    
Thumper
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Thumper
Post Number: 475
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 | | Posted on Friday, July 21, 2006 - 12:29 pm: | |
Hello All,
Solomon: Man, you don't know how I wish I could be in Harlem this weekend! The panel discussion that you will be participating in would have been the one I would have attended. Since I can't be there I can only say that Urban fiction is more Stuck on STUPID. There is nothing creative about wallowing in ignorance. It's triflin'. There is nothing creative about being damn near illiteratre and being PROUD OF IT! I went through this discussion a couple of years ago at the BEA in Chicago. One of A_womon's cousin *LOL* said that his grammatically incorrect writing was his "voice". Now I knew right then that I was looking at a stark tarnated fool! Listen, when Hughes, Hurston, Wright, and others broke with literary standards when writing dialogue (writing how people really sound when talking in everyday life) they were criticised for it. The major difference being these authors knew the rule in order to BREAK the rule. I don't anyone with a lick of sense in their head can say the same for some of today's hip hop writers. There is no knowledge or mastery of the language present in their writing. If there was, this skill would emulate from their writing the same as the smell of fried chicken hitting you in the face when you walk into the house. You did need to go, look in the skillet, and flip a couple of pieces around in the grease to tell that chicken is being fried. So, even though the words "aint", today's slang is pepperer throughout the book, the author's knowledge of the language would show in the descriptions, the structure of the story, even the dialogue of the characters. My vote is for the stuck on stupid, because a person who truly value the word, or his words, will not go out of his way NOT to know the right way. That's straight low-rent! |