Their Rightful Place in the Literary World

I was having a discussion with Rainamoinen about Harry Potter and Twilight the other day. I think the conclusion we came to was not very popular, but I'm going to share it with you anyway. Harry Potter is better than Twilight, but not by much. Now bear with me, and please don't crucify me -- as is tradition, usually -- but Harry Potter is not literary canon. It, in my opinion, falls into the same category as the Chronicles of Narnia (Leena Fitzgerald said this to me the other day, and I found that statement to be adroit as fuck). It's beautiful children's literature, but it should not stand against big boy literature like Tolkien.

I'm not here to talk about whether or not these two texts are fantastic or not, though. I am, however, here to talk about what both are not.

Twilight has taken a lot of flak since its release. My Senior Symposium class kind of hijacked Twilight and used it to talk about how shitty literature has become. I think this is fucking retarded. First of all, I would be really fucking surprised if 90% of the people who bash Twlight have actually read Twilight. I've only read snipits of chapters -- most of which were orated from my troll friend, David. So, I think people need to calm down and stop ripping on Twilight. Secondly, I die a little inside whenever someone suggests that Twilight is one of the worst books written, and that it is a sad showcase of the literary world. This, too, is a stupid claim. Twilight is popular not because it of literary merit, but because it is a simple, pop-lit read aimed for YA audiences. I know, it sucks that there is a Paranormal Teen Romance section at most Barnes & Noble, but that's just the market. Twilight stories simply sell.

Further speaking to the whole "Twilight is the cornhole of the literary world" issue, it's not. Harlequin Romance and Clive Cussler-esque novels are much worse; in fact, they might as well be written by machines. These types of novels are released everyday, and each and every one of them could basically be the same. These are simply written, mindless adventures that, perhaps, provide some sort of catharsis for people in their forties, but not much else. I would be hard pressed to find someone who would say this is untrue. So please, quit talking about Twilight -- it's bad, but it's not that bad.

On to Harry Potter. Harry Potter is not as great as you think. Sure, there's a class for it, but seriously, calm down, fan boy/girl. I can actually talk about this because I've read most of them. Granted, after the fifth one, I lost interest. These books are great for a couple of reasons, especially for my generation. I remember when these books first came out. I was in about sixth grade or so, and I knew a lot of people who had never read a book. When HP came out, people flocked to the bookstores and read it. This is great for obvious reasons. Kids need to read -- it doesn't really matter what it is, in my opinion. However, just because these books hold a special place in the hearts of many people my age, it does not mean these are works of literary merit.

One could say that J.K. plays a lot with language. I suppose this happens at parts, but the whole spell system is basically pig-latin. J.K. knows how to spin a narrative most of the time, but, overall, the HP series is just an adventure novel. These books are fantastic, and they serve a purpose; however, lumping them in with greater books seems unfair. Calling everything art or canon takes away from the achievements people have made in the past.

I've noticed, though, that many people today just want to call everything art. Many people think because something is beautiful, it must be art. This is silly, and that sort of thinking is dangerous. Total equality and inclusion of everything under the umbrella of art justifies anything becoming coined as such, when in reality, this is simply not the case. If literature with limited literary merit is regarded as equal to something like the Great Gatsby, then artists such as Fitzgerald will no longer be necessary.

That's it, I guess. HP is not the top, nor is Twilight the bottom. So please, let's move on from these two series of books. They're exhausting.

JF

Letter To The Leaves: Every Novel Begins With A Few Lines

My Fellow Contributors,

I must admit something that I have been reluctant to tell many. I am a victim of our modern technological era. It seems in our time of status updates and tweets I have become trapped in writing in 150 character thought blocks. My ability to write long cohesive stories has deteriorated. Or perhaps it would be more accurate stated this way: my motivation to write long cohesive stories has eroded.

William Winfield Wright stated last week during the Q&A section of his reading that he loved titles and endings and that short poems let him get to both quickly. Short poems are like Polaroid snap shots. They capture one scene in all its glory. Every minute detail is allowed to rise to the surface. There is truly something to be valued in how much can be said in just a few lines.

But as a good friend of mine reminded me the other day, there is also something to be valued (if not more) in a long sustained novel. This friend said that it was amazing that someone could concentrate and manipulate ideas over the course of three hundred pages.

