Literature

May 1, 2013

You Will Read “Sonny’s Blues” in Hell

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– Or A Summery of American Literature II, in Poetic Verse –

Author’s Note: I wrote this poem with my friend Nikki and A. It is a summary of our American Literature class this semester and it is rife with swearing and the word Cock. If you are offended by this, don’t read the poem. Sorry Not Sorry, E. 

*~*

I have seen the best students of my major destroyed

by madness

Madness, caused not by stress or sadness, but I have seen

them lose their minds to short stories

Most notably the Greek epic, “Sonny’s Blues,” the true pinnacle

of the entirety of human literature

Has been drilled into the minds of unsuspecting English students,

expecting more, but receiving less.

It is the mark of human nature to repeat our mistakes;

thus we returned day after day.

We tried to make sense of an increasingly devious puzzle,

but the mind of our professor could not be cracked.

“I’m a nice guy, but fuck up on MLA and I will finish you,”

the prophecy foretold.

I saw students stew in their incompetancies and struggle

with their citations.

The types of things that enrapture us: the contemporary

corpocracy of the U.S., and why folks get high.

I swear I heard screeching in the walls; “Power-powerless

stick, you’re on the wrong end!”

With the very hearts of the powerless stick pulled from their bodies

good to eat w/ all the junk we’re shootin’ for a thousand years.

Our heads bashed in with concrete and music, It’s gonna be a world

of hurt, a world of hurt, a world of hurt.

And a sphinx. Because Egypt gave us schwarma and gyros and hot

dogs, because Design governs things so small as digestion.

Yo.

We sat through made up mechanisms, and historicisms, and so many

isms it would make the bureaucracy of our corporate

government blush.

Moloch! Depriving us of Slaughter House Five! Moloch! Capitalism taking

over my TV! Moloch! I just wanted to watch King of the Hill!

Sonny! States orbiting the Earth! Sonny! Blues and Digressions and Fire!

Sonny! I just wanted to read and analyze and learn!

Cock! I was just happy I could use Cock in an Academic paper!

Poems we haven’t gone over, Final papers, Monster of English,

The final death of God!

I’ll do minimum work for minimum wage! Skip the 3rd paper,

Take the 95, thank God! Hail Moloch!

Holy! The last four days of our Hell in Pamplin Hall, that the end

is in sight, Be free, my people, be free from that which

bores you!

I have a dream…That one day…It will be a comfortable

temperature in that room.

That, one day, this Appalachian hillbilly might teach something other

than Post-Modern half-truths

That, one day, we may leave the classroom without hearing the devil

whispering in our ear “Mooney teaches ‘Howl’ in Hell!”

You’ll read “Sonny’s Blues” in Hell! In the heart + fire of Pamplin 3001!

Think for yourselves, but trust me ‘bout the government! Or

I’ll ensure you feel a world of hurt.

Revolt, Brothers and Sisters! Change the face of Society! Of Hell!

Of Moloch! Of Sonny! Of Ginsburg, Nemerov, Frost, and Still!

And I ask you, where the fuck was Vonnegut?! And 1865 – 1945? Two

World Wars, The Great Depression, Casablanca? Amen. Amen.

That, in 45 minutes, 3 students wrote a poem and listened to their professor

rant about life, death, cancer, the bloody fuckin’ 1 percent, ANYTHING

but literature.

But, on the bright side, the silver linings playbook, Andy got to use Cock in

a paper! We’ve won a battle- Let’s win the war!

Amen!

Preach!

God bless us every 1.

December 4, 2012

Revision

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– Or Noone No One Gets it Right the First Time –

If you have been paying attention to this blog in any way (and even if you haven’t because I’m about to tell you what you should have noticed anyway), you’ll have noticed that most of my posts are littered with typos and grammar mistakes. Even, in one massively embarrassing case, I attributed a quote about technology to Milton. MILTON.

Anyway, my point is, I screw up, often and spectacularly. And that is okay. Screwing up the first time around is okay, and frankly, necessary.

Why? Well, the first go around, you just write out the skeleton of your idea. You have dumped everything you have about your topic contained in your brain onto a page. You have, perhaps, shaped it into paragraph format, organized it a bit, and voila. You have the first draft of whatever you are writing about.

Now comes the fun part – revision. Most good writing is developed in revision ( I paraphrased this from a John Green video. He may have been quoting someone else. Who knows) and that’s why it’s so awesome. You get to play with your language. Whe else are you allowed to mess around with your words in an attempt to make it sound better? It’s super easy – you already have the framework laid out in front of you, so the hard work of conjuring content out of thin air is complete. Now, you just have to make is sound fun or intelligent or serious or what have you.

