Evidence receipt / belief
Published · transcript-backedLydia Davis: belief
23 Mar 2022 Conversations with Tyler Lydia Davis on Language and Literature
“I think with very short sentences, you can also be very sparkling, lyrical, magical.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Lydia Davis
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- belief
- Recorded
- 23 Mar 2022
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
Transcript context
…Proust — there’s an elaborate nature to the language. The Irish writers — whether older or contemporary — there’s something quite mellifluous about it. Do you think it’s hard for a contemporary American writer to develop a truly appealing language? No, but it would be very different. We do tend towards shorter sentences now anyway. Every writer’s very different, but in general, we have less tolerance for long, elaborately constructed sentences. I think with very short sentences, you can also be very sparkling, lyrical, magical. Do you think the late Thomas Pynchon became unreadable, that somehow it was just a pile of complexity and it lost all relation to the reader? Or are those, in fact, masterworks that we’re just not up to appreciating?…
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