If you give it more than a half second’s thought, it’s easy to see why John Green is such a phenomenon. He is breaking stereotypes and allowing us to rethink our ideas of “code heroes” and brilliant literary minds. In this day and age where communication occurs in a matter of key strokes and clicks, anything he says or does on the World Wide Web is — true to its name — spread worldwide immediately. He is changing the way we view authors right now, and the generation that is the target audience of his literary masterpieces are so lucky to see it. His novels, becoming classics as we grow up, aren’t all that different from those we study in school now. Of course the writing style has changed, and the topics differ in extremes, but the common themes of life-altering adolescence and the search for infinite indestructibility are present in both The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Looking for Alaska; they are salient in not only Animal Farm, but The Fault in Our Stars as well.
What do we know of these classic authors, writers like Twain and Orwell and Alcott, Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Harper Lee? All we know is all we have been told, what reports made during their lives have traveled through time to reach our education systems and the minds of our youth. What primary sources have we ever seen to tell us Hemingway was really a depressive drunk, first and foremost proud and alone? How do we know and trust that these classic authors, known in totality by near any high school student in the USA, were who we are taught to believe?
John Green is changing history, you guys. He’s doing it by Tweeting, and running a blog, and making videos with his brother. He’s doing it by playing Chubby Bunny and making venn diagrams, allowing his readers to get to know him while he lives. Other authors do this, but none — in my opinion — like John Green. In one hundred years, our great-grandchildren will be in high school, and I think they’ll be reading his books. His are becoming classics right before our eyes, and in a hundred years, they’re going to be watching the Vlogbrothers in school and saying “this is who this author was,” and I think that’s so important. He’s breaking the stereotype of reclusive, intimidating writers being the only ones with true talent and poignancy, and that is so important. We can laugh all we want at the fact that John Green, absolute literary genius, has Sharpie marker all over his face, but all he’s doing is being a real person. And to the writing world, to this changing world, so newly reliant upon technology, that is so important; John Green is so important.
Famous Authors, Rejected
newyorker.comShouts & Murmurs: The works of Homer, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Jack Kerouac get rejected: http://nyr.kr/VAENdF
Dear Mr. Homer,
Thank you for coming into the office last week and performing your epic poem. Unfortunately, we do not buy books based on pitches. We think your story is very interes—no, actually we don’t…
The Sound and the Fury to be published in colored ink--as Faulkner intended
guardian.co.ukOver 80 years after The Sound and the Fury made its debut on the literary stage, the novel which would go on to become one of the classics of 20th-century American literature is finally being published the way William Faulkner intended.
The four sections of the book, which tells of the disintegration of a southern family, move back and forth through time. Faulkner had hoped to use different colours of ink to mark the sometimes-confusing chronological shifts, writing on its publication in 1929: “I wish publishing was advanced enough to use colored ink … I’ll just have to save the idea until publishing grows up.”
Instead, the Nobel prize-winning author had to be content with using italics to convey different periods in time, and what he called the “unbroken-surfaced confusion” of Benjy’s narrative, the first section of the novel which is told from the perspective of an adult with the mind of a child. “If I could only get it printed the way it ought to be with different color types for the different times in Benjy’s section recording the flow of events for him, it would make it simpler, probably. I don’t reckon, though, it’ll ever be printed that way, and this’ll have to be the best, with the italics indicating the changes of events,” said Faulkner.
Now, following a suggestion from a member, the Folio Society has worked with two Faulkner scholars, Stephen Ross and Noel Polk, for the past year to pin down the different time periods in the novel, and is publishing the first ever coloured-ink edition of The Sound and the Fury on Friday 6 July, to mark the 50th anniversary of the author’s death.
I Know That Feel Pat (My Favorite Scene in Silver Linings Playbook)
- Pat: "This whole time you're rooting for this Hemingway guy to survive the war and to be with the woman that he loves, Catherine Barkley."
- Dolores: "It's four o'clock in the morning, Pat."
- Pat: "And he does, he does, he survives the war after getting blown up. He survives it and he escapes to Switzerland with Catherine. You think he ends it there? No! She dies, dad! I mean, the world's hard enough as it is, guys. Can't someone say, hey let's be positive? Let's have a good ending to the story?"
- Dolores: "Pat, you owe us an apology."
- Pat: "Mom, I can't, for what, I can't apologize. I'm not going to apologize for this. You know what I will do? I will apologize on behalf of Ernest Hemingway because that's who's to blame here."
- Pat Sr.: "Yeah, have Ernest Hemingway call us and apologize to us too."
Zeitoun: Novel News
At age fifteen or sixteen I began a semi-permanent ban on television. The no-television-under-any-circumstances policy lasted from 1999-2001, with a reprieve on Sept 11, and then again enforced as of Sept 12. I began university in 2002, and from that point until the present I haven’t owned a functional tv. I’m still a voracious consumer of news - listening to daily reports on the radio and reading newspapers in print and online - just a consumer of news without the barrage of images to accompany the stories. This consumption pattern meant that in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans I didn’t see (m)any images of the disaster. I certainly heard reports, read stories of the damage, looting, and unpredictably zealous or absent support from the authorities.