I suppose I agree with her. It is quite the feat that a writer could spend the amount of time and thought necessary to produce such a work. I might even go as far as my friend did and say that it is more impressive than say a collection of poems. However, I'm not one for sitting down for long sustained periods of writing. I find it hard to sit down and write papers for school let alone sitting down to write a novel. And the thought of developing a story that could last over two hundred pages is intimidating. But even with these reasons, I still haven’t been stopped from trying all together.

You see I have been keeping a journal since 2009. It’s not a diary but more like a common place book. Most of it is reflective prose, but there is some poetry interwoven that breaks up the narrative. My hope for this book (and subsequent journals) is two-fold. First I want to keep my thoughts and experiences written down so that they do not get erased with time. And second, I hope one day to pass these books down to my future children and grandchildren. I often write pages and phrases as if I was addressing them. Giving them the advice I learn as I make my way through life.

So I guess in a sense I am writing a long sustained book. And in the course of writing this blog I have discovered for myself the way to write a novel. Just as my common place book, a novel grows day by day, line by line.

There is something to be valued in both short quick poetry, and long methodical novels. Each gives its artist a medium to paint the world as they see it, each with their splendor, each with their beauty.

As Always

Undoubtedly Yours,

Bermuda

P.S.

If you haven’t already please go start following and reviewing Alli’s blogs on Building Your Writer’s Toolkit. These are great for any level of writer and will help you lay the foundation for later success in the world of writing.

Here’s the link to Part Four: “Building Material for your Material”,

http://afewlinesmagazine-theblog.blogspot.com/2012/02/building-your-writing-toolkit-part-four.html

Writers: Why We're Terrible People.

Perhaps the title should've been "Writers: why are we terrible people?" but, no matter. Today's blog is going to be about dark things and why we love them so much, though, I think I will refrain from using "we" as not to drag you into the caste of "terrible person."

As far as plays go, I've never been a fan of comedies (unless they be divine). No, no, I've always been a much bigger fan of tragedy, and, looking at the plays that history has remembered, I'd say that I'm in good company. Some of my favorite characters from drama are Edmund from King Lear, Livia from Women Beware Women, and Bosola from The Duchess of Malfi. What do they have in common? They are all complete bastards (and one of them quite literally). It is these characters that sink to the "bottom" of human nature and really screw things up for everyone else on the stage. In short, they are sowers of pain and discord, they make tragedies entertaining. So why are such acts so entertaining? Aristotle would argue it is to gain a catharsis of sorts, to bleed out these kinds of emotions, but I'm not so sure. If anything, I'd say that these kinds of performances excite these emotions in us. I think Thomas Kyd put it best in The Spanish Tragedy when the ghost of Andrea comments on the systematic murder of all of his friends and enemies by proclaiming "Ay, these were spectacles to please my soul" (4.5). Well, they pleased mine too. I don't think I'm alone in the masthead either, a while back Alli wrote a blog on why we have such a connection with reading sad poetry, check it out, she'll probably provide you with more answers than I can. http://afewlinesmagazine-theblog.blogspot.com/2011/12/art-of-absence-and-other-opinions.html

The idea for this blog spawned from a little writing collaboration that Jack and I are working on. Between me enjoying the bloodier things in life and Jack being a complete bastard, the project was pretty much damned (destined?) to being a tragedy from birth. During one of these writing sessions the conversation turned to Kafka and how depressed he must have been in order to produce such nightmarish stories. In a surprising turn of events, Jack brought up David Foster Wallace who once commented that Kafka laughed so hard while he wrote that he kept his neighbors up at night. My first thought was "Well, that makes sense, Kafka was fucking nuts." But I don't think that tells the whole story. In a bit of self reflection, I noticed that the times that Jack and I laughed the hardest were when we wrote something incredibly tragic. Causing methodical, poetic, and visceral pain to something you created just causes laughter, a hard laughter, but laughter none the less (Yes, it was at this point that I found out that I should never be a dad). So I ask, why do writers of tragedy do it? Why subject your own creations to a level of pain that you would never want to actually experience? And damn it, why do we want to be a part of it at all?

