Both Barnes and Noble and Borders are giving away free e-books on their websites. And not just books in the free domain though those are there too.  I saw a few big name sellers like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and a James Patterson book.  Not really my thing but its there.  The weirdest one I saw was a short story.  I’m not quite sure what I feel about short stories being sold or given away without any other works attached to them quite yet.  (More on that later)

Anyways download a free book, take your device to a Starbucks in a Barnes and Nobles, show the kid behind the counter that you have downloaded the book using the BN E-reader, and then the kid will give you a free tall coffee.

Of course that is true.  All movies, well at least all commercial movies, are made with the hopes that they will make a profit.  That’s how studios decide they are worth the investment.  I don’t necessarily think  that negates their importance or worth but it does make me think what would Lewis Carroll think of all that has been done to his original creation.  Alice in Wonderland has been retold in animated form, as a satire on Cuban society, as a musical, and has even been retold through a Korean musical.  Though I haven’t seen all of the different variations of Alice in Wonderland and they all do seem very different but they all seem to draw on the essential themes Carroll was trying to get through to his readers, that there is something wonderful and magical about being a child and how difficult it is to grow up.

Personally, I don’t think that Burton did such a horrible job.  The story felt more like an excuse to play with cool cinematic tricks and give weird characters a voice there was some sort of connectivity that was lacking in the story.  Characters like the Mad Hatter who were foils in the original story had depth forced on them that wasn’t organic and didn’t really help move the plot forward.  But it was a beautiful movie and entertaining.  As far as book adaptations go, not too bad.

On that note I had one young lady come in to a session really frustrated.   Then again she was also writing her paper on her IPod.  Anyways I asked her why she was so frustrated and she that she was a really good writer but she wrote fiction and writing academically was tough for her and she couldn’t understand why.  She also said she was “complete pathos with her writing.”

I had never heard a writer talk about their own work like that or even use that word in that way so I went and looked it up.  Dictionary.com says that pathos is the feeling of pity or suffering one gets when exposed to a work of art or an experience.  I guess I don’t really know what this girl meant when she said that her work was pathos but I think she was speaking to the goal of her fiction, to elicit a feeling of sympathy and caring for her characters.  I can buy that completely that is a goal of fiction.  What I have had a hard time with lately is how to do that without making the reader feel sad or pity for a character.   It’s true the best stories seem to depend on the reader having that yucky pity feeling but in a lot of ways that seems like a false way to represent the human experience, which I kind of think is the main goal of writing, art,  everything.  But then art that works to bring out happiness, excitement, humor, or anything else seem to either fall under some sort of genre fiction or it relies on a gimmick to be successful as opposed to working despite it.  I don’t have a good answer on this but, maybe, it’s a good thing to think about this week.  Do we go to those standard pity/sorrow emotions because it’s the only way to represent our characters or because it’s easy?

10.  I don’t feel guilty about splurging at the book store.

9.  Every thing you do could possibly turn into an awesome story/essay/poem so you might as well go out and experience everything.

8.   I have made a whole bunch of friends who will actually talk books with me, four hours and hours sometimes.

7.  When you have a good day writing it makes all the bad days worth it.

6.  Reading bad books and thinking if they can get a publishing deal so can I.

5.  When the weather is good I can work outside.

4.  Lots of coffee.

3.  Sometimes you get a rejection letter that actually has a real signature on it.

2.  I can work in my sweatpants and it doesn’t matter.

1.  When you do get published it is the best feeling ever.

To all the new graduates out there, good luck and congratulations!

Adichie goes on to say that she understand why Americans expect things like this from people from Africa.  All we see are the stories about Darfur and the late night commercials begging for money for starving children with no drinking water.  She says that because of these impressions, when she writes her characters, who are primarily Nigerian, if they don’t act like what we see on TV, people question their authenticity.  This got me thinking about how much we actually rely on these single story narratives of different communities to develop characters.  Irish people drink a lot and are forced into marriages because they get knocked up.  New Yorkers are loud and entertaining.  People from the South are fat and jolly.  Japanese people are polite and cold.  It goes on and on.  I see many authors, even authors from the communities they are trying to mimic, pulling from these stereotypes and doing it successfully, at least in my opinion.  While I see Adichie’s point, it is probably most of the time a complete misrepresentation of people. But does that make it invalid or less significant?  Is it just lazy character design?  Or does it mean that it really is impossible to get into someone else’s head if we haven’t lived in a world just like the one we are trying to create?

