a dismissal of the notion that you could begin a piece of
literary art with weather, in earnest.)



2017-03-21 11:54 GMT+01:00 Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de>:

>
> Well, Robert Musil opens his opus magnum with weather ("Über dem Atlantik
> befand sich ein barometrisches Minimum ..."), and Uwe Johnson ("Lange
> Wellen treiben schräg gegen den Strand ...") too! That you cannot do that
> in literary art is a commonplace and as such wrong.
>
> There's also an academic approach called Digital Humanities (and in this
> context the "somewhat arbitrarily chosen" lists are an issue that they at
> least try to deal with in a methodological way). Here's an example from the
> Stanford Literary Lab:
>
> *Between Canon and Corpus: *
> *Six Perspectives on 20**th*
>
> *-Century Novels *Mark Algee-Hewitt/Mark McGurl
>
> https://litlab.stanford.edu/LiteraryLabPamphlet8.pdf
>
> With (a little) Pynchon content.
>
>
>
> Am 21.03.2017 um 11:00 schrieb Jochen Stremmel:
>
> For me the biggest surprise was that Elmore Leonard actually opened two
> books with weather! Must have been early ones, Westerns I presume. Will
> look it up the next time I raise from my desk.
>
> 2017-03-21 10:57 GMT+01:00 John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com>:
>
>> Haven't read it but have read a bunch of stories about it. The author
>> probably knew that a book applying data journalism to literature would get
>> lots of press. The "somewhat arbitrarily" chosen list of 50 authors is a
>> shortcoming, and it would be much more interesting if he'd sorted 500+
>> writers, since data journalism with a sample size of 50 is kind of not
>> really data journalism.
>> But the conclusions he comes to aren't as offensive as I expected and you
>> can take them or leave them as you see fit. The observation that 45 percent
>> of Danielle Steele's first sentences involve the weather - that's fun. And
>> James Patterson's astonishing use of cliche - I know for a fact that
>> Patterson just plots his books and farms the actual writing out to
>> ghostwriters, so that's no surprise.
>>
>> On Tue, Mar 21, 2017 at 8:29 PM, Jochen Stremmel <jstremmel at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/one-writer-used-s
>>> tatistics-reveal-secrets-what-makes-great-writing-180962515/
>>>
>>> Has anybody of you read this book?
>>>
>>
>>
>
>
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