Drive-By Quotes

Some thoughts to chew on...

From skinny, taken from Javier Cercas, The Speed of Light:

…writing well is the opposite of writing pretty phrases. No pretty phrase is capable of expressing truth. Probably no phrase is capable of capturing truth…

And related to above, I found this quote-- buried somewhat in a long post-- by John Scalzi on why simplicity is better than craftiness (i.e. writing pretty):

...which is to say when writers (be they songwriters or authors or playwrights or whomever) say things in a purposefully complex way to show off their skills to a relatively small group of people who will get the joke. That's all fine and good if all you intend to do is to entertain that small group of people solely. If you're planning to get your words out to a larger group, filled with people who don't know your jokes, however, it presents, well, a problem.

From Butch Dalisay, whose article can also be read here (scroll down a bit):

If there’s anything missing in our fiction (especially in English), it’s an awareness and acknowledgment of the fact that we live in a country defined, for most Filipinos, less by malls and coffeeshops than by swaths of coconut, rice, and sugarcane plantations. Even our cities are provincescapes pocked by enclaves of affluence, and as much as the metropolis encroaches and ultimately despoils Nature, many of us remain country boys in city clothes.

The most interesting change in our fiction, I think, will come not so much from the contact between, say, Midsayap and Manila, as between Barrio Wawa in Tanauan, Batangas and Milan in Italy. The cities of our minds have become global cities, and the time has come to write about the Filipino’s journeys through those infernally complex passageways.

An interview with Chris Roberson, that can be linked to Dean's on-going analysis of Philippine Speculative Fiction:

...a writer from outside a culture is never going to write about it with the same level of understanding as someone from inside the culture would, but it isn’t to say that a writer from outside can’t approach a culture with a different level of understanding.

And the BESTEST Transformers the Movie review I've read, from Cherie Priest:

AHHH! AAAAH!!! ROBOTS, OMG ROBOTS and they're FIGHTING and they're all like, PIT-OO, PIT-OO, PIT-OO -- and I'm all LIKE YEAH, THAT'S WHAT I'M TALKIN' ABOUT, and then did you see that one over there -- did you see WHAT HE JUST DID and HOLY SHIT THAT'S OPTIMUS PRIME THAT'S OPTIMUS PRIME LOOKIE HE'S GOT BIG OL' SWORD AND IT'S ORANGE AND ALL KILLY AND STUFF, and that guy who HE'S BEATING LIKE A LITTLE TIN DRUM is MEGATRON and I think that now I can DIE OF AWESOME POISONING because that was more awesome than a whole SWIMMING POOL THAT HAS BEEN FILLED WITH AWESOME, and then someone shoves A PAIR OF GIANT DUELING ALIEN ROBOTS INTO THE SWIMMING POOL, and there's a UNICORN STANDING IN THE BACKGROUND, GRANTING WISHES and SHITTING DIAMONDS.ONLY AWESOMER.