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Zsa Zsa Gabor posted:Brainworm, I'd like to read your opinion on Steinbeck's "East of Eden". I think you said earlier that you haven't read much of his stuff, but maybe that's changed since the begining of the thread. That unfortunately hasn't changed. I'm teaching a Middle English Lit. course in the Fall to cover for a colleague of mine who'll be on sabbatical, and so most of my reading has been in preparation for that. quote:Unrelated: what are your thoughts on David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest"? I finished reading it a week ago and am still struggling to wrap my mind around it (or at least some parts of it). Jest was a mixed bag for me. It's a fine book, don't get me wrong. But I think it also shows some of DFW's limitations that aren't as apparent when he's writing in short forms. The biggest of these is that DFW has a really limited emotional range; basically, everything he writes is some combination of hilarious, erudite, and depressing. And that's great for essays, right? But for a novel, that's not enough. And I think you can see the lines that this draws in Jest. The book as a whole seems to move from hilarious ironies (about the first half or 2/3) to tragic ones; that's a gambit that works well in other books -- Frantzen does it really well in The Corrections, for example -- but it doesn't work for DFW. In other words, to take a cue from Dr. Johnson (talking about Caesar), I'd call Jest a "cold" book. There's a lot of plotting, some surprises, some great humor, and some hideous tragedy. But there isn't really any warmth or room for serious empathy. The characters and situations just aren't built that way; really, they start off as the kind of surreal caricatures you'd expect from an all out farce, and while they get more complicated they don't seem to develop real emotional depth or personhood. All that said, Jest has a lot going for it. DFW is really a prose master, and I think whatever lessons he learned from Jest would have been put to great use in another novel.
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Jul 28, 2010 15:35
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Amazing thread! My question: Does it make any difference if the ghost of Old Hamlet is malevolent or benevolent?
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Jul 28, 2010 18:24
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El Kabong posted:I'd like to start reading more (any) poetry. [...] I've tried to start reading random poets but can't seem to find anything that really catches my interest, got any suggestions for a 28 year old, unemployed, angry guy? Help me noble brainworm! I think Naked Man Punch has some good contemporary poets down, but it's also worth remembering that poetry has a long, long tail. We're lucky enough that some of the greatest poets who ever wrote in English -- Milton, Donne, and so on -- are still as easily readable as most new poetry. What I'm saying is that, for a modern reader, English poetry is an embarrassment of riches. The flip side of this is that poetry's deeply traditional; it's sometimes difficult to make sense of modern poetry without seeing what it's responding to. Sort of like making sense of most modern art. So you could start in a couple places. I think sonnets are about the best introduction to a tradition you're likely to find, and Levin's Book of the Sonnet looks like a good introduction and anthology. A second, more difficult tradition is metaphysical poetry, and it makes a good introduction largely on the strength of TS Eliot. Eliot basically revived an earlier poetic tradition that included Donne, Herbert, Vaughn, and others, and the dialogue between his poetry and theirs is fascinating. All these poets are tough and most of them are religious, so this isn't everybody's favorite introduction to English poetry. But seeing how they fit with one another is also singularly rewarding.
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Jul 29, 2010 17:06
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OctaviusBeaver posted:I am having trouble figuring out what part of this passage from Antony and Cleopatra means: I think that's about right. At this point in the play, Antony thinks Cleopatra's dead; it's basically the end of Romeo and Juliet all over again. So Antony's losing his mind -- a process that started before the play did, with his obsessive love of Cleopatra, and has been beating him down steadily for a couple hours of stage time. So a paraphrase of this passage might look something like this: Bastard Shakespeare posted:Wait for me [Cleopatra], So, again, your sense of the lines is right on. What's probably most important in this speech, though, is what Antony's choosing to say. I mean, he's talking to a dead woman and making up a sort of hedonistic afterlife so he can write a happy ending for himself. He's totally broken with reality. I'm not just saying this because Antony's forgotten all his worldly responsibilities. It's also clear at this point that he's re-writing his relationship with Cleopatra as functional rather than just passionate; he imagines that and Cleopatra are going to be able to jointly conquer this ghosts-in-flowers afterlife, which is exactly the kind of thing they haven't been able to do in the real world. Every time Antony and Cleopatra try a joint conquest, she abandons him, they lose, and they have a drama-packed argument that leads to another disaster. So you can see how far from real Antony is here. He's not only making up an afterlife where he and Cleopatra can be together and unstressed by the responsibilities of running a kingdom. He's also making up a kind of relationship with Cleopatra that he's never actually had. Incidentally, this is one of the reasons I love teaching Antony and Cleopatra against Romeo and Juliet. In a late play like A&C, the characterization is more nuanced and, I think, more realistic. I've never known anyone who's been in a relationship anything like Romeo and Juliet's; Romeo's too emo, Juliet's too clever and loving, and their situation is too contrived for anything to ring true. But Antony's obsessions and delusions? Cleopatra's intensity and inconstancy? That's like an everyday disaster.
