Kurt Vonnegut: How to Get a Job Like Mine

Elif Shafak: The Politics of Fiction

Story Structure

I'm in the process of reading Robert McKee's classic guidebook for creative writing, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting. I've also read some months back another classic on stories, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, by Joseph Cambell. I also recently stumbled on the video clip below. I'd like to look into the 8 steps provided and see how it parallels with McKee's Story and Cambell's Hero, as well as Christopher Booker's Seven Basic Plots.

On Happiness

A prerequisite, I think, is that you ought not to be intelligent.

I remember once, having sprained an ankle, I couldn’t sleep because of the throbbing pain, and while so beset in the midnight hours my empathies stretched out to all those other wretched souls writhing in pain far worse than my own. I cried for the victims of all sorts of cancers, bemoaning their tortured fates, squirming from their ache in cold, hygienic, marbled hospital wards. I knew very well that my sprained ankle, such a silly ailment if there ever was one – the bane of the clumsy – could compare in no way to the agony felt by the really ill. It is in our own moments of suffering that we can have empathy with the suffering of others, and I’m sure many a man has felt similar compassion when he found himself in a situation of discomfort.

The intelligent man, the honest man, need no autobiographical moment to evoke empathy. The artificial construct of the imagination, yeah the knowledge of life (that life is a series of experiences many of which are toil and suffering), is enough to create in the intelligent man, yes the honest man, sympathies with people he do not know but for the anthropomorphic moulding of his imaginings. Of course, one can be intelligent and deceitful and lie to yourself; assembling a padded cage of denial. Yet, one has to wonder whether such a man can authentically be called intelligent.

However, if you are a wise man, i.e. honest and intelligent, you will always be aware that your own happiness rings as a foiled mocking note against the unheard cries of the suffering. For this reason, I believe, the intelligent man cannot be happy. An intelligent man that welcomes self-deceit cannot be happy for his own lies taunt him; the intelligent man that in honesty accepts the true state of affairs is unhappy too, for the truth of others’ suffering flies in the face of his own comforts and pleasures.

The solution is to be either a simpleton or a sadomasochist. As for the former, that’s not much of a choice. A simpleton ambitious for intelligence will not know the life of discontent that awaits him until he has acquired sufficient intelligence and once he has acquired it, it will be too late; for one can seldom return to your former state of stupidity. As for the latter, you need to be of that tandem-disposition. Being only a sadist will not ensure you durable happiness, since it is only a matter of time before some suffering befell you too. And being a masochist only will not cause enduring happiness either, for some fickle good fortune tends to smile, occasionally, even on the most unfortunate of creatures. Only a sadomasochist, and better yet a stupid one at that, who is preferably void of intellectual ambition, can truly be happy this side of Heaven. Ironically, it is Heaven, of all places, where the sadomasochist would suffer most, and not be happy.

C-R-A-P-ify Your Graphic Design

Robin Williams spells out the four basics of effective graphic design in her book The Non-Designer's Design Book: Design and Typographic Principles for the Visual Novice. The following from Daniel H. Pink's A Whole New Mind (2006):

1. Contrast. "If the elemenst (type, color, size, line thicknesses, shape, space, etc.) are not the same, then make them very different."
2. Repetition. Repeating visual elements "helps develop the organization and strengthens the unity" of your brochure, newsletter, or letterhead.
3. Alignment. "Nothing should be placed on the page arbitrarily. Every elements should have some visual connection with another element on the page."
4. Proximity. "Items relating to each other should be grouped close together."
   

19th & 20th Century American Poets

This coming semester I'm teaching 19th and 20th century American poetry. This will be the first time for me teach American poetry. The landscape I need to cover is quite daunting – two centuries of profound poetry within a mere 14 weeks! (The semester is 16 weeks in total, but two weeks are allocated for mid and final exams.) It feels somewhat silly to cram two centuries of American poetry in less than four months, when any of these poets, take Eliot for instance, can easily occupy a semester on his own.

