Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis for December 19, 2021

Amazing how Hemingway, Steinbeck, Salinger, Cheever managed to be great and successful writers without following Rat’s rules.

The more entangled and obscure you are, the more successful you will be.

The sad thing is, as an English major, I know it might just work.

Mark Twain’s definition of a great literary classic was “something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.”

Mine is “a tiresome, plodding, unpleasant chore that no one reads unless they get it assigned to them.”

Wow.

Twas a dark and stormy Knight of Andalusia carrying halberd d’oeuvres.

“Noli timere messorem” = “Don’t fear the reaper.”

The secret of great writing is the same as Colin Chapman’s (of Lotus) for designing great cars: Simplify and add Lightness. Rat is wrong again.

Perhaps this is why any work by William Faulkner is so drawn out and boring.

If it wasn’t published more than 50 years ago very few teachers will assign it anyway.

I learned it. It is spelled I, T.

Rat. Cerbanres would say, “you are a pudding stuffed with proverbs!”

Sounds like Stephen isn’t interested in any literature more challenging than the funny pages!

Joseph Conrad, Franz Kafka, Thomas Wolfe and William Faulkner all seem to have followed Rat’s advice. Call it the abrogation of self-abnegation.

Wow, Rat’s really on to something.

“They moved South as they headed North on their Westward journey to the East!”

Rat: If you can’t impress them with your talents baffle them with B.S! !

Do not fed the reaper!

I did find in English class, if I wrote my first draft, then grabbed a thesaurus for the rewrite, I got at least a full grade better on the paper.Said the same thing with more words.

I wonder what it’s like nowadays, when phrases are abbreviated or represented by first letters of each word, and words are truncated. Would a wordy paper be considered rude rather than intelligent?

Just wondering who Rat’s English teacher was. Mine assigned great, fun reads.

a screaming comes across the sky…

That won’t be much of a bestseller.

That’s not the way. Write the story of a young girl in Nazareth who is about to be married and all of a sudden turns out pregnant. To avoid the scandal, and the groom running away, she says that it was “an angel” who did it. However, things go wrong when everyone falls for it, her son starts a tour of delusion preaching a “new religion”, and all the commotion keeps her lover away. Let the Vatican promote your book :D It doesn’t have to be good. Ask Dan! ;D

Dickens swallowed Samuel Johnson’s “Dictionary of the English Language” then wrote “Tale of two cities”

Nothing to see here …. Time to move on ;-)

riverrun,

They can’t be the same cop and the priest who David Bowie sang about in the song Five Years.

When promulgating your esoteric cogitations or articulating your superficial sentimentalities and amicable, philosophical, or psychological observations, beware of platitudinous ponderosity. Let your conversational communications demonstrate a clarified conciseness, a compact comprehensibleness, no coalescent conglomerations of precious garrulity, jejune bafflement and asinine affectations.Let your extemporaneous verbal evaporations and expatiations have lucidity, intelligibility and veracious vivacity without rodomontade or Thespian Bombast.Sedulously avoid all polysyllabic profundity, pompous propensity, psittaceous vacuity, ventriloquial verbosity and vaniloquent vapidity. Shun double-entendre, obnoxious jocosity and pestiferous profanity, observable or apparent.

It is the insuperable desire for the feeling of mental and linguistic aptitude that best stands in the way of communication. We laboriously elucidate, elaborate , and illuminate, in indecipherable phrases that merely serve to vex, perplex or flummox our interlocutors. In the process, the kernel of the message becomes intricately intertwined in the ludicrous livery in which we couch it. Therefore, despite the gratuitous gratification of pompous verbosity, the only constructive conclusion is that simplicity is key.

Too many words spoil the plot

if teachers didn’t have it in their college course work, you’re out of luck rat. We are what we are thanks to what is poured into us. Trump preys on his victims by this dictum.

In case anyone wants to know, "The official translation in that context is Noli Timere Messorem. This isn’t the most natural word order (which would be noli messorem timere), but the meaning is the same: a command to a single person, “do not fear the reaper”. Blue Oyster Cult did it better.

“Everywhere I go, I’m asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. There’s many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.” Flannery O’Connor.

Noli Timere Messorem was also the motto on Terry Pratchett’s coat of arms, and he was an author who did not follow Rat’s advice AT ALL.

“Gravity’s Rainbow”, Thomas Pynchon: the most lied-about book since “Ulysses”.

Noli messorum timere actually…

Isn’t it interesting how so many people know how to write a bestseller and yet so few of them have done it?

Or, like too many stories I’ve seen, you can start in the middle. And make sure to get “adjectivitis”.

Dang – 1/3 of the way through my novel and now I see that I”ve been doing it wrong. Time to start over. Sigh…

Rat’s not far off! The central character in a mystery crime series I recently finished reading, was a London Police Inspector who got into trouble for punching a dognapping priest.

Yes he said yes he will yes.

