bleah. i’m tired and my eyes are crusty/crunchy since i chose sleep over shower this morning. but on to today’s rant and my first shot at metablogging.
what i get tired of seeing as i search through the morass of the wideworldofweblogging are the sites in which the entries become nothing more than linguistic acrobatics. how cool can i make my mundane life and ideas sound? alas, i have been guilty of this myself. my beef centers on the fine distinction between writing to be ‘clever’ and writing to be precise. writing to be ‘clever’ is easy. you just need a thesaurus and enough imagination to believe the weather forecast. then, utilising Roget’s textual interface a person can substitute words for words creating a rendered universe of kaliedoscopic intransience whose plethora of subliminal gadgetry hides the fact that there is no actual content to the damn thing. this ‘cleverness’ is in fact nothing but intentional ambiguity. writing to be precise, on the other hand, does not let the reading infer anything from the post. they are told what the point of the article is and it is explained sufficiently.
now some might say that i am distinguishing between two different schools or writing which could be represented but not necessarily defined by artistic writing and academic writing. however, what some might mistake as my rant against the artistic is by no means my intention. what i am railing against is writing that has form but no content. neo-Dada writing if you will. the point is that it has no point. fuck that. i believe that those who think they are being clever are actually convinced that their creations have content and meaning.
what is nice to run across are the instances of precision that pierce to the center of the author’s intent and enlighten instead of muddle. when words are chosen not for their cleverness but for their aptness. where adjectives are used with the discerning taste of a connosieur to emphasize, instead of the haphazard arsenal employed by so many that merely overloads. good poetry is precision writing at its best, and it is artistic.
i’d like to acknowledge that the opposite is true, writing can be excessively banal to the point of mild insanity but i’ll talk about that some other time.
Nota Bene: this entry is also an attempt at reflexivity despite the fact that i dislike the postmodern, i am still a child of it. that is probably appropriate for the postmodern itself. coils within coils.