Poor little gophers

Pick up the nearest book (mine happens to be Armageddon in Retrospect)
Flip to page 123
What’s the first line?
What’s the last line?
Connect them together – not with the words that were originally there, you cheater! – and this particular page is actually rather entertaining…

“If they lay a finger on that trap,” Elmer said, “I’ll-”

He balled his hands into fists and slammed them on the table, activating the trap’s trigger and causing it to snap shut. He jumped back and nearly fell over. Roy and Willis looked at each other and the daisy-chain of traps going out the barn door and towards Billy John, who was setting the last three by the gopher holes.

“BILLY JOHN! WATCH OUT FOR THE TRAAAAAAAPS!”

“I’m not afraid!”

 

Vonnegut in Retrospect

Coinciding with the one-year anniversary of the author’s death, “Armageddon in Retrospect” will probably be read by most Vonnegut fans with misty eyes and fond glances towards his other superior works. This is not his best showing, even for a dead madman who wrote the works in question with a growing sense of self-righteousness. Even his son Mark asks in the foreword, “How could he get away with some of this stuff?”

Several of the stories contained within “Armageddon” are clearly a throwback to his “Slaughterhouse-Five” days, revealing some details of the Dresden post-apocalypse that Billy Pilgrim could not have comprehended. Other non-Dresden stories fall somewhere between “Timequake” and nonsense.

I am not disappointed in the dead man, only regretful that I could not have understood more of his work while he was alive.

 

Dog Ear Diary has just managed to define literature for us, using “Madame Bovary” as an example:

I know this is great literature, meticulously constructed by the author, full of symbolism, details and profound portrayals of human nature. But I just couldn’t sympathize with or like any of the characters, and I got bored.

The post before this insight provides a brief description of “A Leg to Stand On,” by Oliver Sacks. I read another book of his, “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” for my Writing with Style class, but it’s nonfiction.

Perhaps the things we read in school and can make little sense of are literature, and everything else isn’t?

One of my favorite books is “Girl, Interrupted” by Susanna Kaysen. It, too, is nonfiction, but is written in what could be a literary style. Ignore the Winona Ryder movie, it’s totally different.

 

Question and Answer

I posted on Yahoo Answers the question “How would you differentiate literary fiction from genre fiction?” and got a singular answer from a demimonde00:

“Ooo tough one! They do blend together sometimes, and should more often. Generally, something can be identified as ‘genre’, and then everything else falls under the ‘literary’ category.

Generally genre fiction is concerned with certain subjects or settings and approaches its plot in a certain way. But these days the genres are getting fuzzier, and I think that’s a good thing.”

Though she didn’t specify what “that’s a good thing,” I’m not quite sure that I agree with the “everything else” category being called “literary fiction.” Kurt Vonnegut is clearly sci-fi, but he’s got some crazy ideas going on in his work which could be called literary. Can authors start out in a genre, but as their work becomes hailed as “classic” (or, as I saw on the cover of someone’s self-published tripe, “a towering literary achievement”) could they migrate over to literary with their formerly genre’d work in tow? Perhaps this is the “good thing” demimondeoo was talking about.

Is “literary” like love: do we know it when we see it?

 

Freedom Writers

I stumbled upon some astoundingly good writing, quite by accident, which I suppose is an appeal of blogs and the Internet:

Freedom Writers

The writers of this blog, according to the introduction, are prisoners in the federal system and the webmaster of the blog receives emails from them and posts their stories. This post should not serve as a review of the inmates’ work, which are by and large incredible works of poetry and prose, and not compared with what else someone might expect to come out of the joint, but on a scale of great works. If there was ever a silver lining, these men have found it.

 

Blog Search Part 2

Now that I’ve searched through the tags, here goes the blogrolls and links contained within the chosen blogs themselves. Thus begins narrowing down the useful ones.

A quick scan of Scathing Book Reviews links another blog I chose, goody, and blasts “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” which I rather liked.

Moments in Erasure mixes it up with Rudyard Kipling next to Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Attack of the 50-Foot Book also links to One Minute Book Reviews and Dog Ear Diary, a more personal take on reviewing work.

The Book Eater has a long blogroll, and a lot of the blogs’ names start with “book” which would seem promising. But the four I clicked on weren’t what I’m looking for.

One Minute takes more than a minute to go through, it’s interesting enough. I logged onto it in the midst of the “Delete Key Awards,” which seem to be like the anti-Oscars for books, and its writer (a professional in the publishing world it seems) includes the excerpts which qualify their books for the award. The writer, Janice Harayda, oddly refers to herself and the blog itself in the third person, and puts a copyright symbol underneath each and every post. Internal links include the GalleyCat.

The last item on the list, Read it or Weep, gets to stay because the librarians who run it have a large audience of people they interact with in real life every day, and those people probably aren’t looking for something high-concept to read on their lunch breaks.

 

Blog Search Part 1

I took a look at each blog on the first page of the “recent posts” under each tag and picked the following:

Poetry
Noah the Great is local.
Ocellus uses wordplay.
Monday’s Verse reviews.
Nectarfizz is multigenre.

Literature
Moderato is high art.
Moments in Erasure excerpts.
Scathing Book Reviews is self-explanatory.

Short Stories
Art of Storytelling is wordy.
Attack of the 50 Foot Book has little pictures of books.
The Book-Eater is hungry.

Classics
One Minute Book Reviews are pithy.

Books
Bertram’s Blog is educational.
Urban Fantasy Land has lots of links.

Writing
An Unreliable Narrator uses profanity.

Fiction
The Books of my Numberless Dreams is high-concept.
Read it or Weep is by a library reference staff.

 

What is the Process

When I create organization out of things, I either painstakingly plan it out beforehand, or make it up as I go along and then model everything after the first example. This is one of those latter times. I have my tags, I have time to burn. Go go go!

 

What Is a Tag

In the vast blogging universe, tags quickly narrow down the search for content. Tags say, “This is what my post is about and if you are interested in this,then my blog should pop up when you search for it.” In my search for the blogosphere’s best literature, I’ve narrowed the field down to the following tags:

poetry, literature, review, short stories, classics, book list, books, writing, journal, English, poems, fiction, creative writing

From the tags, it’s easier to glean quality bloggery.