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Jul 29, 2010 18:08
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WE RIDE posted:Amazing thread! Thanks. Believe it or not, I'm jump starting the blog again now that I've got some personal stuff sorted out. quote:My question: Does it make any difference if the ghost of Old Hamlet is malevolent or benevolent? I think it could. There used to be a popular reading of Hamlet that you'll still see from time to time. It sees the play as Hamlet's coming into a kind of faith, and in fact reads the play as a sort of morality or parable. The anchor quote for this and like readings is in Act V, right after Hamlet escapes the pirates and lands again in Denmark: Hamlet posted:[...] There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. I've added some breaks in here to show how the ideas separate out in this reading. The first is supposed evoke Matthew 10:29-31: Matthew posted:29 Are not two sparrows sold for a penny ? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from the will of your Father. And it does, sort of. The point is that if you read Hamlet as coming into certainty that God has a plan for him, and you think that Hamlet is essentially correct about this, it follows that Old Hamlet's ghost can't really be malevolent. After all, the ghost is initiating a series of events that ends with the revelation of God's justice and the salvation of Hamlet who, before this point, may have been on the brink of suicidal despair. So if you read Hamlet this way, or at least with these kinds of concerns in mind, it matters a great deal whether the ghost is malevolent: a good ghost means that Hamlet may be correct about God incorporating him into some kind of greater divine plan for earthly justice. A bad ghost means that, as late as Act V, Hamlet may be entirely mistaken about the nature of the world and about his place in it, and so may finally accomplish a great deal in terms of justice, action, revenge, self-understanding, and so on while being fundamentally wrong about the kinds of metaphysical concerns he constantly gives voice to in the first several acts. That's an entirely different kind of character arc, because it allows a character who may have been giving voice to different worldviews in a sort of pragmatic way, rather than discovering them through revelation or introspection. That is, Hamlet might know he needs to act and so voice a view of the world that makes his actions justifiable, just as he had earlier voiced views that justified all of his plans through the first four acts. That kind of Hamlet is really interesting, but lacks the kind of spiritual integrity that religious readings of the play often value. But that's also the kind of Hamlet I like -- surrounded by political and supernatural treachery, working against constant and varied delusions, but still a kind of contender. Making Hamlet the knowing hand of God spoils that, I think.
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Jul 29, 2010 21:22
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I haven't posted in here in over a year. The fact that it's still going really indicates how great this thread is. I just saw As You Like It this weekend. It was my first time seeing a professional production of Shakespeare and I enjoyed it thoroughly. Anyway, I was wondering if you could: i) share your thoughts on the play generally (if you haven't elsewhere in this thread - and it's very possible that you have); and ii) explain what you think is the best way to approach seeing a performance of Shakespeare. I had never even heard of As You Like It, much less read the play, so you could say I was 'cold' going into it. On the one hand, I think it's great to be completely unaware of what will happen next (as an analogy, I figure people aren't expected to read screenplays prior to watching films), but on the other, I feel I could have maybe gotten more out of the performance if I had studied the play. Thoughts? Thanks again for this great thread. I mentioned this in my first post in here over a year ago, but it was actually the reason I signed up for SA.
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Aug 1, 2010 12:35
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Brainworm posted:So you could start in a couple places. I think sonnets are about the best introduction to a tradition you're likely to find, and Levin's Book of the Sonnet looks like a good introduction and anthology. I managed to find that book at my library, thanks for the advice.
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Aug 3, 2010 20:45
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What is your opinion on Robert McKee's lecture/book "Story"?
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Aug 4, 2010 00:18
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Halisnacks posted:I haven't posted in here in over a year. The fact that it's still going really indicates how great this thread is. Glad you like it, and I'm glad it's still going -- I've had a lot go on this past year, so writing in this thread has been a nice constant. quote:I just saw As You Like It this weekend. It was my first time seeing a professional production of Shakespeare and I enjoyed it thoroughly. Anyway, I was wondering if you could [...] share your thoughts on the play generally (if you haven't elsewhere in this thread - and it's very possible that you have) As You Like it is probably the most celebrated Shakespearean comedy, and I think there are two reasons for this. 1) It's arguably the first musical in English theater. This is sometimes played up in performance, but it's more often buried. That said, it's not a broadway style musical -- the songs as performed don't have a great deal to do with the plot. Instead, there's a dramatic situation that involves a lot of guys with a lot of leisure time hanging out in a forest, and they're more than happy to sing what were probably well-known songs for anybody who asks them to. This was sort of a natural evolution of what people now widely agree were usual Renaissance staging practices: at certain act breaks, and maybe every act break, there would be a sort of intermission with music and (in the case of Shakespeare's company) dancing by one Will Kemp -- one of those fat but deceptively agile comedians who mostly played nearly identical farcical roles.