I’ve decided to teach it as an “introduction” to 19th and 20th century American poetry, and will cover as many of the big names as possible. Currently my syllabus outline will look something like this:

Week 1: Orientation
What is Poetry?
19th & 20th century America (The Highlights)

Week 2: Romantics
Edgar Allen Poe

Week 3: Two Great Voices
Emily Dickinson & Walt Whitman

Week 4-6: More Originals
Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, E. E. Cummings

Week 7:
Working on the first research paper

Week 8:
Midterm Exams

Week 9-11: Modernism
Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, T. S. Eliot

Week 12-14: Race & Gender (Some Important African American and Female Poets)
Marian Moore, Sylvia Plath, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Maya Angelou

Week 15:
Working on the second research paper

Week 16:
Final Examination

I will also spend a substantial amount of time reviewing poetic devices and figurative language to aid in the quality of the research papers. So far as I can gather, the two research papers the students will write for this class will be a first for many of them, hence the week each I’m allocating before the hand in date for each research paper. Since plagiarism has become such a rampant phenomenon, I’m going to try to keep it hands on with these papers – guiding the students through the process.

My main textbook will be Perrine’s Sound & Sense (Thomas Arp & Creg Johnson, 2008). It include poems of most of the poets I want to look at, gives very good material on reviewing poetry and has a section devoted to writing about poetry. I will probably supplement poems from Norton’s Anthology of Poetry and supplement material from MAP.

Any suggestions?

The Liminal Michael Jackson

Reposted from my main blog: Skryfblok
[Image Source: Rasha]

I’ve avoided the Michael Jackson-saga on purpose. What is there too add? Then I started to think* about what a liminal being Michael Jackson was.

Isn’t Michael Jackson the epitome liminal being? What is Jackson’s ethnicity, what’s Jackson’s gender, what’s Jackson’s “age”? Throughout his career, Jackson seemed to transcendent such labels. Of course he is African-American, but we all have to agree that it is not that simple. Jackson did not look African-American. Imagine an alien being visiting Earth and seeing the Pop-icon for the first time. Seeing Jackson’s ethereal white complexion, silky wavy hair and chiselled-coned nose, the alien visitor would never have been able to guess Jackson’s “ethnicity”. Although politically incorrect and slightly distasteful, there is a reason why we find the following humorous: “Michael Jackson was born a poor black boy, but became a rich white woman.” Regardless of having fathered numerous children, many people still question his sexual orientation. In fact, he is has become an almost asexual being. And towards the end of his life, it would seem that he refused to age, not merely outwardly, because of the many plastic surgeries, but rather inwardly; as if he became a psychological Benjamin Button.

The great essayist James Baldwin wrote in the essay “Here Be Dragons” the following:

The Michael Jackson cacophony is fascinating in that it is not about Jackson at all. I hope he has the good sense to know it and the good fortune to snatch his life out of the jaws of a carnivorous success. He will not swiftly be forgiven for having turned so many tables, for he damn sure grabbed the brass ring, and the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo has nothing on Michael.

All that noise is about America, as the dishonest custodian of black life and wealth; the blacks, especially males, in America; and the burning, buried American guilt; and sex and sexual roles and sexual panic; money, success and despair–to all of which may now be added the bitter need to find a head on which to place the crown of Miss America.

Freaks are called freaks and are treated as they are treated–in the main, abominably–because they are human beings who cause to echo, deep within us, our most profound terrors and desires.

Indeed, Michael Jackson became a freak – a liminal being in who we projected “our most profound terrors and desires”; and that’s why we hated him so much. That’s why we loved him so much.

* My thoughts about Michael Jackson’s liminality was spurred on by an article I started writing recently on the similarities in liminal spaces in Samuel Taylor Coleridge epic poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Tales of the Black Freighter: Marooned”, the comic-within-a-comic, in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ graphic novel Watchmen. [Previous posts on Watchmen here and here.]