Class Should Be Interesting Today

Sidenote: The book (ah, I almost just referred to it as "the text") we are discussing is not A. B. Yeoshua's The Lover that we were so fortunate to read in 10th grade history class.


On Mon, Oct 18, 2010 at 6:17 PM, David Shields wrote:

I'm intrigued by idea of focusing microscopically on how individual books
work. Any thoughts re: how to proceed? Kristen will focus microscopically on
a portion of The Lover--eg, pages 20-40 or whatever--but I'm also open to
slowing down to a crawl and looking at fewer books, but looking at them line
by line. Even looking at books we've already read, eg, Bluets, and seeing
how they work on a line by line basis. This may be an overcorrection. We
could keep moving fwd as we are doing. Or we could, after the halfway point,
change our MO a bit and focus on far fewer books and take them line by line
so that we understand their collage composition. The risk of the latter
approach is that it could become somewhat tedious, but the possible reward
might be immense. I'm open to reactions. ds


From: Kristen Young
Sent: Wednesday, October 20, 2010 9:55 AM
To: David Shields
Cc: Piper Daniels; Elizabeth Cooperman; Cecilia Kiely; Kate Lebo; Kathryn S Linn; Paul Vega; Erika Wilder

Subject: Re: MO for class.

Hello!

As I was reading and rereading The Lover, its muted cries of passion and hushed overtones of violence brought me again and again to the power of silence. Below are some questions I will be asking during our class; we may not arrive at answers but the seeds could bear some future fruit.

Silence is power. How do we harness its potential and kinetic energies?

What gains strength in the withholding, until the tension breaks the dam of separation between the story and its readers and the story pours forth from their own minds?

When does Duras fall silent? And when does she speak?

Silence performs a greater function than separation in collage: it connects.

How do her silences control us?

How do they free us?

How can we know when to introduce a silence in our own work, i.e. when should we as writers fall silent?

Others who have mastered both the potential and kinetic energies of silence: Ernest Hemingway and Miles Davis.

Incredible review of Duras’ life and work:

http://www.nytimes.com/1991/10/20/magazine/the-life-and-loves-of-marguerite-duras.html?scp=8&sq=Marguerite+Duras&st=nyt

See you in class!

-Kristen


On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 10:53 AM, David Shields wrote:

Kristen, These are interesting questions, and you should lead the discussion however you wish, but in my view these are rather abstract (unanswerable) questions, and I’m not sure how useful they are for us as we’re trying to contemplate the nature of collage composition. I’d urge us to focus with great specificity on individual passages, eg, pp. 1-20 of The Lover, and we can thereby learn how collage actually “works.”


From: Kristen Young

To: David Shields
Cc: Piper Daniels; Elizabeth Cooperman; Cecilia Kiely; Kate Lebo; Kathryn S Linn; Paul Vega; Erika Wilder

Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2010 11:17:23 -0700

David,

My plan is to focus on her use of silence to draw us into The Lover on pages 1 - 20; I have specific passages in mind. I don't believe those questions are unanswerable in this text. And as for our own answers, they will come out in our writing. We cannot know how collage works until we know what is not being said, what function the liminal spaces play; to me, those spaces require a more intimate relationship between the reader and the writer than even the words because they invoke greater leaps of imagination as the connective tissue.

See you in class!

-Kristen

Week 3

It's already the third week of school, and I really don't have any interesting stories. In a lot of ways, it feels less like being at school and more like belonging to an overly ambitious book club. That reads exclusively literary collage. And happens to be led by David Shields, who, as far as I can tell, invented the term literary collage.* (On a side note, I really like him so far, and he is, in fact, as bald as his website would lead you to believe.)

I need to maybe find a good definition of literary collage because I am pretty sure that's what I want to write. That's what I have been writing, I just didn't know it was a real thing. Since college, I've been throwing around the term "creative nonfiction" when people grill me about what I actually write (and by "grill," I mean ask the logical follow-up question when someone says I'm a "writer"). And now I get to sound even more pretentious by saying I write creative nonfiction, primarily literary collage.

To give you an idea of some of the things on our reading list, I'd say read Bluets by Maggie Nelson, but the Seattle Public Library system did not have a copy, so it might be hard to find unless you want to buy it. Other books on the list: David Shields Reality Hunger (which is a manifesto about freeing writing from the constraints of narrative and made a lot of sense to me-- maybe because I've never been able to invent characters who do things or tell stories in a linear way). Ann Carson's Plainwater. For the Time Being by Annie Dillard.

*And by this I mean he seems to be the genre's leading proponent. Meaning there aren't very many Google hits for "literary collage," although it is an excellent description. 

Getting Oriented

Apparently this will involve wine & cheese. The Creative Writing Orientation starts at 3:30 pm, followed by a happy hour gathering at what is the official English grad student pub, which I used to frequent as a member of the UW Biology grad student softball team. "Frequent" might be too strong a word, as it might have happened two or three times.

I'm sure there will be stories.

6,000 Miles

Hit 6,000 miles on the Speedster (my bike, the nice one) 2 blocks from Marriah's new house (that she calls the boat because it looks like it has been pieced together room by room-- it's hard to explain but it really does feel like a boat; the porch has a carpet on it.) This means that in the five years I've had my bike, I could have biked to Boston and back.

Monday Night

Enjoying my last fake Sunday night. Last week of work and then, as a student, I will enjoy real weekends (as in not working on Saturdays). In fact, I will only have class on Monday and Wednesday afternoons, so I will have to be careful to leave some room for actually doing my work and not take off on four-day weekend trips every week.

I was a little nervous about actually going back to school, self-doubt creeping in, so I decided to focus on one aspect of returning to the world of academia that I knew I could handle-- extracurriculars. Right now my top choices include, but are not limited to:

-Cycling team
-Climbing at the indoor rock wall
-Intramural basketball (although I am slightly intimidated playing basketball at a university of 50,000 students where statistically there are thousands of ex-varsity high school basketball players who could kick my ass, and I'm not sure how successful I will be fielding any type of sports team from the English Graduate department)
-Joining the UW Yacht Club where I can pretend that I know how to sail dinghies
-Rowing club
-Yoga classes

And for a team sport option, I might even look into ultimate and see if I could compete. That could be fun now that I'm retired from rugby and could use a field sport that involves running and much less contact.