So when I read that Dave Eggers - one of my long favoured authors* - had written another news-novel (more on the genre distinction in a moment) about one family’s experience of the Hurricane, I put it on my list. I admit that what I read amounted to novel news to me in the sense of altogether unknown news about the hurricane. I had little idea that so many citizens were wrongfully and illegally detained in the aftermath of the hurricane; I wasn’t sure about the reports of rape, looting, assault (though to be fair, the novel does a fairly poor job of clarifying whether these events did in fact take place; rather, Eggers points out that there were contradictory news reports and leaves it - frustratingly - at that).
Grounding the hurricane (ha!) in the story of one family - the Zeitoun family - allows the reader to care deeply about the disaster because it has been carefully and thoroughly personalized. I wonder whether the Zeitoun family already inhabited a host of compelling issues in contemporary American life, or whether Eggers emphasized these issues in order to craft a more compelling novel (okay, so I don’t actually wonder, but it’s worth asking the question), but whatever the case, the Zeitoun’s embody questions of race, religion, patriotism, the precarious middle class in ways that read as genuine and appropriately complex.
In terms of genre I have a hard time accepting the designation of ‘non-fiction’ (as assigned by my library). The book is a novel, a historical one, perhaps, or what I’m calling here a news-novel. It has the usual plot, characters, and setting, but more crucially in the ‘novel’ designation - for this reader, anyway - it has thematic preoccupations (what can one man accomplish when set against nature? against the state?), symbols (the flood, drowning, risks of water, rainbows, bleh), and a shifting point of view. Much like What is the What the news-novel asks the reader to accept that what is written is for all intents ‘true,’ but allows that in any telling there will be fictional elements. It is, in short, a genre I like.
*I also like Dave Eggers. Those with reservations who have only read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius would do well to try reading something else he’s written. I myself enjoyed AHWOSG, but see a stark (really) difference between the autobiographical work and his news-novels and short stories. So here’s my plug for an author I adore (not like he needs a plug, but still): he’s really very good.
‘The Finest Life You Ever Saw’ - James Salter
nybooks.comErnest Hemingway, the second oldest of six children, was born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1899 and lived until 1961, thus representing the first half of the twentieth century. He more than represented it, he embodied it. He was a national and international hero, and his life was mythic. Though none of his novels is set in his own country—they take place in France, Spain, Italy, or in the sea between Cuba and Key West—he is a quintessentially American writer and a fiercely moral one. His father, Clarence Hemingway, was a highly principled doctor, and his mother Grace was equally high-minded. They were religious, strict—they even forbade dancing.
“the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”
—Jack Kerouac - On the Road
Favorite.
Listen
The Negro Speaks of Rivers read by the author, Langston Hughes
I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow
of human blood through human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went
down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn
all golden in the sunset.
I’ve known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
This beautiful poem written with the Whitman “I” perspective is used by Hughes to personify the history of African slaves. The metaphor of the rivers explains the value in African culture. For rivers are the source of civilization, and they have given life to the peoples of history. “My soul has grown deep like the rivers,” indicates that the African people, like the rivers, have given rise to civilization and built and given life itself to civilizations throughout all of history, from the pyramids of Egypt to the greatest contemporary nation with the banks of the Mississippi. And just as Langston sees the value in African culture, he witnesses the “muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.” He perceives the value in his skin color, it’s heart, and has witnessed it’s beautiful blossoming in the right moment, the sunset. Langston believes the soul of rivers is intertwined with the soul of his ancestry.
Ebert's Journal: Gatsby without greatness
blogs.suntimes.comRoger Ebert gives his opinion on a watered down adaptation of The Great Gatsby (which is apparently a version created primarily for ESL students). I like the discussions this is sparking in the comments about ESL and mainstream high school reading curriculum. Personally, re-reading these opening and closing passages from Gatsby reminds me why I love language and literature, and I agree with Ebert that it would be better for ESL students to read YA novels while they are first learning English than to be exposed to such an off-point adaptation. Reading an awful misrepresentation of Gatsby could give students a false sense of mastery; as Ebert says, “Fitzgerald’s novel is not about a story. It is about how the story is told. Its poetry, its message, its evocation of Gatsby’s lost American dream, is expressed in Fitzgerald’s style—in the precise words he chose to write what some consider the great American novel.”
On the other hand, I can see how many teachers would, on first glance, love to use such an adaptation in the classroom. We are told that we are to make ESL students (especially beginners) feel like they are a part of the classroom, and if they are singled out to read an entirely different novel than the rest of the class then that is not doing it. We are supposed to give them every tool we can to assist them in learning English while also completing the same curriculum as mainstream students. Wouldn’t it be worth it to give ESL students the opportunity to feel like they could speak up during lit discussion because they are reading basically the same story? Perhaps, if the rest of the adaptation is more like the plot of the original than what I have read.
If only this adaptation were a little more like the original and didn’t leave out so much of Nick’s detailed commentary, I would say that it could be beneficial for an ESL student to read it alongside the original as a resource when they are reading at home on their own. It is just too uninteresting and too irrelevant based on the bits I have read; I feel it would confuse the student more than anything. Then again, that’s my biased perspective, since an ESL student possibly would not find the language or the story to be plain or boring, as their focus is likely more on decoding and understanding rather than enjoying.
One positive thing about the retelling is that it is rich in visual aids. Now that is something I can use for ALL students, no question.