What does that mean for people who come from boring parts of the world and from communities where, for the most part, life was happy and boring?  Does that mean we can never reach that higher level of truth in a story that just gives you goosebumps?  I guess I always believed that people are people no matter where.  That basically we are more similar than we are different and the main differences are the pressures we have on us and that we can get close enough with research that the rest doesn’t matter.  I know that many writers tend to write kind of what they know and there is nothing wrong with that but I’d be interested how many people have really tried to write in a world they are unfamiliar with and how they were successful or how they failed.

Check out Adichie’s speech:

The Danger of a Single Story

“Using adverbs is a mortal sin” –Elmore Leonard

“You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there’s no free lunch. Writing is work. It’s also gambling. You don’t get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but ­essentially you’re on your own. ­Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don’t whine.” – Margaret Atwood

“Do not place a photograph of your ­favourite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide.” – Roddy Doyle

“Do be kind to yourself. Fill pages as quickly as possible; double space, or write on every second line. Regard every new page as a small triumph.” – Roddy Doyle

“Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire.” – Geoff Dyer

“Only bad writers think that their work is really good.” – Anne Enright

“The most purely autobiographical ­fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more auto­biographical story than “The Meta­morphosis.” – Richard Ford

So anyways, the class is set up so that my fellow TAs and I mostly just run online discussion boards and then we get to have two “breakout sessions” where we actually get to talk to the students face to face.    Let me tell you, it was like pulling teeth to get anyone to say anything about the book.  Personally, I feel like I had this set-up pretty well.  I had the class arranged so we were sitting in a circle to encourage a Socratic discussion, I showed a video clip, and I had my discussion points laid out pretty well and pulled them from places like Spark Notes so I knew they weren’t too hard.  But when push came to shove no one would say anything except for few of the older women in class.  Finally, I had to do it, I asked them if they read the pages they were supposed to.  All of the eyes in the class immediately looked away from me.    I think only four people in a group of 19 read the mere 150 pages they had a week and a half to read.  So I asked if they were struggling with reading or if they were confused about something.  The only answer I got was reading was really stupid and they didn’t think they should have to read a book.  It was too much work.  It was terrifying.  Not to sound crotchety or anything, but what is with kids today? Is it laziness?  Is it that they really don’t know how to read?  Is it that no one has ever failed them?  There have been times in my life when I didn’t do my homework, sure, but when I screwed up I got a bad grade.  No one felt sorry for me.  I got what I deserved.

What really bothers me is that we are raising a generation of illiterate people and giving them a diploma because we want to say we have an educated workforce.  I used to think that the reason people weren’t reading anymore was because writers write stuff that only writers would like.  Now I think that as a society we are becoming illiterate and so books that are anything more than juvenile vampire literature is too much to handle.

So that being said what is it about these pains and hurts that makes one person turn serial killer, versus a comedian, versus a saint or even a writer?  The simple answer is to look at life experiences that give people the coping skills or lack of coping skills and then justify that with their motivations and emotions. When I say it out-loud this sounds almost formulaic but I find myself almost never “buying” the conflicts in writing.  It usually seems phoned in and convenient.

I did read Junot Diaz’s Drown again this week and he is the master of complications and evil acts.  He can boil down a conflict and make it, all at once, be rooted in the global community, the local community, a family, cultural expectation and in the realm of the individual character.  Granted Diaz is playing on some easily identifiable tropes (especially the machismo and the American immigrant experience) and I feel like a good chunk of his characters come from his real life.  So if we are fortunate to come from a world where these problems aren’t a problem for us how do we do it too?

It got me thinking about this book I read that I was really psyched about and it was flat out boring.  It was one of those books that I’ve heard all kinds of good things about it and how exciting it is supposed to be. It just did nothing for me for whatever reason.  I won’t go into details about which book it is because it really doesn’t matter.  People enjoy it and that’s great and I don’t see much reason to rain on their parade about it but it got me thinking about how sometimes the legends behind books and authors become just as intriguing (or sometimes more intriguing) than the writing.  We all love a crazy author story.  This book that I read was kind of like that.  I heard all of these crazy rumors about the author and while it got me to purchase a copy of the book, I felt kind of betrayed.  And I wonder if the book would have been more successful if I hadn’t come in with expectations and been able to take the book on its own terms.  Anyways while I won’t recommend the book to you I do suggest taking a look at this episode.

http://www.southparkstudios.com/episodes/267108