Mel Mudkiper posted:

yeah I teach phonetics and that is gibberish

Lex Neville posted:

/ɪə/ is two syllables in this instance.

Lex Neville posted:

You go first

James Kelman posted:

In this factory in the north of England acid was essential. It was contained in large vats. Gangways were laid above them.

James Kelman posted:

Before these gangways were completely safe a young man fell into a vat feet first. His screams of agony were heard all over the department. Except for one old fellow the large body of men was so horrified that for a time not one of them could move.

James Kelman posted:

In an instant this old fellow who was also the young man's father had clambered up and along the gangway carrying a big pole. Sorry Hughie, he said. And then he ducked the young man below the surface.

James Kelman posted:

Obviously the old fellow had had to do this because only the head and shoulders – in fact, that which had been seen above the acid – was all that remained of the young man.

Kelman posted:

Except for one old fellow the large body of men was so horrified that for a time not one of them could move.

You posted:

Death by acid is such a commonplace occurrence that the old fellow doesn't even flinch

You posted:

especially not when his own son dies

You posted:

he just had to do it to keep the factory going

Eugene V. Dubstep posted:

there's a fine line between naturalistic and clumsy, and the last sentence definitely crosses it.

Eugene V. Dubstep posted:

Lex has got it right, I think. Not knowing what comes next, it seems pretty clear to me that Hughie's father "had had to do this" because obliterating the body was preferable to retrieving only a mutilated head. That said, the situation presented seems a little contrived. I can't imagine open vats of acid (much less acid strong enough to dissolve a body in seconds) have ever been as common as Kelman and DC Comics would have us believe. Practically any other industrial accident would have denied Kelman his absurdly poignant moment.

But we're here to talk prose. Phrases like "had had to do this" and misplaced details like "who was also the young man's father" are clever naturalistic touches, imo—but there's a fine line between naturalistic and clumsy, and the last sentence definitely crosses it.

Lex Neville posted:

^^^ that's cool!

Would you prefer parentheses over omission?

Krankenstyle posted:

i dont see it as contrived.. never underestimate the utter lack of regard for safety or humanity that factory owners have displayed throughout history. locking doors to sweatshops, taking out life insurance on the women who handle your radioactive material, etc, etc, etc,

Eugene V. Dubstep posted:

and the whole reason we've had this argument over why the old fellow dunked the head is that the clause following "because" does not actually give a reason.

Eugene V. Dubstep posted:

e2: I looked this up and apparently the paragraph that was posted is the entire story.

Jon McGregor's If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things posted:

If you listen, you can hear it.
The city, it sings.
If you stand quietly, at the foot of a garden, in the middle of a street, on the roof of a house.
It’s clearest at night, when the sound cuts more sharply across the surface of things, when the song reaches out to a place inside you.
It’s a wordless song, for the most, but it’s a song all the same, and nobody hearing it could doubt what it sings.
And the song sings the loudest when you pick out each note.

The low soothing hum of air-conditioners, fanning out the heat and the smells of shops and cafes and offices across the city, winding up and winding down, long breaths layered upon each other, a lullaby hum for tired streets.
The rush of traffic still cutting across flyovers, even in the dark hours a constant rush of sound, tyres rolling across tarmac and engines rumbling, loose drains and manhole covers clack-clacking like cast-iron castanets.
Road-menders mending, choosing the hours of least interruption, rupturing the cold night air with drills and jack-hammers and pneumatic pumps, hard-sweating beneath the fizzing hiss of floodlights, shouting to each other like drummers in rock bands calling out rhythms, pasting new skin on the veins of the city.
Restless machines in workshops and factories with endless shifts, turning and pumping and steaming and sparking, pressing and rolling and weaving and printing, the hard crash and ring and clatter lifting out of echo-high buildings and sifting into the night, an unaudited product beside the paper and cloth and steel and bread, the packed and the bound and the made.
Lorries reversing, right round the arc of industrial parks, it seems every lorry in town is reversing, backing through gateways, easing up ramps, shrill-calling their presence while forklift trucks gas and prang around them, heaping and stacking and loading.
And all the alarms, calling for help, each district and quarter, each street and estate, each every way you turn has alarms going off, coming on, going off, coming on, a hammered ring like a lightning drum-roll, like a mesmeric bell-toll, the false and the real as loud as each other, crying their needs to the night like an understaffed orphanage, babies waawaa-ing in darkened wards.
Sung sirens, sliding through the streets, streaking blue light from distress to distress, the slow wail weaving urgency through the darkest of the dark hours, a lament lifted high, held above the rooftops and fading away, lifted high, flashing past, fading away.

