comp lit and mediaphilia
Wow. Somehow I only have a little over a week left. I’m ready to go home, but I’m also just getting the hang of things in Prague and want to enjoy that. And I have an unbelievable amount of work to do. The weekend trip I signed up for (and paid $95 for) was a bad idea.
I’ve taken a decent amount of side trips already, and I’m still adoring my classes. I have a lunch conference with my fiction professor, Robert Eversz , who is awesome–one of those people who will just talk and then all of a sudden you’ll realize that he’s teaching you something really useful. Our workshop is particularly for people writing novels, which means not only do we critique and talk about literature, but we also storyboard everyone’s submissions, talk about extended narratives, etc. I’m loving it. I’m learning. I’m inspired. I actually want to write a lot, and I do it. It’s been at least a year since I’ve been a writer like I used to be. I feel good about where I’m headed. I have three fiction projects I feel really good about.
My side trips have been to Kutná Hora, Dresden, and today to Terezín, but I don’t think I feel like writing about that. Leaving that space in my journal empty seems like the most justice I can do to it, at least today. In Kutná Hora is a church with decorations made from the bones of 40,000 people.
Yup.
Posted in adventures
Tagged authors , novel , photographs , prague , summer , workshops , writing
Jul · 22
I just learned this week that the word I thought of as “expatriot” is actually “expatriate.” I think that’s a really interesting mistake, but I’m also disappointed in myself for not getting it, since I consider myself fairly linguistically gifted. It would be much more interesting, and also much more US-centric, I think, if it were an “expatriot,” because it would describe an American who leaves the US because they are dissatisfied with American culture or embarrassed by it, while at the same time showing how American they are. It would certainly describe me.
So it’s funny that we have this word “immigrant,” which is used as a mark of awesomeness in history classes and as a pejorative in political discourse. Without going to the OED, I would say that on the surface, “expatriate” and “immigrant” actually mean the same thing–that is, a person from one nation who lives in another–except that “immigrant” has the implication of inferiority as the main catalyst for the move from one country to another. That is certainly a reason for immigration, I’m sure, but it’s not really all that fair. Do we have one word for people who move to the US to find “better” lives that we don’t use for, say, a successful Hollywood actor who is actually from Britain but lives in LA? Who is that person? An expatriate, an immigrant, or something else?
This is probably not such an interesting observation to make, but this class is making me more aware of how Americans use linguistics, particularly euphemisms and the vastness of the American vocabulary, to assert its imperialism and colonialism without directly doing so.
In my workshop the other day, we ended up talking about the use of Spanish in literature that is otherwise all in English. We’ve also brought this up in my literature class, because the assumption is that American literature is all in English, but since the United States doesn’t have an official language, and since it is a nation formed through immigration, that’s not necessarily the only way of looking at it. Writers such as Junot Diaz, Rudolfo Anaya and Sandra Cisneros challenge that. (And that’s just in terms of Spanish in America–there’s also the fact that Americans love Yiddish, and that there are tons of other languages spoken in the US.) And so a girl in my workshop had written a piece in which there is Spanish written. Thankfully, it was not italicized or immediately translated, and I liked that. Sure, some people may have to google a word or two if it’s not made clear by context (it usually was), and some people may stop reading, but literature isn’t written for all readers. That would be silly. And there’s no reason that nondominant culture should be overexplained in literature. But one woman in the workshop was offended by it, and when others of us tried to explain that being offended by Spanish and by culture that she didn’t understand was a white-privileged response, she said that that was just Americans being obsessed with political correctness. And, because she was an expatriate living in Prague, she was exempt from knowing what is going on in literature, racism, political correctness, and all that.
Fucking bullshit.
Posted in rambling
Tagged "philosophy" , criticism , culture , other people , politics , prague , race , school , workshops , writing
Jul · 16
I keep telling myself that today is the day I start doing 500 words a day, and then it doesn’t happen. Things come up, and I’m just a lazy procrastinator. Today I had a lovely afternoon with my niece, who only flipped out a couple times, and then I went grocery shopping, then I had a kind of crappy workout, and now I’m home, watching “Grey’s,” which I hope I will be sick of soon, and I’m also outlining and working on characterization for a book project! It’s not the book I should be working on, the more literary book, the book I want to use in my workshop that starts in less than two weeks, but it’s something, and with all the bits and pieces I already have, it’s around 12,000 words.
I just made an outline of all the stories the book will include, and then I decided that it’s been so long since I worked on it that I need to get to know my characters again. There is a lot of them. Clearly my television watching has infiltrated my writing, because this book has an ensemble cast. It is “Grey’s.” It is “Lost.” It is my high school experience, just with slightly fewer characters. But only slightly few. My graduating class numbered 44. Anyway. I’m filling out character personality sheets for each one, so I can know her again. And I will finish this book before my 22nd birthday. And then I’ll get an agent again, and we’ll sell it. And that’s just the way things are going to have to be.
I may just be on track again. Hurrah!
Posted in writing
Tagged family , happy , novel , procrastinating , summer , television , workshops , writing
Jun · 22
I bought myself two new books today. This was wholly unnecessary, as I own at least fifty books I have not yet read, and I have a reading list of well over 100. But I can’t control myself, and I love bookstores, and I figured that at least I was buying books of short stories, which I don’t read enough of, and I decided that this would help me further the education I am getting in my fiction writing classes at school, which all have focused on short stories.
