Misc notes - Heaney, cliche, genre, Cusk

Snippets from the substack world: Heaney, cliché, genre and Cusk -

• "Heaney didn’t have to resort to poetic metaphor nearly as often as the rest of us, because he always, somehow, found the word he needed" - Don Paterson
• "There’s a big difference between clichéd writing and clichéd wisdom. While certain sayings that feel clichéd to us may be worn thin, they are not lazy strings of overused words. They are idioms, metaphors, proverbs, or aphorisms, and, taken together, they form a kind of common wisdom worthy of defense. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”" - Catherine Shannon
• "the publishing ecosystems for literary and genre fiction differ wildly, particularly in terms of attitudes toward money. In the present, the separation of these two worlds is often justified in terms of aesthetics. ... why did the publishing world bifurcate in the first place? The answer can be found partly in the history of the novel in English. At the start of the 19th century, fiction wasn’t a prestige genre, and genre boundaries were porous. Dickens mixed social commentary with spontaneous human combustion and ghosts. George Eliot wrote a novella called The Lifted Veil about a man with psychic powers. As mass-printed material increased in availability, class divisions within fiction began, driven by ideas about who was reading what. The penny-dreadful (serialized stories) in the 19th century came to be associated with the working poor, the dirtiness of city slums, loose sexuality, and alcoholism. ... Another answer lies in the establishment of Creative Writing as an academic discipline." - Jennifer Pullen
• "I am anti-Cusk and I am grateful for this modest opportunity to push back on her pernicious influence in the literary culture. It’s like a combination of all the vices of fiction in our time: there’s the art house preening, the willful obfuscation, the use of triviality in a way that is somehow meant to come across as portentous. ... the absence of storytelling narrative creates an inexorable pull towards babble. And this is babble." - Sam Kahn