Response to Big Books read

A person whose opinion I value highly has just pointed out to me the flaws of my reading of 46 books on the big books read list, and I think I should perhaps point out some things that will skew that data.

Of the 46 books on the list, only 28 of them I chose to read by myself. (yes, ONLY 28. I'm very strange like that) Some of them are children's books. Some of them were books I only read to acquaint myself with the movie, which was starring one of my favorite actors. (Anna Karenina, which I dislike thoroughly along with most of Tolstoy's work, springs to mind)

And certainly I thought there were a lot of books that I've really enjoyed and considered great literature that weren't on there, and some books that I didn't think were great literature were on there anyway. Edith Wharton was sadly not there- I love The Age of Innocence, and the fact that it won a Pulitzer could matter less to me. I think it's great, evocative writing.

On the issue of black authorship, I will be the first to admit that I am highly deficient in that subject, mainly because I have not been exposed to much of it. The only book I read by a black author in school was Beloved, by Toni Morrison, which, while a great work of writing, I didn't enjoy reading at all. I do not think I would ever be prompted to read one of her books again on my own because, simply put, the first one did not move me.

One author I'd be delighted to read more of is Ernest J. Gaines, whose Lesson Before Dying was a stirring and beautiful peice that, if memory serves, caused me to tear up a little. He is not on the list, but his book was brilliant. So also was his 'A Gathering of Old Men' which was a great piece and just a cool exercise in trying to piece together a narrative from the viewpoints of many different people. I read both of those books because a teacher recommended them to me after we read part of A Gathering of Old Men in a Creative writing class and I mentioned wanting to read the rest of it because the subject and style interested me.

Last Semester with Sister Mara we read an article about a white scholar doing academic work with Toni Morrison's work and her novel Sula kept coming up. Several interesting quotes were raised and I might, if my summer permits, read that. I've been on a memoir-non fiction streak so far; I read the last two of Frank McCourt's memoirs, Reading Lolita in Tehran (which was amazing) and am now trying (and failing) to get through Queen Bees and Wannabes, the book that inspired Mean Girls. The Bookseller of Kabul is another book that is on my list, along with anything else I'll pick up at the book rescue where I'm volunteering.

People often say "Don't judge a book by it's cover." Perhaps I should try "Don't judge a book by the picture on it's dust jacket."

Big Books Read-

cross posted at HMS_Mercury

Taken 'cause Karen asked me to.

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed. Well, let's see.
1) Bold the books you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Copy, paste, & repeat.
5) Starred next to the books you're reading/have read some of.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible*
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte*
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott -
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare*
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis. I own them now. :D
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding- I hated this book with a firey passion.
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov - I'm going to start reading "Reading Lolita in Tehran"- does that count?
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas - I appreciate the movie versions of these books so much. otherwise it just drags on and on and never finishes! HAVE YOUR REVENGE ALREADY, DANTES!
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac*
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy*
68 Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker- Epistolatory novels make my day full of rain clouds and the desire to kill the people who write them.
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray I got through about half and love the 2004 movie. That was the summer I read War and Peace; I was sick of big books.
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle- most of them, when i was about twelve and too young to follow what was going on.
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery- I hate this book. I had to read it for french TWICE.
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare Several times. I love Hamlet.
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Karen, I see your 32 and raise you 14. 46 books out of 100.

Damn. I must not read much current stuff....

Why I have a Problem with fanfic 100

On-line lately there has been an outpouring of LJ communities who specialize in doling out 100-prompts, little ideas that you, the author, are supposed to execute in 100 words.

I have a problem with these.

Why?

Because that's not a story, that's a snapshot. Heck, that's not even a snapshot; a picture's supposed to be worth a thousand words, ten of these little...woodles, as I call them. I've been noticing on my RSS feed of recently updated C.S. Lewis stories that more and more of these are being done, and I think you should up the word count to at least a thousand. It's not that hard to write 1000 words. Anthony Trollope forced himself to write 3000 every DAY.

I know that in the world of college essays and timed writing, word counts are getting to be more and more of an issue, to make it easier on your professors and graders. But a story has no word limit- God does not say, please live your life in this many years or less, otherwise points will be docked. I tell a story until I am done telling it, or it is done telling me what to write. And in the long run, only writing 100 words leaves you no practice for developing character, sustaining plot, or taking in a whole moment. It narrows your vision, forces you to find the barest of details to set a scene. You shouldn't limit yourselves to a mere 100 words. It's only a tenth of the picture, and your reader wants to see the whole thing.

