{"id":38563,"date":"2022-02-10T11:47:18","date_gmt":"2022-02-10T16:47:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.lsa.umich.edu\/mqr\/?p=38563"},"modified":"2022-02-10T11:48:06","modified_gmt":"2022-02-10T16:48:06","slug":"against-quirky-writing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.lsa.umich.edu\/mqr\/2022\/02\/against-quirky-writing\/","title":{"rendered":"Against Quirky Writing"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Why I Chose It:\u00a0Michigan Quarterly Review<\/em>\u2019s Assistant Managing Editor and former Nonfiction Editor, Aaron J. Stone,\u00a0introduces Joe Sacksteder\u2019s \u201cAgainst Quirky Writing\u201d from our\u00a0<\/strong>Winter 2022 issue<\/strong><\/a>. You can purchase the issue\u00a0<\/strong>here<\/strong><\/a>.<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This essay\u2019s reputation preceded it\u2014which is nearly unheard of for an unsolicited submission. While I was Nonfiction Editor, I one day joined a Zoom call to find some of our readers already embroiled in an eager discussion of a new submission they had just sent to me. It was bold. It was thrilling. It was irreverent, insightful, witty, provocative. It was perhaps even <\/em>too much, eliciting that sense of excess that we often get from brilliant work lying just beyond the horizon of our expectations. It was \u201cAgainst Quirky Writing.\u201d And I had to read it, immediately.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Joe Sacksteder did not disappoint. This essay parses in minute detail the \u201cquirky\u201d style it identifies, its neologisms, its jumbled parts of speech, its eschewal of parallelisms, and other impediments to sense-making. This long list of grievances, hammered loudly onto the door of the Church of the New Sentence, is nonetheless penned in the elegant calligraphy of a writer whose long-nursed annoyance has matured into eloquent philosophy.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, the essay\u2019s real point is not to catalogue a pet peeve (delightful though this cataloguing may be), but to caution us\u2014as writers, as readers, as editors\u2014against a potentially dangerous reductionism. \u201cI worry,\u201d Sacksteder writes, \u201cthat we\u2019re losing the ability to see a text as experimental unless it\u2019s experimental on the line level.\u201d What about other, subtler experimentalisms that don\u2019t slap us in the face with defamiliarized language? What about texts that don\u2019t make us slow down to piece together self-consciously difficult sentences, but rather encourage a speediness in our reading practices? Does \u201cquirky writing\u201d threaten to devalue such texts as too simple, less serious?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

These important questions drive the piece, but lest they seem to point us too dogmatically toward the singular position that the essay\u2019s title suggests, another confounding element intervenes. Nestled between each chunk of anti-quirky diatribe are fragments of a definitively \u201cquirky\u201d narrative of Sacksteder\u2019s own devising. Presented with nearly no commentary, these segments force us to puzzle over their relationship to the essay itself. While the story could perhaps be read as a homegrown example of what not to do, it is also composed with a delicacy that is not reducible to parody. Between its hard-hitting commentary and its own ludic narrative experiments, \u201cAgainst Quirky Writing\u201d provides a crisp and timely warning that we avoid being blinded by the dazzling spectacle of what can be, after all, an enticingly pleasurable writing style.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Against Quirky Writing<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

No, not Gertrude Stein. Samuel Beckett\u2014I\u2019m not talking about him either. Its practitioners might cite Ron Silliman\u2019s \u201cThe New Sentence\u201d or Viktor Shklovsky\u2019s writings on defamiliarization or Garielle Lutz\u2019s lecture \u201cThe Sentence Is a Lonely Place\u201d; these folks are all involved in what I\u2019m here to critique, but they are not my targets. Melvin B. Tolson\u2014no\u2014James Joyce\u2014not even a little bit\u2014Theresa Hak Kyung Cha\u2014try again\u2014Frank Kuenstler\u2014nada. My target: the conservative watering-down of these writers\u2019 techniques largely by now middle-aged writers who cut their teeth in or adjacent to the alt lit scene and the indie publishing boon of the aughts. Writers who want their weird language and their story, too, and who gesture toward this surface-level experimentation by way of basically one maneuver: wrenching a word from one part of speech into another. The most insufferable example is using an adjective as a noun without putting an article in front of it or a suffix like -ness<\/em> after it. This practice is also beloved by marketers of giant corporations who hope to come across as less threatening by feigning the stupidity they ascribe to their consumers\u2014\u201cgive the gift of happy.\u201dOkay, there\u2019s one more big maneuver: a Mad Libs approach to prose by which they substitute for certain unlucky words a synonym that\u2019s not really a synonym. Sometimes there\u2019s a neologism or an article that gets dropped or added for the sake of profundity, but that\u2019s it. Those are pretty much their moves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

