"Let's Get Married and Raise Fat Ugly Kids Together!"

I fear, after taking the time to read this piece of stereotypical toilet humour tropes, I must offer my own far from positive review...

It seems that you write in order to shock, offend, insult, transgress, push boundaries, break taboos, offer up the grotesque on an equally grotesque plate. I assume you think this is creative, imaginative, bold, daring, innovative? A frenetic pace, a mashing together of ugly words and ideas, a wrecking ball to that tyrannical establishment you so long to annihilate? Yet, the content is childish. The style pedestrian. You seem to desperately crave avoidance of the pedantic, but in this desperation you spin yourself full circle into just another form of pedantry. The pedantry of the overly obscene.

Being grotesque isn't new. And it can be ****ing beautiful. I suggest you read the aesthetic ugliness of Bataille, or the fetishistic symphonies of certain sections of Pynchon; maybe the pubic hair sniffing, navel obsessed prose of Nádas; the beautiful obscenities of Burroughs; the wonderfully poetic and brilliantly bizarre, shameless filth of a defecatory Beckett; the endless toilet humour turned profound by Rabelais or Sterne. In so doing you might discover that simply being grotesque isn't enough. Mashing obscenities together and crafting (if one may call this a craft) an ugliness with no other elements provides for a banality the world does not need. Be multi-dimensional. Be free of this idiomatic dogma you have created for yourself. It does you no favours. It's terribly boring.

Your writing comes across as all for show. Words without ideas. Where's the substance? I want to be forced to engage with a novel - and if it's of the grotesque sort - to do battle with it, be provoked by it, be alternately shocked and stunned. I want you to give me moments of unashamed beauty beside the obscene to heighten both extremes. I want not just your frenetic ramblings alone, I want them to inspire thoughts that run rampant through my head; I want to ponder meanings, ideas, philosophies.

Unfortunately the only feeling this work elicits is apathy. The only idea is banality. Currently it's on a one way street to nowhere, to a realm of boredom masquerading as ferocity, and I'm afraid, once there, it shall not escape.

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Originally Posted by islandclimber

I fear, after taking the time to read this piece of stereotypical toilet humour tropes, I must offer my own far from positive review...

It seems that you write in order to shock, offend, insult, transgress, push boundaries, break taboos, offer up the grotesque on an equally grotesque plate. I assume you think this is creative, imaginative, bold, daring, innovative? A frenetic pace, a mashing together of ugly words and ideas, a wrecking ball to that tyrannical establishment you so long to annihilate? Yet, the content is childish. The style pedestrian. You seem to desperately crave avoidance of the pedantic, but in this desperation you spin yourself full circle into just another form of pedantry. The pedantry of the overly obscene.

Being grotesque isn't new. And it can be ****ing beautiful. I suggest you read the aesthetic ugliness of Bataille, or the fetishistic symphonies of certain sections of Pynchon; maybe the pubic hair sniffing, navel obsessed prose of Nádas; the beautiful obscenities of Burroughs; the wonderfully poetic and brilliantly bizarre, shameless filth of a defecatory Beckett; the endless toilet humour turned profound by Rabelais or Sterne. In so doing you might discover that simply being grotesque isn't enough. Mashing obscenities together and crafting (if one may call this a craft) an ugliness with no other elements provides for a banality the world does not need. Be multi-dimensional. Be free of this idiomatic dogma you have created for yourself. It does you no favours. It's terribly boring.

Your writing comes across as all for show. Words without ideas. Where's the substance? I want to be forced to engage with a novel - and if it's of the grotesque sort - to do battle with it, be provoked by it, be alternately shocked and stunned. I want you to give me moments of unashamed beauty beside the obscene to heighten both extremes. I want not just your frenetic ramblings alone, I want them to inspire thoughts that run rampant through my head; I want to ponder meanings, ideas, philosophies.

Unfortunately the only feeling this work elicits is apathy. The only idea is banality. Currently it's on a one way street to nowhere, to a realm of boredom masquerading as ferocity, and I'm afraid, once there, it shall not escape.

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My answer to the critic:

I fear that zebras are going to take the time to eat stereotypical toilets, so I must offer my own review of the skyscrapers of lollipops that are just so juicy and red...