Don’t get carried away, though. Revision can quickly become a sickness, if you let it. It infects you, makes you think your writing must be perfect the first go. It doesn’t. Resist that urge, the urge that tells you to revise your first paragraph before moving on to the second. It’s evil and it will eat your soul.

Well, maybe it won’t eat your soul, but it will certainly eat your productivity. You will never finish with the goal of a perfect first draft. First off, those rarely, if ever, get produced. There are always things to change, to tweak, to tighten up for precision’s sake. That in mind, leave them be. Your first draft is allowed to suck. It’s called the first draft for a reason; it implies that there will be MULTIPLE drafts. There may only be two. There may be a thousand. You can always make more changes.

(Be warned though; at some point, it’s time to stop editing and just let the work go. It’s okay. There will probably be one or two more mistakes in it, but I promise you are the only one who notices.)

So go forth! Find the mistakes in this first-draft-blog. Find your own mistakes. Appreciate them. Love them. Fix them. Revise, my pretties, revise!!

April 5, 2012

Literary Superiority

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– Or Storytelling 4; Let the People Read What They Want (Emily Gets Ranty) –

‘The only thing more embarrassing than catching a guy on the plane looking at pornography on his computer is seeing a guy on the plane reading “The Hunger Games.”’

-Joel Stein, New York Times “Room for Debate”

In his op-ed, “Adults Should Read Adult Books,” Joel Stein expresses his opinion that adults, unless reading them to a child, should not read books like Harry Potter, or The Hunger Games. These books were written ‘for children,’ and therefore have none of the complexity, depth of vocabulary, or thought provoking points that adult books have. And Stein knows this without having read The Hunger Games, and he vows “I’ll read “The Hunger Games” when I finish the previous 3,000 years of fiction written for adults.”

This is the sort of argument that I hate, and it always seems to arise from authors, or English majors, or journalists – it’s the argument of Literary Superiority. It’s the argument that, because some 30 year old is reading Candide, he/she is superior (mentally?) to the 30 year old reading Harry Potter on the plane.

I’ve heard several variations on this argument, and every single time I am left with the position of “What?” I genuinely don’t understand where this argument comes from – I am usually just ecstatic to see people reading in general. I don’t understand why these “levels of acceptable books” exist.

I understand that, if an author is determined to write a book for 13-year-olds, its going to be vastly different from a book for 16-year-olds. It will have a different vocabulary, it will have different plots, but that does not mean that it is any less valid, any less thought provoking, any less relevant. Some are better than others (I’m not saying every piece of Young Adult fiction/Children’s fiction is a work of art) but you can’t lump them all together and say that they are less than adult books simply because of their genre.

There are several “kid’s” books part of literary cannon – The Hobbit, Treasure Island, Wind in the Willows, Alice in Wonderland – these are all considered literature, and they are all stories written for children. Children’s stories and books, Young Adult books – the best ones often tackle deep, frankly adult issues. Childhood has the association of innocence, that we can’t teach them about death, illness, or the evils of the world. Therefore, books written for teenagers or children are lesser because they aren’t ‘adult.’

But the fact of the matter is, people like Joel Stein don’t read children’s/young adult books because of this ideal, and then think that the have a basis for an argument because “they’re written for innocents. Don’t read them because you’re not innocent.”

Joel Stein says: “Let’s have the decency to let tween girls have their own little world of vampires and child wizards and games you play when hungry.”

You’re not being decent; you sir, are being ignorant of the impact fantasy and reading can have on children, teens, and adults. If an adult wants to read The Hunger Games, let them read it. They are open minded enough to give it a chance – if you have a problem with it, please go bury your nose in your ‘real literature’ and leave us ‘children’ alone.

March 8, 2012

Reading is Not a Chore

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– Or Why I Need a Bookshelf at School and You Need One Too –

and this blog post is probably going to bore you, but I need to talk about something, because I haven’t talked about anything for quite a long time. I’m going to talk about books, and why I need to read more books, and why people in general should read more books, because, as a society, we don’t read enough. We includes me, by the way – I don’t read enough. I don’t read enough and I am an English major. (Also, if you haven’t noticed already, this post is going to be a bit rambly – in the style of Rules of Attraction, cause it’s awesome.)

I figure I’m not reading enough because I’m already so bombarded with information that part of me just doesn’t think it can handle all the fiction, and that’s just a ridiculous notion because, come on, it’s fiction. It’s supposed to be an escape from all the work I have to do – a little place of awesome where I can forget about that terrible Philosophy essay I just handed in and pretend I’m a Hobbit. Or am friends with Dr. Watson. Or can cast spells and actually go to Hogwarts, instead of boring old regular school. Fiction shouldn’t be work, and I’m getting increasingly worried that it’s becoming work, mostly because of boring English classes taught by boring English teachers who do nothing to point out how exciting it all is, all of these word, phrases, clauses, and other bits of grammar. They should be explaining how damned cool it is that the monster in Frankenstein is essentially just the monstrous undertones of Victor’s personality, or how Holden spends an entire book trying to get people to listen to him and he can’t even get the reader to listen to him. Literature is cool – but most English teachers make it boring and inflexible and a chore. And thus people think that it’s always a chore and stop reading. They stop reading like the theoretical readers of this blog have probably stopped reading by now because something has made reading hard and unfun rather than cool and awesome.

