[Beyle]

Beyle, here:

The above corrects my initial error, signing in as “Sean” in that recent disastrous posting that so exercised at least a couple of you. So far, “a couple.” The truly vast number of misspellings, or typos, as Worldwalker appeared to understand, can be attributed to several factors, but is nevertheless inexcusable. I was in a hurry to make my first posting about something that I felt strongly about, the dumbing down of the American culture (I
have to confess to having played a considerable part in that myself in another medium).

Anyway, there was no one around to correct it and I’m such a technological incompetent it wasn’t until yesterday that I discovered the “spell check” in place, or that I could enlarge the print slightly. Finally, as we say nowadays, I have vision issues. My apologies.

However, and there is always a “however.” As to “logs and moats,” I don’t remember attacking anyone by name. Or knowing anyone vulnerable whom I would consider my m “neighbor.”And if one attempts to criticize any social or culture phenomenon there will surely be some who take it as a direct attack - on them, personally. What would be the alternative?

Then there is the question of punctuation. Bill Goldman said his novels are mostly dialogue because punctuation is too confused these days. Cormac McCarthy doesn’t use quotation marks, hate’s semi-colons. Most of the best writers in our era won’t use an apostrophe after dropping, say, the last letter in a word, mainly the “g” in gerunds (dialect, of course). If you’re a formalist I recommend the first gorgeous half-page sentence with two commas in McCarthy’s OUTER DARK.

On the other hand, maybe you’re right in that it would have been mannerly to use the formal style - letters, essays, papers, etc. – for that posting. I haven’t gone back and revisited the scene of the disaster, a practice, I believe, that is considerably overrated as a means of improvement. Yes, perhaps I should have applied the formal standard here although I’ve seldom found it useful and am far more inclined to write fiction on my own terms. I think I’ll stick with that. After all that, some of my best friends are curmudgeons.

I do have to say that I found Ms. Queentess’s ad hominem reference to my age a bit of a cheap shot. Not done, my dear, in the thinking classes, any more than you would use the pejorative words for various races, religious groups, gays... In fact, several older members of the WGA are now dividing seventy-two million dollars owed to them by the studios and various producers who have not only used that word but the implementation of it. Words, too, have consequences.

I believe you’re also very wrong about the times you’ve never experienced, either in print or life evidently. There has never been a ruling group in this country remotely as cerebral (excluding the sciences) as that which created the Constitution. The Old West and mining camps used to be full of men who could read the Bible or The Bard to their fellows around the fire. It was not unusual to find traveling Shakespearean companies or performers. Classical Greek was sometimes read within the legal fraternity of the Old South. Gold and silver miners greeted Oscar Wilde with enthusiasm. Homer and Shakespeare were taught in urban elementary schools. Okay, so I was a sprout during the early days of television but we watched “Art and the Gods,” “The Dave Garroway Show,” and at night live dramas about real people by America’s best playwrights, Horton Foote, Reginald Rose, Paddy Chayetsky, Tennessee Williams. Truman Capote.

Finally, and thank God, you say, the aforementioned Cormac McCarthy is seventy-eight or nine, , the great Peruvian writer, Llosa, who just won the Nobel Prize, is eighty, Patrick O’Brien didn’t start his wonderfully successful series about the Nelsonian navy until he was in his late seventies, and on and on....

Besides, I’m not a old geezer, merely a senesent attenuated superannuate.

I also want to say that despite our differences and my extreme antiquity I do admire Queentess’s Weimar look.