Keys to Writing A Good Review

Just as a lark the other day, I checked several of my more recent stories to see who on ff.net had me on story alert, a feature that sends you an email message when an author puts up a new chapter.

What surprised me was that there were several people on that list who have never REVIEWED the stories in question, part of that elusive online community we call Lurkers, people who read but don't comment, who favorite but never tell you why.

So I decided to write a note in my next chapter asking these people to review, because I like knowing why or how I've entertained them. And this was one of the replies I got:

"I'm afraid I'm not a very good reveiwer, but I'll do my best."

Not a good reviewer? What sort of polluted world do we live in? All reviews are good reviews; there are just some that are better formulated than others. So with that in mind, I'm going to publish

MERCURY GRAY'S KEYS TO WRITING A GOOD REVIEW

Now this is a really simple format to writing a review, and it comes in three parts, just like Aristotle says stories should be. A Beginning, or Exposition, A Middle, or Body, and an End, or a Conclusion. Yes, Aristotle had to lay that out in his Poetics. I guess the Greeks didn't quite get it.


Start the review off your initial impression after reading. This is normally one word, like "WOW." or "Hrm." Pair this with something that really knocked your socks off, a particular phrase or image they used. If there's several things, list them! Explain why you think this worked particularly well or how it made you think of something else. Writers like to hear that you understood their humor, got their inside jokes, etc.


Then, tell them nicely what you didn't like, or what you thought didn't work well and could be changed. Give a suggestion here, and if you don't have one, apologize that you don't. If you're not going to suggest a solution to their problem, it's not helpful to have you point it out. A Phrase like:

I liked this...but I think you could change it in this way to make it better...

works very well. Be polite at this part; writers don't particularly like criticism if it's not given nicely. But lots of writers will thank you for pointing out errors in spelling, punctuation, and lost capital letters if you phrase it right.


Last, sum the review up with another really strong point. You want to end the story on a positive note. Talk about the tone, the narrative voice they used, or a particularly good ending line and how it really helped with the feeling of the story. Tell them if you're looking forward to their next post or how they really did a nice job with this story, and you're done!


That's not really that hard, is it? It just takes a little time to think about. But, writing these reviews also helps you as a writer- thinking about suggestions for other writers will often jumpstart your own stories, and seeing what does and doesn't work for other writers will help you find what does and doesn't work in your own writing.

The format of this review is to help and encourage writers. I learned this format in a speech class in which everyone was doing something that's really hard to do: get up in front of a large group of people and speak. There are estimates that 80% of the adult population has, at one point in their lives, dreaded making a speech. Writing is much the same way. It's hard to expose something that you've worked really hard on to public criticism, and sometimes you get mean, nasty reviews telling you that your work is crap and that you are a nasty, horrible person. No one wants to hear that.

So please, take these keys seriously and I think that we can make ff.net and other writing sites nicer places to be.

The Monday Update

I've posted a new chapter of A Jewel in the Crown and a new chapter of Outrageous Fortune. I'm too lazy to put links in, so you'll have to use the sidebar.

Page Changes

If you check out the links box, you'll see a new link to my Deviant Art page. There's not a lot of stuff there, but it's all pretty cool.

While you're at deviant art, you should check out the page of my new friend, Mira Dzialynska.
She's from Poland, and she's just done a piece for my PC fanfic of my main character, Aleybis. It's really pretty, and she did a really nice job. So you should all go and tell her this.

follow up to Advice to Young Writers

Okay, so you remember a few posts ago I gave a transcript of a really long review I left some poor soul on fictionpress?

Well, she asked me to beta-read for her. Good, yes?


she hasn't sent me anything yet. That was a week ago. I think I should private message her and tell her the hallmark of a good writer is to write ALL THE TIME.

Assorted items

Item One- I have found a new muse!

Neil Perry, from Dead Poet's society. Which leads me to item two-

Item Two- New DPS fanfic up on FF.net. It's called Outrageous Fortune, and you can read it here. It's all Neil's fault. Really.

Item Three- New chapter of A Jewel in the Crown is also up on FF.net. You can read that HERE

Item Four- I have a new favorite piece of classical music- Beethoven's 9th symphony. Genius!

YES!

Scribe in talks for "Dune" resurrection

By Jay A. Fernandez 1 hour, 13 minutes ago

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter)- We have wormsign.

Rookie scribe Josh Zetumer is in negotiations to write the latest incarnation of "Dune," Frank Herbert's sprawling sci-fi epic, for Paramount Pictures.

