Thursday, March 27, 2003 Hoola Boola
I've been up all night. I remember when that used to mean I'd been partying hard.
Tonight was Pravda night, and in honor of April Fool's day, Pravda was actually called Pravda for this edition only. Forced humor in a shitty college paper is worse than a painful skin rash. Grrrawk. It's a living. I must, I must, I must complete my thesis. Otherwise I'll never get out of this one-horse town.
I've actually been working on it tonight, for the first time in a week. I think my advisor is right and I do have to swittch the whole damn thing into 3rd person. It is to weep, but it really is surprisingly better that way.
Right now, I really envy Miss Wong, and all my other classmates who are writing poetry theses. Even if they sweated blood for every word they wrote (and they probably didn't. Despite the myths the tortured artist industry tries to spread, at least some percent of the writing she does comes easily or satisfyingly to any writer. If it didn't, she would've chosen a different career path.), even if it was that fucking tough to write, you can go back and re-write the whole thng as gibberish in a fairly short period of time. If I want to re-write my thesis as gibberish, it's going to take a while.
And another thing! Here is an un-retouched excerpt from a story a very guy kid turned in for my fiction class:
"His statement could have been taken as a smart-alecky comment. But Mona understood Keith's way of speaking. He was wise, for his forty-six years, and he will speak his mind. But her husband has this way of speaking potentially demeaning phrases of clarity with a genital ease, as genital as his touch. It's soothing knowledge has comforted Mona these twenty years of marriage." I don't have time for this. Arrogant as it may be, I'm kind of insulted that I have to spend my time dealing with cactopusses like this when I could be eating vegan bon bons and basking in the spring sunshine.I used to take a stand against anything I thought was remotely elitist, and one of the things I really liked about my school initially was that they didn't make you jump through hoops to be in the writing program. I probably wouldn't have tested into one of the hot-shit writing programs my freshman year. I don't know if I would now, but I know I've learned a lot in the past few years, and it would sort of suck if I hadn't gotten a chance to do that.
Now, that being said, that story was written by an upperclassman, and he's not the only one who makes this mistakes. We spend most of the workshopping time in class telling each other "That was really good, but..." but it made no damn sense, or didn't have a single developed character, or was barely decipherable due to numerous hilarious errors of spelling, grammar, diction or syntax. I don't make a lot of those errors very much. I make other errors, and lots of them, but nobody really calls me on them because I have basic technical skills. Bah. That's what I say.
posted by Frenz | 3/27/2003 07:13:00 AM
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