I arrive at the Water Street site, soon to be a house. A house not yet fit for sleep, a day already pried open and spilling its contents. \/\/ Inside, a liability of workers huddle aside the stairwall, betokening some grievous manglement. I rush my heart but enter only the amaze of a colleague\u2019s fresh handiwork. \/\/ Halvard, chisel-handed, has squalled some birch design in defiance of all prints, blue or otherwise, all estimates, budgeted or kindred. \/\/ \u201cGouge!\u201d I mean to swear but spit instead. Confuse them aside to assess the dammit. \/\/ It spins before swum eyes, a sequence of parallel fluted narrows above a further gnawed violence of terraced checkerboard gorings like when one wants to farm on a hillside. I lean back, a tourist of sunsets through redrock arches fifteen hundred feet above a bouldrous miscalculation of dead landscape. As quick I\u2019m sucked in and see three-fifths of what I\u2019d gauged manual is the woodgrain\u2019s own speech. Halvard having co-authored the gaffe with a plant\u2019s own corpse, emerging a script so crimpt the director will never finish his jungle fever dream. A spell, I realize and speak aloud. A how-to for never having noticed. Blueprint for the end of them.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

I have a problem: I worry that we\u2019re losing the ability to see a text as experimental unless it\u2019s experimental on the line level.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This type of writing does not have a name. A misnomer might be \u201clanguage writing\u201d or the equally redundant \u201csentence writing.\u201d Language-intensive, sentence-centered, etc. It often rubs elbows with Gordon Lish and Dean Young, with the idea that every line or sentence must stand on its own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s a style and a problem born from the ways in which technology has changed how we write, how we read, and how we teach the two practices\u2014but, even more so, how we submit writing and how it\u2019s vetted, quirky writing less a conscious aesthetic choice than a reflex, a consequence of the increasingly wide gulf between the things that are easy and the things that are difficult about being a writer these days. It\u2019s hard to get a book published, or even a short story in a literary journal, in part because the act itself of typing words and submitting them online is so very simple and convenient. Add to this a million MFA programs, and the glut of strong writing and talented writers out there verges on the mathematical sublime. There are fewer people writing experimental literature, but there are also fewer people reading it and fewer places to submit it. The primary outlets for writers of innovative work are independent and university-based journals and presses, most of which operate on thin to zero resources. Readers are often volunteering their time while taking a full load of courses and trying to get their own work out into the world. Submission guidelines for other journals might indeed be some of the twenty tabs open on their browsers as they read for their venue, their capacity for sustained focus long gone. No wonder that they might only look at a submission for a minute or two before rejecting it. In such a situation, the benefit of quirky writing is that it immediately announces itself as strange. A story, conversely, that begins in a more conventional way and gradually escalates its strangeness is going to be a harder sell.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The chances of quirkily written pieces finding success are increased further by their tendency to take very short forms, often inhabiting the gray area of flash fiction \/ prose poetry. It\u2019s hard not to be suspicious that it has something to do with the difficulty of sustaining such syntactic gymnastics over broader stretches. The longer quirky writing persists in asking us to be surprised by its moves, the more that it can start to reveal itself as a string of one-liners\u2014and the more that the experimental claims of the text can begin to feel wholly superficial, too little thought given to the narrative occasion that has called upon such idiosyncrasy. It\u2019s also no accident that quirky writing loves fairy tales, that it has assimilated the work done by fairy tale revisionists of the 1960s such as Anne Sexton and Robert Coover. With such revisionism, the story and readers\u2019 familiarity with it act as a prefabricated arc upon which the language can be smeared, like papier-m\u00e2ch\u00e9 on a skeleton of chicken wire. This described situation creates a feedback loop in which the busyness of contemporary existence, the internet\u2019s many lures and demands, and the immediacy of quirky language are inextricably entwined. The more that aspiring writers read these excited little pills, the more they submit and the more that this style passes for publishable experimentation these days. Stories have a tendency to take on the qualities of their sentences on a larger level, quirky ones so often reading as assemblages of mismatched parts, inadvertent picaresques. Their plot arcs are often simply one-thing-after-another with the result that they just stop on the last page rather than end.