And it is cool and awesome, which is why I have a huge list of books that I am going to read this year. I am going to read and attempt to finish all of them, unless the book becomes laborious and sluggish (I’m looking at you, Fellowship of the Ring), in which case I will throw the book in the ‘unenjoyable’ pile and move on to the next. I’m endeavoring to make reading fun again. It brings a sort of meaning to my life in a way nothing else ever has, and it’s the only handbook writers have to improving their craft, and I just really like books. I encourage the liking of books – I think other people should read at least a little bit, or try at least a little bit, because I promise you will find something that changes your life or out look or idea of the world. Or perhaps you’ll just find an escape.

And before I forget, I should just add that

February 4, 2012

My Life of Stories

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-Or Why I Will Never Be As Good A Writer As Markus Zusak –

-Or Storytelling, Part 2 –

– A Guided Tour Of Suffering –

To your left,

perhaps your right,

maybe even straight ahead,

you find a small black room.

In it sits a Jew.

He is scum.

He is starving.

He is afraid.

Please – try not to look away.

First, some context: The above quote is from Markus Zusak’s brilliant novel The Book Theif, which revolves around a little girl named Liesel Meminger. She lives with her foster parents in Germany, circa 1940 , and fosters a love for reading – a skill which she learns through reading stolen books with her foster father. Also, her family is hiding a Jew in their basement.

There are few words that adequately describe my love affair with this novel. It is quite simply one of the most beautifully written books I have ever had the pleasure of reading (and I am taking my good sweet time reading it.) I use this book for writing inspiration, but probably not in the way you think. I read this book and my self-esteem says:

“Wow. I suck at writing.”

And then I usually respond with:

“Yeah, I do. But I could be better. Let’s get writing!”

This may strike people as weird, but it’s the way I improve – I see someone working in my preferred medium, someone who is significantly better than I am in that medium, and I get this feeling that I need to improve. I need to, in some way, prove to that person that I can write amazing things, I just need to work at it a bit.

This is how I feel with Zusak’s writing. He wrote The Book Thief from the point of view of Death, but he makes Death world weary and haunted. Death takes you on the journey of Liesel’s life because it fascinated him, which, in turn, fascinates the reader. Death points out the horrors of the Holocaust without being heavy handed – in ‘A Guided Tour Of Suffering,’ he merely asks that you don’t look away. That statement resonated so much with me that I nearly cried; how many times do we witness suffering and look away?

Zusak’s writing is beautiful, resonant, relevant, and powerful. He makes his characters into real people – people that you care for – and tears at you with the terrible horrors in their lives. He can sting you with a line and soothe you with a paragraph, make you cry with the turn of a phrase. Zusak’s manages to capture all of the beauty and deformed depravity of the human condition in a way that makes me want to write like him.

I want to be able to influence people the way his writing has influenced me, and that is why I continue to write at midnight each night, because that is the only time I have to myself. It’s why I read my stories out loud to fix tense changes, why I struggle through writers block, why I even bother with the lofty dream of some day being published. I want my writing to matter to someone. I want my characters to come alive on the page, to have a reader make a connection with something that I have written.

These wishes feel very selfish as I write them, but I want to gift my stories to readers. I want readers to dissect, interpret, and attach meanings to my words that I never even imagined while writing them. I want to give people a story, so that they might find meaning in it. Markus Zusak and several other writers have given me the gift of inspiration, and I, in turn, want to give that gift to someone else.

The last line of The Book Thief:

“I am haunted by humans.”

I am haunted by stories, festering in my mind, clawing their way out. I am haunted by the words I want to say, and the stories those words tell. I am consumed by them.

January 24, 2012

Storytelling, Part 1

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– Or YES, Good Writing Does Still Exist in TV Shows –

– Also, Why American TV Occasionally Sucks –

Allow me to be self-indulgent and annoying for a second and quote an episode of Sherlock –

Jim Moriarty: Do you know what happens if you don’t leave me alone, Sherlock? To you?
Sherlock Holmes: Oh, let me guess, I get killed?
Jim Moriarty: Kill you? No, don’t be obvious. I mean I’m going to kill you anyway, someday. I don’t want to rush it though. I’m saving it up for something special. No no no no no. If you don’t stop prying… I will burn you. I will burn… the heart out of you.
Sherlock Holmes: I have been reliably informed that I don’t have one.
Jim Moriarty: But we both know that’s not quite true.

