Orange Prize 2010

[lenz]

I was referring to those writers fresh out of "creative" writing courses who have been encouraged to express themselves in ecstatic outpourings of descriptive prose in which they tell us how a room is furnished. That the description is unnecessary and does not add to our understanding of the story seems unimportant to them - as long as they can show off their perfected technique.

"Paid by the word," indeed. Dickens was paid by the word and there's a lot of tangential verbiage in his novels. Publishers today like big novels with lots of words and most of them aren't too fussy if the plots are stuffed with pages full of dreamy fluff. I don't like fluff!

[Mirabell]

I'm curious. How do you establish this

That the description is unnecessary

?

An interesting claim, but IMO an odd stance to take vis-?-vis a novel. I would think we assume everything in the book is necessary and check how it works and why it does so. But then, maybe I'm weird that way. Maybe I'm very odd, but it seems to me that this phrase

does not add to our understanding of the story

should really have been

does not add to my understanding of the story

[Liam]

I would think we assume everything in the book is necessary and check how it works and why it does so.

I don't know, M. Tell that to the poor little soul who wants to brave Samuel Richardson's Clarissa in its entirety, .

[lenz]

I'm curious. How do you establish this

Quote:
That the description is unnecessary

?

How do you establish it?

[Mirabell]

How do you establish it?

I don't. I'm puzzled that anyone (as reader not editor) would do that at all.

[Mirabell]

I don't know, M. Tell that to the poor little soul who wants to brave Samuel Richardson's Clarissa in its entirety, .

I love that book. You don't like it?

[lenz]

I don't. I'm puzzled that anyone (as reader not editor) would do that at all.

I believe you are being disingenuous, Mirabell.
Do you mean to say that you don't judge a writer's novelistic abilities when you are reading a novel? Why should a reader not read as an editor? I read as an editor because I can't help it. Having read a lot of great writing (as have you) I have developed a sense of what is real and what is fake, what is useful and what is fluff. I know you have that sense too because of the critical comments you make here and in your blog.

[Mirabell]

I made a thread in another forum to discuss my puzzled feeling over this and this is what I wrote, maybe it explains how I feel

Have you ever considered an element of a book unnecessary? Am I the only one who thinks this is weird? I look at books as finished objects, with all elements mirroring each other, referring to one another. A description may be unconnected, or dull, or boring, whatever, I can be as critical as I want to, but unnecessary? How do people establish this? If the book considers it important to mention that a table is brown, why would I question that importance instead of asking what role does this description play here, not if it is important but why it is important. why, of a million possible descriptions, it's this one. Maybe I spent too much time with reading/thinking about Merrill, who once said that when he can't move on, when he's in a rut, when he has problems with a text, he tends to focus on the interiors, working on descriptions and finding his way into the text again. I think that descriptions are necessary because they are part of the book as a mechanism, and the structuring of the characters is not really easy to separate from that of the environment. I mean as I said you can say a description is boring, uninteresting, whatever, but unnecessary? In the story you might have written, yes. In the story the author wrote, no, because it is part of the book, of the text as an artifact, as a mechanism. The plot is one of many elements that form the text, but far from the only one.

[Eric]

MIRABELL IS LITERALLY SHIGEKUNI

(No link, I just like underlining capital letters. When you've got a Borat haircut, you can afford to hide behind a brochure or two.)

By the way: I still think that a women-only prize is sexist. Let's have a men-only one and shut out the Frauenzimmer, or "ladies' rooms", as we call them in English.

I do not regard the ball-cock as an unnecessary mechanism.

Finally. are they really going to include lady novelists writing in Esperanto for the hitherto English-only Orange, or was this merely an unkind spoofish rumour circulated by male chauvinist pigs with no conscience about the deprived regiment of monsters? 'Fraid my Esperanto is not good enough to translate: "green is the new orange".

