Downwind from nobody

by Joan Wells

cover good no writing some stamps This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0882661442
• ISBN13: 9780882661445
• Release Date: January 1978
• Publisher: Garden Way Pub
• Length: 291 Pages
• Weight: 1.32 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Rethinking

The above said, semicolon, however comma; somehow, this is a great book. And you will fruitlessly search the universe to find someone else whose life was turned as upside-down by this book, as mine was. My obsession with the writing therein amounts to a life-work. I think it should be a college textbook, and am attempting to buy the rights so I can annotate it and publish the interpolated work. Joan writes in a dialect of English that, once we can isolate it perfectly, as she has, we can efface it from existence. Or at least inoculate the young. Nobody should write words like this unless they died of the plague in London. As "rare as anthropophagi?" (This is a book about hippie goat farming in the Seventies... No anthropophagi have ever existed in Oregon, unless Hannibal Lecter moved to Portland recently. This is what we in the writing industry call the WFW.) There are writers by the hundreds who can write beautifully, in a way to make your guts twist because you couldn't have written THAT in a century of trying. Joan's writing style could lead ten million students out of their fill-up-the-page rut, and show them what it leads to in later life. We actually met, once, in a hot tub. What an incredible, beautiful, and wise being she was, and while I've thought for over 30 years that she was a world-class awful writer, now I wonder if she had a long-range plan in mind. Maybe she knew how deeply the syntax would affect me. This book would lose 99% of its value in a Cliff Notes. Imagine tuning a car engine so that it would barely run, and trying to see how bad your mileage could be, and how many breakdowns you had, while traveling from coast to coast. And arriving safely, getting good mileage. That's just the first boggler in this book, written on a typewriter. If I could take only one book on vacation, it would be this one. And I'd read it with the same pleasure as probing a toothache, for the thousandth time, quite literally. This book merits study by finer minds than mine, and better writers. It's either genius, or stultifying insanity, or something else.

So bad that it's good

Met Joan Wells in 1980, in Portland. Wonderful person, but an abysmal writer. Buy this book. Read it. Examine how the author uses, and misuses, the English language. A gaggle of kittens? Of farm implements? I'm using it as a contrapuntal element in a teaching situation, to contrast it against the brilliantly written "The Egg and I." Obviously the author used this previous (1940's) book as a template. Also, the author decided to retreat into edu-speak and academese when telling an otherwise wonderful story. She has a tin ear for the language, and never, ever, gets the correct word. Some of her sentences are so mindlessly pointless that all you can do is wonder what the f* she was trying to say in English. This book should be required reading in every level of English education. This is what edumahooticators would write, if someone turned them loose. Joan was too afraid to communicate. Oddly enough, it's a great story, well worth reading. Too bad the author decided to hide behind chalktalk crapspeak. "No geese ply today's skyways, no birds extoll (sic) stippled shelter." Pure horse puckey. This is why most teachers can't teach writing. They've been crippled by their years of education, taught to rant a polysyllabic garbage that is obfuscatory and crepuscular, so that nobody will think they're ordinary, stupid, or worse: uneducated. When I read Betty MacDonald's book, I think, What beautiful, clear, honest, natural phrasing. When I read Joan Well's book, I think, What a Goddamned shame she went to college. She was a poet. Then she got filled up with edumahootication.