This section of text seems entirely irrelevant without the voices of the actors, the scene, the context. Yet – and maybe this is because I’ve seen this scene before and have had time to process it – this scene conveys so much on it’s own. The insanity of Moriarty, the stubborn, emotionless Holmes. Or, the seemingly emotionless Holmes. I’m going to stop myself now, before this turns into a rant about Sherlock Holmes in literature in general, because that’s not what this post is about (though it is horribly tempting to change topics).

What strikes me about this script – or, to be more specific, section of dialogue – is how simple it is, and yet how creepy is can remain, even in it’s lifeless “text-on-a-page” state. What this tells me is the writer’s of this show know what they are doing; a skill many seem to lack in television these days.

Allow me to be self-indulgent once again and quote How I Met Your Mother, so that I may prove a point-

Ted: I’m gonna do what that guy couldn’t, I’m gonna take the plunge… Well, I guess that’s not a perfect metaphor since… for me it’s falling in love and for him it’s… death.
Barney: Actually, that is a perfect metaphor.

Now, I’m not going to lie here – I love How I Met Your Mother. And I can perfectly visualize this scene in my head. But I don’t hear it, I don’t feel it. It’s a cheap joke that’s been reposted on a blog, written by a blogger who assumes she has something intelligent to say about the world. The words are lifeless and hold no meaning. I can’t even bring my self to laugh at it. This, unfortunately, is true of most shows that I watch – they are less memorable and I lose the desire to watch them and geek out over the small details.

Now, to be fair, Sherlock is a drama, and HIMYM is a comedy. They don’t operate on the same level generally – my inner need to analyze the living crap out of a TV show is going to be more pronounced when I watch a modern drama over a modern comedy. But I feel like society (American society, specifically) has relegated the comedy to a silly, void-of-meaning medium. Sitcoms are there to make you laugh once, and then you never really go back. They rely on cheap jokes in the worst case, life-situations in the best. But comedies can be funny and contain meaning [read: Anything by Oscar Wilde (playwise)]. Dramas in the US don’t fair much better, as they often end up focusing too much on action and not enough on story.

So why does this happen? It happens for several reasons, the most important (and disappointing one) is that stories and storytelling don’t make money in the United States. And I would wager that making money is a major factor in picking shows for a Television Station. this makes sense – you have to pay the actors, directors, camera men, make up artists, broadcasters, etc. What’s sad about this emphasis on money making is that story falls to the wayside. If a show doesn’t catch on immediately, it’s scrapped. If the show follows a familiar formula that has already proven to make money, then it will probably be picked up. This leads to an over saturation of terrible writing by people attempting to make a buck.

(There are exceptions to this, of course. Lost and The Mentalist being among them.)

The problem with TV, at least here, is that over saturation. Let’s take a look back at Sherlock for a second. Sherlock is a wildly successful British TV show that focus’ on accuracy and loyalty to the source material while modernizing the main characters and making them People. The scripts are brilliant, at times filled with laughter, and then shaking with sadness. The scripts are alive before they are acted, and when they given to the actors, the scripts become real. It engages the audience, and makes them connect with the stories on an emotional level.

What did the US take away from this? “LET’S MAKE OUR OWN SHERLOCK. IT MAKES MONEY.”

There are several problems with this; first among them being that Sherlock Holmes is an inherently English story. He belongs in London, on Baker’s street, and any attempt to Americanize it would be disappointing at the least. Secondly, I have little faith in the passion of American screen-writers. I have the feeling that this version will lack all of the wit, the venom, the terror, and terrible sadness of the original. Now, i could be wrong, but in the case of Americans Americanizing British Television, the record is currently something like 0-2.

I believe that this spurs from a distinct lack of appreciation for stories in our culture. We want our stories fast, conflict heavy, and action oriented. We want our comedies vaguely funny and enjoyable. While there is nothing inherently wrong with this, it has caused the Media-at-Large to believe that we don’t care what we consume. That we don’t care about stories. So they feed us formulaic television, and hope that we don’t notice that 2 Broke Girls is essentially a really bad take on Friends – only with two girls who are vapid and lack the mental complicity to do anything interesting. (Again, there are exceptions. Psyche and Modern Family are both fantastic comedies – because the writer’s know their characters [in Psyche] and know how normal people function [in Modern Family]. Baseline: They know what they are doing.)

Yet, some of the best shows on television are hour-long, story-oriented shows. I do very much believe people like to be engaged in their stories, and what screen writers need to realize is that if they put passion into their script and pay attention, try to comprehend what they are doing, then the show will catch on. I’m not saying do away with the sitcoms – I’m saying give stories, Real Stories, a chance. They may, in fact, surprise you.