The award-winning 1965 novel -- the first in a series of six books about a futuristic struggle for control of a precious spice called Melange on the desert planet Arrakis -- was first adapted by David Lynch into a financially and critically disastrous 1984 film (though Herbert apparently liked it). It also was turned into a more successful Sci Fi Channel miniseries in 2000.

No one involved would comment on Zetumer's take on the "Dune" saga.

Herbert's son, Brian, and Kevin J. Anderson, who have co-written several additional "Dune" novels, will co-produce. Peter Berg ("Friday Night Lights") is attached to direct.

Reuters/Hollywood Reporter

I LOVE THESE BOOKS!

Wake Up, Little Susie

New PC fic (yeah, I know, another one.) called Wake Up, Little Susie up now on ff.net

HERE

and here's the song featured in it! Yay for the Everly Brothers!

Advice to Young Writers

I just left a killer long review of someone's story, and I feel like this is advice every young writer needs to hear.

Well, you asked me to review, and so I shall. I think the dialogue in this story is your main strength, but the strengths of this story are outweighed and overwhelmed by the things you need to fix, like your spelling and punctuation.

Before you put a story up, it should be a given that you've checked it over to make sure your sentences start with capital letters and you have basic proper punctuation. Normally when I see a story without proper punctuation I stop reading and forget about leaving a review, because if the writer can't take their own story seriously enough to proofread, I'm not sure I want to waste my time.

When someone stops speaking in a sentence and a period is required, you need a comma. "Like right now," the Wordsmith exemplified. But there's a lot of ways to end a sentence, and that comma rule doesn't work all the time. If you know someone who's a really good writer, like an English teacher or an older sibling who's taken a lot of English classes, ask them to explain the rules to you, because frankly, they're really hard to explain over the Internet.

The other major problem I see with this story is that your beginning is a little...amateur. You need a good beginning to hook your readers in, and no real writer begins their story describing the physical attributes of their characters. It's boring! If they're well written, people aren't going to need to know what they look like, only how they act and feel. The way a character looks is only secondary to the story, and doesn't need to be described in detail unless it's somehow related to the plot.

And speaking of plot, I'd like to know where this story is going. You have a nice little summary for it, but it's the end of the first chapter and I wouldn't know what the story is about unless I read that summary. You need to introduce a problem, or a hint of what the problem's going to be, before you can start trying to be funny or describe the daily lives of your characters. What does this gum incident at the end have to do with being pregnant? Is it the gum's fault that the girl is pregnant? I know that sounds like a stupid question, but authors always have to have a reason for putting something in a story, and right now, I'm not seeing what the line of reasoning was.

So I'm sorry for the long and angry review, but I mean it all in the best way. All authors have to go through a phase like this one, and the best thing to do is keep writing, and also keep reading. The reason I'm giving this advice is that I really wish someone had told me all of this stuff when I had started writing.

The best writers, I've been told, are the best readers as well. when you read, you find out what you like, as well as what you don't like, and you can see how real, published authors write, set up plot, and treat characters.

So keep going, and keep reading. You might your next big idea.

I didn't know how long I'd been writing until I realized how good my writing actually was compared to the twelve and thirteen year olds of the world who are just starting. I've come a long way since then.

Crazy psuedo feminist poem

Merc's new crazy pseudo feminist poem (and in the women's right's 60s feminist kind of way, not the way Professor Steve keeps trying to explain that I still, after an entire semester, don't understand) is up now at allpoetry. It's called Don't You Honey-Baby-Sugar-Sweetheart Me.


And you can read it here!

Or here on my fictionpress, if you'd like to leave a comment and you don't have an allpoetry account.

New Story

A new PC fic, That Word Honor, about Peter and Edmund returning to school and a world at war with quite a different tyrant than the ones they're used to fighting, is now up at ff.net.

You can read it here!

It involves a song from my research project on radio propaganda, Edmund ranting on Hitler and the nature of war, and a very surly Peter.

New Chapter

The second chapter of my new Prince Caspian fic (which is looking like it's going to be a LONG haul, by the way) is up and ready for reviewing at ff.net.

HERE

I'm really terrible

I was just listening to Queen's We Will Rock You on the Knight's Tale soundtrack, and i got to thinking--

Someone should make a fanvid for Prince Caspian and the Pevensies to "The Boys are Back in Town."

*sings* Guess who just got back today - them wild eyed boys that had been away. Hadn't changed, hadn't much to say, but man I still think them cats are crazy...

New Prince Caspian fic!

My New Prince Caspian Fanfic, A Jewel in the Crown, is up now on FF.net

Go read it now HERE!

Also-

New short story (or essay, almost) called Death and Time up on fictionpress.com

Go read that HERE!