* As You Like It moves these musical interludes into the body of the play. 2) As You Like It also established a now-common character type: the Omni-Competent Heroine. This is of course in the person of Rosalind, whose most notable characteristic is that she is excellent at everything. OCHs are usually, like Rosalind, put in some difficulty by some entirely arbitrary twist of fate. In the process of extracting themselves from that difficulty they usually "rescue" one or more people: In AYLI Rosalind, exiled through no fault of her own, rehabilitates Orlando through her cross-dressing tutelage and instigates a series of events that lead to the exiled Duke reclaiming his throne and Orlando's evil brother, Oliver, recognizing the error of his ways. Score at least three for her, plus maybe Touchstone. You see OCHs do this all the time in modern comedies -- mostly, but not exclusively, as bossy white suburban moms. Two good examples are Nancy Botwin (on Weeds) and Leigh Anne Tuohy (Sandra Bullock's character in The Blind Side). Both texts are built around the idea that either heroine -- despite being upper-class housewives and (in Tuohy's case) an interior decorator -- can reflexively do things that usually require either complex training, field experience, or at least long habituation. Nancy Botwin can, as a matter of course, sell enough weed to maintain a home in an exclusive private suburb and a lease on a Land Rover, and buy it from trustworthy suppliers whom she effortlessly locates. She can also intimidate other dealers and people we understand to be violent criminals, and all while being a major player in the PTA. Tuohy can successfully diagnose and correct a football player's on-field problems armed with a thirty second pep talk and a standardized test score.** You get the idea. The OCH is a sort of Homer Simpson -- a character whose abilities are elastic enough to meet whatever situation the plot demands -- but outside the farcical context that normally makes such a character workable. Of course you'll see OCHs in other places, too -- particularly comic (happy-ending) drama. Lifetime movies are built around them. That's a strange legacy for a Shakespearean character, but there it is all the same. I don't mean to harsh the OCH, but despite their Shakespearean heritage they're often vehicles for terrible, terrible writing. quote:ii) explain what you think is the best way to approach seeing a performance of Shakespeare. I had never even heard of As You Like It, much less read the play, so you could say I was 'cold' going into it. On the one hand, I think it's great to be completely unaware of what will happen next (as an analogy, I figure people aren't expected to read screenplays prior to watching films), but on the other, I feel I could have maybe gotten more out of the performance if I had studied the play. Thoughts? Oh, you always want to see a play before you read it. I don't often have the luxury of teaching plays that way, but I'd do it every time if I could. Plays do lots of things that are easier to apprehend on the stage than on the page. There are matters of timing (surprises, quick exchanges), for example, or scenes that only work with a certain arrangement of characters on the stage -- Troilus and Cressida V.ii (with Thersites eavesdropping on Troilus and Ulysses, who are eavesdropping on Cressida and Diomed) is probably the most notorious of these. There are also smaller matters, like what an actor can do with the lines he's given. I've heard at least one actor playing Lear say "howl, howl, howl" in Act V instead of, you know, howling or screaming. Likewise, students sometimes think that words like "pah" or "zounds" are more words than sounds, or that every speech is meant to be delivered calmly, clearly, and deliberately -- even though they'd never tolerate a modern actor who says "ah-choo" for a sneeze or "grunt, sigh" during a love scene. quote:Thanks again for this great thread. I mentioned this in my first post in here over a year ago, but it was actually the reason I signed up for SA. Thank you. I was going to ask for your ten bucks, but someone got me this avatar. So it evens out. * Think Chris Farley. ** Apparently Mike Orr scored a 98% in "protectiveness."
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Aug 4, 2010 00:38
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El Kabong posted:I managed to find that book at my library, thanks for the advice. Please let me know what you think of it. I've never used it in the classroom before, but I'm considering it for later this year.
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Aug 4, 2010 00:41
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Thanks for that! I hadn't really thought Rosalind was some archetypal character, but your explanation certainly makes sense. Definitely I'm gonna try to locate a copy to read. Now, did you use the term Omni-Competent Heroine because of the context (speaking about Rosalind), or is this a common character type that is always (or usually) a woman? Your two modern-day examples were about female protagonists, and you also mentioned they are common characters in Lifetime movies. Brainworm posted:It's arguably the first musical in English theater. This is sometimes played up in performance, but it's more often buried. Just thought I'd mention this was definitely played up in the performance I saw. It was the production running at the Old Vic in London, directed by Sam Mendes.
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Aug 4, 2010 12:30
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Brainworm, this has been a fantastic thread. A great read start to finish. Having been out of school for some time (and having taken only two 1st year literature courses) I found your comments on approaching literature in reference with other works very interesting . I recently re-read "The Magus" by John Fowles, and though it's a shot in the dark, I was wondering if you had read it, and if you view it in relation with any other works.
