College musings
April already. The novel is coming along well at 21k words (about 70 pages). I'm happy it's a mix of poker and character. The novel group is going okay. Bimbling along.
The Contemporary American lit course has been a lot more tempestuous with a reading list that has not gone down well. We started with Carrie (Stephen King) which most ppl know is about a teenage girl brought up by a psycho religious mum. Carrie has telekinetic powers and kills loads of ppl at the prom. Good, wholesome, American fun.
Then we had Anita Shreve, The Pilot's Wife. This was picked up by Oprah, made her book list and since then everything Shreve has written has gone gold. This is coffee table literature; not low brow, not high brow, just readable. Not a great story but well enough executed.
From here, things went downhill with a string of increasingly literary books. The tutor is unfortunate in that he has three of the most commercially focussed writers on the course in his group, the most vociferous of which is a Scot who thinks Dan Brown is a genius (The Da Vinci Code).
Anne Tyler's, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, is a study of a disfunctional family told from each members point of view, set in Baltimore from the fifties to near present. Grim, lacking any real story and little to no change in character throughout. Shrug.
Dan De Lilo's, The Body Artist, is a novella of 124 pages whose first 24 pages are devoted to a confused and rambling portrayal of a man and his wife having breakfast, after which he drives off to his ex-wife's house and commits suicide. The woman is the Body Artist in question and the rest of the book is about her dealing with this death and the nature of time. The novella is best described (politely) as performance art (Don goes as far as to tell us pretty much this) or (less politely) crap.
You can imagine this went down poorly with our Psychic presenter from Sky (Psychic interactive daily) and our Scots thriller writer.
And next we are faced with Joyce Carol Oates, I'll Take You There, a stream of conciousness novel told from the point of view of an unreliale and unlikeable woman dealing with her neurosis of identity, love and family. I wonder if it will come to blows.
And if we survive that, then there is Beloved to follow up (Toni Morrison, Nobel Laureate 1993) and her book about the slave woman who kills her own children rather than let them fall into the hands of slavers. Beloved is the single word on her daughter's gravestone and the name of the woman/ghost that returns to her mother. Good stuff if you are Stephen King, but in the hands of Toni Morrison we get a book where it is difficult to tell when anything is happening, who is doing it, and with a point of view that on occasions changes by paragraph, let alone by chapter. Soulful, certainly. Rich in character, doubtless. Delivered in a confusing as hell melange designed to confuse and frustrate, absolutely.
I'm currently reading the book after that, Blood Meridian, Cormac MacCarthy. Best described as Hemmingway on peyote. Literary and yet direct and brutal, it is a portrayal of early 19th Century US west/Mexico that is unfogiving in its meanness and cracks along like a buffalo herd. Dispassionate, gruesome, compelling; this is bound to stir more debate.
The Contemporary American lit course has been a lot more tempestuous with a reading list that has not gone down well. We started with Carrie (Stephen King) which most ppl know is about a teenage girl brought up by a psycho religious mum. Carrie has telekinetic powers and kills loads of ppl at the prom. Good, wholesome, American fun.
Then we had Anita Shreve, The Pilot's Wife. This was picked up by Oprah, made her book list and since then everything Shreve has written has gone gold. This is coffee table literature; not low brow, not high brow, just readable. Not a great story but well enough executed.
From here, things went downhill with a string of increasingly literary books. The tutor is unfortunate in that he has three of the most commercially focussed writers on the course in his group, the most vociferous of which is a Scot who thinks Dan Brown is a genius (The Da Vinci Code).
Anne Tyler's, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, is a study of a disfunctional family told from each members point of view, set in Baltimore from the fifties to near present. Grim, lacking any real story and little to no change in character throughout. Shrug.
Dan De Lilo's, The Body Artist, is a novella of 124 pages whose first 24 pages are devoted to a confused and rambling portrayal of a man and his wife having breakfast, after which he drives off to his ex-wife's house and commits suicide. The woman is the Body Artist in question and the rest of the book is about her dealing with this death and the nature of time. The novella is best described (politely) as performance art (Don goes as far as to tell us pretty much this) or (less politely) crap.
You can imagine this went down poorly with our Psychic presenter from Sky (Psychic interactive daily) and our Scots thriller writer.
And next we are faced with Joyce Carol Oates, I'll Take You There, a stream of conciousness novel told from the point of view of an unreliale and unlikeable woman dealing with her neurosis of identity, love and family. I wonder if it will come to blows.
And if we survive that, then there is Beloved to follow up (Toni Morrison, Nobel Laureate 1993) and her book about the slave woman who kills her own children rather than let them fall into the hands of slavers. Beloved is the single word on her daughter's gravestone and the name of the woman/ghost that returns to her mother. Good stuff if you are Stephen King, but in the hands of Toni Morrison we get a book where it is difficult to tell when anything is happening, who is doing it, and with a point of view that on occasions changes by paragraph, let alone by chapter. Soulful, certainly. Rich in character, doubtless. Delivered in a confusing as hell melange designed to confuse and frustrate, absolutely.
I'm currently reading the book after that, Blood Meridian, Cormac MacCarthy. Best described as Hemmingway on peyote. Literary and yet direct and brutal, it is a portrayal of early 19th Century US west/Mexico that is unfogiving in its meanness and cracks along like a buffalo herd. Dispassionate, gruesome, compelling; this is bound to stir more debate.