New Poem

I wrote this poem when I was teacher shadowing a few weeks back- It's called "Ruby Beautiful"

give me ruby beautiful

give me emerald fine

kiss me in the moonlight,

let me know you're mine.

give me diamond lullaby,

give me sapphire song,

rock me on the porch swing,

all night long.

show me that you love me,

show me that you care

whether its with daisies

or diamonds for my hair.

P&P

damn. seems by 1830 Fanny and Charlotte would be 21, not 18 as was previously supposed.


Need to find someplace to put a queen victoria joke.

Updates

Item One- I no longer hate Edith Wharton, and am seriously considering posting the fiction in question.

Item Two- A new Kingdom of Heaven fanfic, God Wills It, is up now at ff.net (Links bar to your right for direction) New evidence reveals it may be theologically unsound- who knew!

Item Three- Jane Austen wants to take Edith Wharton to town for distracting me away from Husbands and Lovers. Unfortunately, updates on that front seem to be rather sparse at the moment, as George, Fanny, Charlotte, Richard and Co. have decided to take a love nest by the seashore and booze around while I sit and listen to sea shanties at home. Sometimes I hate my characters.

In other news, I may be open to adopting a new muse. Submissions for recommendation are being accepted now; candidates being considered will have to at least have appeared in one of my fanfics or interest me immensely.

Edith Wharton, I hate you.

You and Martin Scorsese. You've made me start writing this stupid little fanfiction no one will ever read (because I'm the only person in the world who writes Edith Wharton fanfiction) and what's worse, it's not going anywhere!

----

Travel! They exhorted her. See Europe and all its wonder while you are still young. And she had, staying in London, Paris, Madrid, Berlin, St. Petersburg. She’d seen all there was to see, and then some, until her trunks were tired and their sides were filled with labels from hotels with exotic names- Hotel de Ville, Hoffenhammerplatz Haus, Le Russe Imperial. Then she had bought new trunks, new clothes and traveled more. There were bits of her past all over Europe’s salons and receiving rooms: a forgotten fan at a café in Madrid, a dress left for the maid who had attended to her in Berlin. She had forgotten and purposely misplaced her possessions until nothing remained that reminded her of Jefferson.

Then she had returned home.

The great house on Fifth Avenue seemed either too big or too small – it seemed to depend on the time of day she observed the large front hall and the darkly paneled sitting rooms. Too old, though, her new architectural sensibilities told her, too old and too fusty by half. Remake, remodel, renew, or better still, knock it down! No, no, too soon for that. Her father had designed this house, and she was not about to give him up and change it all at once, losing the only bit of him she had left.

A year later, and they were still cooing over her. Poor Beth, all of New York was saying, Poor Miss Danderidge. Lost her father and then had her engagement broken and then ran off to Europe to recooperate. Poor thing.

That’s the one thing that never changes, Beth, her mother had reminded her when she returned home. the false modesty, the false sympathy, and the false friends of Society. Society is still here, Beth, as much as you wanted it to crawl into a corner and die while you were away. You’ll have to face it sooner or later, Beth. They’ll be expecting you to.

Random Culture Find Status- War, Inc and recent article

I told you several weeks ago in a post about a movie that was coming out called War, Inc with John Cusack and some other people about a war in which everything has been branded. I'm not personally jumping up to go see this movie (I'm not a huge John Cusack fan) but neither, it seems, is anyone else.

Mark Caro, of the Chicago Tribune, wrote in his "Pop Machine" blog as well as in the Sunday, May 18th section of the Trib,

"...“War, Inc.” isn’t exactly riding the blockbuster train either. Co-written by Cusack (and, as he told me last year, largely directed by him despite a full credit for Joshua Seftel), this “Grosse Pointe Blank”-meets-Naomi Klein [bold print mine] political satire opens next Friday in New York and Los Angeles but has no further release dates scheduled, including in his hometown. (John’s sister Joan, another Chicagoan, co-stars.)"

What did I tell you people! Naomi Klein No-Logo-ism all over the place! Anyway- Professor Steve would be proud of me. I felt smart; I knew what Mark Caro was talking about. GO THEORY!

Now, Caro goes on to talk about how the movie isn't very well publicised and how the less than success of the film is also due in part to the critical response it got at the Tribeca Film festival. Representation, anyone? Having a movie be successful is just as much about advertising (guaranteed representation) as it is about how the press and the public represent it. The best movies are the ones you walk out of the theater wanting all your freinds to see so you can discuss it. Apparently War, Inc is not one of these movies. Shame, really. Naomi Klein deserves more screen time herself.