[lenz]

Me:

I was referring to those writers fresh out of "creative" writing courses who have been encouraged to express themselves in ecstatic outpourings of descriptive prose in which they tell us how a room is furnished [but not what that tells us, that we didn't already know, about a character, time or place]. That the description is [merely a beginner's excercise in style], and does not add to our understanding of the story, seems unimportant to them - as long as they can show off their perfected technique.

Mirabell:

Have you ever considered an element of a book unnecessary? Am I the only one who thinks this is weird? I look at books as finished objects, with all elements mirroring each other, referring to one another.

That's how I look at books, too. To understand what I mean by necessary and unnecessary description, you might think of the German verb dichten meaning to tighten, make compact, dense; also, to compose, write. It's that idea of the writer self-editing, discarding what is inessential or merely self-admiring in order to keep a poem or novel as tightly focused as possible on the idea and meaning of their work that is of critical importance to me. This Dichtheit or Dichtung does not preclude flights of fancy, long digressions, metafictive devices or anything else the writer deems necessary to satisfy their desire for completeness or to create meaning in the reader's mind, but does, in my opinion, insist on a certain integrity and dedication to whatever idea led to the making of the work in the first place. Once again, I must make my cri de coeur, "I don't like fluff!"

[Mirabell]

you might think of the German verb dichten meaning to tighten, make compact, dense; also, to compose, write.

This Dichtheit or Dichtung does not preclude flights of fancy, long digressions, ...

Close, but no cig...well, not even close, really.

The Verb dichten can be used to mean all kinds of things, but not what you want it to mean. The primary meaning is to compose or write. You can use it also to mean "to caulk", "plug up" or "seal". verdichten is what you mean.

The noun that corresponds to verdichten is not Dichtheit or Dichtung but Dichte. Dichtung actually refers to a technical device used to plug up or seal a sink (no idea what it's called in English).

[lenz]

Thanks for the German lesson.

[Eric]

Vot you ?eal ze ?ink or pluck ze cherry-can wi? in ze Inglisch l?ngwitch i? cold ze "gunk".

This is the first line of the Joycean novel "Why I Write Women's Novels Under a Pseudonym", which embodies the exemplification of good taste with hilarious sexist sneezings about "them with cocks who can't win our prize". An all-lady panel of judgettes (N.B. without cocks but with tits /though not man-boobs/) has cosily adjudged this novel to be:

"The best novel ever written by a woman."

Silly thing is that it was actually written by a man as the title suggests, who tricked the dumb housewives of the jury into thinking it was written by a woman by adding the words "petticoat", "knickers", "pastel" and "sprouts" now and again to give an aura of femininity.

The author is in fact called Reginald Nice and is a big hairy sixty-year old male Esperanto poet with a drooping belly & willy. (It is Nice who is said to have put the "rant" in Esperanto, though his rap is crap.) He used the pseudonym "Joyce James" as a double-double bluff of complex proportions.

Nice once said he was inspired by Doris Lessing who sent in an entry to a competition, or a manuscript to a publisher, pretending to be a young beginner when in fact she'd been writing for decades. They pooh-poohed the work. If they'd have known it was by Lessing they'd have been licking her toenails. Though Lessing was in fact a German 18th century author who wasn't woman enough to win the Orange, despite his funny ladywig (a female periwig). Doris' real name was Taylor. Doris Taylor, great name for a novelist. But at least she didn't call herself George Eliot or Ernst Ahlgren and pretend she was a bloke.

Anyway, you can see from my ramblings here how much I still appreciate the Woman-Orang-Utang Prize for Inadequate Ladies.

[Eric]

Who's going to start the Orange 2011 thread? Here's the latest from the Monstrous Regiment:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/b...-of-women.html

Orange will be unsexed... but not yet. Long live sexism in literature!

Bettany Hughes (whoever she is) says:

So is the prize sexist, exclusionist and outdated, as some critics have suggested? Although the Orange has been so effective that it will eventually run its course, it’s not time quite yet to throw in the towel. And I say this with the long view of a historian.