February 27, 2010

I hope for poetic expressions that are aggressive, baroque and esoteric...

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… I hope for poetic expressions that are aggressive, baroque and esoteric; I prefer ridiculous and embarrassing to perfection. On the literary market, which is dominated by the aesthetic and social ideals of the upper middleclass, it is unacceptable to be excessive in any way – one adjective too many and you’re out. There’s a stubborn cliché that the sober, quiet and elegant, the so-called “simple” is categorically more informative than the noisy. The fleshy, screamy and overdone, the vulgar, desperate and pathetic are so taboo in our culture that there must be dog buried in the phenomenon.*

- Aase Berg, from It’s Not Acceptable to be Fatso





* In Swedish, “a buried dog” has the same meaning as “a dead rat” in English.



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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Couldn't agree more