Student teaching DAY THREE, FOUR, and FIVE

yesterday was student teaching day three, which began miserably (for a laundry list of reasons) and ended reasonably well. I forgot to give my dad a job application, my mother made me change a perfectly cute outfit, and I had cramps. glorious way to start a Wednesday.

anyway, I really don't know what happened between 8 and 3, but by the end of the day I was feeling pretty good about myself.

More on that later. We began watching The Age of Innocence in Mrs. A's first AP class, and Edith Wharton and Martin Scorsese have me hooked. I want to see the end of this film come hell or high water. I've even started writing a short story set in the 1870s. I like it so far, although there's a bump in the middle that's tastelessly overwrought and sounds suspiciously like a bad paperback of a certain genre that women of a certain age seem to flock to like flies to fruit. My main character (Beth Danderidge) had the misfortune to loose her father and then have her fiance run off to Argentina. She fled to Europe, learned a lot about herself, and is now trying to deal with Society with a capital S and her treacherous fiance's best friend, whom she jilts because she really doesn't like him.

.... Dear lord, that sounds worse now than when I started writing it. Alright, so the only merit this piece has now is its prose. Oh well. The trials and tribulations of attempting to write something happy and only getting trash.

Day four has yet to end, and was also amazing. I lead a little bit of a class discussion on poetry and how you approach it, got a chance to read two poems (one of mine and one of Carl Sandberg's) to the 2R students, shared an expierence where I made the right choice with the 2B students (they didn't seem impressed with a 20 page research paper)

Day five is just starting, so I'll update all y'all later.

Student Teaching DAY TWO

Day two of my teacher shadowing went swimmingly. I graded some quizzes, proofread papers, wrote part of an exam, watched two very different classes today (Mrs. B's first years in the Computer Lab and Mr. A's sophomores in group work), and shared a poem by Larry Schug with the two sophomore classes reading Dandelion Wine. The poem is called Dandelions, and it's in his book "The Turning of Wheels," if you want to read it. A really, really great poem.

Now I have to finish filling out a job application. blargh.

Student Teaching DAY ONE

So Student teaching today at the HS English department went FABULOUSLY. I'll refer to everyone in code so that school administrators who may happen to find this page will not be put on to the covert teacher drama I may chronicle here.

I am shadowing Mrs. A as a HS English teacher, and today was my first day. (Contrary to my father's belief, I was not acting as her literal shadow the whole day) I was introduced to all her classes as Miss Gray, which really tickled me pink, and several other teachers, including Mr. A, Mrs. B, and Mrs. D, were all glad to see me back and wished me well.

Today I oversaw group projects in 2R classes and helped several groups with idea brainstorming for their imagery presentations. They were all very impressed to hear that I had read Dandelion Wine (the book in question) in two short days.

I also sat in on 2 AP classes, each of whom are designing and implementing their own projects for the last 8 days of class. One class is watching Wharton's The Age of Innocence, which I am excited to be watching. the other class is doing a project that involves putting together soundtracks relative to the books that they have read so far in AP and compiling corresponding analysis relating the songs to the book. Not nearly as interesting by half.

So, I am bailing on the second AP class to observe Mr. A's History Class, which should be equally fun because they are doing a unit on the Palestinian/ Israeli Peace crisis. I'm trying to find a good clip from Lawrence of Arabia because I don't know how far they'll be in this and David Lean's filmmaking is made out of AWESOME, which I don't think these sophomores realize.

I also got to sit in on Mrs. A's 2B class, which was also very, very interesting. Being something of an english geek, I've never been in a Regular English class, let alone a Basic one. A different enviroment, to say the least. Mrs. A informed me that many of these students write at a 4th grade level and read at a 5th grade, or the other way around. Well below grade level, at any rate. And they don't get better because...they're in high school! High school English teachers are not taught how to teach reading, because that's something that - NEWSFLASH!- kids are already supposed to be able to do by sophomore year in high school. I also got to read some of their essays, which, for sophomores in high school, were terrible. My little sister writes better essays, and she's in the 8th grade.

But considering that Mrs. A and her team teacher had to teach these kids cold turkey over two weeks how to write and research a two page essay, they were good. Factoring in reading level and writing level, they were actually really good. All they needed was a little analysis. And some of the best essays I read were actually from ELL students- English Language Learners. They just needed some one-on-one conference time, I think, to really polish them off.

So that was Day One. I hope Day Two is just as good.

Corporate Buyout

In a sudden and long predicted move, the owner of this blog has decided to phase out the 'Literary Theory Posting' capacity and phase in the Stage Two of the Blog Life Continuum, the Wordsmithy fucntionality, of underaspreadingchestnuttree.blogspot.com.

