20 Lines A Day, Genius or Not

As mentioned in our first class, you will benefit enormously from a daily writing habit this semester. Just getting something (practically anything) on the page every day will help build your confidence with writing of all kinds. Daily writing will also result in an array of words, sentences and ideas to be foraged for the stories you're working on this semester.

I've always liked Stendhal's instruction to himself (partly because it's French, I admit it):

 Vingt ligne par jour, génie ou pas. 

However, one of my students this semester has done that pithy phrase one better. That's right, a student blogger has created a post full of smart ideas and links to others thinking about daily habits and especially daily writing--so do check it out. 

Fave book and punctuation assignment

Ahem, the assignment.

I generally am very happy to stick with writing about my old boyfriend, James Joyce, and to discuss him a little when working with college writers. Reading him and thinking about him absolutely cannot hurt a writer. Unless--but that's another topic. You can always riff through this blog to find old posts on the topic, if you wish.

However, it's probably time to mention someone else to my students. I've admired the Brazilian novelist-essayist Clarice Lispector since I was introduced to her in grad school many moons ago. The book I've got by my bedside is her first novel, Near to the Wild Heart, translated by Alison Entrekin. (The very first book I read of hers, The Hour of the Star, is absolutely fantastic too, and I'm only not quoting from it because I'd have to do some digging to find it.)

In keeping with our assignment, here is a bit from the beginning of a Wild Heart chapter called "…The Bath…"

When her aunt went to pay for her purchase, Joana took the book and carefully slipped it among the others, under her arm. Her aunt went white.
    Outside, she chose her words with care:
    "Joana … Joana, I saw …"
    Joana glanced at her quickly. She remained silent.
    "But don't you have anything to say?" blurted her aunt in a tearful voice. "My God, what will become of you?"
     "Don't worry, ma'am."
     "But just a girl … Do you even know what you did?"
     "Yes …"
     "Do you know … do you know the word …?"
     "I stole the book, isn't that it?"
     "But, Dear Lord! Now I'm at a complete loss, as she even confesses to it!"
     "You made me confess, ma'am."

It has (as per our assignment) perfectly standard punctuation.

This will probably be my last assignment (one of the joys of being the teacher), but I remain ready and waiting for yours. 

Back to school: Open world

Al Filreis Is Summing It All Up

I am tagging along in a Coursera class called ModPo run by Al Filreis, and wanted to snatch his notes in answer to the students' insistent question: What is modernism. Al says:

1. intense self-referentiality (the poem gives evidence of self-consciousness about the fact that it is a poem)
2. a partial or complete break from mimeticism, realism, narrative
3. a partial or complete break from a stable coherent "I"/persona/speaker
4. a move away from traditional stanza forms
5. an intentional open-endedness at the level of the meaning of words and phrases, and also at the ending (non-ending) of the poem
6. meta-poetry, an intense interest in poems as themselves providing an ars poetica
7. a devotion to the kind of art that makes you ask, "Is it art?" - existential questions at the level of art itself
8. often, especially in the early years of U.S. modernism: an effort to condense; a hatred of verbosity, especially lofty "flowery" rhetoric
9. belief that the poem is a poem, not a beautiful thought, not a sentiment
10. a belief that anything can be potentially the material (or subject matter) for a poem
11. a distrust of high-flown rhetoric and "high poetic" diction

These are ridiculously enormous generalizations and won't hold up with any given poet, but describe a general trend.

Love this all and want to think about it later, both alone and with my own students. . . .

Obsession

(Not the perfume.)

Obsession is crucial for a writer. Trust yours.

It's Getting to Be That Time

I for one am totally looking forward to seeing what everyone has to share from and about a favorite book.

For me, Ulysses by James Joyce remains a big favorite. Though it's a book best read in a class or (at least) with others who can help you puzzle through the confusion--which was absolutely deliberate on Joyce's part--it inevitably becomes a fabulous book to return to. I recommend it heartily to students all the time.

The BBC has prepared a hilariously abbreviated version of the novel here, and the comments include lots of jibes from the haters, if that gives you any comfort.

Here, the first few paragraphs. (Note Joyce's stubborn refusal to abide by quotation punctuation.)

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of
lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown,
ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him on the mild morning air. He
held the bowl aloft and intoned:

--_Introibo ad altare Dei_.

Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called out coarsely:

--Come up, Kinch! Come up, you fearful jesuit!

Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest. He faced about
and blessed gravely thrice the tower, the surrounding land and the
awaking mountains. Then, catching sight of Stephen Dedalus, he bent
towards him and made rapid crosses in the air, gurgling in his throat
and shaking his head. Stephen Dedalus, displeased and sleepy, leaned
his arms on the top of the staircase and looked coldly at the shaking
gurgling face that blessed him, equine in its length, and at the light
untonsured hair, grained and hued like pale oak.

Advice from Kerouac (What a Romantic)

I've stolen this from a site on the beats, thinking it would be good to have in the lineup for my upcoming advanced fiction workshop.

Belief & Technique
For Modern Prose
by Jack Kerouac
List of Essentials

Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
Submissive to everything, open, listening
Try never get drunk outside yr own house
Be in love with yr life
Something that you feel will find its own form
Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
Blow as deep as you want to blow
Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
The unspeakable visions of the individual
No time for poetry but exactly what is
Visionary tics shivering in the chest
In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
Like Proust be an old teahead of time
Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
Accept loss forever
Believe in the holy contour of life
Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better
Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
You're a Genius all the time
Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven