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Sonora Review DFW Tribute
Sonora Review DFW Tribute
by
multiple authors
by
multiple authors
Sonora Review DFW Tribute
by
multiple authors
by
multiple authors
[...] I am too personally at my own firm of Alan Schoenweiss and Associates. 'So then where's Mr. Associates?' the hilarious Solomon Silverfish asks me every time he has had a cocktail in my presence. 'When do I get to meet Mr. Associates?' [...]
classic DFW gag
[...] The train was called Dying, it was the Dying Person Express, was what everybody but the smooth pink healthy doctors seemed to know. Solomon also knew, though he did not believe. The train was called Dying and the louder it got also the smaller in your field of true vision. It did not run you over like a penny on a track but shrank as it grew to be nothing but a roar that came from deep inside you, where there was only the growing heat of a boiling fight between polysyllables. Here was a train you didn't know was on you until it was too late to get free of the bright knife of the track, a knife that cuts you to show that the ear has been hearing itself, a knife whose thin side is also a mirror in which you see what you hear while it cuts what you are. While you sink and burn. A sickness not at all delicate was what she had.
Sophie, in bed, drowsed, and bits of memory came at her in the flashing strobes of predreams. Here's a shiny ice storm, two newlyweds in a new tract house in Cicero. Ice glittering gray in a crunchy March lawn, more wet ice falling out of a sky without color. Solomon watching it out a window, Sophie behind him with her arms around his thick waist, her hair a black waterfall down his arm, her chin on his shoulder, also watching. Pellets of dirty Cicero crystal hitting the hard lawn, beads bouncing and jumping hopping lively skittering ice. Solomon's voice, quiet, full of Silverfish dreams, his breath fogs a rainbow circle on the window as he stares at the jumping beads, whispers to himself grasshoppers grasshoppers grasshoppers. A young man she loves dreams life into ice while she plays with his ear.
just, beautiful
[...] feeling almost as though she and Solomon, or rather she-and-Solomon, will never really and truthfully die, no matter where or what they are. She feels through the promise of new pain and sickness of the stomach a brand-new sensation of cleanness and security, like a cold chill warmed, wrapped in a hot quilt on the lap of a mother who radiates a soft flame in gentle tones and tiny gestures of arrangement.
A thing that for her was magic Sophie was remembering as she drowsed in the orange light through the filmy window and her arm warmed with medicine. She felt the crackers in her stomach. It was 3:30 in the morning. Through a dream soaked the sound of the doorbell [...]
[...] I tell him S.S. child I seen love at angles you ass aint dreamed but I aint never seen no white man love a bitch like you love that tiless stick in that little metal band. My man get pissed off? He never get pissed off at Too Pretty. He just look in Too Prettys face with some bad eyes all aftershave blue and deep as his own head and ax me do I love my own self. And when I say shit whose black ass I gone love if not Too Pretty, my man say what it is, young Schwartz, he be callin my ass Schwartz, knock me out. He say that it rights there, Londell. The bitch be my own ass. [...]
the way he writes in Too Pretty's voice is weird, to say the least, but this passage at least is nice
[...] Everybody's pissed off and exasperated and impervious to arguments from any other side. Opposing viewpoints are not just incorrect but contemptible, corrupt, evil. Conservative thinkers are balder about this kind of attitude: Limbaugh, Hannity, that horrific O'Reilly person. Coulter, Kristol, etc. But the Left's been infected, too. Have you read this new Al Franken book? Parts of it are funny, but it's totally venomous (like, what possible response can rightist pundits have to Franken's broadsides but further rage and return venom?). [...] 90 per cent of political commentary no simply abets the uncomplicatedly sexy delusion that one side is Right and Just and the other Wrong and Dangerous. Which is of course a pleasant delusion, in a way--as is the belief that every last person you're in conflict with is an asshole--but it's childish, and totally unconducive to hard thought, give and take, compromise, or the ability of grown-ups to function as any kind of community.
the larger point is solid
[...] It might be that one of the really significant problems of today's culture involves finding ways for educated people to talk meaningfully with each other across the divides of radical specialization. [...] a particular kind of genius that's not really part of their specific area of expertise as such areas are usually defined and taught. There's not really even a good univocal word for this kind of genius--which might be significant. Maybe there should be a word; maybe being able to communicate with people outside one's area of expertise should be taught, and talked about, and considered as a requirement for genuine expertise. . . [...]
[...] you don't get any sense of the infinity of choices that were made in the text until you start trying to reproduce them. [...]
his suggestion that students try to imitate a page of text word for word (from memory) to learn how to write like the author, so you can feel your muscles working to achieve the same effect
A good opener, first and foremost, fails to repel. Right? So it's interesting and engaging. It lays out the terms of the argument, and, in my opinion, should also in some way imply the stakes. Right? Not only am I right, but in any piece of writing there's a tertiary argument: why should you spend your time writing this? right? "so here's why the following issue might be important, useful, practical." I would think that if one did it deftly, one could in a one-paragraph opening grab the reader, state the terms of the argument, and state the motivation for the argument. I imagine most good argumentative stuff that I've read, you could boil that down to the opener.
[...] In order for your sentences not to make the reader's eyes glaze over, you can't simply use the same core set of words, particularly important nouns and verbs, over and over again. You have to have synonyms at your fingertips and alternative constructions at your fingertips. And usually, though not in the sense of memorizing vocab words like we were kids, but having a larger vocabulary is usually the best way to do that. The best. having a good vocabulary ups the chances that we're going to be able to know the right word, even if that's the plainest word that will do and to achieve some kind of elegant variation, which I am kind of a fiend for.