It seems that you write in order to induce electrical shocks to the radio waves of zoom-ha-ha-ha, and to the nuclear-armed republic for which it stands in its electric underwear – and in this way offend the transvestites of the highest order by skiing across boundaries, breaking open skies of tomato sauce, and offering up the grotEsque facEs of hope soup served on a insomniac plate. Indeed, I ride my *** across this landscape of creative, imaginative, bold, daring, innovative? Whooooooooooooooooo?! The frantic pace of the ugliest words & ideas all annihilating the freshest day? Boooooooonk! Yet, the BOOM-bok-paduupee-dooooong is just so childy-wildy-blip! The style pedestrian plane crash!! You seem to desperately crave used underwear from fat politicians in order to pedantic the spin? Spiiiin – spiiiiin – spiiiiin! Spinning like a full circle of glorious obscenities marching out of all the testicles – oh no that word again! – It's time for the pUritaN-aCadeMic-riOts to begin! Anybody have any rioting-adjectives-sauce?

Being gRoteSque isn't paper airplanes! And you can be as beautiful as defecating in the toilet – especially when the mouth of the toilet is – oh we can't say that here – so puritanical-puritanical-puritanical! Symphonies of sexual fetishes! Obsessed prose of navels! Pubic hair sniffing on the presidential altar of S&M factories! Burroughs Burroughs Burroughs defecating brilliantly bizarre! Mashing obscenities together like potatoes! Multidimensional words jumping everywhere! Be free to create yourself! What delicious psychotic flavors in your pussy!

It's all a penis-asparagus-Wolf Larsen show! Words that eat the ideas! Where's the substance of Shakespeare fast-food hamburgers when you need escalators?

I want to be forced to have S&M orgies with all my novels – even if it's a grotesque kind of century we’re building – to do battle with candycane transvestites! To be provoked by the it! To be shocked & stunned by Star Trek testicles! I want to give you my moments of extreme beauty – of puritanical obscenities – with all the thoughts rampant in my head! I pound on the anvil all my meanings & ideas & philosophies!

Unfortunately, all my feelings are building urban skylines with apathy! Banality is the only mountain cliff to fall off of! Currently, it's a one-way street to the nowwheres that are festering around the corner! And I fear there is no escape!

Copyright 2012 by Wolf Larsen

But after a while, doesn't the shock value wear off? The endless repetition of the same old,same old senseless scatology without any metaphorical meaning becomes banal, ho-hum, NOT NEW!

Shock is a quick, nearly fatal wound, not a chronic disease.

I wonder if there is any shock value to this? It's been done before, so many times that it does not shock, instead it breeds apathy and indifference. You don't hook the reader because you offer nothing besides superficial and obscene words. Obscenity has been done, many times, but with actual substance, in brief or not so brief attacks, always leading from something else and to something else. In works with any merit, it is never alone. As AuntShecky said: "Shock is a quick, nearly fatal wound, not a chronic disease." This is a brilliantly succinct way of identifying the problem with your work.

Regardless. Best of luck with your prose stylings.

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Originally Posted by islandclimber

I wonder if there is any shock value to this? It's been done before, so many times that it does not shock, instead it breeds apathy and indifference. You don't hook the reader because you offer nothing besides superficial and obscene words. Obscenity has been done, many times, but with actual substance, in brief or not so brief attacks, always leading from something else and to something else. In works with any merit, it is never alone. As AuntShecky said: "Shock is a quick, nearly fatal wound, not a chronic disease." This is a brilliantly succinct way of identifying the problem with your work.

Regardless. Best of luck with your prose stylings.

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I have to admit that right now I'm reading Jack London's The Sea Wolf. Wolf Larson is presented at first as brutal and yes, strong. But as the novel progresses we come to find out that he's well read, a philosopher, and has depth. If he was just full of expletives and suffering from potty mouth outbreaks, there wouldn't be much to him. He'd be all surface. But London's character, though mal-formed, is a complete character, and genuine. He can talk about anything, and debate positions too, that's what makes him dangerous, his thought processes and Darwinism. He isn't just a one-trick pony. He's got more up his sleeve than that.