In retrospect, the blog title really should have been "Writers: Why We're Bastards,"

-Rainamoinen

Reservations on the Home Front

When I applied to the Cal Poly Pomona Writing Center, I didn’t realize how unique of an experience it would be. While walking with fellow editor Jack and one of our professors today, our professor remarked, that there are two types of learning that go on in a classroom: student learning and professorial learning. Though it was not the first time I had ever heard a professor state that they learn from their students, it made me start to think about all that I have learned from the students that I tutor at the writing center. Although I could turn this into a catalog, and my following sentence could be something along the lines of: what I learn from my tutees is, I have something else in mind, something I hope is less painful. I want to share an experience I had while instructing a group tutoring session last week.

I only have four students in this particular group this quarter, but, luckily, all of these students are adamant to do well in their English class, so our discussions are never lacking. They constantly bombard me with questions on both content and grammar, asking about how to organize their paragraphs, or whether or not I think a comma should go here.

However, this past week was different. Rather than coming to the meeting in a mild panic filled with questions and uncertainty, they all came in empty handed, with nothing to do. They had turned in their final essays already and were assigned just to study for the final, two weeks from then. As silence fell over the room I decided I wanted to try something that I had been interesting in doing with them for a few weeks now. I began by asking the class if they ever write for fun, or in their free time. This question was met with a series of giggles and a few exclamations of: “writing is stupid.” I wasn’t surprised, and I wasn’t sad either. In fact, they responded exactly how I expected them to.

Following this question, I asked them if they had ever heard of free writing. Most of them had heard of it before, but they were unsure of exactly what it entailed. After I explained to them how free writing worked, I told them that we would free write for five minutes without stopping, and that I wanted them to focus on why they disliked writing so much, and where this “writing is stupid” strain of thinking originated.

And so they did...

After five minutes passed I asked the students to finish up their final sentence and then to stop writing. They had each produced about half a page of writing, some more and some less, attempting to explain their loathe for writing. I was surprised to see that most of these students blamed the teachers that they had had in the past. They revealed that when they were younger they actually enjoyed writing, but when they got into high school and college, and were constantly given papers back covered in read marks with little explanation and disrespectful remarks like “duh” or “are you serious?” on them, this love soon turned to hate. Furthermore, all of the students in the meeting that day were ESL (English as a Second Language) students, so they had to face even more challenges along their paths as writers.

Since, at this point, we had fifteen more minutes left of the meeting I decided to take this exercise one step further. I noticed that to my previous question they had all began their essays with a short thesis: “I hate writing because...” And their short paragraphs continued on similarly to how their in normal essays would. In an attempt to get them to break free from this style of writing, I wanted them to write a short narrative. I designed a scenario for them. I told them that the Earth had just stopped spinning, and since objects in motion have a tendency to stay in motion, they were now hurtling thousands of miles per hour at the nearest wall, but mid air they suddenly began to think about something, anything. I told them that I didn't want them to write: “While I was mid air flying at the wall because the Earth had just stopped spinning I thought...” I wanted them to, rather than saying I am thinking something, think on the page. I wanted them to write differently than before; I wanted them to forget about all of the inhibitions that they had about their writing and just pour their minds out on the pages. No stopping, no revision, no worries. And, this time, I would join them.

And so we wrote...

After five minutes had passed I, again, told them to finish up their sentences and stop their writing. I then asked the students to share what they had written by either reading it off the page or just summarizing what they had written. It was interesting to find that two of the students seemed to be able to accomplish this task the way I had asked. One student talked about her mom and asked her a question she had always wanted to ask her, but never did. Another student tried to recollect what the man sitting across from him at lunch had been wearing, eating, drinking, but was unable to remember any of these details. These two students remarked that the process felt liberating and that they just wrote whatever first came into their head, even if it took them away from the overall topic. Yet, the other two students were unable to break out of their known essay formatting process. Although these students did not start out by stating : “I would think...” they did start out by describing the situation, and then moved to describing their thoughts. They wrote: “I think about...” and so on. I asked them why they chose to write their paragraphs this way, compared to how I had asked them to and they stated that they did not know how. That this was the only way they knew how to write.

Well, if you got this far I want to thank you for reading this in its entirety. I have no huge conclusion or lesson that I want to elicit to students, tutors, or teachers. I merely wanted to share one of my experiences with you, and let you take what you want from it. If you do have any thoughts or comments about any of my blog, please leave them in the comments section below. I'd love to hear what you have to say.

Until next time,

Nick

Call for Book Reviews: William Winfield Wright's Cosmonauts

Readers,

In the interest of time, I will keep this brief. I'm sure some of you know we recently released our first chapbook, Cosmonauts. This chapbook by William Winfield Wright is, in the words of Keats, is our Bright Star. I know, this is cliche and overly romantic; however, to some extent, this manuscript has set an amazing standard of excellence we will certainly hold on to.

