I love Christian Lorentzen’s writing, in general, and get excited to hear his thoughts on pretty much anything. I loved his recent piece, In Defense of Pretentiousness (“Those who remember me as an adolescent in small-town Massachusetts likely recall an arrogant grade-grubber all too eager to quote the Virgil he’d memorized the night before or to share his deep thoughts about the lyrics of Soul Asylum.”), and his tour de force: Toward a Unified Theory of Joan Didion: it’s essential reading, and expressed some things that I have found disheartening or … disturbing … in the current love-fest around Didion, who has been sort of absorbed into the self-help culture because of her “memoirs”. Lorentzen clocks what is wrong with that, and I breathed a sigh of relief when I read his essay, because it NEEDED to be said. By someone able to say it well.
Onward: I adore his latest essay: Could We Just Lose the Adverb Already?
Sneak peek:
But some adverbs are the most powerful words in English. We can no more escape the adverbs of time than we can escape aging. Without the adverbs of place, we wouldn’t be anywhere, not even nowhere. I am in awe of “yesterday” and “tomorrow” and of “here” and “there.” All these words can provoke potent feelings along the spectrum of sadness and happiness and are essential to getting on with the job of reporting what has or will have happened and where. They’re beautiful words with a simplicity undiluted by suffixes. But their power is best spent in small doses. If you’re deploying an adverb of time in every sentence, you must be writing a police report or singing the Cure’s “Friday I’m in Love.”
Sheila, THANK YOU. I really have to return to reading bylines. I’ve been reading Christian and loving his stuff and bookmarking it, and sending it off to my favorite people to read, and didn’t realize it till I just read your piece. I was doing him a disservice.(sp?)
So, thank you for this.
Isn’t he so great?
He loves Don DeLillo more than I do – but I loved his recent piece on DeLillo – it’s always good to hear an opposing side, stated so damn well.
I met him once – he was on the panel after a screening of Woody Allen’s Manhattan Murder Mystery at the 92nd Street Y (it’s my favorite Allen, bar none) – and that was when I was able to put a face to the name, and the writer I so admired. He is exactly what you would expect from his prose.
I like him a lot.
His piece on David Foster Wallace was also masterful – and similar to the Joan Didion piece, in that it criticized the absorption of DFW – a subversive and difficult writer – into our homily-mad culture that wants everything to be uplifting.
http://www.vulture.com/2015/06/rewriting-of-david-foster-wallace.html
Thanks for the link! I’m going to do a little searching to find the other articles and see if I can even find a picture. Oh, what a fun day I’m already having. HA.
Ha! (Spoiler: He’s cute.) He wrote a hilarious essay on Jonathan Franzen too. His writing makes me hopeful that serious critical conversations can still happen in this country. You can tell that Didion is his gold standard. His style is very different … but he has the same chilly objectivity, and yet somehow … he’s warm and personal too? Don’t know how he manages it.
Chilly objectivity. Interesting. All I know is that he manages to speak directly to me. And he’s funny. And so smart. Deadly combination…
I agree – he’s a lot of fun and puts into words a lot of the things floating around in my head. I like it when he challenges my own assumptions too (DeLillo, etc.)
Schoolhouse Rock was always a source of wisdom.
“Suppose you’re going nut-gathering…”