Editors & Sailors
By:
August 30, 2011
HiLobrow contributor Mark Kingwell — always a contrarian — praises editors, of all people, in a CBC Books essay today. Well, good editors, to be precise. He says:
Good editors save you from yourself. They help you kill your darlings, as Faulkner put it: anything cute, slick, sentimental, or too clever by half. I try not to look back on my published work — doing so tends to generate rapid flashes of shame (“I can’t believe I wrote that”) and equally shameful vanity (“Not so bad, actually”) — but if I ever find myself indulging it, my most frequent thought is: I wish I had listened to so-and-so when he/she said to blueline that bit of tricksy guff.
Meanwhile, the magazine Linebreak published a poem by HILOBROW’s Matthew Battles today. It begins like so:
No tricksy guff in evidence!