Word: hacks
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Because of today's declining market for fiction, says Fleming in this week's New York Times Book Review, writers are producing journalism to make a living-an advance over writing hack fiction or Hollywood scripts. Beyond that, journalism enables them to escape from their own introspection, the "feeling of feeding on one's own vitals, of using up and then repeating and restringing ad nauseam one's autobiographic experience." Journalism replenishes their experiences of the world...
...decent editor might have been able to hack free some interesting thoughts from yards of Year-bok-style verbiage. ("The situation I have seen that probably best exemplifies this conflict of criteria is the plight of the high school super-athlete at Harvard," writes the jock.) On the other hand, nothing good could come from the idiotic little statistical "analysis" of the senior class taken from the blurbs accompanying seniors' pictures...
...charisma,' 'existential' (used seriously), 'dialogue' (as applied to political talks between nations) and 'vocabulary' (as applied to a dauber). Listing in one breath Auschwitz, Hiroshima and Viet Nam is seditious poshlost. Belonging to a very select club (which sports one Jewish name, that of the treasurer) is genteel poshlost. Hack reviews are frequently poshlost, that is simple, but it also lurks in certain highbrow essays. Poshlost calls Mr. Blank a great poet, and Mr. Bluff a great novelist. One of poshlost's favorite breeding places has always been the Art Exhibition; there it is produced by so-called sculptors working...
Enough quibbling. They've transformed a hack's piece into something golden. Throw money...
This is Nat Turner's message-and Styron's. His story flows relentlessly to its collision with horror. The conspirators hack off heads as if vengeance alone were the insurrection's aim. The de fenders of slavery respond as bloodily; more than 200 Negroes, most of them innocent, die in reprisal. U.S. slavery's only true revolt vanishes into the darkness before the Civil War. "It just ain't a race made for revolution, that's all," says a court officer smugly...