How I always hope a story will work

Jeff Ford and a bunch of other blokes (well, mostly blokes) talk about worldbuilding, in a wonderland of melded minds at SFSignal, and Jeff refers to his comments from Gooslegate over at Ellen Datlow's livejournal. In talking about worldbuilding in relation to 'The Goosle', he says:

I was trying to point out the remarkable aspects of the story as a true work of art and also taking a piss at the term "worldbuilding" the way it is, I believe, traditionally understood. Defending Lanagan's story against a claim that it was some kind of pornography, I wanted to point out how cohesively all of the different aspects of the story blended inextricably together and supported each other. Lanagan's grim "fairy tale" reality would be less terrifyingly effective, less an authentic nightmare, and I'd care less about what happened to the protagonist, if the dialogue were more "standard," if the sentence structure wasn't a little loopy at times, a little tortured at others in just the right measure, if her word choice wasn't unique. You can't separate these things out from the incredible imagery. The beauty of that story is that it's a vision, an organic whole, and not some construct of parts super glued together.

*glows*