*slumps*

[the_grynne]

The Co-op and Gleebooks are having their Winter sale, so true to my accumulative, possessive nature, I went on a book-buying binge that strained the wallet and almost broke my back when I had to carry them all home from uni in my bookbag.

The loot:

(Yesterday)
~ The Great Dune Trilogy (Dune, Dune Messiah, and Children of Dune in one 910-paged volume), Frank Herbert
~ At Day's Close: A History Of Nighttime, A. Roger Ekirch
~ Stories and Tales, Hans Christian Andersen
~ Modern Library Writer's Workshop, Stephen Koch
~ Reflections on Exile (and Other Literary and Cultural Essays), Edward W. Said

(Today)
~ Orientalism (Penguin paperback! I figured it was time I read the whole thing), Edward W. Said
~ Écrits: a selection, Jacques Lacan
~ Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, Pu Song-Ling
~ Not One More Death, essays on the Iraq War by John Le Carré, Brian Eno, Richard Dawkins, Michel Faber, Harold Pinter (Nobel acceptance speech), and Haita Zangana
~ Great Books, David Denby
~ and a book with Dae in mind, although my bringing it up is just to tease her, because she won't get it to know what it is for another four months, when it's her birthday.

My off-curriculum reading has these last couple of years become like my fic writing - there are a dozen balls up in the air at once, half of which I'll let clatter, unfinished to the earth, out of sheer shortage of inspiration or interest (or number of hands); the rest may hang out like wayward moons circling my mental heavens for weeks, months... Years.

~

A couple, I've already gotten a start into.

1. At Day's Close, A. Roger Ekirch
   Read: Preface and Introduction ("Shutting-In")
   Picked this up because of the interesting (anti-scholastic) cover, and the Guardian recommendation on the back, claiming "Here are microcultural tales of pirates and robbers, blanket fairs (people climbing into bed together to talk before going to sleep), curtain lectures (wives who felt emboldened by the dark to complain to their recumbent husbands) and night-kings (sewer cleaners in Germany)"; and because after last semester's essay on History-and-Anthropology (the two disciplines bleeding into one another in the last couple of decades, as Anthropology turned its eye from the 'other' to the historical 'self'), I was just curious. Curiosity, actually, is enough of a good reason to buy a book, is my philosophy.
   
   Ekirch is out to debunk the traditional belief that set in after the Industrial Revolution (and the beginning of the era of the electric light) that "little else of consequence transpired" during the night apart from crime and sorcery. The preface states: "Rather than a backdrop to daily existence, or a natural hiatus, night-time in the early modern age instead embodied a distinct culture, with many of its own customs and rituals." Almost immediately, the rightness of my purchase was confirmed; and the introduction - beginning with the sentence, "Rather than falling, night, to the watchful eye, rises" - held out the promise of a good read.


2. Modern Library Writer's Workshop, Stephen Koch
   Read: Introduction and Chapter One ("Beginnings")
   Why did I buy this? Maybe because I never took English seriously when I was at school, half-discouraged as I was by the fact that I apparently sucked (relatively) at it. So it's with some surprise that I've discovered that my essay writing is not truly as dreadful as I'd always supposed. After a failed attempt to complete English Extension 2, followed by a couple of years of flirting with fan fiction and academic writing, I've learned some things about how I write, my flaws in particular. And although Chabon's "Wonder Boys" put me against the idea of a person teaching anyone else how to write, and although I found the essay-writing courses we were advised to take in 1st year of absolutely no use at all, I've come to appreciate the value of tips.
   
