Letters to the Editor
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"And you say they're just her friends?!?! Awwwaaooo, baby..." :)
>Toni Schlesinger is a literary version of Henry Rousseau: self-taught and persistently innocent... the vague, rambling style of the story is done in unselfconscious spoken word with lack of polish: a comic composed by instant messaging.<
Oh, no--it's the dread "It's art--therefore it can be incompetent as crap and that's cool" excuse. Um..._real_ art is when a creator knows the rules enough to break them in interesting ways. Anything else is pretentious wanking...and a waste of time and space.
>Think of KOF as something written by a teenager.. and enjoy the splash of it.<
Given that at any given time online there are at least five teenagers doing stuff better than this, you've got a lot of nerve saying this.
>How did KOF get published? Salon co-founder Laura Miller probably helped create her and bring her in. Laura's a promoter of contemporary authors; Toni writes a quirky column for the Voice. Last few years have seen some mingling: Toni and Tom Bachtell collaborated on a play in 2002; Toni and Laura published articles in the NYT in Sept 2003 (Toni's was a wide-eyed account of a cruise her aunt treated her to).<
Well, we've got the "who, what, where," and "how." Now, we need the "why." Schlesinger has no feel for this material and only seems to care about the genre to the extent that she can steal from it. If she's doing this as a satire, she's missing the abovementioned components. And the stuff isn't funny. If she's doing this as a straight story, she's really missed the mark. So, what's her purpose? The only thing this is good for is to give some 21st-century Mark Twain ample material to do an updated "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses."
http://www.pbs.org/marktwain/learnmore/writings_fenimore.html
And, as Twain so aptly noted:
"A work of art? It has no invention; it has no order, system, sequence, or result; it has no lifelikeness, no thrill, no stir, no seeming of reality; its characters are confusedly drawn, and by their acts and words they prove that they are not the sort of people the author claims that they are; its humor is pathetic; its pathos is funny; its conversations are–oh! indescribable; its love-scenes odious; its English a crime against the language.
Counting these out, what is left is Art. I think we must all admit that."