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Aug 10, 2010 18:44
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Halisnacks posted:[...]did you use the term Omni-Competent Heroine because of the context (speaking about Rosalind), or is this a common character type that is always (or usually) a woman? Your two modern-day examples were about female protagonists, and you also mentioned they are common characters in Lifetime movies. I think that this character type is gender specific, at least in the incarnations that people take seriously -- you'll see omnicompetent heroes in badly-written adventure stories, for example, or as Homer Simpsons: characters whose abilities are elastic enough to accommodate whatever comic situation the writers dream up. But more often, your male protagonists have tightly bounded areas of competence. Think MacGyver's mechanical skill, or James Bond's mastery of aristocratic leisure activities (gambling, seducing models, and so on). In solid treatments of this character type, those areas of competence also imply certain kinds of flaws: Bond's particularly good at his job because he's a sociopath, and a hero because he works against a set of less-acceptable sociopaths. I mean, it's telling that Bond only works as a hero -- or looks like a good person -- when he's set against a villain who's trying to destroy the world for no particularly good reason. Put him in any remotely realistic situation, take away the Richard III-style villainous caricatures, and Bond's a sleazy murderer. This doesn't mean you don't see heroines with similarly bounded abilities. It just means that, for whatever reason, leading female characters don't necessarily need bounded abilities or plausible limitations in order to be dramatically viable. I don't know why this is, but it sticks out like mad in television shows especially. Even in generally well-written sitcoms like The Simpsons, the comic situation or conflict that drives an episode almost always originates in a well-understood limitation of the leading man. Homer's a lazy glutton, so he decides to gain weight to get on disability. Tim Taylor's semicompetent weedeater modification strips the siding off the house. Fred Flintstone, I dunno, goes bowling instead of grocery shopping. Hilarity ensues. Point is, that's the trope. Watch fifteen minutes of any sitcom, and you'll see a conflict driven by the leading man's limitations. We all know that Homer Simpson's lazy and inept, that Fred Flintstone (and every other character modeled on Ralph Kramden) is a loudmouthed boor, that Tim Taylor is an incompetent and misguided mechanic, and so on. But look at their wives. I think you'd have to watch a lot of The Simpsonss to spot Marge's limitations. Same goes for Jill Taylor or Alice Kramden, all of whom are major characters and otherwise extensively detailed.
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Aug 17, 2010 15:47
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Here's a question I spent some time thinking about today, and I'd like to hear your thoughts. You can mistrust, and you can distrust. They mean largely the same thing. You can, if you don't mind being archaic, mislike. If you want to be modern, you can dislike. They mean largely the same thing. You can misplace something. You can also displace something. Here, the meanings aren't the same, but still conceptually similar. However, while you can mislay something, nothing has every been dislayed. Is there a reason that the dis- prefix failed to get attached to that particular example? Why did we end up with two prefixes that do basically the same thing, and thus with doubles of several different words? Did each prefix come from a different root language, and one language has a concept for mislaying things, while the other always knew where its car keys were?
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Aug 18, 2010 02:52
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Brainworm posted:Point is, that's the trope. Watch fifteen minutes of any sitcom, and you'll see a conflict driven by the leading man's limitations. We all know that Homer Simpson's lazy and inept, that Fred Flintstone (and every other character modeled on Ralph Kramden) is a loudmouthed boor, that Tim Taylor is an incompetent and misguided mechanic, and so on. But look at their wives. I think you'd have to watch a lot of The Simpsonss to spot Marge's limitations. Same goes for Jill Taylor or Alice Kramden, all of whom are major characters and otherwise extensively detailed. Would you say the reasons for this have something to do with the madonna/whore complex, i.e. the notion that men perceive all women as either perfect figures incapable of sin or temptresses bent on ruining them? That is to say that said complex makes flawless female characters more believable to the psyche (at least for male readers, who relate them to their mother or their little girl or the one that got away) than flawless male characters?
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Aug 18, 2010 04:06
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Here is something I've never really quite grasped. People say "I would like to do this as opposed to that", but I think "I would like to do this as apposed to that" should also be OK, and may be even better. "Apposed" means "juxtapose" or place in position for comparison, so it just always seemed to me that you would compare things and then decide which is preferred, thus "x as apposed to y" ... I am pretty sure I am incorrect here though, so please explain why this way of thinking is wrong. Thanks,
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Aug 18, 2010 06:26
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Coca Koala posted:However, while you can mislay something, nothing has every been dislayed. Is there a reason that the dis- prefix failed to get attached to that particular example? Why did we end up with two prefixes that do basically the same thing, and thus with doubles of several different words? Did each prefix come from a different root language, and one language has a concept for mislaying things, while the other always knew where its car keys were? The mis- prefix is from old-Germanic, while dis- is from Latin. English has lots of synonyms where one is from the Germanic or Norse languages and one from the Latin languages (mostly French). I'm drawing a blank at the moment, but I know there's a bunch. (I know a few people who are learning English as a second language, and all these similar words with slight differences drive them nuts...) I've heard that English has an really high number of words like that compared to other languages... but I'm not sure if that's true. Sometimes both versions survive; other times only one does. It's generally pretty much arbitrary. Why do we no longer use words like 'hip' for something we like, but 'cool' is still around? No real reason.. just one stayed popular, the other is dated and no longer used.
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Aug 18, 2010 06:33
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Zombies' Downfall posted:Would you say the reasons for this have something to do with the madonna/whore complex, i.e. the notion that men perceive all women as either perfect figures incapable of sin or temptresses bent on ruining them? That is to say that said complex makes flawless female characters more believable to the psyche (at least for male readers, who relate them to their mother or their little girl or the one that got away) than flawless male characters? Or maybe women were portrayed on tv as incompetent or ill-equipped for so long that the pendulum of social justice just swung as hard as it could in the other direction.
