Worst of all, John Gardner relies so much on the "Crippled-Analogue Shuffle," "Garbled-Comparison Hop," and "Down Home Two-Step" for flashy similes and borrows so frequently from the "Warehouse of Hackneyed Phrases" for triumphant cliches as to produce a style so execrable as to be absolutely
styleless (Sorrentino, Something 216-17).
"He's completely
styleless," says the actor, best known to gay audiences for playing the son of Nathan Lane and Robin Williams in The Birdcage, taking over the lead (after Joe Mantello) of the Broadway run of Angels in America, and starring in the indie gay film Urbania.
Pound and Brakhage both had moved away from the accepted and acclaimed to styles that could be mistaken as
styleless. They both had been held to account for what had been perceived, by critics of their work, as unfortunate appropriations from other traditions that they had only partially comprehended.
FRONTMAN Jonathan Donahoe is one of those rock stars who can get away with caressing microphones, smoking on stage and
styleless dancing.
Those tones were amplified by the
styleless flounces and frills of the woman's white gown and headdress and by the way that Stefan, in searching for his key, was encumbered by his evening dress, awkward in his management of a bulky cloak, his top hat and gloves.
Sagar is an excellent critic, so this is only one step in a much longer and more complex argument, one which sees Hughes as striving for a voice enriched by exposure to other cultures, but finally reaching beyond those cultures to "the ultimate
styleless simplicity" (xiii) he seems to have found in Shakespeare.
Brodsky "writes badly, like Dostoevsky"; he is "an heir to the
styleless Dostoevsky." What sounds at first to be unforgivingly critical soon becomes a ringing endorsement for the esthetic "inconstancy" of Brodsky's verse, which Batkin calls "chechetka" (tap-dancing): "I sense Brodsky's mastery in significant details: in the clear-sighted and accurate visual sweep, the energy and capriciousness of rhythm, the refined enjambment and consonance, the dazzling tap dance." As with Dostoevsky, this often disconcerting shift between beauty and boorishness reflects an existential situation; it reflects the constant attempts of boorish man to hear, see, or find an eternal beauty: "It's untrue that there's no sense to life.
Occasionally -- but only occasionally, for we usually photograph rather badly; in appearance we tend at best to be
styleless -- there's a professor teaching a class.