| on editing and ugliness |
So I've been editing all year. A law journal, of all things. And it's been incredibly fun. I will be sad to be done. I'm trying to figure out how to characterize what this one-year stint has done to me. I know I longer end sentences with "on." I don't use "since" when I mean "because." But what does that mean? It's not that I've gotten more anal, I've realized. Although I've feared that before. It's that previously whatever things have become, well, ugly. My friend Andy (also an editor-type person) said it best. Upon looking at the proofs of an article of his which was published in a journal with different period-quote conventions: His publication was a policial science publication; his journal is a law journal. Andy said "God, it's so *hideous* to me now, seeing it the other way." And that's it. It's not our level of anality that's changed, it's our aesthete that's changed. Previously ignored things are uglified. Like glaring pock-marks on the face of a pretty girl. Or buck teeth.1 We react. Viscerally. To these grammatical "errors." They are not errors to us; we do not look at them and compare them to rules and note: hey, this text isn't following the rule. No. Instead, we look at it and think: Ugly! Ugly! Go away! Make it stop! Things uglify and prettify for no reason at all. I once thought lime green was terribly terribly ugly. And now I find it beautiful, but in an ugly kind of way. Edginess is prettiness and ugliness, rolled up in one. Reading ohsohip on-line publications makes full screen text look ugly to me now. I can only bear thin, narrow columns of type. Endings, clear concise endings in fiction are ugly to me now. They started out as beautiful, back when I read Tolkeinesque fantasy and Star Warslike science fiction. Then the non-ending, the hanging nothingness became edgy in my mind, hip. Now, from my terrible diet of "postmodern" fiction, the alternative-- the wrap-up endings--those are ugly to me now. Oh, and footnotes. Footnotes are pretty to me now. My love for DFW is not due to humor, which would entail a recognition of the ridiculousness of extensive footnoting, but rather to a grand appreciation and revelry in footnotes in general. They are beautiful, they are a joy. Yet I recognize their mockery value, and I rejoice in that too. See Carlos Manuel Vazquez, Eleventh Amendment Schizophrenia, in some law journal somewhere. There is a page. Actually, there are two, no three pages. ALL A SINGLE FOOTNOTE. Beautiful and ugly. Only the author's pure seriousness flips the article over the line from edgy, into, well, mockingly horrible.2 Is edginess ever completely serious? I do not know. I would have sex to see a self-mocking, edgy law review article. Oh, wait, what a dumb sentence. I would also have sex to eradicate my own personal love-hate relationship with edginess. To fight it out once and for all. To break up with edginess, and to make up the next morning amidst great sex, and then to break up again. But I wander. Anyway. 041200
1. I'll have you know I actually like buck teeth. All because of an ex from last summer. It is strange the types of things that can change one's personal sense of aesthetics. 2. But Vazquez has buck teeth, and a silly, youngish voice. So I am transfixed, even while his lectures put me to sleep. |