I’m a big fan of clear, straight-forward writing, but there are meanings and effects you can’t get in a simple style. There can be a great pleasure in playing with the language. I would say something similar about music, for example, or painting. The great modernists (say, Stravinsky in music, Picasso in painting) achieved amazing meanings and effects that wouldn’t have been possible in a simpler style. I think there can be a kind of pride in anti-intellectualism that I don’t admire. Sure, burst the bubbles of the pompous and pretentious, there’s no shortage of targets, but don’t assume that because you won’t take the time to understand it, it can’t be understood.

If a Catholic Priest punches out an Irish Cop, I just GOT to read that book…..

Yeah, I don’t think anybody’s gonna understand that, Rat. Even Pig didn’t understand that.

Is Pastis a frustrated novelist?

This must be how Charles Dickens wrote his novels. I never did like Charles Dickens… too wordy. Just get to the point already!

James Joyce, my eyes kept sliding off the page.

Hemingway?, Steinbeck?, Salinger?, Cheever? Who are these guys?

See? Easy-peasy Buahahahahaha

My Latin IV class was way too long ago…translation, please.

How many of you have learned something you didn’t previously know by reading a reference to it in a novel? For that matter how many of you, when encountering a reference to something you don’t know in a novel, look it up?

Even if you only read fiction, you can learn a lot of things by reading widely. If you actively don’t want to learn anything you didn’t already know, stay away from books in general. Or sometimes even comic strips. Or the comments to comic strips, where I’ve learned many interesting things over the years.

“If I get the reference and you don’t, the writer is being erudite and you are ignorant. If you get the reference and I don’t, the writer is being obscure and you’re a snob.”

I see that some are complaining that Dickens’ novels (for example) are too long. But I notice that a lot of people these days spend many hours binge-watching TV series. When Dickens’ novels were first published, they came out in magazine instalments, once a week or once a month, over the course of a year or longer. So they were the series of their time. And for those who ask, “Why don’t these writers get to the point?”, I would say, some points take a while to get to. Why isn’t a basketball game decided by the first score? Because that’s not the point. My mother-in-law used to say, “Wouldn’t these game be settled more quickly if they would just have two balls, one for each team, then they wouldn’t have to fight over it.” Yes, she’s missing the point. (And she knew it; she was a smart and funny lady.) The message in a novel is not like the message you find in a fortune cookie. It’s the whole thing, if it’s a good novel.

Sounds like a book I just quit reading because there was too much of that crap! :-)

IT’S TRUE! English teachers love it when you use obscure references and characters!

Literature today is looked upon much like films. While there are people who can appreciate The Battleship Potempkin there are far too many people who think Ernest Goes To Camp is mighty high brow.

Where is the car chase, Rat?! If you have that, you will sell the movie rights to the story.

I think in English Literature terms and not regular English “Noli Timere Messorem” means “Do not be afraid of the reaper”.

Don’t fear the bleeper!

It appears that Rat has been at it all day and/or night, since he is sporting 5 o’clock shadow. I didn’t know rats could do that.

Panel one sounds like the punch line to a “Walk into a bar” joke.

Hey Stephan, have you perchance been reading Hogfather? :)

This one belongs in ‘Frazz’….

Funny how no-one asked about “Astra Planeta”. Did you all think he was talking about a planet? The phrase means, literally, “Wandering Star” and I assume from the time of year it refers to the “Christmas Star”.

“Patriarch’s feathers”? Fallen from an angel’s wings? We need more ideas.

Whoops, he leaked the secret of the “great” writers.

Getting English teachers to assign it doesn’t make it great literature.

I sent it to my book club, ‘cause we’re reading Henry James.

I am sure there are plenty of English teachers who would really go for Rat’s obscure story. It is the fodder for dozens of abstruse lectures and academic articles!

Congratulations, Rat!

Does anyone have any idea what the hell this means?

Hmm, SOMEbody seems to have had trouble in English class. Ah. Explains a lot, actually. ;)

Here’s the web search results for those who wondered but didn’t want to bother: “The Astra Planeta were the children of Eos and Astraeus. They were the younger siblings of the Anemoi. They symbolized the classical planets,… "(Greek Mythology) (Do I need to point out that “apparition” might refer simply to “the appearing” or a spirit or ghostly visual phenomenon? Oh, everyone understands “phenomenon,” right?)

noli temere messorium = do not fear the reaper

as the patriarch’s feathers crested gravity’s arch: Yeah, don’t thing the interweb will help on that one. I think Pastis was just making up a metaphorical phrase, perhaps referring to the priest’s hair flying up as energetically put his whole body into the swing of his punch.

I’m presently reading one of Tom Wolfe’s books, and I agree there is a lot of pretentiousness in some writers’ works. John Grisham will never be called a literary writer, but at least he’s easy to read.

As for the classics, I’m sure I’m not alone when I say I didn’t understand a word of The Sound and the Fury, even when re-reading it as an adult.

This is completely unrelated to anyone or anything except my stomach. I must have a banana. How about you, do you have a favorite fruit or vegetable?