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Aug 18, 2010 10:47
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Trimangle posted:Brainworm, this has been a fantastic thread. A great read start to finish. Thanks. quote:Having been out of school for some time (and having taken only two 1st year literature courses) I found your comments on approaching literature in reference with other works very interesting . I recently re-read "The Magus" by John Fowles, and though it's a shot in the dark, I was wondering if you had read it, and if you view it in relation with any other works. I'd love to be able to give you something good, but I read Magus for the first and last time in the early '90s, and I'd want to read it again before I give a definite answer. I suspect that Magus is partly a retelling of the Odyssey, since off the top of my head I can peg some key similarities: Urfe leaves his girlfriend, and fate lands him on a Greek island where he's imprisoned by a sort of enchantment -- in this reading, Conchis is a sort of Calypso figure. And you've got other setting similarities, too; both Odyssey and Magus are postwar stories in significant ways. That's a knee-jerk reading, and I don't know where I'd go with it next. Magus probably has other, more significant influences that I can't spot for forgetting much of the book.
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Aug 18, 2010 15:14
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You said a year ago (drat) that the only Steinbeck you'd read was Grapes of Wrath. How was it? Would you recommend reading it for pleasure? I'm in the middle of Travels with Charlie, which I adore. It's got me more curious about his other work, now.
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Aug 18, 2010 20:11
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Coca Koala posted:You can mistrust, and you can distrust. They mean largely the same thing. I think the best place to start with a question like this is a bald assertion: English, like most languages, is not governed by rules. so when you ask "why is something this way?" the answer is going to wend through history, not point to a rational, rule-based reason for why we use one prefix instead of another, or for why an expression looks this way instead of that. English is the consequence of history, not principles. This is basically JasonV's point. I'm just giving it a long second. What's really interesting to me, though, is that "mislay" (as "mysse layst") goes back to 1402, though it doesn't appear as a single word until 1601. I think that's interesting because both those periods import a lot of French and Latin words, so it's a bit novel to see a Germanic/Old English prefix enter circulation. But I'm also working off the OED, so the term could have been in common use long before it was snagged by a writer whose texts survived to the present day.
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Aug 20, 2010 13:39
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What do you think about people majoring in literature because they want to become writers (i.e. novelists) themselves? Do you think majoring in literature would give an aspiring writer a leg-up in becoming better at their craft?
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Aug 26, 2010 12:39
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El Kabong posted:Or maybe women were portrayed on tv as incompetent or ill-equipped for so long that the pendulum of social justice just swung as hard as it could in the other direction. Ack. I wrote -- and lost -- a pretty hefty response to this, and thought I'd give it another, shorter shot. I think the "pendulum of social justice" has had more to do with what we call the "politics of reception" (the audience's collective response to a text) than with the content of the text itself; that is, our not-as-modern-as-we-sometimes-think attitudes toward gender equality have, I think, influenced the way we read less than the way we write. What I mean is, you can locate the OCH pretty firmly in two genres. One of these is Comedy, which has roots in As You Like It and includes e.g. notoriously perfect sitcom wives. The second is the Morality, which starts with (probably) Boccacio's patient Griselda and now includes e.g. Lifetime movies and Sandra Bullock's character in The Blind Side. I think the comic OCH is relatively easy to parse; in most sitcoms, for instance, the OCH is playing the "straight man," the perceptive Marge to the callous Homer. In those situations, the OCH is a sort of sounding board for the leading man's antics, a reminder that the world in which the leading man cuts his capers is strange enough to allow them but not strange enough to endorse them. And there are comedies in which the situation is gender-reversed -- I Love Lucy is a great example, and Rosanne, Designing Women, Three's Company, and Golden Girls all, to some extent, have female comics and male straight men -- though, to be fair, the male straight men rarely have the relentlessly unflawed judgment of an OCH. The Morality is a different situation. In a Morality, or Morality-flavored drama, it's important that the protagonist either be perfect or discover a state of moral perfection -- which, in recent moralities, means articulating a position of unflagging moral certainty that the text uncritically endorses. The Blind Side is a good example: Leigh Anne Tuohy's decisions are not just clearly morally right but also devoid of negatives. I mean, you've got a family full of nouveau-riche crackers who aren't only entirely unprejudiced, but seem devoid of any racial misapprehensions or blind spots; the children are so well-adjusted that they don't resent their adopted brother taking up a stunning amount of their parents' time and attention; paying for an extra kid to go to private school, have constant private tutelage, and even go to college -- those things aren't even financial issues. In short, Leigh Anne's decisions aren't just morally right in TBS, they're not even complicated, and their outcomes are consistently wholly positive. And this is where I think audience expectations have changed since the social justice pendulum started its latest downswing. If you look at older Moralities -- say, It's a Wonderful Life, or even Boccacio's Patient Griselda, the clear message is that doing the right thing requires some sacrifice or is at least difficult. Jimmy Stewart has to contemplate suicide before things start going right for him; even Griselda, that model of morality, gets torn up because she thinks her children are dead and her husband loathes her. But at some point -- maybe with Sheldon's In His Steps -- there arose a literary convention in which deciding what is right is reflexive and easy, that doing it requires only firm conviction, and that one need not give up anything significant in the process. Don't get me wrong; there are still stories about complex moral decisions in which the decider must sacrifice a great deal in order to do what he or she has painstakingly decided is the right thing. But there's also The Blind Side. I don't have anything more precise to say about this, since my thinking about social issues is frustratingly sloppy. But I think it's also simple to see a morally frustrated audience -- an audience who thinks that the right thing ought to be done, but is not being done -- as an ideal audience for media that suggests that the right thing is also the most practical of all possible options.
