Skip to main content

Clarity and Audience




I'm sure this cartoon was designed with science fiction in mind, but it also is a pretty good attack on James Joyce.

Question: If a book is written by an author for his own amusement (i.e. Joyce, Pynchon, most post-modernists), can it ever really be considered "good"? When is it okay to break the rule of clarity in fiction?

Labels:

Comments

  1. Just a guyOctober 1, 2008 at 12:28 PM

    awww....you don't include the mouseovers when re-posting xkcd

    ReplyDelete
  2. Bret R. FullerOctober 1, 2008 at 1:18 PM

    Hey "Guy,"

    Not sure what mouseover you're referring to, unless you mean for the XKCD store. I'll be sure to mention the store!

    Bret

    ReplyDelete
  3. Just a guyOctober 1, 2008 at 1:23 PM

    Every xkcd comic has an alternate text available on mouseover.

    Just hold the mouse cursor over the comic and let it be still for a moment, a dialog should pop up.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Jesus and the Inconvenience of His Word to American Christians

I'm not a preacher, but if you follow the teachings of Jesus, it was he who said: Do to others as you would have them do to you. That's from Luke 6:31 , and reading all of Luke 6 isn't a bad way to spend five minutes of your time.  https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=luke%206&version=NIV I guess a lot of Christians understand the Golden Rule and practice it in their daily lives. Others, however, especially political Christians (and specifically those promoting Christian Nationalism) seem to ignore the Golden Rule. They don't care about humanitarian issues. They claim they either don't exist, aren't the problem of the United States, or are the fault of the victims. They counter with distractions like, "Why do you care so much about THEM when you should be caring about the REAL people who matter?" Sorry, but I don't recall Jesus ever dividing people into those who matter more and those who matter less. Of course, Jesus also said not to j...
Post a Comment
Read more

Microblogging? The Future of Writing with ADHD

Bill Bennett is a very common name. Right now, I'm reading a book by the Australian film maker Bill Bennett. He hiked the Camino in 2013 and then wrote a book (and made an Australian movie, not available in the U.S.) about it.  Seems he kept a blog about that hike, too. I went to look for his Camino blog, and found he started one years after the hike, but he didn't post regularly... His last post from 2022 announced his had Parkinson's and had kept the diagnosis secret for 4 years.  Now that almost three years have passed from that post, I wonder what's happened to him.  Blogs are weird. They just sit there. Anyone can stumble upon them, and read them. So I decided to keep looking for his Camino blog.  https://billbennett.blog/home/ *** And I found another Bill Bennett, this one from New Zealand, who keeps a microblog. It's current and updated. "What's a microblog?" My wife asked. Well, I said, it's a small blog. Just a sentence or two for a post. ...
Post a Comment
Read more