Per this notice, this blog will now be repository to all literary outputs Wordsmith, and will be an update log for her many stories, fanfictions and literary exploits.

----

Made possible by people like Gandhi- Post Colonial Literature

I, Wordsmith, english major and blogmaster extrodinaire, have a confession to make.

I really like this book.


I like it for several reasons, the first of which is that it deals with a time period in history that i really enjoy reading about- Mughal India. Of course, it wasn't until I started reading this book that I realized the significance of this.

I first became interested in the Mughals (Or Moguls, depending on what you're reading) after reading a book on Jahanara, the daughter of Shan Jahan, the emperor who built the Taj Mahal and who is mentioned in Holder of the World as the World Ruler. It's because of the post-colonial literature movement that I can read about what India was like both before (and after) the British created their Raj there in the 1800s.

In HOTW, Bharati Mukherjee illuminates for us a story that would not have seen the light of day before the post-colonial movement, a story that allows inter-racial relationships to be seen in a somewhat positive light. She is telling the story that wouldn't be allowed to be told otherwise; that there are narratives besides the white narrative that have value and a place in the literary spectrum.

In a fanfiction that I'm writing now, one of the characters, when proposed the idea that the Taj Mahal is bigger and more fantastic than anything the English have constructed, she puts her nose in the air and replies,

"Barbaric. I suppose this great marble palace pales in comparison to St. James’ Palace. Your friend must be exaggerating; nothing can outstrip the grandeur of British architecture or the ingenuity of English builders."

If you were ever to venture to India," Another character replies," I think you would find much there that outstrips British ingenuity. Was it not the Romans who built the coliseum with nothing more than a few simple cranes and ladders? And did not the Greeks build the temples after which we fashion our own houses in the same manner? Those are the tools which still exist in India today to build their houses and temples. Simple people they may be now, barbaric, if you must, but do not underestimate their capability in erecting monuments. Once there were great kings in the Deccan, and their accomplishments make our English wars and castles look pale and puny in their shadow.”

The story takes place in the 1830s, just at the outset of the British Raj, and to be completely fair, I doubt that the character speaking there would have given the Mughals the time of day. But the fact remains that I as the author think that they deserve a place in my story, because I have been able to hear their part in world history and I like it.

The first character, Catherine, has never traveled outside of England, thinking that there is nothing there worth exploring, and the character who answers her, Horatio, is a ship's captain who, along with several other people in the conversation, has both been to India and seen all the marvelous things the Mughal Emperors did there. He tries to correct her idea of Oriental Decadence by reminding her that it wasn't until after the Viceroys began celebrating the Durbar did these shows of eastern wealth and power that she seems so adverse to actually began happening. These well-traveled men, who have been to parts of the world some people only dream about visiting, are trying to de-mystify why she thinks the way she does.

(On a historical note, the practice of Durbar wasn't actually celebrated until the 1860s under Lord Canning when Victoria became Empress of India. Empress, I should add, of a land she never even visited.)


And while we're talking about Posts, I guess we should talk about Post Modernism, the re-imagining of accepted forms to suit new purposes and methods of transmission. To put it in Professor Steve's words, Mo on a necktie. The story that I've been quoting to you from is, in my opinion, a type of what might be considered Post Modern literature- the fan fiction.

Fan Fiction is the art of taking an established piece of work (in the case of the above story, Pride and Prejudice, among other things; there's a note in my bio about it) and fiddling around with the characters, placing them in different or amusing situations, trying to write yourself into the story, or just exploring the nuances of place and person the author didn't get around to establishing. It's not necessarily Modernism on the chopping block, but it is the re-imagining of accepted forms. In this case, however, it's not architectural elements but characters. HOTW is in essence a fanfiction as well- it takes an already established story, and, with a bit of research and scholarly application, re-imagines Hawthorne's story.


While I'm really looking forward to completing Mukhergee's book, I'm not really looking forward to the end of these blogs. The end of the blogs means the end of the class, and I've really grown fond of all the people in my writing group.

Follow it in the Papers: Advertising Strategies and Tactics.

After a long study session rehashing Klein and Juffer until they could be rehashed no more, I remembered I still had to do one of these pesky things. Well, I'm kind of sick of talking about reclaiming the streets and boycotting clothes made in south american sweatshops, so I'm going to talk a little bit about strategies on the other end of Klein's party line: I'm going to talk about Advertising strategies.

