Quarterly updates

Summary of this past quarter in Lit Collab: we got to know each other, vented about classes and professors, distributed the Very Unofficial Collection of Helpful Hints for New Lit Students, went on a tour of the Book Arts lab, held a peer advising session for next quarter's classes, and started a little writing group. We also got a paper recycling bin in room 143. A few of us started using Wordie.

What is the Very Unofficial Collection of Helpful Hints for New Lit Students? It's a 10-page pamphlet/zine organized by last year's Lit Collab members for this year's new students. It includes notes about people and places, practical tips about classes, myths debunked, the library explained, a lot of recommendations for classes, secrets of the English department, information about Study Abroad, and more. You can download it as a PDF.

Our plans for next quarter: organizing another Scrabble evening (see photos of last year's Scrabble tournament), further decorating room 143, getting a stapler for the computer lab (and chaining it to the wall), bringing Robyn to one of our meetings to chat about the Lit program, holding a more effective peer advising session, and...who knows what else? Maybe designing and ordering some CCS Lit t-shirts?

I have a class next quarter during our usual meeting time, so we're probably going to move meetings from Wednesdays at 5 pm to Wednesdays at 2:30 pm.

Sad news!

I got an email from Christopher recently about Professor Corum's "Shakespeare and Theory" class canceling and I wrote back in concern about Corum's health since there were rumors that he was feeling ill. Christopher wrote back saying that Corum is fine — just retiring.

While I'm glad there is nothing physically wrong with Corum, I'm severely disappointed by this change of events. Not only am I losing out on a great class that will fulfill one of the few requirements we have, I'm losing my adviser.

Though I will say that GOLD does not yet say "canceled" nor did the man himself confirm the news in response to the email I sent, but I'm pretty certain that Christopher has all his facts straight.

What another alumna says

Gall and Gumption is an interesting blog by a former Literature student named Kia. She graduated in 1981 and also taught here for a while; she was friends with Marvin Mudrick and is friends with other CCS Lit old-timers like Max Schott. I think some of you are familiar with her name because she's been published in Spectrum several times. She's written several good blog posts about Mudrick, which makes me happy. Learning about CCS history helps me understand why this college is like it is now, which is a useful understanding to have as I try to get the most out of CCS Lit and also try to help make the program better. You probably share my aims and would like to learn more too! Yay!

This 1995 article is a summary of part of CCS history, mostly from a CCS point of view. Here's some relevant background material from it:

Since the college was established as a reaction to conventional undergraduate instruction, there has been tension between the college and some academic departments, especially English.

Some of the bad feeling between the college and the English department has to do with personality conflicts of long standing; some has to do with the approach to literature. The college is interested in teaching students to read carefully and to write well, while the English department is more interested in literary theory.

The external review team found that the college's literature faculty was "extraordinarily inbred," most being former College of Creative Studies students who had received their Ph.D.s from UC Santa Barbara, and recommended that they be replaced by English department faculty.

The literature lecturers disagreed. "It's almost impossible to find people who have enough of a sense of what's going on here to teach here," said Max Schott.

"It is true that we don't spend time talking about intellectual fads like 'deconstruction' and the 'new historicism,'" said Kia Penso, another college lecturer. "Primarily we read the literature and talk about what we have read. But the fact that we don't devote a lot of time to literary theory doesn't mean we are less rigorous."

Kia's blog posts give first-person detail and color to that history. She explains aspects of Mudrick's personality:

The exuberance that so grated on his critics was an urgency of feeling about the richness of this idea as he experienced it, and an impatience with all the phony or less satisfactory notions of the good that just got in the way. Yeah, there are people who laugh at their own jokes because they're nervous and don't know how to be cool. Marvin laughed at his own jokes because he was jubilant, full of high spirits, of energy, of rejoicing in goodness and beauty, in what was out there.

She has ideas that I like:

Which is sort of the point of literature, to give you a more interesting and revealing and rich theory of life and experience (including literature and music, yes) than the half-baked notions we walk about with unthinking.

She also describes her ideas about how to teach reading, which seem to be a decent description of the CCS approach. That approach is one of those controversial things about CCS Lit (note the statement in the above news article that "The college is interested in teaching students to read carefully and to write well, while the English department is more interested in literary theory"), and the success of this approach depends very much on how good the teacher is.

