The heresy of paraphrase

[readingredhead]

I had two opportunities to talk about writing today with writers, which is really weird and unusual and lovely and should happen more often. Both of these too-brief conversations were held before the beginning of a class, and inevitably there were other (non-writer) people listening. In my Clarissa seminar the guy who sits across from me noticed my

Comments

[readingredhead]

I think it's less about the East Coast and more about graduate school in English lit. And to be fair the girl who made the Twilight comment is the same girl who owns a harp...so it's not like they are ALL like this. For example Jenny Davidson has spent her whole life on the East Coast and yet regularly talks about fantasy and science fiction novels and TV shows in class (she had an aside the other day in which she compared Sabriel and George R. R. Martin, talking about the fear of the North & screening things away with magical walls, and I wanted to just pause the entire class conversation and inform her that we need to have a lengthy talk about fantasy novels so I can worship her brain even more than I already do). I am incredibly glad she exists because she gives me hope.

The problem with space-time bending city story is that its plot is too complex and I did not go into it knowing everything that was going to happen, and also it was a NaNo-novel and as a result is pretty much ~50k of me whining about the polar desires of academic life, i.e. critical distance/emotional engagement, and how they relate to the use of biographical detail in literary criticism.

[readingredhead]

Haha Jenny is great; she's my advisor in the English department, and in addition to having written two really well-received books of literary criticism about the 18th century, she's written 3 novels (2 of which were young adult alternate history/fantasy!) and is at work on a fourth. And she reads the heck out of SF/F and crime/mystery stuff, while still knowing more about the contemporary "literary" market than I suspect I will ever want to! Basically if I grow up to be her, things are going well.