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Aug 30, 2010 23:13
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Raimundus posted:You said a year ago (drat) that the only Steinbeck you'd read was Grapes of Wrath. How was it? Would you recommend reading it for pleasure? I'd absolutely recommend it as pleasure reading. I mean, yes. The book has flaws -- not the least of these is its anchoring in a definite and dated sort of propaganda, which makes it read more like Atlas Shrugged than Mice and Men. But it's still way, way over the bar, and even its politics give it a sense of time and place that you don't as much get from, say, the USA Trilogy.
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Aug 30, 2010 23:17
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Brainworm posted:
Just wanted to say that in the few minutes it took me to read this post you made realize and reconsider more 'stuff' than anything else I've read in a while. Thanks. More please.
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Aug 31, 2010 00:14
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hajimewa posted:What do you think about people majoring in literature because they want to become writers (i.e. novelists) themselves? Do you think majoring in literature would give an aspiring writer a leg-up in becoming better at their craft? I think so, but I'm also not a writer. I mean, throughout the thread I've harped on the idea that good writers are of necessity good readers, and that much good writing is actually good rewriting -- someone examining a situation or character from an earlier text, seeing what's good in it, what it's shortcomings seem to be, and making some kind of improvement. A literature major seems like excellent training for that process. What I can't speak to is whether that training is more useful than other things you can or should be doing as an aspiring writer. Hemingway's advice, in paraphrase, was that an author should go out and live rather than stay inside and read; likewise, I think any creative writing professor would say that his or her creative writing classes are the best place for an aspiring writer. How much stock to put in that, I don't know. I mistrust many creative writing programs -- at my worst moments, I think they're a categorically deceptive enterprise. But there's also no denying that many of the successful authors I most admire are products of creative writing programs, too. Stephen King, for instance. But that's chasing the rabbit down the hole.
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Aug 31, 2010 15:27
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Can you think of any resources which might help me learn how to read poetry out loud better? Especially pieces without an obvious meter or scheme, like Tennyson's Ulysses? Using the example above, though I have a fantastic memory for lyrics and poetry and could easily recite the whole thing without having gone to any lengths to be able to do so, I'd do it very badly and all the magic would be lost in my reading. My father, on the other hand, can't recite any but a few lines by heart, but reads it beautifully. Personally, I'm envious of his English public schooling in this respect, because although I can get great pleasure from poetry, I can't for the life of me read it like it ought to be read.
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Aug 31, 2010 16:39
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Brainworm posted:I think so, but I'm also not a writer. If I could, I'd like to pursue that rabbit. I'm interested in writing novels in the future, but am not sure that I want to enter an actual creative writing program to prepare for it (though I'm currently in philosophy, which itself is probably not the best preparation, rather than literature). What are your thoughts and concerns about creative writing programs, especially if they may be "categorically deceptive?" Do you have any general thoughts on preparing to be a writer in addition to read, read, read and write, write, write?
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Aug 31, 2010 18:00
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Cwapface posted:Can you think of any resources which might help me learn how to read poetry out loud better? Especially pieces without an obvious meter or scheme, like Tennyson's Ulysses? This is a great question. One of the best single articles I've read on reading poetry aloud F. R. Leavis's "Reading Out Poetry," which I have in Valuation in Criticism and Other Essays, though it may appear elsewhere. Also indispensable is Kenneth Burke's "On Musicality in Verse," which I think is in Philosophy of Literary Form. Another good one is Wallace Stevens's "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words" (from The Necessary Angel). Yvor Winters's "The Audible Reading of Poetry" (from The Function of Criticism) is also excellent. These are all short, useful pieces and may get the job done. If you want more, the classic book on the subject is Peter Levi's The Noise Made By Poems, which is tough to find outside of a college library. There are also two newer volumes I like: Carper and Attridge's Meter and Meaning and Hobsbaum's Meter, Rhythm, and Verse Form. Those should be somewhat easier to track down and, as their titles suggest, also have excellent sections on meter.
