(no subject)

[kokopellinelli]

I have a confession to make.

I am a bad personwithaBAinEnglish.

I love to read, but almost every book I read for a class, I felt either indifference toward, or pure hatred. I mean, there were a few I liked, and I was glad I read them, but I would never read them again. Like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Liked it. Still have a copy. But it's not the first thing I go for when I have some time on my hands. Native Son? Hate. Flowers for Algernon? Liked it. Depressing as all hell. Never reading it again. Wuthering Heights? Die, all of you.

I hated my literary criticism classes, because they made me feel stupid. People would say, "Well, obviously this line here means the author had an awful childhood where he was abducted and probed by aliens, then they shoved spongecake down his throat and sent him back to earth where he landed in a pond full of waterlilies, and also he had sex with his mother," and I'd think, "Or...maybe he just doesn't like spongecake." But invariably, the teacher would look at those overly-active-imagination people and say, "That is exactly right! Next!"

The kind of books I read most often now? Romance and fantasy. Yeah.

I loved my creative writing classes, but writing anything having to do with fantasy or romance was out, because we were supposed to be writing things Deep and Meaningful and Modern, with Big Huge Special Ideas and Inner Conflict and Freudian Brainstorms. There was no romance, only hard rough sex on top of beds of syringes. There was no love, only lust. There was no fantasy, only cold hard reality. There was no humor, only bleak sad hurt that only deep-minded angsty people would want to read. Don't get me wrong, I had great teachers, and most of the people in my classes were very good writers. But I always came out of those classes feeling vaguely depressed. Like, no one was allowed to write light-hearted fun fluffy stuff anymore. If you wrote light-hearted fun fluffy stuff, you weren't a real writer. That's not why you took those classes. You took those classes to learn to write Truth, and by god that's what you would do. And it was SUPPOSED to be depressing, because goddammit, Truth is depressing. Well, they succeeded. I don't know how to write, and I probably never did. I have a BA in writing, and I'm afraid to write anything, let alone let other people see it, because what if it isn't Truthful enough? What if it's fluffy? What if the people in it live happily ever after? What if people don't feel properly deflated after reading it? Could I ever again show my face in society?

Well, you know what? I like silly poems. I like fluffy happy romance stories, and stories about dragons and fairies and kings and thieves. I don't like stories about Real Life. I'm using that as a generalization...some Real Life stories are perfectly good and uplifting, and I've been happy to read them. Does that mean I would ever read any of them more than once? Nope. I read it and pretend it makes me a moderately better person, then send it on its way and return to my Terry Goodkind and Catherine Anderson. I've never read Nietzsche...I'm not even sure I know how to pronounce it. I should, I know. I should bite the bullet and go read all those famous authors with the unpronounceable names and their overuse of adjectives. But will I? In all probability, no. Not unless someone thrusts one at me and says "Read this or your family will die." And even then it's possible I would bitch and moan about it (though not within the psycho's hearing).

Um...I seem to have lost my train of thought. I guess that's okay. Seems like a suitably long rant to me. It's midnight and I'm fading fast. I hate feeling inadequate. No one has made me feel this way, it's all me. I'm afraid of people thinking I'm stupid. If someone says something about Nietzsche (it's Nee-chee, right?) I nod and smile and stay silent, because I want people to like me, and I know that's stupid, because they should like me for who I am instead of what books I've read, but I stay silent anyway. I don't know what I'd say anyway. "I've never read Nee-chee! Can we talk about Dr. Seuss instead?" *vapid smile* *gum pop*

I'm debating with myself whether or not to even post this, though I'm fairly certain those people who would be reading my LJ in the first place wouldn't give a twit if I'm well-read or not, but you never know.

Well, here goes.

Comments

[foresthouse.livejournal.com]

I've never read Nietzche either. *shrug* I have read a lot of other things, and I LOVE literary analysis, though I'm pretty sure I've never analyzed sponge cake. But for one thing, I grew up with an English teacher and we had little impromptu literary discussions starting when I was like, 7. And for another, I totally agree that people can go WAY too far in their hypotheses, and come up with some blatantly ridiculous shit. My mom and I laugh about that kind of thing a lot. I think one of my personal favorites was when someone hypothesized that Gatsby was actually black, and it drove the whole novel.

And that whole gloomy creative writing thing? My theory is that it is because writers who aren't yet real writers (read: still trying to get published or whatever, not yet (or sometimes ever) good enough to be read and enjoyed) are often overdramatic or feel they MUST write melancholy tragedies and seem mysterious and misunderstood. Which is, of course, bull. And it makes those of us who don't write like that either feel out of place or amused/annoyed. When I was in high school, I won a poetry contest along with about 20 other people, and we were all invited to read our poetry. Which, as you can imagine, made me go, "Oh, shit. Really? I have to read it out loud? Damn." And I went, and I read, and I was about the last person to go, and as I sat there and listened to all the others, I realized that out of 20, I was one of possibly THREE people who had not written depressing poetry. Every. Single. Person. there had written about death, or winter, or night, or dying, or whatever. And I had written about a legendary bullfight and a summer rainstorm. Talk about feeling out of place.

So there's my two cents. Um. Or my reciprocal ramble. I hear ya, girl! :)

[kokopellinelli]

Lol. In my creative writing class, I was one of the only people who wrote something humorous. Everyone else wrote about sex and drugs and abortion, and I wrote about an exploding spider (Spiderbomb). I TRIED to make it important, but then the spider just kind of happened and it was all downhill from there.