You can write in a vivid and engaging fashion. You have our attention. Do something worth while with it other than shake us. After a while soldiers get used to cannon fire, and readers get used to and then bored by the naughtiest of words too, when they're repeated enough. As mentioned above, repeated shocks just stop shocking after a while.

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Originally Posted by islandclimber

I fear, after taking the time to read this piece of stereotypical toilet humour tropes, I must offer my own far from positive review...

It seems that you write in order to shock, offend, insult, transgress, push boundaries, break taboos, offer up the grotesque on an equally grotesque plate. I assume you think this is creative, imaginative, bold, daring, innovative? A frenetic pace, a mashing together of ugly words and ideas, a wrecking ball to that tyrannical establishment you so long to annihilate? Yet, the content is childish. The style pedestrian. You seem to desperately crave avoidance of the pedantic, but in this desperation you spin yourself full circle into just another form of pedantry. The pedantry of the overly obscene.

Being grotesque isn't new. And it can be ****ing beautiful. I suggest you read the aesthetic ugliness of Bataille, or the fetishistic symphonies of certain sections of Pynchon; maybe the pubic hair sniffing, navel obsessed prose of Nádas; the beautiful obscenities of Burroughs; the wonderfully poetic and brilliantly bizarre, shameless filth of a defecatory Beckett; the endless toilet humour turned profound by Rabelais or Sterne. In so doing you might discover that simply being grotesque isn't enough. Mashing obscenities together and crafting (if one may call this a craft) an ugliness with no other elements provides for a banality the world does not need. Be multi-dimensional. Be free of this idiomatic dogma you have created for yourself. It does you no favours. It's terribly boring.

Your writing comes across as all for show. Words without ideas. Where's the substance? I want to be forced to engage with a novel - and if it's of the grotesque sort - to do battle with it, be provoked by it, be alternately shocked and stunned. I want you to give me moments of unashamed beauty beside the obscene to heighten both extremes. I want not just your frenetic ramblings alone, I want them to inspire thoughts that run rampant through my head; I want to ponder meanings, ideas, philosophies.

Unfortunately the only feeling this work elicits is apathy. The only idea is banality. Currently it's on a one way street to nowhere, to a realm of boredom masquerading as ferocity, and I'm afraid, once there, it shall not escape.

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Intelligent comment/critique. We need more of this in this forum. If Wolf's work can illicit a comment like this, I don't think Wolf's writings should be censored or he should be banned. What I got from Wolf is the process of verbal desensitization. When penises and vaginas are said often, they become as mundane and insipid as the flower vase of fabric flowers and the landscape calendar in my grandmother's living room. The good thing with that process is that it can lead us to explore the unsaid--why he writes that way or why he is angry or why he hates vanilla literature. Maybe behind his writings that some loathe is an interesting story of himself that I so want to read.

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Originally Posted by miyako73

Intelligent comment/critique. We need more of this in this forum. If Wolf's work can illicit a comment like this, I don't think Wolf's writings should be censored or he should be banned. What I got from Wolf is the process of verbal desensitization. When penises and vaginas are said often, they become as mundane and insipid as the flower vase of fabric flowers and the landscape calendar in my grandmother's living room. The good thing with that process is that it can lead us to explore the unsaid--why he writes that way or why he is angry or why he hates vanilla literature. Maybe behind his writings that some loathe is an interesting story of himself that I so want to read.

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Thank you. Like you, I surely don't think his work should be censored or banned. I was intrigued at the first line or two, though now having read his Shakespeare poetry series, I grow less intrigued. They trump this piece in ghastliness. Yet, there is potential in this ramming of obscenities into the reader's brain. There is the shadow of something more, a something that it seems he is hiding behind this wall of overly crude prose. My problem with his process of verbal desensitization is that this is all it offers. There is no substance, it's purely style; there is no metaphorical meaning, no ideas to be pondered, just a crude obscene wordplay. I want him to offer up something more. Please, be vulgar and obscene, but offer up an underlying idea through it. Wolf offers only the penis for the penis' sake, and the vagina for the vagina's sake, scat for scat's sake... Rather than l'art pour l'art he offers us obscenity for the sake of obscenity. It comes across as childish, immature, and quite tedious.

