On Thu, 7 Sep 2000, Kevin Burton Smith wrote:
> Doesn't Marlowe at one point say something like "He
snarled and
> called me something nasty." Would that sentence
really have been
> better if Chandler had written: "He called me a
motherfucking
> asshole."
As an icon of its time, yes, it might have been better, but
only if the immediate context is good enough, which leads me
to the following...
> This issue never really bothered me before, but as a
fiction editor
> for my site for the last few years, I've seen some
pretty poor
> writing, tarted up with "fuck you's" and
"cocksucker's", and enough
> misogyny, racism, ignorance and just plain hatred to
make you despair
> for the whole planet.
> Were the actual stories any good, it might be
different. But they're
> not.
So, it's still the point of whether fiction is good or bad.
It's not the words, it's what you make with them.
Juri
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