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Lunch cracked open a day\u2019s feints at progress, the crew plays with food. Ragnar allowing in only what stuffs he could nudge along the inside slick of pink and behind the holes of molars. Knut combing Jesus for pictures of food: grilled cheese, pancakes, tea leaves, entrails. Kaia chewing each bit so many times the bolus just is gone with no swallow. Halvard drinking Coke Zero. Hilda yielding only to what thrown bits go missed by a circling ineptitude of gulls. Aline and Doc passing a pickle back and forth for \u201cmost tastes.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Back in vans, break itself broken, Knut drawls, \u201cthese signs eat honey?\u201d \/\/ \u201cIt\u2019s very clever,\u201d I aye, eyes roadside. \/\/ \u201cAnother. repent and be saved.\u201d \/\/ \u201cThis line of drive-by signs \/ are only good for one lousy rhyme,\u201d I try. \/\/ \u201cWhat do words amount to? Yours? That sign and the other sign and I think a third?\u201d \/\/ His glyphs, they glitch even as they say. \/\/ Feet swing in blue sky from ladders bungeed to roof racks. \/\/ \u201cYou read them sequentially. That\u2019s how they make sense.\u201d \/\/ \u201cthese . . . signs . . . eat . . . honey.\u201d \/\/ \u201cThe signs the signs<\/em>, not the words<\/em> the signs:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cTHESE SIGNS EAT LOCUST\nTHESE SIGNS EAT HONEY\nPREPARING THE WAY\nFOR THE SECOND COMING\nREPENT AND BE SAVED\u201d<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
\u201cMy sign was briefer.\u201d \/\/ \u201cFive signs, read one after the other.\u201d \/\/ \u201cWhat if you don\u2019t encounter them in order?\u201d \/\/ \u201cYou have to. You drive by them.\u201d \/\/ \u201cWhat if you were on foot, raised away from all trending slang, emergent through a scree of trees, and the one sign was humanity\u2019s first hail?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\n
Quirky writers like to (1) borrow flat characterization from the fairy tale genre so as not to distract from the language, often withholding characters\u2019 names; (2) jolt that archetypal approach with the sudden appearance of product names and pop culture references; (3) lean into the inelegance of syntactic constructions that we often avoid, such as consecutive homophones, homonyms, comma splices, or –ing<\/em> words; (4) italicize words for no other emphasis than their extra quirkiness; (5) give readers a singular noun where we would expect a plural one, or vice versa, again for profundity; (6) put words side-by-side just because they share lots of letters; (7) go bonkers with synaesthesia, rendering tangible things intangible and vice versa, especially language itself; (8) disrupt the parallel structure that often helps us navigate sentence fragments and lists like this one; (9) use vagueness deliberately, lavishing in some<\/em>, somehow<\/em>, somewhere<\/em>,and something<\/em>;(10) likewise, string together anaphors of some_____ <\/em>and this_____<\/em> phrases; (11) visit plagues upon their built words, the flimsiest and most default way of suggesting a diegetic impetus for the quirky language; (12) veer away from their quirkiness with abrupt, unadorned plainspokenness or Valley Girl tics or strangely antiquated language and speech patterns or suddenly precise statistics; (13) insist on puns; (14) go full glossolalia at some point during a text; (15) believe the names of collective animals in the wild to be the most magically novel thing ever, aspiring to strew the strangeness of calling a flock of starlings a murmuration<\/em> across their descriptions of everything in existence; and (16) see if they can out-ridiculous Cormac McCarthy\u2019s penchant for incongruous compound words\u2014\u201cdogshadow,\u201d \u201cfreshkilled,\u201d \u201cwretchedlooking,\u201d \u201cmeatcamp,\u201d \u201chalfsordid.\u201d In regard to that guy\u2014not a quirky writer but their hero\u2014quirky readers have an amazing capacity to put away their usual skepticism of American myth-making and spectacles of helpless women needing to be saved by violent men if it means they get to read about vagrants who all speak utterly gaseous philosophies in the same archaic voice. If it means they get to read not-at-all ludicrous descriptions like \u201cA howl of such outrage as to stitch a caesura in the pulsebeat of the world,\u201d or \u201cthe staccato mountains bespoken blue and barren out of the void,\u201d or \u201cwrapped in these serapes they looked like God\u2019s profoundest peons.