With that being said, I have a request. For all you poets, professors, editors, publishers, and anyone involved in the community of the arts, I invite you all to purchase this chapbook. The chapbook can be found by going to www.wormwoodchapbooks.org and clicking on the "store" tab.

Once you've bought and read this book, I invite you to take an extra step forward and review this book. The best of the reviews will be published on AFL and Wormwood's main website. Moreover, if there is a knock-out review of Cosmonauts, we will consider publishing it in the fifth issue of A Few Lines Magazine.

So please, consider my request. Cosmonauts is an amazing piece of literature, and it certainly is worth the two dollars for a PDF. Support us in our endeavor to bring you all the best of the underground literary world.

Thank you all for your time; I hope to receive your reviews. To submit a review, please e-mail me, Jack Foster, at jfoster.editor@gmail.com

Regards,

JF

Some Minor Thoughts on Art and Snobbery

A student in my Freshman English class has been absent from the last few class meetings. After class tonight, as I was getting him up to speed, for summation, he offered, "so what we've been doing lately is basically common sense, right?"

Let me back up a second so as to explain why I was not at all insulted by this remark.

Over the last couple days in the course, I have been guiding my students in the process of visual analysis in the hopes that the techniques used to dissect a largely visual medium will smoothly translate for them to analysis of written works. Last class meeting, we looked at advertisements, picking apart the elements that appeal to ethos, logos, and/or pathos and determining whether or not each example was truly effective or not.

So, when I summed all this up for my previously-absent student in a brief rundown, he responded with the above question. My response? "Right!"

I have to say that I was thrilled that this guy sees what we are doing as "common sense." If more people could feel that way about reasonably complex rhetorical concepts, what an easy job I would have. Well, let's be honest, what a pointless job I would have!

I see the necessity of my job when it comes to guiding students toward writing better, more coherent, more focused, more effective papers; but, often I feel a certain level of rage at the concept that our college students need to be taught how to look at something in a critical manner. The worst part is, of course, when even after an extensive explanation and comp check as to how to conduct the steps of critical/logical thinking, groups of students (varying significantly in size and number depending on the particular level of the class) stare at me as if I am some kind of alien who has just asked them to watch random acts of sodomy.

So, when a student informs me that what I'm teaching him makes perfect sense, I'm practically beside myself. I wanted to give him a gold star for already knowing what basically everyone should be able to figure out all by their little selves.

But, before I ruined this little moment for myself with negative thoughts, I decided to do something uncharacteristically humble and compare myself to my students. I have a bit of a checked academic past. As I have confessed to you, our reader, before, I was not the greatest of students, and I only really got my act together as a result of being bullied into doing so. Even when I did get my act together and started doing well in school, I really only put true heart and concern into my English and literature classes, which is why I became a totally badass student by the time grad school came around.

All of this is to say that I know how it feels to not get (and not care all that much about getting) certain academic subjects. Subjects I was less than enthusiastic for included biology (101), anthropology, and statistics. The subject I just happened to kick ass at and truly enjoy was English. I get that every student has his/her true interests and then the subjects that he/she couldn't care less about.

While I can explain away the rhetorical appeals, employ Stasis Theory to dazzle any freshman, and identify the audience for a particular advertisement down to a T, I don't know shit about chemistry. And I have to remember before I get all high and mighty and annoyed with the majority of my students for not getting rhetoric, that a hell of a lot of them know more about chemistry (and math and sign language and various elements of life in general) than I do.

The whole reason I personally find literature and art to be fascinating is because I see them as THE ways for answering the questions of the universe and what it means to be human; I love to dwell in the struggle for meaning and art is all about that and these are the realms that make sense to me.

Some people will agree with me, like my student earlier tonight did, and say that seeing the world through a lens of argument and writing is "common sense," as I'm sure most of us here agree as this is a blog site for a literary magazine. But let's not get so caught up in the way we view the world, in the beauty that we've found, to forget that many people happen to be wearing an entirely different set of prescriptions.

