I went to a great poetry event on campus last night after class. And I'll be librarying and amazoning the headliners as soon as I'm done writing this post.
Wow, except the photo editor is not working, so I can't upload the flyer to tonight's event that will feature mystic vocal performer Sunni Patterson and spoken word guru John Goode.
Chuck Palahniuk's Pygmy was dark, disgusting, and absolutely hilarious. It's the story of a young would-be terrorist from foreign country [redacted]. He narrates the tale of his arrival in a Midwestern U.S. town where he is taken in by a Christian host family with two teenage kids. Pygmy, as Agent 67 is called by his new community, has a nickname for everyone. He exposes the hangups of everyone he meets as Palahniuk attacks Christianity, Captialism, Consumerism, and everything else American, in true Chuckie fashion. Through his eyes, we watch him and his fellow "exchange student" operatives prepare for Operation Havoc. He goes to school, he gets in fights, he falls in love. It's a riff on your typical YA high school story, but it's twisted.
The satire is scathing and brilliant. Chuckie doesn't pull any punches, but he doesn't unilaterally beat up on American culture. He exposes some of our weaknesses but shows how dictatorial, freedomless fascist training is also flawed and damaging. I don't know if he goes so far as to promote a happy medium, but he certainly doesn't say that one side or the other is blameless. The ending is a bit "neat" and "easy" as he wraps things up at the end. I don't want to give anything away, but it is the process and commentary in the book that shine rather than the story arc and final product.
The writing style is postmodern, and I like it. I'm lucky that I picked up the audiobook version, because the reader did a wonderful job and I don't think I could sit through reading-by-sight the choppy, jumbled (though hilarious) "sentences" of Chuckie's prose.
I liked this book a lot. It is NOT for the faint of heart, and if you strongly dislike gratuitous and graphic violence, don't bother. The social and political commentary are not novel enough to make this required reading for anyone, but it's great escapism if you're into that sort of thing.
Anyone here like Barbara Kingsolver? *raises hand* She did an interview with Goodreads recently, in part to promote her new book, and the interview transcript is fabulous! She has some great gems and insights about writing and culture, how trends in writing have changed over the past thirty years, and much more. I quote one nugget as my gchat status message, but it's cumbersome. A nice nugget for a blog post is the quotation below:
"The essential ingredient of authorship is authority." It sounds easy, obvious, but it's so true. In order to write, you have to own your material and your subject. That's not to say that if you feel unknowledgeable you shouldn't try to write. Write. Always write. But don't be afraid of research. Don't be afraid of reading everything you can get your hands on. Read from a diversity of sources. Learn how to discern which sources are good and which are not. Weave them into your story. Be entrenched in your ideas, and you'll find that your words can mystically write themselves. To push that idea, build a foundation of information ideas and then empty your mind to let the words flow through you and onto the page.
Authorship as authority is true not only of fiction-writing, as I know many people are attempting with National Novel Writing Month. It is also true of academic writing. In freshman composition courses, students are learning about discourse communities, which is just a big scary word for specific conversation among people with similar goals. John Swales can give you more details at the wiki site. Basically, students need to enter the discourse community by learning about it and then practicing. Dive in, or at least wade. That's how children learn language, and that's how most of us learn anything. It's ad hoc and intensive and beautiful.
P.S. I'm thinking about going over here. Still being indecisive and weighing things. Being able to display my RSS feed favorites there is tempting.
Thanks for the whole Youth comment, ER! I don't always look like I'm 12, but I guess green brings out the blueness of my eyes, and that angle made them look uber-anime-y, as another friend let me know.
Yesterday at 3:30 I spilled coffee/hot chocolate all over my khaki pants. I was tired and I laughed at myself for a few minutes before I decided to go home and change. While home, I decided to do a little front yardwork - mowing and stripping a fallen branch for easier cleanup later. Then I showered, neglected to read anything for class tonight, and showed up thirty minutes early. Before class started, I came up with some great ideas for poetry that talks about the differences between apophatic theology and its counterpart, cataphatic theology through the metaphor of the eastern, forest-filled U.S. (cataphatic) and the U.S. West, a gorgeous, ineffable void (apophatic). We'll see what comes of that.
During class, we spent a decent amount of time on my work again. Becky, you're right. The class always energizes me. I should go home between work and class more often, but it seems silly to spent the extra gas driving. The professor read a chapter from a book that one of his colleagues has been passing around, so I assumed he wanted to talk fiction instead of poesy... but when nobody else volunteered to read their stuff, I decided what the hell. I like hearing people's comments about my work, obviously, but I don't want to be *that girl* who hogs the classroom. As class was winding down and we talked about a poem I wrote about the autumn season, I told him I was worried my portfolio would be newer, unedited stuff, because I write more in the cooler autumn months than in hot summer. The prof actually expressed the same thing - he said the dark cold helped him churn out his best work. I like that we are kindred spirits. I'll have to tell him about how Dominique Lowell is now my facebook friend!!! She wrote a really neat poem about Jim Morrison that my prof shared in class a couple of weeks ago in response to my own poem on the same subject. I tracked Lowell down and she eventually got and *liked* a copy of my work. My already larger-than-life ego feels even huger. And today's unspilled caffeine helps
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