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Sep 1, 2010 14:05
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halesuhtem posted:[...]What are your thoughts and concerns about creative writing programs, especially if they may be "categorically deceptive?" I think the place to start -- and maybe end -- is that creative writing programs produce many more degree-holding creative writers than there are places for. Granted, other programs do this. Especially now, when jobs are in short supply. But one thing that sets Creative Writing apart is degree. Every year in my department we have a seminar on graduate school, and that seminar includes data on what people do once they finish. The numbers in English are bleak: somewhere between one-third and one-half of graduates find full time positions (depending on how you count). The best years see aggregate placement of about 65% within the first three years after graduation. That's bad. But our departmental Creative Writer (PhD Psychology, so he knows his statistics) says that MFAs in Creative Writing have it worse by a factor of roughly one hundred. That is, for every one thousand MFA holders, about five will make a living in Creative Writing. The overwhelming majority of these will do this as teachers, not writers. We're talking about field job placement of, like, 0.5% -- so far inside the margin of error it might as well be zero. So that's one part of this. The second part -- the part that I think may make such programs deceptive -- involves what I'm going to call attainability. It's reflected in job placement stats, but a slightly different issue. Here's how it works: Basically, almost anyone with sufficient motivation can become an accountant, a fireman, an engineer, a mathematician, a computer programmer, an architect, a lawyer, a doctor, and so on. This is partly because, as a culture, we have designed systems for training these kinds of professionals, and made these systems broadly accessible. The rule for these is that (almost) any person + training = professional. But there's another class of less attainable careers: professional athlete, rock star, head of state, supermodel, astronaut, movie star, and so on. You can't train just anybody to play for the NBA -- you have to start with a someone who has a specific and rare set of physical attributes, a specific and rare disposition, and so on. And even then it's an incredibly long shot. So we don't have majors Supermodeling or Rock Stardom, and programs that train, say, potential astronauts and NBA players have really high barriers to entry. And it would be irresponsible to start a general-admissions major in, say, Astronauting, knowing that (a) many of the people you admit cannot possibly become astronauts, no matter how motivated they are and no matter the quality of their training, and (b) many of the qualifications for being an astronaut are not trainable. I think Creative Writing is much the same. I can't tell you exactly which skills a professional creative writer requires, and I can't tell you that those skills aren't teachable; I suspect many of them are not, but I could be totally wrong. What I can say is that I don't see evidence that any Creative Writing program has discovered a way to teach those skills reliably or consistently to admitted students in anything like the ways we teach Biology, Chemistry, Engineering, English, or History. That's a problem. If you have a program of study, I don't think you're promising students jobs. You may not even be promising them a reasonable chance at a job. But you are promising them that you know how to teach the field -- that you know what the field demands in terms of skills and experience, and that students have a chance to learn those skills and have those experiences in your program. That, for me, is where Creative Writing programs can be deceptive. There are well over four hundred college-level Creative Writing programs in the US, and it seems statistically certain that many of them have never produced a career creative writer. So on what basis can they claim teaching competence? This doesn't mean that colleges shouldn't offer classes in Creative Writing, or even offer a lot of them. It just means that a college shouldn't offer a program of study unless they've reason to believe they can teach the subject to the students they admit. quote:Do you have any general thoughts on preparing to be a writer in addition to read, read, read and write, write, write? I do not. Except maybe "learn, learn, learn." And "steal, steal, steal." When you read, think about what's good and bad in what you're reading, about what works and doesn't. Then steal the things that work and revise the things that don't.
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Sep 1, 2010 22:16
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Brainworm posted:When you read, think about what's good and bad in what you're reading, about what works and doesn't. Then steal the things that work and revise the things that don't.  What is your advice to those who seek to invent rather than despoil? I do suppose it's not easy to be successful with something that nobody has ever seen before... people crave relevance.
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Sep 2, 2010 00:45
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Why is using what works 'despoiling'? No one starts from zero. Just because you may use things that other writers have used and build off them doesn't mean you're a terrible writer. In fact, Brainworm has said several times he thinks good works are those that communicate with past ones.
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Sep 2, 2010 02:22
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z0331 posted:Why is using what works 'despoiling'? I think I just disagree with the way he phrased it, that time. I should steal from Ander Monson's Other Electricities because I found that the unique narrative style had the intended effect of conveying the complex atmosphere surrounding a single moment in time? Meh. I should explore using unique narrative formats that I haven't encountered before? Absolutely.
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Sep 2, 2010 03:18
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Maybe it's cause I'm not a writer, but I'd be pretty impressed if you could actually truly copy or take another writer's narrative style unless it's a really overly simplistic one. Instead I think you'd be doing what many writers do and what I think (maybe I'm wrong) Brainworm is saying - imitating/taking/stealing/using elements of a narrative style that you find effective or interesting and mixing them with things that come from you or from other styles to create a voice that you feel expresses what you want to say how you want to say it. Again, possibly because I'm not a writer, let alone a good one, but I can't imagine how you'd say to yourself 'I'm going to come up with a totally unique narrative voice!'. At the very least you'd be influenced by the things you've read in the past.
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Sep 2, 2010 03:36
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Thanks for the advice, Brainworm. I double majored in Philosophy with a minor in Creative Writing for my BA. If I can just throw my two cents in regarding the latter, my experience was that it's a total waste of time. Aside from the quality of teaching only serving to reinforce the old adage that those who can do and those who can't teach (no offense to the OP), the coursework was just nonsense. It involved next to no reading, except for unknown, usually self-indulgent short stories and single-act plays. 80% of the classes were female, and at least 30% had some sort of self-diagnosed disorder that they wanted to write about or were generally socially inept creatures for whom writing was, as they liked to put it, "an outlet." You wouldn't believe the amount of Twilight-inspired writing there was. Worst of all for me was that you were always encouraged and often required to write about yourself. As an 18-20 year old layabout this was extremely frustrating, because I have never been under the delusion that other people are any more interested in my life than I am in theirs. There were things I had to say which I thought might be worth reading, sure, but almost all of those belonged more to my major more than creative writing, and I considered virtually none of my ideas well-formed enough to want share as an undergraduate. All the way though we were told to "draw on experience," and I seemed to be the only student in the field willing to admit that I didn't have any of any consequence yet. The whole subject ended up seeming to me like a convenient arena in which people could talk and write ad infinitum about themselves and their boring problems without being called out for the clowns they were. z0331 posted:Maybe it's cause I'm not a writer, but I'd be pretty impressed if you could actually truly copy or take another writer's narrative style unless it's a really overly simplistic one. Smudgie Buggler fucked around with this message at 12:28 on Sep 2, 2010 |
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Sep 2, 2010 12:21
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Cwapface posted:I think you'd be surprised. Graham Greene once entered entered a Graham Greene write-alike parody contest under a pseudonym and only came third. Are you sure that's actually true? Because the fact that it's a palette swap of a popular (and mostly true!) story about Charlie Chaplain suggests myth.