One book is a large collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s shorts. The other is an anthology about adolescence, which should prove to be entertaining. Plus, a lot of my writing focuses on that, so it’s good to see what’s out there. The short story anthologies for our classes always duplicate famous stories, and they get so dull. I know I should read the classics, and I do, but crotchety old men get rather boring, as do cliché assignments like Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” (itself wonderful writing, but it as an assigned reading kind of hackneyed and obvious) and the same story by the same writers. This is my problem with poetry anthologies as well. I understand that I should read a lot of one author to really understand them, but is it too much to ask that not every collection have the same poems in it? William Carlos Williams wrote more than one good poem. Shakespeare did more than comparing thee to a summer’s day. Blah, blah, blah.
But it hit me that I can’t further my education if I haven’t learned anything. I have a lot of snobbery going into my writing classes here, which stems out of a variety of things: 1. I was trained in high school to consider myself completely above U of A; 2. I naturally consider myself above most things; 3. U of A’s creative writing program is nothing special unless it’s the MFA, which obviously I am not getting right now; and 4. I really have not learned that much about writing, at least not in a direct way, in either last semester’s beginning class or this semester’s intermediate class. I definitely learned a bit about craft in the beginning class, because we actually had to read a book about writing, and we had lectures and exercises that specifically helped us develop certain aspects of writing, from dialogue to setting to whatever. And, of course, we all know that the best way to become a better writer is to actually write, and to read anything and everything. Duh. So practicing my writing by having to write stories for class is always a good thing.
But it’s like I can’t remember anything I learned last semester, and this semester we only practice and half heartedly critique, rather than hone skills. What does that leave for the advanced writing class? Never having been one to write short anything, I have a lot of trouble with short stories. And after a semester and a half of “college writing classes,” I don’t really know much more about the art of short fiction than I did when I was writing paragraph-long stories in second grade. I have no idea what I’m doing. Teach me, please.
Tagged books , school , workshops , writing
Mar · 19
The first annual Tucson Festival of Books was this weekend. Saturday I went for pleasure, Sunday I went as a volunteer. It was a pretty great event–not perfect, but especially awesome for the first year. I, dork that I am, went on Saturday dressed in my Marcus Flutie shirt, and Megan McCafferty definitely noticed it when she signed my book. It was sweet. She also spoke for an hour about writing, and like any good author does ( Megan McCafferty and Rachel Cohn are hands down the best current YA writers, though technically Megan is an adult writer–another reason why she’s an awesome YA writer, if you can understand me), made me want to get back to my writing. Too bad it’s still lost on that broken harddrive in my bottom drawer
Still, it was a wonderful event. I now have a New York Times t-shirt. Very useful, I know. I also have a tent of a volunteer shirt from yesterday, which I promptly took off because it was too hard to move my arms in a men’s large. AND I have various other goodies, like Bookman’s tote bags. Whatever.
The Billy Collins reading was fabulous. Too bad the audience wasn’t. I have a huge problem with annoying audiences, and I feel like often, baby boomers are incredibly annoying to sit near. My parents are baby boomers, and they’re not obnoxious, but I think it’s inappropriate to continually guffaw at every other line of a poem, even if it is funny. This isn’t a comedy club, and though it’s one thing to chuckle or laugh occasionally, cracking up at everything that was even slightly funny meant a) I wanted to smack lots and lots of people and b) I couldn’t hear the next line of the effing poem. Shut up, people. But who cares, because Collins still writes great stuff, and his voice is awesome. I was wondering why it sounded familiar and then it hit me: Kevin Spacey. I’m not sure if Collins’ life is interesting enough for a biopic, but if it is, Spacey must play him. They have the exact same voice. Same monotony, same dry, wry way of being funny. Awesome.
His interjections about his poems were kind of the best part. Writers are some of the most interesting people to speak, especially poets, because you’re so used to ascribing your own voice to their work. I was actually surprised to find him so funny, not because I missed seeing the humor in his poems, but just because I read them as wry, not direct humor. He had two that I think are as yet unpublished, one called “Migraine” or “Hangover,” he said, depending on what feeling you’re more familiar with, that was hilarious, and another about the phrase that has already been kicked out of slang standing for “OMG,” which was a clever poem, but I think it needs work because he had to explain quite a lot of it before he actually read the few lines. But it was funny. Like a joke. Then it was okay to laugh. But other times, I think chuckling would have been far less annoying.
So afterwards I stood in line, which was also annoying, because it made me think of the Jason Mraz concert and about how famous people tend to get snobby and forget how to be gracious. I understand that it’s more efficient to have your book open to the page that needs to be signed, but sticking a post-it with my name in it seemed a bit much, and even more was the “volunteers” who took my book from me and opened it. I have had a book signed before, thanks. I’ve also read a book before, and I know what a title page is, thanks.
But again, who cares, right? Billy Collins. But I think he hates me. He saw my name, and he informed me that it was the same backwards and forwards, and we both acknowledged that it was a palindrome. I really like it when people tell me that about my name, because I’ve never written it before, so I would never have noticed. He said, “I’m going to show you the best palindrome,” and I was pretty excited, because a poet was going to tell me something, and not only is he a former poet laureate (I think you get to always keep the title, kind of like president) but he also has a PhD. so he starts writing “I love m–” and I go, “I love me, volume one.” (Spelled “I love me, vol. I,” it is a pretty sweet palindrome that is also the title of a book of palindromes.)
So he looks up and goes, “Oh. You’ve heard it.”
Oops. So much for being gracious. Foot in mouth, poet laureate crossed off list of future friends.
Still, a pretty wonderful festival over all. Can’t wait till I’m a guest there.
Posted in books
Tagged authors , books , news , poetry , workshops
Mar · 16
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