It’s time to prove yourself, muggles.
Wednesday, June 10, 2015
Jane Austen Receives Feedback From Tim, A Guy In Her MFA Workshop
Posted by Unknown on Wednesday, June 10, 2015
Just a couple notes.
Dan Meth / Cassandra Austen / Via en.wikipedia.org
Dear Jane,
I don't usually read chick lit, but I didn't hate reading this draft of your novel, which you're calling Pride and Prejudice. I really liked the part where Elizabeth and her aunt and uncle went on a road trip, which reminded me of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (also about a road trip — check it out!). Anyway, good job. I do have a couple of notes to share, in the spirit of constructive criticism.
So, a big question I have is "Why?" Why does Elizabeth do the things she does? Why does Mr. Darcy do the things he does? Why does Mrs. Bennet do the things she does? Have you read Hamlet? I feel like you could really learn something from how Shakespeare (the author) has Hamlet tell readers why he's doing the things he does.
Another problem I noticed: Mr. Wickham (great name, by the way, evoking both a strong but flexible plant, and an earthly, bestial pig) is in the army, but you don't make use of that. What if Mr. Wickham, instead of just being sort of a scoundrel (Again: why?), is a scoundrel because he's suffering from his experiences in the war? (Which war, btw?) That way he could tell Elizabeth about it, and we would be able to see that she's not just an independent young woman, but also a really good listener. He could tell some jokes, too, to liven up the mood, and show that Elizabeth has a good sense of humor. This could be the middle section of the book, like five or six chapters in there.
Also, why five sisters? How about just two? Combine Jane and Kitty. Or, better, make one of the sisters a brother (named "Jim," maybe?), and then he could be the narrator who mentions his sisters from time to time! Like Hamlet!
While I'm on the sisters, is it just me, or does everyone treat Kitty really badly? Personally, I want to say "Huzzah!" to Kitty, and it's annoying that everyone else — literally everyone else — wants to hold her back. Even you, I think— and, sorry, don't mean to hit too close to home here, but… I'm just saying that I would totally court Kitty. She's got a great sense of humor. But anyway, if you change her to Jim, problem solved!
A few other concerns: Mrs. Bennett is annoying, and you don't have any people of color. Also, there aren't a lot of men in this book. Only about the same number as there are women. I was thinking that what you could do is have Mrs. Bennett be dying, but give her a black best friend. Like Othello? (Have you read it? It's also by Shakespeare, fwiw.) The Othello character could be her butler, maybe? There you go: three problems solved. You're welcome!
I don't know if you noticed this, but there's a lot about hair ribbons here. Did you mean to do that? Maybe you could develop them into a kind of motif throughout, the way Shakespeare uses a skull in Hamlet? Maybe, when Mrs. Bennet is dying, she could ask to hold a hair ribbon? And Othello the butler could bring it to her, and tell her a story, or, better yet, get Wickham in there to tell her about the war. Oh! Perfect: just have Wickham, Jim and Othello talk about the war, while Mrs. Bennet lies unconscious in the background, holding a ribbon.
What do you think about Jim, Othello, and Wickham: Brothers in Arms as a title instead of Pride and Prejudice?
Anyway, while this isn't something I would pick up on my own to read, I still enjoyed it more than I thought I would. Thanks for letting me take a look, and let me know if you need any more help with it.
Keep writing!
Tim
Juan Felipe Herrera Becomes The First Latino Poet Laureate Of The United States
Posted by Unknown on Wednesday, June 10, 2015
Juan Felipe Herrera, the author of 28 books of poetry, novels, and most recently “Portraits of Hispanic American Heroes,” will become the first Latino poet laureate of the United States, the Library of Congress announced Wednesday.
Herrera will succeed Charles Wright in the country’s highest honor in poetry. Herrera was the poet laureate of California from 2012 to 2015.
“I feel like I’m on one of those big diving boards,” he told the New York Times. “I was on a really high one already, and now I’m going to the highest one. It’s a little scary but I’m going to do a back flip and dance as I go into it.”
Immigration is a common theme in Herrera’s poetry, which includes his collection “Border-Crosser With a Lamborghini Dream,” and “187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border.”
In addition to his collections of poetry – “Half the World in Light: New and Selected Poems” won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the International Latino Book Award – Herrera is a celebrated young adult and children’s book author.
“His poems engage in a serious sense of play – in language and in image – that I feel gives them enduring power,” Librarian of Congress James H. Billington said in a statement, calling Herrera a “an American original. ”I see how they champion vices, traditions and histories, as well as cultural perspective, which is a vital part of our larger American identity.”
Herrera was born in California in 1948 as the son of migrant farm workers. He moved around a lot as a child, living in tents and trailers. He graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1972 with a bachelor’s degree in social anthropology. He received his master’s degree from Stanford University and in 1990 received a Masters of Fine Arts at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
He retired as professor at the University of California, Riverside, this year and is currently a visiting professor at the University of Washington, Seattle.
