SLPAD 4

[Mark Kohut]

Accents mean reality is captured ---or not. TRP has a very good ear for
basic middle class speech, imo; I mean the speech of
Bleeding Edge for just one exampel---and some
slang but we can't usually tell how that slang was articulated so it comes
off on the page as kinds studied. Which
TRP knows as he puts it down as if in quotation marks so to speak, in that
his characters' actions are sorta like that
usually too.....his vaunted 'hyperrealism"....

On Sat, Feb 18, 2023 at 4:10 AM Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
wrote:

> The idea of rendering accents in fiction -
> Thomas Wolfe did this extensively, I seem to remember. Or excessively,
> though it was digable.
>
> Here it says it’s a regrettable plot point in TSR, but only regrettable
> because wrong.
>
> Mostly I think accents are kind of fun, maybe a little bit informative (if
> gotten correct) and part of the practice in mental gymnastics one tends to
> rely on fiction for providing. They deepen the illusion if they’re
> familiar; if unfamiliar, they pleasantly reify the enjoyable strangeness of
> fiction and get tucked away to gleefully subvocalize in odd moments, and/or
> test against real speech in the event of an actual encounter with speakers
> of that accent.
>
> Like in AtD - I can’t tell you how many times I’ve subvocalized Plug
> Loafsley’s “r to hv” shift when the Chums go to NYC. “…some koindt of a
> sailboat pitchuhv on it!”
>
> It does accord with the way a girl who’d moved from (I know not which part
> of) New York & attended “my” high school in Michigan spoke, for awhile.
> Memorable lo these many years.
>
>
>
> The next mistake cited is in “attitude towards death.”
>
> “When we speak of “seriousness” in fiction ultimately we are talking about
> an attitude toward death—“
>
> There’s an interesting proposition.
>
> I wonder what he’s going to say about that in the rest of the sentence.
>
>
> When you read that, do you open a little file of possible counter-examples,
> other salient descriptors of serious fiction?
>
> - describing & decrying injustice
> - championing morality
> - avoidance of impossibilities & logical contradiction
> - treatment of ideas
>
> Etc etc.
>
>  I have my doubts about serious fiction having to deal with death. Seems
> like simply omitting it from the tale would work, or devising a containment
> method so that it’s dealt with in logical ways without being a main, or
> even a major, theme.
>
> But I’m not dogmatic about it (woof!)
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>