Archive for the ‘reading’ Category
October 14th, 2009
The Raven, from http://xkcd.com/
By Julia H. Jackson
Imagine that your significant other has recently fallen ill. You are an orphaned adult. Everyone who is close to you is slowly dying of tuberculosis, or as you call it, consumption. You can’t sleep. You fidget. You wait by your writing table and contemplate the slow descent of humanity. And suddenly, there is a knock at your door.
I should mention that you are a sometimes-successful editor of literary magazines. It is 1845.
“Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
`’Tis some visitor,’ I muttered, `tapping at my chamber door -
Only this, and nothing more.’”
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September 30th, 2009
John Keats
I’m glad of the arrival of the new movie Bright Star, based on the life of poet John Keats. Really, it’s high time Hollywood produced a movie based on the romantic and absolutely fascinating life of this famous poet. Bright Star focuses on Keats’ relationship with his neighbor Fanny Brawne, and the subsequent influence Brawne has had on the subject and nature of his work. Hopefully, the film will spark a fresh wave of interest in Keats, someone whose life hasn’t provided the kind of mainstream biographical interest as his contemporaries, Byron and Shelley.
Bright Star also got me thinking about the many if-not-great then at least ’solid’ biopics that have recently been produced on the lives of poets. Of course, we don’t prescribe to a biographical reading of any author’s work (we are strictly Barthesian in believing that the author is dead), but we whole-heartedly enjoy the singular sensation of watching the real-life, actual persona of a poet — a creator of poetic fictions — become the subject of a fictional portrayal itself. No one can possibly argue that a Hollywood biopic has any relevance in the discipline of academic biography, so the pleasures we experience in watching them are intently and completely based on fictional — i.e., entertainment — value. These poetic biopics are wholly ‘meta’, unapologetically middle-brow, and greatly entertaining, with small trivia takeaways that become of value later in board games and dinner conversation. We love them! And, without further ado, here are our five favorites.
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September 25th, 2009
As beautiful as the sentences that come out of the brains of people like Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, or William Faulkner are, they are definitely of a different generation of thinkers than you students. You love their work, but you can’t really relate, on a tangible level, to what they say. Right? Or was the first time you read Ulysses the moment when you recognized your own soul inside the fictional framework of a literary character? Yeah right. Gimme a break.
I love Joyce as much as anyone else does. Heck, I’ll take your Joyce, and I’ll raise you a Samuel Beckett. I adore tough modernist literature as much as the next dude, but I’ll admit that I (a twenty-something former English major — I’m not that much older than you, dear student, even though in your eyes I might be ancient) have trouble relating to Estragon on a personal level. We speak a different language now. We are stuck in a post-modern fugue, and the entire landscape of literature has changed.
Luckily, there are many writers that consistently produce masterpiece-level literature and write through a modern lense. These writers talk about things like television, anti-depressants, and the Internet. Finally, someone who speaks our language! While we may not read them (yet) as a part of the canon of literature, these hip writers will one day be the Ezra Pounds of our generation. They are people that you should know and read, and here are 5 of our favorites:
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