“I write while I’m walking, on little scraps of paper,” he told the Times. “If I have a melody going, I can feel it for days.”
Other poets to have held the position include Natasha Trethewey, Phillip Levine, Kay Ryan, Charles Simic, Donald Hall, Billy Collins and Rita Dove.
Here are a few of Herrera's poems:
19 Pokrovskaya Street
My father lights the kerosene lamp, his beard bitten, hands
wet from the river, where he kneels to pray in the mornings,
he sits and pulls out his razor, rummages through a gunnysack,
papers, photos of his children in another country, he cries a little
when he mentions his mother, Benita, and his father, Salomé,
who ran a stable in El Mulato, Chihuahua, eyes cast down
then he points to the mural on the wall, the red
angels descending to earth, naked mothers with bellies giving birth,
lovers in wrinkled green trousers, and a horse with the figures
of children laughing on its back, a goat floats across the night,
a flank of tawdry farmers unfurl into a sparkling forest moon
where elegant birds sit on snowy branches, here is
a miniature virgin where the yellow flames light up the village
one dancer carries fishing poles and easels with diamonds
and other jewels as colors, my father is silent
when he sees these things cut across my face.
Excerpted from Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems by Juan Felipe Herrera.
Copyright ©2008 Juan Felipe Herrera. Reprinted with the permission of the University of Arizona Press. This material is protected from unauthorized downloading and distribution.
Let Me Tell You What a Poem Brings
for Charles Fishman
Before you go further,
let me tell you what a poem brings,
first, you must know the secret, there is no poem
to speak of, it is a way to attain a life without boundaries,
yes, it is that easy, a poem, imagine me telling you this,
instead of going day by day against the razors, well,
the judgments, all the tick-tock bronze, a leather jacket
sizing you up, the fashion mall, for example, from
the outside you think you are being entertained,
when you enter, things change, you get caught by surprise,
your mouth goes sour, you get thirsty, your legs grow cold
standing still in the middle of a storm, a poem, of course,
is always open for business too, except, as you can see,
it isn’t exactly business that pulls your spirit into
the alarming waters, there you can bathe, you can play,
you can even join in on the gossip—the mist, that is,
the mist becomes central to your existence.
Excerpted from Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems by Juan Felipe Herrera.
Copyright ©2008 Juan Felipe Herrera. Reprinted with the permission of the University of Arizona Press. This material is protected from unauthorized downloading and distribution.
53 Of The Best Opening Lines In Literature
Posted by Unknown on Wednesday, June 10, 2015
“All this happened, more or less.” —Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Creative Commons 2.0 / Via Flickr: slgc
2. "The war in Zagreb began over a pack of cigarettes."
—Girl at War by Sara Nović
3. "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."
—100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
4. "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."
—Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
5. "What makes Iago evil? some people ask. I never ask."
—Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion
6. "I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won't bother to talk about, except it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead."
—On the Road by Jack Kerouac
7. "Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can't be sure."
—The Stranger by Albert Camus
8. "Once upon a time, in a far-off land, I was kidnapped by a gang of fearless yet terrified young men with so much impossible hope beating inside their bodies it burned their very skin and strengthened their will right through their bones."
—An Untamed State by Roxane Gay
Creative Commons 2.0 / Via Flickr: 33284937@N04
10. "The play—for which Briony had designed the posters, programs and tickets, constructed the sales booth out of a folding screen tipped on its side, and lined the collection box in red crêpe paper—was written in her two-day tempest of composition, causing her to miss a breakfast and a lunch."
—Atonement by Ian McEwan
11. "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul."
—Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
12. "Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed."
—Ulysses by James Joyce
13. "He—for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it—was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters."
—Orlando by Virginia Woolf
14. "Everyone had always said that John would be a preacher when he grew up, just like his father. It had been said so often that John, without ever thinking about it, had come to believe it himself."
—Go Tell It On the Mountain by James Baldwin
15. "Lydia is dead. But they don't know this yet."
—Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng
16. "The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we understood the gravity of our situation."
—The Secret History by Donna Tartt
These Female Writers Want To Stop “Chick Lit” Being Used To Describe Work By Women
Posted by Unknown on Wednesday, June 10, 2015
BuzzFeed News spoke to a number of authors about the term after Marian Keyes called it out as pejorative.
Bestselling novelist Marian Keyes recently called the term “chick lit” derogatory and now other female writers are expressing how much they dislike the term.
Samir Hussein / Via Getty
Some believe books by women are often sidelined and not taken as seriously as those by men, even when, as with Keyes' work, they address topics as serious as drug addiction, depression, and domestic violence, and sell in vast quantities.
"The term 'chick' can't have been used as a slang word for a female since the 1950s, so it does feel very 'back in your box', without a doubt," bestselling author Mhairi McFarlane told BuzzFeed News.
