style | The Smart Set

Don’t Sing, Scarf, or Spit

John Capista — Thu, 18 Apr 2024 14:28:17 +0000

Culture, if we can still call it that, has taken a definite downward turn in the last couple of decades. Tee shirts with I HATE YOUR F—ING MASK (the F word spelled out) printed in large letters on the front. Texting at the dinner table. Parents using profanity to children. Being honked and tailgated while […]

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No Way to Bresson

Greg Gerke — Mon, 16 Oct 2023 11:30:00 +0000

At 18 I began to teach myself about sex by watching foreign films. And when I write “sex,” I am at the same time inscribing the word “women.” I was introduced to many intellectual types across the oceans, which heavily contrasted with the vacant Julia Roberts’s and Michelle Pfeiffers’s I could not get too excited […]

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My Father Through Mann’s Eyes

Greg Gerke — Wed, 03 Mar 2021 22:56:13 +0000

I can’t ask my father if he has seen Anthony Mann’s Man of the West because my father is dead. A mild aficionado of the “western,” he might have come upon it, maybe on some meandering 70s’ or 80s’ Saturday afternoon in a pan-and-scan version on television. Or, maybe he watched a remastered copy on TCM in the last 20 years of his life, as cable television packages anchored him in those […]

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A Gun in the First Act

Kelly Cherry — Mon, 08 Feb 2016 13:58:15 +0000

Every place has a rhythm. You must echo that rhythm in your writing. A character in New York City will not be as mellow as a character on the beach. A character in Wyoming will have a more expansive view than the character in Los Angeles. Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick might have had the grandest […]

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Whatever Happens, Happens Somewhere

Kelly Cherry — Wed, 06 Jan 2016 13:38:14 +0000

In her essay “Place in Fiction,” Eudora Welty wrote that “place is one of the lesser angels.” She said other considerations were more important than place — “character, plot, symbolic meaning … and feeling, who in my eyes carries the crown, soars highest of them all and rightly relegates place into the shade.” She did […]

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Desire is Complicated

Kelly Cherry — Thu, 15 Oct 2015 13:26:22 +0000

The truth is, almost all of us want more than just one thing. The child who wants water also wants to share it with his mother. The mother wants her child to have water and also food. Take a look at Chekhov’s stories. Maybe you already have and are already acquainted with his distinctively realistic stories. […]

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Everybody Wants More than Just One Thing

Kelly Cherry — Thu, 03 Sep 2015 15:22:42 +0000

It is standard advice to state that the main character or characters should want something. That it is wanting — desire — that motivates characters to act and action that creates the story, novel, perhaps even the persona in a persona poem. It’s not bad advice; genre fiction can get a lot of mileage from […]

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…And How To Get It

Kelly Cherry — Mon, 27 Jul 2015 14:55:08 +0000

And now, to examine an entirely different style, consider this line from Ben Marcus’s experimental and lovely first novel, The Age of Wire and String, published in 1995. The author’s postmodern premise is that when we look at an object, our desire destroys it. It opens thus: This book is a catalog of the life […]

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On Style…

Kelly Cherry — Tue, 21 Jul 2015 15:59:03 +0000

Almost the first thing a reader notices about a piece of writing is its style — unless the style is transparent. Transparent prose is prose that lets you see the object before you. It has often been referred to as a window, for the window in no way obstructs your view. Indeed, it serves the […]

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Let’s Talk About Specs

Greg Beato — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 16:12:43 +0000

At a time when the average person would sooner donate money to a relief fund for investment bankers than pay full retail price for a CD, millions of Americans happily spend hundreds of dollars on a single pair of eyeglasses. A pair of Tiffany & Co. frames at LensCrafters retails for $410, lenses not included. […]

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