So the latest fun activity for bloggers is the I Write Like super duper writing analysis website that proclaims it will tell you which famous writer you sound (write) like. As with everything in ten interwebs, I am a bit skeptical, but we are also want a bit of ego polishing from time to time. I selected at random a somewhat long post of mine, added it to the magic site and….
David Foster Wallace
I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!
OK, who the hell is David Foster Wallace? I googled him and I got the pic of somebody that looks quite the hippie and published three books before committing suicide.
So I tried again with a different long post and I got…
Seriously? Vonnegut?? C’mon! I read Welcome to the Monkey House and Slaughterhouse 5 under duress and only with the aid of spirits which my Father frowned upon because I was an underage student in high school ( I had a weird literature teacher but most of her assignments were fun for book lovers) and I do hope I am not that frigging convoluted… although it may explain my low hit count.
I tried yet another post, medium size and posted under the influence of ire. I got…
I am not quite sure how should I feel about a writer whose greatest achievement was a novel about a potential child molester. And no, I haven’t read Lolita but I am really not attracted to the theme.
So next I try a mid size paragraph instead of a long post and I am taken to…
Is this the Stephen King of The Stand (which I wouldn’t mind since it is his best book) or the Stephen King post PC thinking and Hollywood bucks? I heard an ugly rumor that he is the sinister force behind the Twilight saga and mentor of Anne Rice and the Fabio-Gayish-Vampire genre.
Another random short post is used and now I am….
Hmmmm. OK do I detect a pattern here? Ulysses was another of those books that I read because I had to. This time was chasing a girl and trying to do things to impress her. At the end she went and chose a Che T-shirt- patchouli-sandals-fleas&ticks hippie I kid you not. It is not like I don’t like long winded books, I was raised and enjoyed War and Peace and any long winded russian writer from back then plus I still think that charging over $20 for a book with less than 300 pages is a felony, but Ulysses was a drag and it is not my style!
One more chance at redemption! Three paragraphs at random, now or never. Survey says..
Arthur Conan Doyle
I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!
YES! I am staying here. Forty plus years later I still enjoy Holmes & Watson’s stories like the first day I laid my hands on a battered and cover-less paperback I got by pennies on this little bookstore somewhere south of the Caribbean. I still have the book, but now it is set aside as a personal relic not to be touched because it may fall apart any second.
The truth, I think this badge is more truthful than all the analysis out coming out to the webiste.
a jackass with a laptop
I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!
And that’s all I have to say 🙂
Re Lolita: it’s the (sexually experienced) young girl who comes on to the inexperienced bumbling older guy. And it’s not a pr0-pedophile book by any means — both characters end up with their lives ruined. It’s a tragedy in the real, honest Greek sense of the word.
And Nabokov was probably the 2nd most authentically conservative, anti-Communist writer of the mid-late 20th century (after his fellow countryman Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.)
Give Lolita a chance.
Re Vonnegut: The only good thing he wrote was “Harrison Bergeron”, a short story about a society where equality has gone mad (ironic, as he was a committed socialist).
If you haven’t read it, you should.
I’ll second reading “Harrison Bergeron,” one of my favorite movies is based on it.
Oh, and I write like Cory Doctorow.
I’ll give Lolita a try… and who the heck is Cory Doctorow? Sounds like a tropical bird.
Imagine me, as a Leftist. He was born to Trotskyists, worked for Greenpeace, and he is pretty far to the left.
LOL… You got screwed. 🙂
I got Orwell. Not too bad.
Sure, he was a leftist, but he prized gun ownership, warned against pacifism, and turned against the Soviet Union after the Spanish Civil War and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.