If you look at advertisements for different companies, you'll notice that the ads have a slightly different flavor depending on who the target market is. Changing these flavors is a strategy, a over arching idea that dominates how a someone (or an army, or a marketing department, for that matter) does things. Each different flavor is a different string in the strategy, and on each string there are many different tactics, specific actions, words, or layouts that can draw your attention to one thing or another within the ad.

In my education class, we just finished a unit on how as teachers we can help students who live in poverty, and as part of this unit, we got a bunch of handouts on how people from different places on the socio-economic ladder deal with different situations. This information is actually really applicable to advertising.

For people living in poverty, possessions are People. If you have people, you're set, because obviously, stuff costs money, and money is something they don't have.

For the middle class, possessions are Stuff. real, tangible things we can use every day.

For the Wealthy, possessions are one of a kind objects, legacies and pedigrees. No one else has what they have. It's very elitist.

This shows a lot in high fashion advertising. When Dolce and Gabbana roll out their new fall collection (and we use the word collection because it implies that it has taken a lot of time to put together, it is beyond pricing, and it all has a common theme) they like to show it off as no one has shown it off before!

High Fashion advertising fetishizes the clothes, showing them off in outlandish situations so that we look past what the models are doing to look at what they're wearing while doing it. (This is why D&G ads are really fun to look at, for me, anyway)


The wealthy, with food, care about Presentation, how it looks, because obviously there's not a problem getting it or a problem with the quality of the food. These ads are all about Presentation. How does it look? This is what adbusters is making fun of when they put out faux CK ads that look like this:

The ads fetishize clothes, and normal human beings...well, they fetishize other things. Adbusters are trying to look past the clothes aspect into what the advertisement is also selling: Ideal body image.

Let's look at a different advertisement, one from say, JC Penny's. Much more middle class audience.

See, less about the image of the clothes and more of...well, just the clothes and what you as the consumer are going to be doing in them: Having fun. All the models in the JC Penney ad are smiling, not doing that fakey 'mysterious' look that you see on the models in the couture ad. The middle class doesn't care about image, they care about quality, not quantity, as the impoverished tend to care about, or presentation, as the wealthy care about.

Here's where I'd show you an advertisement geared towards poor folks, but that's right, they don't make those!

That's another marketing strategy: put money where it pays.

NOT A CLASS POST- random culture find

There's a movie coming out called "War, Inc" about a war that is 'the first ever war to be entirely outsourced to other companies' and which is apparently filled with advertising. It reminds me of Naomi Klein and I think it should be marked down on a "should see" list.

Plus it just looks ridiculous, which I think is a good enough reason to see any movie.

War, Inc @ IMDb.com

On a side note, I might just start posting more 'random culture finds' as I seem to come across a lot of them.

Going Public- Space and what the heck it has to do with this class

Barring a freak occurrence of snow in April, the chance that we were indeed going to have class on Friday was actually pretty high, and were it not for the freak occurrence of snow in April, we were going to talk about public space.

Why?

That's the question I asked myself on Friday morning when I was trying to figure out what I was going to do with my day, and I figured I should probably at least think about what class was going to be about if I couldn't actually go.

This is what I came up with:

Public Space creates Representation. Representation creates Agency, the ability to act and do things. Having people know who you are, either as a celebrity or as a group of people, gives you the power to do things -- Agency.

Public space can be anything, a billboard, a park, or the airwaves of TV. This is why free speech is important, because free speech helps create public space, a place where people can voice their opinions and represent ideas, concepts, and groups, giving them the ability to act. This is why we have publicly traded companies, public television, public libraries, public lots of things! By making them available to the people, they give the people space to act. That's why it's important to have unregulated public space, free from commercialism that tells us who we are or who we should be, because that's forced agency, and that's actually a loss of power for the consumer. That's why Naomi Klein is scared of the corporate university, because then those students are loosing their agency for forced agency, which, as I mentioned, is no agency at all.

Without public space, the people (all people) loose their representation and their ability to act. In my education class now, we're beginning a unit on homosexuality in schools and whether we should teach students to accept it or not. The jury's still out because we were supposed to discuss this in class on Friday, but the point remains that schools can be Public Space: they can be a place to create representation.

Now, you can argue with me till the cows come home about whether homosexuals are right or wrong, but the fact still remains that they exist, they are fellow human beings, and their side of the story deserves to be heard. I started thinking about the history of education and how we're kind of at a crossroads here that future education students will be thinking about and judging us on. First we had a debate about whether to have public education at all, then to have (white)women get education, then to get (white) women and men to be able to get an education at the same school, then to get blacks and other minorities to be able to get an education at the same school, and now we're concerned about homosexuals.

