cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Too Savage for Literary Analysis I have resolved to ignore literary scholarship for a while. This is to say that when I read a book, even afterwards I do not want to know what the accepted view of it is. Right now I'm about 3/4 through 'In Our Time.' My impression at this point is 'WTF? I can write better shit than this. I *do* write better shit than this.' But if I go and read all about what I have just read then probably I will no longer feel this way. And what good would that do me? Somehow I ended up taking quite a few lit classes in college without meaning to. Mostly on American literature during the gilded age. A bit of feminist fiction, some sort of survey of Irish literature and poetry. This happened with film as well. You know what always really pissed me off in lit classes? When we would be assigned to read introductions or scholarly critiques of great works before we'd even read them. These reading assignments would always give away important plot points and suck the joy right out of the book. I never could understand why half of these essays and introductions even existed. Why does anyone need to write 20 pages about 'Pud'n Head Wilson?' How could there possibly be that much to say about it that you can't grasp just by reading the fucking book. I'm not saying that literary scholarship is a bad thing or that it shouldn't exist. Just that it isn't the stuff for me. I'm too much of a savage. The book continues to come together in my mind. On paper (well, electrons anyway) it's scattered amongst dozens of fragments and diary entries waiting to be pulled together into a single body. There's a piece of it in my last entry. Without even trying, I'm finding themes and subtexts asserting themselves. The book opens with the day that I shot the deer. The deer that I shot through the spine at the same instant that my dog's paralysis was miraculously cured. I'm taking the liberty of compressing about 6 months worth of events into the space of a week. I tried to buy a copy of 'For Whom the Bell Tolls' after work on Friday but I was out of luck. The bookstore didn't have it in so I went to the used bookstore. They didn't have it either, but they did have 'In Our Time,' which I thought I could plow through pretty quick. Except that it was two dollars and fifty cents and I only had plastic, no cash. And you can't go putting two fifty on a card at a little mom and pop business like that or else they lose money after the fee for the card. So I also ended up walking out of there with 'The OId Man and the Sea,' something nautical called 'The Bomb Ship' and another Hemingway volume, the name of which I can't even remember. When all was said and done I'd bought 4 books in order to buy one, which was not even the one I'd wanted in the first place. 13:51 - 2008-03-24 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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