I'm trying to read more dead people because I keep having to read stuff for juries and so forth.
I am in Boston right now, in fact, to do work at the New England Historical Genealogical Library, where I'm trying to finish up tracing my lineage back to the seventeenth century.
My contention is that that style is just as stylized as an ornate style.
When prose gets too stylized and out of control - and Stein is sometimes a good example - when you don't know what the hell is going on, then it's kind of boring.
My grandfather was a newspaper publisher and his paper had all the comics in NYC, so some of my earliest memories are of reading the family paper and heading straight for the comics insert.
The process of composition, messing around with paragraphs and trying to make really good prose, is hardwired into my personality.
