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.