Now for Wrath, for Ruin, and the Red Dawn

I warned you that this post was forthcoming.

I tire of the necessity for one-lined anecdotes, for the desire to condense an entire night’s thoughts and events into something that one can twitter, can post on texts from last night, can lead into a single – usually impure and incomplete - sentence at the end of the blogpost. It is time for the Zeitgeist pendulum of style to swing once more.*

The Minimalism of my contemporaries was borne of those like Hemingway and Carver, but it has bastardized all; that which protected from inane inconsequentiality was the give-and-take of starkly indicative sentences and the longer descriptions that surrounded them. Hemingway had the T-Unit count of a third-grader, but not the soul of one. I fear the same cannot be said of all of my contemporaries.

Begone, then, you days of adverb-less statements!

Begone, tales of ambiguity and brevity!

Begone, sentences without hearts, without souls, without breath!

Let the demands of the Whites and Turabians fade into the past as have the programmes of Dickens and Tolstoy and all the rest!

Let our Style, all ye Post-Modernists, equivocate to the purgative wishes of our philosophies.!

Let awaken the World Ear to sentences of length longer than an iamb, to wishes darker than an economist’s soul, to sounds more frightful than Ginsberg’s howl!

No longer can we wait in the shadows of Dali, of Warhol, of Einstein and Eisenhower, of Hitler and Stalin, of Foucault and Sartre, of those who forged the 20th century to what it was – no longer can we honor our forebears at the expense of our desires. May our swinging pendulum strike against the bounds of their aesthetics and shatter their portraits into nothingness.

* I freely admit that this is a crotchety old man’s response to the hipness of Twitter, to the paunchy one-liners of bloggers and Internet users the world over. It makes my demand no less imperative.