Billy Collins became our poet laureate in 2001 and 2003 by copying out the least boring sections of his journal and adding line breaks between every gBilly Collins became our poet laureate in 2001 and 2003 by copying out the least boring sections of his journal and adding line breaks between every grammatical clause, proving definitively that the American public has no ear for pleasing sounds and no eye for moderately evocative images....more
The back-cover description pasted here on Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ was clearly written by the author himself and is, unfortuMeh.
Actually, that might be a bit strong.
The back-cover description pasted here on Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ was clearly written by the author himself and is, unfortunately, the most interesting bit of prose contained in the book. Seems fairly common amongst books of this chic new genre called "critifiction," which translates into English, roughly, as "masturbatory tripe." Read some Benjamin, and pronounce it BEYN-yah-meen, and then tell me how avant garde and under-appreciated you are, you hipster fucks.
The "plot" (and I'm using the word out of kindness) is Sontag's On Photography smeared over Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Also, I have not enjoyed a second-person narrator since the Choose Your Own Adventure books in j-high. When they aren't busy being fawning and intrusive, second-person narrators smack of the Everyman. Add the observation that the "you" narrator is loosely based on Olsen himself, and I am grossly insulted by his attempts at pawning off his interior musings as my own, as though he were saying something (a) original, or (b) so astoundingly important I must share in his subject-position.
The cover blurb claims that the book's "prevailing metaphor and structural device, the photograph, examines the way images, in their magical ability to mimic memory, ultimately mock and eradicate it." Which means only that the author read Camera Lucida in grad school. "The individual past, seemingly stable and fixed, turns out to be as protean and unknowable as the future." Noooo, you're shitting me. You mean, like, Schopenhauer circa eighteen fifty fucking one? Can you even say "turns out to be" after a century and a half? Turns out there is a literary trope in which love is fully consummated only in death. Turns out we'll call it Love-Death, or liebestod. Turns out "Hills Like White Elephants" is about an abortion. An abortion, people! Gawd! "The body becomes strangely dispensable, perpetually adrift in a cybernetic world of hyperlinks and interfaces." This last bit is utter trendy bullshit, not addressed at all in the novel but damn, doesn't it sound cool? Interfaces...mmmmm. The closest we come is the "you" narrator's fleeting fascination with a performance artist who looks strangely like , as if the aura of her brilliance might rub off onto this red-shirted bitch of an author.
Basically, this waste of 328 pages is a stoner's super-deep epiphanies after regurgitating a surface-level recap of actually intelligent people who have come before. There is no story-telling involved in this book. There is only a bibliography strung out and uncited for twelve chapters....more
JCO is everything I hate about Jane Austen made sublime. Not one of her characters is believable, but they all act in the way we wish we could act undJCO is everything I hate about Jane Austen made sublime. Not one of her characters is believable, but they all act in the way we wish we could act under similar circumstances. They all utter the stunning, pithy lines we imagine speaking two days later. Oates smiles on the mundane shit of our lives, and honors the interior significance we fabricate in order to slog through each day.
"But that night as he falls slowly asleep he hears himself explaining to Annemarie in a calm measured voice that she will be risking something few men can risk, she should know herself exalted, privileged, in a way invulnerable to hurt even if she is very badly hurt, she'll be risking something he himself cannot risk again in his life. And maybe he never risked it at all. You'll be going to a place I can't reach, he says. He would touch her, in wonder, in dread, he would caress her, but his body is heavy with sleep, growing distant from him. He says softly, I'm not sure I'll be here when you come back. But by now Annemarie's breathing is so deep and rhythmic she must be asleep. In any case she gives no sign of having heard."
High Lonesome is a collection of out-of-print stories with eleven new stories that, honestly, aren't necessary to sell me on the old ones. Her touch sort of faded after the 80s, which isn't to say that her later stories are crap but, rather, that her earliest stories are goddamn golden. Two pieces in this collection of 36 are padding. Find me another author who can say that after forty fucking years.
I counted three places where her voice took over -- moments that had no justification other than the pleasure she took in writing them. They were stunning. I found myself eagerly reading to find more of them. Each story on its own is perfect as cut glass; the collection itself was brilliantly organized. I couldn't stop, and for 664 pages, that's something considering how most authors' conceits and voices bore me after the first 150.
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I would also like to note that this book was gifted to me by a beautiful young woman who tenaciously tracked down JCO to sign the bugger for me. That's right, bitches. Suck it....more
Some bloke named Jeffrey gave this monument of shite four friggin stars. Look for us to oil wrestle soon on cable.
Why can'We hates it. We haaaates it.
Some bloke named Jeffrey gave this monument of shite four friggin stars. Look for us to oil wrestle soon on cable.
Why can't I give this book negative stars? I want to take away the stars anyone else gave this book. That's right, Jeffrey, I'm vetoing your stars. Like I'm China.
Show of hands -- who here actually begins writing anything by first clustering? Eh? Who counts the sentences in their paragraphs to make sure there are between five and twelve sentences? You? Who stops after drafting a paragraph to notate each sentence as "more specific" or "more general" and then rearrange them into a more "logical" order?
The answer is that no one does. Actually, two people do, but no one likes them very much, and they're both stuck trying to find new superlatives for the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit special.
The fact of the matter is that concepts like "coherence through inductive order" and "parallelism in number and person" only make sense in retrospect, after you have firm working experience with those tools. Spanking a 100-level composition student with this crap is like expecting someone to understand Sartre before they've had their own existential crisis. And let's be honest here -- this is the same bullshit students were fed for four years throughout high school. If it didn't take then, what on earth makes you think what they really need is a rehash of the same? Brilliant. Clearly, when these students didn't sponge up their sophomore lesson that a "topic sentence is a topic plus a controlling idea," the only reason for that failure is because they were too preoccupied with prom/puberty/the Olson Twins, those lazy bastards. Let's beat them with the same switch again.
I'd like to suggest a (not really) radical idea -- that these students are stuck in a 100-level "remedial" composition course precisely because of the disgusting, patronizing pedagogy exhibited in Fawcett's Evergreen. I'd like to suggest, moreover, that students learn to write, not by placing their boots carefully in the footprints of people who have gone before and just now noticed their own path, but rather by writing, and they learn to write better by reading.
Noooo, no no. That's absurd. Instead, let's follow the little gems of uber-writing wisdom from Ms. Fawcett: "Consider adding a good quotation to emphasize one of your key points. You can begin by looking through...an online version of Bartlett's Quotations." Please, do. Also, why don't you draw jazzhands in the margin? Just to spice things up. I'm sure it will perfectly offset Mark Twain's insights into birth control and HIV in subcontinental India. "Suggested topics for persuasive paragraphs: (1) Occasional arguments are good for friendships. (2) ________ (writer, singer, or actor) has a message that more people need to hear. (3) People should laugh more because laughter heals." Fantastic. Thank you for that insightful bit of writing, Gidget. I'll be sure to keep that in mind when I have testicular cancer.
Perhaps, when you feed students purile, infantilizing bullshit, they give you only purile, infantile bullshit in return. Perhaps, instead of secretly believing that all 100-level students are utter morons who are "slow" in developing their language skills and who just need more of the same crap that didn't work the first time around -- perhaps, instead, if you believe they're secretly brilliant and already fluent in a multitude of discourses, they'll grow into that picture of themselves that you present them with.
The day I am granted tenure? That is the day I shred this book for the green manure that it really is....more
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