title: Aesthetic Resistance and Dis-Interest: Things Which Will Not Allow Themselves to Be Said (Crime and Contemporary Art)
author: John Steppling
description: John Steppling is an original founding member of the Padua hills Playwrights festival, a two-time NEA recipient, rockefeller fellow in theatre, and PEN-west winner for playwriting. his plays have been produced in lA, NyC, Sf, louisville, and at universities across the US, as well in warsaw, lodz, Paris, London and Krakow. he taught screenwriting and curated the cinematheque for five years at the Polish National film School in Lodz. Plays include The Shaper, dream Coast, Standard of the Breed, The Thrill, wheel of fortune, dogmouth, and Phantom luck. film credits include 52 Pick-up (directed by John frankenheimer, 1985) and Animal factory (directed by Steve Buscemi, 1999).
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  # The Art of Writing
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### Robert Louis Stevenson
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### CHAPTER I - ON SOME TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF STYLE IN LITERATURE
  
  
  
  
  
  (1)
  
  
  
  
  
    
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
    
  
  
  THERE is nothing more disenchanting to man than to be shown
  
  
  the springs and mechanism of any art. All our arts and
  
  
  occupations lie wholly on the surface; it is on the surface
  
  
  that we perceive their beauty, fitness, and significance; and
  
  
  to pry below is to be appalled by their emptiness and shocked
  
  
  by the coarseness of the strings and pulleys. In a similar
  
  
  way, psychology itself, when pushed to any nicety, discovers
  
  
  an abhorrent baldness, but rather from the fault of our
  
  
  analysis than from any poverty native to the mind. And
  
  
  perhaps in aesthetics the reason is the same: those
  
  
  disclosures which seem fatal to the dignity of art seem so
  
  
  perhaps only in the proportion of our ignorance; and those
  
  
  conscious and unconscious artific