Wolf has a ferocity to his writing that is initially seductive. That is my compliment to him. I would likely have written far less in response if I didn't see a possibility for something more. Far more. Like you, I think there is a story lurking behind these writings (or maybe within them waiting illumination, an expansion of his work in which content andf substance arrive?), and I so want to read it.

An example from Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow" here, witness the way he uses the crude to make a statement.

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How the penises of Western men have leapt, for a century, to the sight of this singular point at the top of a lady’s stocking, this transition from silk to bare skin and suspender! It’s easy for non-fetishists to sneer about Pavlovian conditioning and let it go at that, but any underwear enthusiast worth his unwholesome giggle can tell you there is much more here—there is a cosmology. (396)

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I want Wolf to keep his profanity-laced tirades, but to make them mean something, say something, to bare his own or someone else's philosophies and psychologies for interpretation through his work. Give me meaning Wolf. Add more. Give me the monstrosity and the grotesque of this human condition, but give me also the mysteries of this world and this universe on an infinite or infinitesimal or just plain old everyday level.

Again Pynchon from "V."

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One pried her jaws apart while another removed a set of false teeth […] the children peeled back one eyelid to reveal a glass eye with the iris in the shape of a clock. This, too, they removed […] Surely her arms and breasts could be detached; the skin of her legs be peeled away to reveal some intricate under-structure of silver openwork. Perhaps the trunk itself contained other wonders: intestines of parti-coloured silk, gay balloon-lungs, a rococo heart. (343)

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And from Burroughs' "Naked Lunch":

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“Squatting on old bones and excrement and rusty iron, in a white blaze of heat, a panorama of naked idiots stretches to the horizon. Complete silence - their speech centres are destroyed - except for the crackle of sparks and the popping of singed flesh as they apply electrodes up and down the spine. White smoke of burning flesh hangs in the motionless air. A group of children have tied an idiot to a post with barbed wire and built a fire between his legs and stand watching with bestial curiosity as the flames lick his thighs. His flesh jerks in the fire with insect agony.”

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Burroughs and Pynchon say something. They don't just offer words, they offer meaning. They create an image with words, and then force us to think. They provoke us, assail us, lay siege to the safe sections of our minds. They want us to fight back, to discover the meaning, to attack it mercilessly (if we diagree), or to understand it before we accept it (if we agree).

I want Wolf to read the early scenes of copulation and sodomy and bdsm from "Gravity's Rainbow" with Gottfried, Katje, Blicero. Or Burrough's "Naked Lunch." Or Bataille's "Story of the Eye." De Sade's "120 Days of Sodom" if it can be stomached. And I want him to expand his stories. Make them something more. Tell us not just a superficial story with a shallow and one-dimensional vulgar stream, but a story that is a fierce denizen of the delta of his river, infinitely branching, of variable depths, filled with meaning.

Lordy- loopity-loop I thought I'd stumbled into some Internet group therapy surgery! Alfie Jarry eat yer heart out!

Well some people – a lot of people are talking about shock – but the thing is I don't find this piece shocking at all. Other people talk about obscenity – I don't find this piece in the least bit obscene. Actually, in order to have as few problems with the moderator as possible I post my tamest stuff on this site.

The piece I guess is rather abstract. Some of the commentators don't like that, just like a lot of people don't like abstract sculpture or painting. But, why not write in an abstract manner? Why not look at the art world and learn? After all, the art world is doing far more interesting things than the literary world is doing.

I just think the piece is not tame and conventional enough to please the people who are more conventionally and academically minded.

Not everybody likes the same thing. Some people like Mozart. Others like Bartok. Some people like Norman Rockwell. Others prefer Jackson Pollock. That's just the way the world is.

Oh and happy new year!

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Originally Posted by WolfLarsen

Not everybody likes the same thing. Some people like Mozart. Others like Bartok. Some people like Norman Rockwell. Others prefer Jackson Pollock. That's just the way the world is.

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Some people go around saying they're better writers than Shakespeare, and others do not.

Even so, I truly liked your analogy of the bus riders preferring to look out the window at scenery they see everyday rather than continue to read a boring book.

Happy New Year to you, aussi.

[QUOTE=AuntShecky;1195582]Some people go around saying they're better writers than Shakespeare, and others do not.QUOTE]

But what does it mean to be a better poet than Shakespeare? Perhaps it doesn't mean much at all.