\u201d Quirky writers get all babydazzled by words like: gloaming<\/em>, lurch<\/em>, meat<\/em>, hum<\/em>, drummed<\/em>, fluted<\/em>, coax<\/em>, proffer<\/em>, loam<\/em>, jerk<\/em>, gnaw<\/em>, foam<\/em>, slur<\/em>, slurry<\/em>, node<\/em>, nodule<\/em>, error<\/em>, skin<\/em>, peel<\/em>, jostle<\/em>, yawn<\/em>, maw<\/em>, ache<\/em>, suck<\/em>, loom<\/em>, hive<\/em>, ash<\/em>, curdle<\/em>, guttural<\/em>, fray<\/em>, clot<\/em>, gape<\/em>, milk<\/em>, and rip<\/em> . . . Useful words, all of them, and they benefit from being syllable light and concrete\u2014which quirky writers love interrupting with the sudden awkwardness of a longer, abstract, Latinate clunker.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
These days we read literature like we\u2019re scanning a product\u2019s list of ingredients at the grocery store for something it has recently become fashionable to avoid. In our scene\u2019s recent resuscitation of biographical criticism\u2014the death of \u201cThe Death of the Author\u201d that is identity and representation\u2014quirky writing has taken advantage of the fact that it\u2019s become charmingly antiquated, sophomoric, and beside the point to critique a novel or story or poem due to something related to style or, generally, aesthetics. Perhaps quirky writing\u2019s chief characteristic and goal is that it\u2019s unassailable (he writes, while assailing it), not because it\u2019s difficult to understand per se, but because it\u2019s willfully unspecific and detached from the kinds of issues that get readers hot and get writers cancelled. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\n
Before, we\u2019d shuddered into cleanup 30 minutes or 37 minutes before the workday itself was plump for auger. Night is preferred to work though night doesn\u2019t pay for most. In night, we can turn on breaking news. We can resign ourselves to food that isn\u2019t also work. We can scrub gray skin its birth color or close, dig grout from under nails with nails with pulverized volcano. We can kiss and sometimes fuck our wives and boyfriends. We can make our children more like us and fail because. We can strip naked in switched-off showers to funnel filth into the domestic zone most likely to clean itself. We can fist dog shit in what today held brussels sprouts eaten tonight. We can calculate just how much of that day\u2019s night erased that day\u2019s day, turned tomorrow red, the month red, the year. We can spurt and chew and flush and smack and dose and dream and stub and binge and tweeze. \/\/ So it was often an air of jocund did descend upon the boys at the sounding of cleanup. But as of late, ever since Halvard had vouchsafed his remaining days to five square feet of stairwall woodwork, cleanup had been assaulting those previously forward chunks of day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I come bearing trayed slurries that disguise as optimism the need to piss. It is one morning. I am late, but just. I find: the crew packing it in for the day. Perhaps, I ration, the cycles of constructive strewing and necessary penance no longer fit snugly within a day\u2019s container, yesterday\u2019s forgotten session phasing into today\u2019s spillage. \/\/ In pairs they\u2019ve staked archeological digs bent on minute pains. Halvard and Ragnar stitch snags flat in butcher paper. Doc and Knut parachute scabrous drop cloths into flagged shards fit for war widows. Hilda and Kaia and Aline on knees take toothbrushes and scissors to the furry gutter where sheetrock fails to run just flush with hardwood. Molding and shoe molding and caulk will cover upon cover upon cover this jagged wound of hurry\u2014but I get it. \/\/ I grab a brush and get on knees. If not for us, dust would stow itself in that depth as long as Water Street mimed shelter, security. That\u2019s why it\u2019s called molding. Screams. Lightless.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To read the rest of \u201cAgainst Quirky Writing,\u201d<\/strong> you can purchase the Winter 2022 issue <\/strong>here<\/strong><\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Cover Image by Bill Dickinson<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Why I Chose It:\u00a0Michigan Quarterly Review\u2019s Assistant Managing Editor and former Nonfiction Editor, Aaron J. Stone,\u00a0introduces Joe Sacksteder\u2019s \u201cAgainst Quirky Writing\u201d from our\u00a0Winter 2022 issue. You can purchase the issue\u00a0here. This essay\u2019s reputation preceded it\u2014which is nearly unheard of for an unsolicited submission. While I was Nonfiction Editor, I one day joined a Zoom call 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Jon Stone","author_link":"https:\/\/sites.lsa.umich.edu\/mqr\/author\/stoneaa\/"},"uagb_comment_info":0,"uagb_excerpt":"Why I Chose It:\u00a0Michigan Quarterly Review\u2019s Assistant Managing Editor and former Nonfiction Editor, Aaron J. 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