Structuralist Poetics

Slothrop: This cover does no justice to the original one which featured orange concentric circles of Literary Fire. Jonathan Culler, Slothrop has decided, writes like Richard Pryor likes his milk and cookies. All of his sentences declare, explain, and elucidate, no matter their conceptual difficulty, and leave no conjured idea flapping. Proves what Slothrop already knew: that bad writing is a function of arrogance and laziness, not, as the sophists would like us to believe, difficulty of subject matter. Mr. Culler is now an old man, but should Slothrop ever have the great misfortune of running into him in a dark alley in Harlem at 4am, not even a bulletproof vest made of disdain for Ass-Head's perch atop the Boney Noses would save his scrawny-self from this man's claws of verbal steel. A fucking steel ninja, I say.

Smart Boris: "Writes like Richard Pryor" what? Let's not go nuts; Culler writes like a bureaucrat. His prose is clear and effective but it's far from inspired. Never have I opened any of his books and thought hey, this is beautiful. I have, however, thought precisely that while reading the rapturous scholarship of Thomas McFarland.

And on behalf of bad writers everywhere, I'd like to point out that good writers are just as doggedly arrogant and lazy as we are. Granted, deep thinking does not justify bad writing, and of course Plato on down have proven that serious noodling gets done in gorgeous, lucid language, but come on, some people write poorly because they can't write, not because they're lazy or mean or occlusive. Sometimes a fella just thinks better than he writes. See Chomsky and others for exempla.

Please, chuck your wrongheaded Enlightenment ethos, you fine-writing mythbiters. This argued from the black of the cave by Boris and the rest of the revolutionary mucks.

And by the way, I agree: Culler works, and everyone should write well.

Slothrop: Slothrop didn't say Culler writes like Richard Pryor, he said he writes like Richard Pryor likes his milk and cookies, which is very much indeed; extrapolated, this means Culler writes very much indeed. That's all Slothy meant. And he does not write like a bureaucrat because we can understand what he means. Bureaucrats like to waste paper, and Mr. Culler is a tree hugger. Metaphorically, however, I agree.

Smart Boris: Nobody likes anything as much as Richard Pryor liked milk and cookies, and Culler never set himself on fire by writing. And yes, he does write like a bureaucrat, "An official who is rigidly devoted to the details of administrative procedure." Bureaucrats are efficient and procedural, is what I meant. Not those other time wasters, like the reporter in Anglo-Saxon Attitudes or DMV munchkins, who are not bureaucrats but Bartlebys, casualties of an institution. 

Slothrop: Slothrop is most displeased with your virulent hatred.