There's an interesting comment on a post criticizing Adam Gopnik, which is one of the posts that I might find interesting (along with this one about riding trains) even if I didn't care about CCS. The comment is about Mudrick's strange appeal:

I went to bed perusing Mudrick on the web-don't even wonder why after all these years his voice is singing high ptched over my shoulder as I read what I type....The thing about Marvin was that you loved him so much despite every reason to dislike him.

I liked reading the second-hand Mudrick advice in some of the posts, reminding me to not worry too much about self-indulgence when writing:

If he read a book on Chaucer he would dispatch it efficiently and then have lots of room to write about Chaucer in a way that considerably increased your pleasure and understanding of Chaucer...The extended inquiry into ideas that you find in one of Mudrick's pieces, the pursuit of the author's presence, the use of jokes as little revelations, all of this sort of thing is self-indulgence...not at all in conformity with that great American virtue of being sparing of words and "sincere" with the few simple ones you use, and in which thinking and inquiring into the ideas that people live by is a frightful piece of presumption.

And to not worry too much about using generalizations when writing and talking:

A generalization was a place from which you launched out into a subject, with the assumption that your observations -- or the observations of other readers in conversation with you -- would correct the generalization. That was what it was out there for, to be corrected, to be filled with content, or to be discarded as not sufficiently descriptive or for any number of reasons that resulted from investigating the questions it raised.

If you're interested in more, I quoted some other people talking about Mudrick in an earlier post. There's also a book called Mudrick Transcribed, but I haven't read that yet.

Robyn returns!

For everyone who hasn't already heard, Robyn Bell will be returning to the mothership for the Spring 2008 Quarter.

As a meager second year, I've only had once class with Robyn. The course was titled "Graphic Novels" and cycled through a collection of books that were certainly not "comic books," with authors like Neil Gaiman, Craig Thompson and Marjane Satrapi (writer of now motion picture Persepolis!). The ten weeks of writing, reading, discussing and, on one day, painting with Robyn were enough to leave me with a strong impression. Besides her sharp wit and wry sense of humor, which always kept the class at a relaxed but crackling mood, she constantly drank green tea out of those little Arizona juice boxes. That was super adorable. I remember thinking that.

For those of you that have been here longer, I'm sure you have better anecdotes to tell about the professor who many consider the "heart" of CCS Literature. Those lucky enough to have her as an adviser tell stories of her sitting with them and imparting lessons in between checking classes on their yellow slips. Those that are yet to experience one of her amazing classes, well, I feel much like my friend Megan did when she realized I hadn't seen the third Star Wars and told me she wished she could go back and experience it again. Robyn's like that — a showdown on a lava covered rock. Meaning that she'll keep your hearts abeating and your brains aworking. Rejoice.

Robyn will be teaching two courses next quarter as follows:

Solo Author

Is there a writer you like who is not taught, or not sufficiently taught? In this course, you investigate that writer. You sleuth through all your author's writing and through pertinent criticism, biography. You teach class in small weekly installments; distribute weekly written reports; and in the end produce an article, for class, presenting your findings, mysteries, and other research.

Emily Dickinson's Bookmaking

When she was in her late twenties and early thirties, Emily Dickinson transformed herself from a gifted amateur to "one of the greatest poets of all time." We watch that happen. How? By reading, in very approximate chronological order, most of the poems she produced then — those that she copied and bound into 40 small booklets. From first to last, we try to keep up with her; we follow Dickinson's hairpin turns, light-year leaps, and zero-to-the-bone stops.

Also, the Literature Collaborative will hopefully be co-hosting a welcome back party for Robyn at the beginning of the quarter, so keep an ear out for news!

And don't forget to sign up for Robyn's classes when your next pass time comes!

Dictate III, winter blowout edition

Dictate was so much fun on Thursday evening! Here's who read: Heather Bartlett, Rachel Heine, Steph Soule-Maggio, Erin Johnson, me, Alyse Speyer, Sophie Gore Browne, Amy Katz, Franciscus Alex Rebro, and Morgan Burke. Amy Arani also played her lovely songs again.