And all these things sing constant, the machines and the sirens, the cars blurting hey and rumbling all headlong, the hoots and the shouts and the hums and the crackles, all come together and rouse like a choir, sinking and rising with the turn of the wind, the counter and solo, the harmony humming expecting more voices.

So listen.
Listen, and there is more to hear.
The rattle of a dustbin lid knocked to the floor.
The scrawl and scratch of two hackle-raised felines.
The sudden thundercrash of bottles emptied into crates. The slam-slam of car doors, the changing of gears, the hobbled hip-hop of a slow walk home.
The rippled roll of shutters pulled down on late-night cafes, a crackled voice crying street names for taxis, a loud scream that lingers and cracks into laughter, a bang that might just be an old car backfiring, a callbox calling out for an answer, a treeful of birds tricked into morning, a whistle and a shout and a broken glass, a blare of soft music and a blam of hard beats, a barking and yelling and singing and crying and it all swells up the rumbles and crashes and bangings and slams, all the noise and the rush and the non-stop wonder of the song of the city you can hear if you listen the song

and it stops

in some rare and sacred dead time, sandwiched between the late sleepers and the early risers, there is a miracle of silence.

Everything has stopped.

Krankenstyle posted:

i think its probably too long for me

The Vosgian Beast posted:

The Vosgian Beast posted:

"Assassins are evil in alignment (perforce, as the killing of humans and other intelligent life forms for the purpose of profit is basically held to be the antithesis of weal)." -Gary Gygax

It's amazing, almost every word is the wrong word to express what he wants to express. It's both overly technical AND purple at the same time,

ulmont posted:

I'm not going to claim that this is good prose, but I don't see which words are not expressing what Gygax wants to say here, namely that killing people for money is the opposite of wellness* and therefore assassins must be evil.

*Probably the word used closest to incorrectly.

"Hortense Calisher – [u posted:

Standard Dreaming[/u], 36-7"]That was a week he had gone up to Boston on the sinking arrow of premonition, not even trying the telephone. To visit his still-beloved saint. Who was blessedly still there. Who, being as he was, didn't throw his father down the stairs to the idlers watching Berners' try from below, or repudiate him in any of the ways Berners had learned from the group and its occasional visitors. Who had been content to stand there glowing from it, with the luminous skin of the fasting, receding from his father cell by cell. That cellular rejection, Berners could feel it! Of him the father, and through him, life. Which rejection had begun first, one would have to pry out as one would from a foreign organ grafted on a hopeful, intolerant body. Ask, Berners found himself pleading, to that rotunda, nameless as yet, which had already begun to attend him. Ask the cell its knowledge. Cells think.

Who shall I ask, he had thought, his breath rupturing. Who is there to ask? He had stood there, five-foot-eleven to the six-foot-four of this stubbornly pale boy he had grafted on life. Whom Berners still wanted to help to live. Who wanted to show Berners, his father, how to die. Eye to eye. All faces under starvation return to Christ—the cheekbones high, the mouth in its rictus toward the skeleton, in that special smile which begins to understand—what death understands. Berners wanted to ask it a question, but he didn't yet know the question. He felt that his son, now on the other side of the room to which he always retreated, was pressing him to learn how to ask it. Over the years they had long since exchanged all ordinary ones. Afterward Berners, going over that long, motionless communion with the same fidelity memory had for love-play, would record it as the borderline, when the science in his own flesh, blending with the biblical, first began to tell him something it knew.

When he went down the stairs, his son had turned away to the sink and was drinking a glass of water, giving Berners a little hope. But that day, Berners also began thinking that hope might be part of the process too. Deep in its own helix, the dying new graft must itself have a kind of hope.

Outside, the idlers let their glazed eyes pass over him—a prodigal father, not received.