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Literature & Art Across Frontiers: We are not all destined to be Hemingways, nor would most of us want to be
The premise that in many cases writers entertain, move, and inspire us less by what they say (their matter) than by how they say it (their manner) would seem irrefutable. To name some obvious examples, Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, and Dave Barry are read and honored hardly at all for their profound insights about the human condition, much more for their intoxicating and immediately identifiable ways of expressing themselves -- their styles.
This idea, that the how is more important and revealing than the what, goes without saying when it comes to other creative endeavors. Think of Michael Jordan and Jerry West each making a 20-foot jump shot, of Charlie Parker and Ben Webster playing a chorus of All the Things You Are, of Julia Child and Paul Prudhomme fixing a duck à l'orange, or of Pieter Brueghel and Vincent van Gogh painting the same farmhouse. Everyone understands that the content is constant, frequently ordinary, and sometimes banal; that the (wide) variation, the arena for expression and excellence, the fun, the art -- are all in the individual style.
• Style as a pleasure for the reader or the writer - Ooh, aah, look how eccentric and demanding I am [I believe a good teacher should be, that little voice inside my head pipes up, telling me ... Come on now, don't be that guy..]
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• · · Kurt Vonnegut: I Love You, Madame Librarian; I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves
• · · · Books and Politics: Poli-tainment is a bizarre sort of political Cliffs Notes
• · · · · Commentary on Open Access Publishing and Its Costs: The devil you don’t know: The unexpected future of Open Access publishing by Joseph J. Esposito
• · · · · · See Also You'd call him the grandfather of stand-up comedy, if grandfather didn't seem altogether too cosy. He's Richard Pryor