mauve

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

Ach Jochen ...

Read, in both cases, the whole opening paragraph again and you will see that "low humidity" (Musil) and "fluttery wind" (Johnson) are part of the description. Musil's irony is to be found everywhere in the book and has nothing particular to do with the weather or its literary representation. Actually science - meteorology and astronomy - is the target of the first paragraph's irony in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften.

Let's look at the quote by Leonard whose books I don't know because I rarely read crime fiction. Here's what the article says:

"Elmore Leonard, who was a very successful novelist, had said, 'Never open a book with weather.' This is also advice found in a lot of writing guides."

Now you say that this advice has nothing to do with literary art. Well, I don't know whether Leonard's stuff has to be considered as art or as pulp fiction, but if the advice by the fellow ("a very successful novelist") was just given with view on commercial success, I couldn't care less about it.

Literary art is the only kind of (fictional) literature that interests me.


Am 21.03.2017 um 12:29 schrieb 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<mailto: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 20th-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<mailto: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<mailto:jstremmel at gmail.com>> wrote:
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/one-writer-used-statistics-reveal-secrets-what-makes-great-writing-180962515/

Has anybody of you read this book?





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