It's a matter of Representation; we wanted to show that different groups existed. Well, homosexuals exist, so let's show students they do. It's up to the students to determine whether they think they're 'right' or 'wrong' for being who they are. Representation creates Agency, and Agency is Action. Action, in this case, is discussion, and I think we can all learn a lot from that. That's what school's all about, isn't it? Learning?

Or maybe it's snow days. I'm not sure.

Represent! : Women in "The Nanny Diaries"

I'll be the first to admit that I had absolutely no idea what I was going to blog about for this unit, and then, after a very enlightening conversation with Professor Steve, I had an idea. A very, very lucky idea.

Not having any pressing homework to do on Tuesday night (yeah, I know. None. Beat that.) I decided to check out a movie and not having a great selection at Saint Ben's of the movies I wanted to see (usually involving war or an international crisis of some kind) I decided to watch the Nanny Diaries. Little did I know that this was the perfect movie to talk about representation with because it not only covers nannies and the upper crust elite they serve, but also single moms.

Annie Braddock, the young woman who is telling the audience her story, explains early on that she is the "Chanel Bag" of nannies because she, unlike most of the other nannies in the film, speaks English as her first language, is college educated, and is white. Huh. Good Help on upper east side manhattan = white= status symbol. Interesting.

More interesting to me after our discussion on Tuesday was the portrayal of Annie's mom, who- guess what?- is a single mom. "And here's the woman who reared me- pretty much by herself," Annie introduces her mother. "She's a nurse- note the shoes." Even with this harmless comment we're given a picture of a woman who works so hard she probably just came from work to see her daughter graduate and forgot a pair of nice shoes to wear.

After graduation, Annie's mom gives Annie a graduation present of a suit, saying that it's "not much" and brings up her hopes that Annie can become a famous CFO, not ending up like her father, who owns "a double wide trailer in Scranton." Clearly, money's kind of an issue in this family, and Mrs. Braddock wants her daughter to succeed. "I would give the world to be sitting where you're sitting right now," she reminds her daughter. "You are so much smarter than I was. No man is going to squash your dreams."

Okay, we're four minutes into the movie. Let's recap. Single mom is: hardworking, potentially overworked, underpaid, and...man-hating?. I'm sure there's a lot of single moms who don't fit that last one, but there you go: In order to be single, she has to have a reason for not having a husband, and Mrs. Braddock's is that her husband was insupportive and squashed her dreams.

We'll come back to the single mom later: let's get back to Annie, who now pages through a series of stereotypical women's roles in New York- Tribeca Fashionista (who has to be divorced) Park Slope Lawyer (who apparently has to be a lesbian; riddle that one out) or Central Park Bag Lady. Riveting options, all of which seem to imply that if you have a man in your life, you can't succeed. And if you do have a man in your life, like Fifth Avenue Mom Mrs. X, Annie's employer, you have no occupation, you're not working for your own income and the only thing you do in life is shop.

This movie does so much for women, doesn't it?

Moving on. Annie has a dream about her future, which involves being closed in on one side by the suited members of the buisness world and on the other side by her mother, who's shouting at her, hands on her hips. Another mark of the single mom: overprotective.

All these Fifth Avenue moms want Annie as their nanny because, as mentioned earlier, she's white, college educated, and 'terminally single', the Chanel bag of nannies. Chanel is exclusive and exclusive in nanny world means not ethnic minority and educated, which means...that all nannies are black, asian, or hispanic, don't speak english well, and generally trampled over. Funny, the two women who wrote the book this movie is based on are white. Anyway. Mrs. X talks about how she gave up her professional dreams to be a mom, and how she doesn't have enough hours in the day to go to her Parent's society meetings, so that she can learn how to be a better mother... for the son she's going to be pawning off on her live-in nanny. Right.

I'm not even half way through the movie yet and I've already found so much to talk about in the way women in general are represented, in this movie, at least. There aren't really any positives in the bunch, unless you count Annie's friend Lynette, who is spunky, independent, and forward thinking. Oh yeah, and she's also played by Alica Keys. Not that I don't love her character, I do, but white women can't be spunky and independent and black women have to be? What up with that? And oh, by the way, the first time we meet Lynette she's getting off the 8 am train from Manhattan in 'last night's party clothes' and staggering a little bit. Huh.

The Nanny Diaries is full of stereotypes, but I figure that it's supposed to be: the viewers are supposed to walk away from this overblown version of real life thinking, "Now wait a minute, this is ridiculous!" It's satire about the world of Nannies, disguised as a chick flick with a diaper bag.

Clever.