Building your Writing Toolkit: Part Five – Pounding it Together: Making Narrative Work

Humans are a social species, and what that really means for our society for the last 80 thousand years or so is that we’re a vocal species. We talk constantly. We frequently talk out of necessity – from a need for information, acknowledgment of instructions, informing others of danger, and so on – but conversations that we enjoy the most are centered around arguing and storytelling. These kinds of talking translate into two fields of study (with a fair amount of overlap) that we work with in English classes: rhetoric and narrative. Rhetoric is a complicated field of study with lots of rules and schools and scholarly schisms that I don’t have the degree to get into – I’ll leave that to Jack, Eric and Ryan to hash out when they feel like getting into a drawn out debate. Narrative, though, is a frustratingly diverse concept that stymies the writers of everything from novels to haiku – and that’s what I’ll be talking about here.

Think of your friend who tells great stories. Everyone has one of these friends. He’s the guy who makes his anecdote about going to the mall on Christmas Eve into a forty-five minute tale that is alternately hilarious and harrowing, enthralling throughout, endlessly amusing and worthy of reiteration for years to come. She’s the girl whose stories about high school make you choke with laughter and burn with shame, effortlessly plunging you into memories of your own high school experience. These are the friends who never lamely wind down from a monologue with “well, I guess you had to be there,” because listening to them talk convinces you that you were there. These people are blessed with an unusual (sometimes learned, sometimes native) understanding of narrative. All that narrative really means (literally, when you get down to the Latin root) is “to recount.”

So how do you make narrative work in your writing? Well, there are lots of ways - there are all kinds of different voices and perspectives and chronologies that you can get into in order to make your work work, the trick is figuring out what works for your specific piece.

One of my favorite examples of the power of narrative experimentation is Pulp Fiction. Pulp Fiction is a wonderfully entertaining movie, but only because of the non-linear storytelling – if you watch the whole thing chronologically (maybe leaving the Christopher Walken scene as a flashback instead of the start of the film) Pulp Fiction is actually really boring. There’s no mystery to it, everything (except for the freaks in the pawn shop) makes sense and you end up with a pretty dull day-in-the-life flick with Butch as an interloping antagonist. But because Tarantino screwed with the order you end up with an intense ball of oddities an a wide range of intriguing antiheroes whose lives touch on and affect each other as a result of divergent motivation and the unifying element of Marcellus Wallace.

Now, just because it works for Tarantino and Pulp Fiction doesn’t mean that non-linear storytelling will work for your short story (or your poem, or your essay, or even other Tarantino films – his biggest critics in the last few years have been complaining that he’s come to rely on the non-linear gimmick to tell stories that are dull even when they are chopped to pieces.)

But if your work is missing something, consider what might happen if you re-order chapters or pieces to present aspects of your characters outside of the chronology of their story. It won’t work for everything, but it will make you consider what works in the story you’ve got, and what you need to add some more polish to.

But linearity is only one tiny aspect of narrative. Voice is a bigger part, and a more complicated one. We’ve all heard about the first-person omniscient voice, third-person narrators, and a whole slew of other bullshit that is primarily discussed in high school or lower-division college English classes. In upper division classes and serious writing groups focus less on the actual “proper” names and types of voice and more on the more literal “voice” of the narrator: who is talking to the reader? Do you tell your story through a character? Is that character trustworthy? Do you tell your story through your voice? Or through an unnamed narrator who might be you? Does your audience trust you? Should they? These are the questions that really matter when you’re working on narrative.

One of the best historical examples of this is The Canterbury Tales, which is not only written by Chaucer but is also narrated by the character of Chaucer the Pilgrim, and the potential distance between Chaucer the author and the character of Chaucer the Pilgrim has been the subject of Academic debate for centuries, with good reason: Chaucer the narrating Pilgrim is untrustworthy as a narrator which casts interesting light on the stories he tells in the Tales that might otherwise be devoid of interest (especially the essentially stolen tales that feature virtually no changes from their folklore origins) and gives the whole work a wonderful recounting air – by including himself as a character Chaucer tells his audience “I was there, so listen and hear what I saw” and by making his character untrustworthy (but more trustworthy than the other narrators in the tales) he creates drama and intrigue in a very contrived frame story.

But looking back over this blog so far I see that I’ve said a lot of words without saying very much about writing, so I guess I’m going to break off now, leaving you with a condensed history and definition of narrative, and I’ll be back next Sunday with some actual advice for you about making narrative work in your writing.

Thanks for reading, sorry I’m late, and I’ll see you next week.

Cheers,
Alli