TikTok Lady Rips Ocean Vuong's Precious Prose
"What?" she says
Annie Korzen, an actress most notable for playing Doris Klompus on Seinfeld, is delightful on TikTok. She’s also a writing teacher, and recently posted a video talking about the craft. “I teach writing, and what I really like in anybody’s writing is clear, simple, everyday language,” she said. She then goes on to read a passage from the New York Times about Emily Dickinson that goes as follows:
“In fact, part of her capacious power lies in her ability to use the universal possibility of the natural world — and even abstracted objects like a loaded gun, a funeral carriage — to create potent metaphoric interfaces from which syntax architects complicated philosophical and moral arguments, a mode that was perennial to the religious revivals of her 19th-century milieu.”
After finishing, Korzen deadpans: “What?”
I have to agree. Korzen is too classy to name the name behind this hell sentence, but it turns out she’s reading from an interview with the writer Ocean Vuong, adored by critics for his lyrical if labyrinthine prose in which he mostly uses 50 words to say something that could be conveyed in 10. Whatever, it’s his style, you go my guy. But it’s funny to watch someone like Annie, seemingly without context, read the words of someone so critically adored and say what many of us might be thinking: What is this shit?
Anyway, turning off my replies and going to bed. Bye!