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Sep 2, 2010 13:20
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Raimundus posted:I think I just disagree with the way he phrased it, that time. I should steal from Ander Monson's Other Electricities because I found that the unique narrative style had the intended effect of conveying the complex atmosphere surrounding a single moment in time? Meh. Yeah, I should have been less pithy. There's a difference -- a huge difference -- between "imitating" and "stealing," though I know I didn't make the distinction clear. When you imitate an author, what you're usually imitating is your reading of his or her style, your reading of a character type, or your reading of that author's take on a genre (i.e. your understanding of Stephanie Meyers's innovations on the romance novel). The result of imitation is usually a sort of unfunny parody, a horror story that uses a lot of "eldritch" and has two dimensional characters plunge into insanity at the slightest whiff of an unforgiving elder god. Theft is different. When you steal from an author, what you're stealing is really something that was yours to begin with: your response to the text. So you read Lovecraft and you feel small and terrified in a cosmic sense. That's why you read him. Lovecraft effects an emotion in you, and you enjoy the experience of that emotion and, perhaps, the deftness with which he inspired it. Theft -- or at least good theft -- means thinking about how you can inspire the same effect in your readers. And the way you do that might be very different from the way Lovecraft does it. If you want to make your readers feel small and terrified, you can write a story where the sinister forces that control every aspect of your characters' worlds aren't gods at all -- just equally powerful and equally indifferent to suffering. Distant parents, employers, cities, highly conformist communities, and natural settings (e.g. the ocean, outer space, the desert) have all done this job in one way or another, but the only boundaries to this innovation are your confidence and skill. Maybe there are better terms for this than "imitation" and "theft." I mean, "theft" is especially thorny because things one ordinarily steals operate according to a natural economy that doesn't cleanly apply to intellectual matter like writing. The key difference, I think, is that you imitate something that belongs to someone else, and so imitation is always kind of reference or gesture toward the imitated thing. But when you steal something, you make it your own. When you steal, say, someone else's bike, you grind off any serial numbers, repaint it, and blow past all the suckers who have to walk to Pizza Hut because they got their bike lock off Craigslist. When you steal something writerly, you do about the same thing; you use it how and when you want, but keep it from being traced back to the owner.
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Sep 2, 2010 14:06
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Brainworm posted:When you imitate an author, what you're usually imitating is your reading of his or her style, your reading of a character type, or your reading of that author's take on a genre (i.e. your understanding of Stephanie Meyers's innovations on the romance novel). The result of imitation is usually a sort of unfunny parody, a horror story that uses a lot of "eldritch" and has two dimensional characters plunge into insanity at the slightest whiff of an unforgiving elder god. I think the difference between inspiration and imitation is fundamentally a matter of honesty. I think you can read good stories and say "I want to write stories that make people feel the way these stories made me feel," and along the way you find your own voice. You put yourself into the heads of the characters you create, into the environment you create, and you only include what's relevant to what you're trying to do, and above all, you write what you're want to read. Dishonest writers squeeze things into their stories because another writer did it and they thought it was cool, so they include it without regard to whether it makes sense in terms of the character, the setting, or even what they're really trying to provoke in the reader at that particular moment. They include junk because they think it's obligatory. This is where we get action heroes who say a one-liner before every pull of the trigger, romance stories clogged with reminders that the characters are just so gosh-darn pretty, and horror stories crammed with tentacles and "Lo, foolish mortal, soon you shall..."
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Sep 2, 2010 14:54
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How do I get better at close-reading?
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Sep 5, 2010 07:02
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El Kabong posted:How do I get better at close-reading? Building up on this: which books on everyday reading (i.e., focusing on practice of reading instead of high theory) and engaging with texts do you recommend? And what would you want to see in such a book? You've mentioned Harold Bloom, Kenneth Burke and others, but they mostly write on the nature of texts and/or specific examples. Also, somebody way earlier in the thread asked your opinion on Bob Dylan's lyrics. Have you given him a listen? If you haven't, here's a few samples from throughout his career. They're really quite different, but if you haven't got the time, please check out at least the last one. It's rare to hear an informed opinion on his texts which don't come from either side of the barricades. Burning Rain fucked around with this message at 14:00 on Sep 7, 2010 |
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Sep 7, 2010 12:25
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