Alyse Speyer ran the show and Jessica Delfanti helped organize the event, including obtaining the tasty treats (with Stacie Nellor's assistance). We were honored to have Dean Tiffney and Professor Corum in the audience among all our other fans.

A couple friends asked me for the names of the books I referenced in the essay I read, and I'm immodest so here's my whole works cited, but the two main ones are Oranges by John McPhee and The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan. Anybody else, especially people who read at Dictate, can get their work posted here on the blog for everybody to read and re-read — just let me know if you're interested. Self-promotion is good for you.

Literature links

You always need more to read, right? Yes, yes, of course you do.

Genres: Alternative, non-cheesy covers for science fiction books — "to reach out to a new audience who wouldn't dream of picking up the standard sci-fi book."

Poetry: The story of a controversial minimalist poem from 1965: "lighght" — Congress got annoyed at paying $750 for one word, but it "still manages to make people think."

Fiction: "Smitty", a short story by Jacob Berman about some guys, a girl, and a boat — published in Spectrum and written by one of my favorite professors.

Criticism: Is Harry Potter just about wealth and connections? — "Harry rarely puts hard work or effort into anything...Hogwarts is nothing more than a magical Mensa meeting."

Learning: Kurt Vonnegut on the silliness of writer's conferences — "Nothing is known about helping real writers to write better."

Comedy: Anton Chekhov spoke at Barnes & Noble and signed books — Improv Everywhere is great.

Pedantry: Why not to decapitalize E. E. Cummings — "we hope the dismal lowercase custom will disappear from the face of the earth," from 1992.

Our patron saint: Dylan Thomas had a messy little writing shed that he painted blue — "...then from two til seven he would retire to the shed to write, think or sleep off the beer."

What one alumnus says

When I was a prospective student, one of the people who convinced me to go to CCS was the popular blogger Tony Pierce ('91), who responded to an email from me:

i told her that i didnt hate any part of [ccs], but that she should be on the lookout for a few things when going into a writing program.

first she should actually try the things that the professors suggest. i had a teacher who hated talking animals, talking inanimate objects, science fiction, anything that wasnt happening right now, or better yet, two hundred years ago.

his theory, though he never said it, was that sci fi, talking animals, and lets say escalators that speak chinese are really things having a conversation, so why not make it easy on yourself and just make those two things People because, especially when youre just a fucking idiot getting drunk for the first time regularilly, getting two people to talk realistically on the page is tough enough.

He's written other things about CCS too:

In 2005: "because there were no grades, no tests, and no finals, i immediately started working at the campus newspaper...where i ended up writing more articles than anyone. blah blah blah. needless to say, my college experience was a magical one and im still very close with the friends that i made there"

To caption that picture from 2002: "i took her past my old college, the glorious fantastic college of creative studies and she said, god thats small, i said, i thought you said size didnt matter"

While discussing The Sopranos in 2004: "the arguement in creative studies is, if youre going to make your character reveal something in a dream, let them reveal it while awake and the consequences are much more interesting, and the effect will be more powerful."

Also from 2004: "i was invited to return back to the greatest classroom ever and sit at the head of the table and teach...they told me the terrible news that the college paper, the daily nexus wasnt good anymore"

He's currently editor of the LA Times blogs.

Marvin Mudrick

The person who founded CCS was an English professor and the Literature program was his baby, which means we're the heart of CCS. Reading about him can help you understand this place a little better.

Jervey Tervalon ('78) talks about learning from him:

Mudrick was fascinated by people, and he loved people in books, and he didn't make a big distinction between the two, except for the fact that you'll know people in books far better than you will know people in life. Here's the advice he gave me: Read literature like we read the newspaper, skim the boring parts, read carefully what interests you — just keep reading. What Mudrick couldn't stand were tastemongers, chasing some intellectual hobgoblin of the modern aesthetic; kitsch culture; the cult of family dysfunction; more about slavery; more about the Holocaust...Mudrick believed writing was a function of reading. If you read with passion and intelligence, you'd eventually come around to wanting to write.

Karen Christensen ('81) also talks about being a Literature major in the Mudrick era:

Mudrick would assign us a new novel every couple of days, and we were asked (though perhaps not expected) to get through piles of Shakespeare (whom he called a misogynist), Chaucer ("just pretend it's horribly misspelled"), and Milton (again, no favorite of Mudrick's).

