Try Making that Prose a Little More Haunting

This morning I was just minding my own business, thinking about how glad I am not to be European, when I opened the NYT to discover that I may in fact be missing out. Apparently “no writer in Europe today has dealt more eloquently with the obligations and moral conundrums of memory, private and collective, than the Hungarian novelist and essayist Peter Nadas” [lies – ed.]. But Nadas wonders:

… can someone in, say, Boston, “pouring sweet maple syrup over sizzling bacon” understand “from such ambiguous sentences how deformed the thoughts and actions of someone can become who for years has used their mother tongue for hiding thoughts rather than for expressing them? […] How meaning slips around in the shadow of words, hissing through the gaps in their definitions?

Readers, as someone in Boston, and I will tell you that I almost never understand how meaning slips around in the shadow of words. It’s an obstacle I struggle with every day. Now excuse me while I go feast on some syrup-bacon, as per ushe, and forget about the past.

Some of the sentences in there brought to mind this essay/manifesto that Nick recently pointed out to me. It’s basically about how fucking annoying writers can be, and while it makes some crazy claims, it also says some things that I wish people talked about more. Anyway, read and be provoked...and then maybe we can have an instructive forum on the state of contemporary fiction or something? call me??