   Stephen Koch taught fiction writing to graduate students at Columbia for twenty-one years. In the introduction, I immediately came across something that made me think of discussions relating to fic writing that come up regularly on LiveJournal:
   
   "Except in journalism, writing is a necessarily solitary trade, the most chronically solitary of all the arts. Writing's inordinate quotient of solitude, and the need not only to tolerate that solitude but even to love it, is an immovable fact of the métier, and one of the most salient psychological facts you must grasp about it. Yet too often aspiring writers are condemned--as if in punishment for their wish to write--to feel their way to the most elementary methods of the craft entirely on their own, hit or miss, and without any help whatever. There is no need for this absurd waste. Every writer is fated to face things--and plenty of them--that will have to be mastered alone, in solitary struggle. These real problems will leave no time to waste fumbling for the obvious...
   
   "Unfortunately, all too many perfectly intelligent people, generally of the writing-can't-be-taught school, really believe that writers are supposed to teach themselves everything, all alone, and by magic. They would never dream of asking a pianist or a painter or a composer--leave aside a record producer or a film director--to find out everything about the craft without help. In these areas at least, nobody would have the slightest difficulty grasping the necessary interplay between what must be taught and what must be picked up privately in the knack of any technique. Why not writing?"
   
   Posts about technique, about character/plot/atmosphere construction, about getting over writers' block and what quality consists in, are always cropping up among fan fiction writers, but what strikes me about a lot of this discussion is how it takes place seemingly exclusive from the discourse about fiction writing in general - as if fan fiction, in virtue of the mainly amateur demographics, needs to be treated as something separate, that it had to "reinvent the wheel", to borrow Koch's phrase. Fan fiction and pastiche has some of its own rules and features, like any genre, of course, but a lot of things that are said about writing in general are just as relevant to fan fiction. Why pretend it doesn't exist?
   
   Is it something defining in fan fiction that the writers are mainly self taught? That they learn their own devices, their own unique processes, away from the "experts" - accompanied only by companions in the craft, by fellow fans? (Is this why so much of fan fiction is so unreadable? And is that law in fact a necessary condition if fan fiction is to remain true to its nature?)
   
   Edit: Just had a flash idea of Death of the Endless coming to the anthrophomorphic personification of the short story (who would probably have some Greek or Latin name) because writers were not being true to its nature omg. *g*


3. Great Books, David Denby
   David Denby is a critic for the New Yorker whose film reviews I enjoy reading a great deal - even when they're trouncing films I happen to like, you can't help but laugh at their wit and eloquence. In 1991, at the age of forty-eight, Denby re-enrolled in two courses at Columbia University (Literature Humanities, and Contemporary Civilisation) on a personal "project", and re-read the masterpieces - like Homer, the Bible, Marx, and Hegel. He attended discussions with the undergraduates, mostly just listening in, but sometimes joining in. Then he wrote a book about it, about his responses to each of the works of the Western canon that he read, about the students and teachers he encountered. I initially picked up this book about a year ago in Kinokuniya because of the painting on the cover: Caspar David Friedrich's The Wanderer above a Sea of Mist, but I quickly realised that I'd read about it before, online. Since then, I may have even borrowed it from a library once, but my memory is shaky on that point.
   
   I'm reading the chapters out of order, picking ones that are of particular interest to me. Machiavelli, Hobbes, the Old Testament, and so on. What I'm enjoying even more that his passionate, highly personal take on the books are his acute observations about contemporary undergraduate life, written as a journalist who vaguely remembers his own college days, but is now experiencing it again at a entirely difference stage in his life. Describing a class on Hobbes' Leviathan, where he was the dissenting speaker:
   "But couldn't they admit, I asked, that Hobbes might have something to say to them? Couldn't freedom lead to evil as well as to good?
   
   "This was nasty talk, and no one liked it. Conversation was often free-ranging in Stephanson's class, but I never heard a single generalization offered about the behaviour of a given social group or human beings as a whole. The unwillingness to generalize at all--the desire to see absolutely everything as a very special case produced by specific historical circumstances--was the undergraduate version of political correctness. [...] With or without the lingo, the students sensed that I was tempting them with the politically incorrect sin of social generalization, and they balked."
   
   I wish he could have heard the "Marxists" generalizing about the Israelis before the start of the political economy lecture today.