He said, for example, that the measure of fiction was that it had a human story that would interest anyone, of any age, anywhere. Mudrick believed that students were able to write good stories — really good stories — because, as he said to one class, "you're at the right age, you're still about to get in touch with your own language...[but] you can't write expository prose. You can't write professional prose of any kind, you're not skilled enough yet."

That, for me, is Mudrick's legacy, or at least something he helped to strengthen in me: fascination with the whole of life and a fearlessness about digging into a new bank of knowledge.

From a New York Times review of a book by him:

In several of these essays, Mr. Mudrick seems to believe that the only way to judge a literary work is by the lusty willingness of its heroine or the vigor and explicitness of its sex scenes.

From another New York Times review of that book:

Mr. Mudrick is rude, contentious, incorrigible, comma spliced, headlong, raunchy, scornful and know-it-all...He plays, wonderfully, to the peanut gallery, and we clap so hard our hands and heads fall off, and then we go home and sleep, alas, with Hamlet: if only he weren’t real.

From his University of California memorial, written by CCS Literature professors:

...he reminds his readers that no artistic statement can be separated from the human being who has made it...Like the voices of his favorite authors, the voice in his writing reproduces his own living voice in an almost uncanny way. That voice is cantankerous, loving, aggressive, spiteful, charming; it abounds with energy and fierce humor. His very funny wordplay remains, and his gift for parody as well as his enormous love for, and need for the arts, as though his own life has depended on them.

There were subjects about which he could never be persuaded to alter his opinion, and this represents a weakness in his idiosyncratic approach. Personality was so important to him, the unstinted expression of a strong individuality was so much part of his own critical method, that he sometimes assumed that the personality of an artist lay closer to the surface than it sometimes does.

His capacity to aggravate was great, but so was his genuine pleasure at being opposed by people he liked...some of the College's most spectacular successes have been in areas where Mudrick himself had little expertise — for example in the sciences. This bears out the premise on which his College was founded, that similar qualities of curiosity and independence are necessary in order to excel in any subject.

And a picture.

CCS cleanup day

As promised, if you'd peeked into Building 494 on Sunday anytime from noon to 6 pm, you'd have seen dozens of chairs in the hallways and seven Literature majors (Janie Davis, Jessica Delfanti, Stacie Nellor, Nick Crosby, Carolyn Chiao, Mitch Shira, and me) scrubbing the place. Yay!

In room 143, we dusted and rearranged the chairs, cleaned the table, picked up the junk on the piano, mopped the floor, and decorated the walls:

There were more than enough blue tiles to make that room nice, so some of them got distributed around the hallways in random places. If you're curious, the tiles are removable and they're from Shalgo. (I didn't realize that these colors resemble my favorite website until my friend suspected covert promotional tactics.)

Next we tackled the student lounge, which was especially dirty from months — maybe years — of people spattering food residue in weird places. We cleaned the sink, scrubbed the walls and floor, disposed of the gross things in the refrigerator, shook out the rugs, dusted the tops of things, and organized the random books and magazines.

Then the computer lab got its trash picked up, keyboards cleaned, floor mopped, desktops cleared, and tables dusted. It also received a huge crossword puzzle with its top squares so high up on the wall that only CCS students could ever figure out how to fill them out. Here's an early part of the process of putting it up:

CCS staff provided many of the cleaning supplies and also fuel for us in the form of Woodstock's pizza. They're wonderful.

There are many more pictures on Facebook (a public album). We had fun, and we may do this again.

Dictate II

The second installment of Dictate (our open-mic series) took place Tuesday evening, and naturally everyone had a lot of fun again.

The lovely people who read their poetry and prose were: Stacie Nellor (pictured above), Franciscus Alex Rebro, Anna Becker, Nick Crosby, Erin Johnson, Jessica Delfanti, Alyse Speyer, Brittany Farmer, Sean Rys, Mitch Shira, and me (Britta Gustafson). I may have forgotten somebody or misspelled a name, so let me know if you have a correction.

We're planning to hold the next one on February 12 with something of a "love" theme. It may not be in the Old Little Theatre this time, so watch for the Facebook event.