Harper Collins
What Do You Wish You Could Ask J.K. Rowling?
Posted by Unknown on Wednesday, June 10, 2015
But actually, why are Hufflepuffs badgers?
J.K. Rowling is one of those amazing people that everyone wants to ask a billion questions to.
TFI News / Via corneliapornelia.tumblr.com
Maybe you want to know what the deal was with the brains in a tank in the Department of Mysteries.
Warner Bros.
Or do you want to know more about other Wizarding schools around the world?
Warner Bros.
Or perhaps you just want to know what would have happened if Voldy had succeeded in killing Harry when he was a baby.
Warner Bros.
Twitter Had A Lot Of Fun Imagining Jeb Bush In English Class
Posted by Unknown on Wednesday, June 10, 2015
The former governor of Florida’s controversial comments in his 1995 book sparked a hypothetical debate on Twitter.
One of the reasons more young women are giving birth out of wedlock and more young men are walking away from their paternal obligations is that there is no longer a stigma attached to this behavior, no reason to feel shame. Many of these young women and young men look around and see their friends engaged in the same irresponsible conduct. Their parents and neighbors have become ineffective at attaching some sense of ridicule to this behavior. There was a time when neighbors and communities would frown on out of wedlock births and when public condemnation was enough of a stimulus for one to be careful.
"Infamous shotgun weddings and Nathaniel Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter are reminders that public condemnation of irresponsible sexual behavior has strong historical roots."
To All "Game Of Thrones" Book-Readers: The End Is Nigh
Posted by Unknown on Wednesday, June 10, 2015
RIP our knowledge. Spoilers for all published A Song of Ice and Fire books.
Look, A Song of Ice and Fire readers who also like Game of Thrones. It's time to give up. We can count and the numbers don't look good.
Bantam Books / Via geekireland.com
The show is going to overtake the books, and it's going to do it next season. The show's already doing it now! We're out of book content, and the showrunners are out of fucks.
I mean sure, we've got some Oldtown stuff to do with Sam and MAYBE the entire Iron Islands plot to get through, but once season 5 wraps up we're toast.
HBO / Via giphy.com
So let's gird our loins for whatever Season 6 will bring us, and pour one out for those we have lost along the way:
HBO / Via giphy.com
Farewell, hope of seeing Strong Belwas take a dump on a Meereenese champion.
Phillip Baker / Getty Images
Thanks To J.K. Rowling, Dumbledore And Gandalf Got Married This Weekend
Posted by Unknown on Wednesday, June 10, 2015
It’s the most magical union in all of the fictional wizarding world. And it all became possible thanks to J.K. Rowling’s twitter domination.
Here's What Happens When You Ask Mamrie Hart To Make You A Drink
Posted by Unknown on Wednesday, June 10, 2015
New author and YouTube cutie Mamrie Hart stopped by to teach us how to make five delicious summer cocktails.
Alice Mongkongllite / BuzzFeed
Mamrie Hart, YouTube's cocktail superstar, recently published a book all about her "boozy misadventures."
You Deserve A Drink is chock full of her best drinking stories. Each chapter comes with a corresponding recipe, so it feels a lot like the book version of watching her hilarious videos.
Lauren Zaser / BuzzFeed
Mamrie has nearly a million subscribers on YouTube, and it's easy to see why.
Her videos are filled with delightful puns about your favorite celebrities or hot topics; plus, each vid comes with its own drinking game so you can rewatch and play along.
The book is just as entertaining as the channel, with the added perk of getting to know Mamrie a bit more. It has some truly outrageous stories which can serve as either cautionary tales or inspirational advice.
While her language and jokes may get wild, her book and channel are all about accepting who you are without being afraid to poke fun at yourself.
We're Going To Learn More About The American Hogwarts In "Fantastic Beasts"
Posted by Unknown on Wednesday, June 10, 2015
J.K. Rowling tweeted about the American Wizarding school that plays a role in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, the Harry Potter spin-off movie that fans are waiting *very* patiently to see, doesn't hit theaters until November 2016.
The film — which is based on the book written by Rowling — takes place 70 years prior to the Harry Potter story we're already familiar with. It revolves around the story of Newt Scamander, a famous Magizoologist and the author of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them which was the required text for the Care of Magical Creatures course at Hogwarts.
Scholastic
But thanks to J.K. Rowling's Twitter account (aka the gift that keeps on giving), we have a little more insight into the unnamed school of witchcraft and wizardry in America.
Toby Canham / Getty Images
When Harry walks through the camp site at the Quidditch World Cup, he saw American witches from The Salem Witches' Institute. Not to mention, in a 2000 interview someone asked Rowling if Americans could attend Hogwarts. She replied, "No, they have their own school. You'll find out in Book 4. Hogwarts just serves Britain and Ireland."
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