Update February 7, 2008: Actually, we're going to skip February 12 and instead hold one big Dictate event on February 28 in the Old Little Theater. It works out better that way.

Because we all can use a little more cash

Here are this month's writing contests:

1. Sylvia K. Burak Scholarship 2008 — Submit a previously unpublished 600- to 800-word personal essay in English on the experience that most changed your life. Award is $500 and a year's subscription to The Writer. Deadline is March 1st.
   
2. The Writer's 2008 Short-Story Contest (Mystery) — Submit two copies of your mystery short story. Award is $1,000, first place; $300, second place; $200, third place. Deadline postmarked June 30. Entry fee is $10.
   
3. Nelligan Prize for Short Fiction 2008 — Award is $1000 and publication in Colorado Review. Deadline is March 15. Entry fee is $10.
   
4. Linguistic Depravity Crime/Mystery — Genre novella contest of 17,500 to 40,000 words. Award is $300, first place; $200, second place; $100, third place. Deadline is Feburary 28, midnight. Reading fee is $25.
5. Pilgrimage Magazine — Nonfiction and poetry entries with themes. Eligible for a writing reward. For the themes shadow/light, deadline is March 1. For 1960s, the deadline is July 1. For deep democracy, the deadline is October 1.
6. Potomac Review — Annual Poetry Contest. Send up to three unpublished poems. All entrants receive a one-year subscription. Award is $250, first prize; $150, second prize. Reading fee is $20.
7. Writing It Real — Winter personal experience essay contest up to ten-pages double spaced on any subject. Award is $150, first prize; $75, second prize; $50, third prize. The reading period is January 15 to April 1 (so send it whenever during this time frame) and the reading fee is $15.

Good luck with your entries! :)

Book review by Stacie

Shirley Jackson is perhaps better known for her short story "The Lottery" and The Haunting of Hill House (made into an astonishingly bad movie in 1999). We Have Always Lived in the Castle was her final novel and I find something so alluring about being drawn into the strange world the Blackwoods. On the outskirts of a small New England town Mary lives with her older sister Constance and bedridden uncle in a sprawling mansion estate. The opening gives a good sense for the distinct, haunting calmness of the narrator's voice:

My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.

Turning through the story, you slowly learn how the other members of the family died and watch as the tension between the small town and the isolated Blackwood estate grows. Look for the Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition to see Thomas Otts' fittingly eerie black and white cover art.

Spiffing up Building 494

Since we care about our friendly, creaky old building and we spend a lot of time in it, there are rumors that various people may descend on CCS in a couple weeks, armed with cleaning supplies and new decorations.

You can help decide what these decorations will look like. Possible options, with suggestions welcome:

1. More graphical wall decals, which would be like the blue and black birds already around CCS. (Janie voted for the Keith Haring decals in particular.)
2. A bunch of blue tile decals arranged in interesting patterns on walls.
3. An appropriate poster or two, maybe in the lounge.
4. A giant crossword puzzle, suggested by Stacie, maybe in the computer lab.
5. Fancy light switch plates, also suggested by Stacie.

This is important because the appearance of our building affects how people feel about CCS: is it grungy or delightful? So, if you're interested in helping clean or decorate, come to meetings! Or just let one of us know somehow.

Dictate! pictures

Tonight's Dictate! kickoff was great: entertaining readings by Literature and English students and Barry Spacks, music by Amy Arani, a good-sized crowd in the Old Little Theatre, and plenty of muffins and grape juice. The series will continue with an open-mic night in two weeks.

Here are pictures from before the main event. I blame my non-fancy camera for any possible blurriness you may notice.

Alyse Speyer, Erin Johnson, Lindsay Pullin, a mostly-hidden Stacie Nellor, and Nick Crosby.

Un-leader Mitch Shira practicing on the growing crowd.

The poet of honor, the podium-mover, and the featured musician.

Hello everybody!

This glorious blog will include:

• Meeting notes
• Event announcements
• Pictures of those events
• Bits and pieces of student work
• Constructive essays and opinions
• Videos of Mitch on the grass

So, it functions like a newsletter — a way of communicating internal stuff to each other and to the outside world — but it's better. This will help fulfill our goal of sharing information with each other, and hopefully it'll help everyone else understand us better too.