life lessons
it's not every saturday you learn an actual, honest-to-goodness life lesson, but i've learned more than one today. and i simply must share.
life lesson one: i am an intellectual snob.
life lesson two: it's in everyone's best interests if i stay away from the rest of jack ketchum's novels.
life lesson three: it's never wise to depend on your instructors to have good taste in reading material chosen for a class.
life lesson four: there are times when it is just plain the better course of action to devote yourself to saying very little in class, esp when the alternative is proclaiming a textbook to be violence porn with no merit or redeeming traits. (note the use of traits here rather than qualities. i refuse to attach the concept of quality to this novel, even in the negative sense.)
those are the lessons i've learned today. i did not know these things at noon. i was starting to realize them at 1:00, and i'd gotten the gist of them by 2:00, but by 3:00 i had come to accept these lessons as hard, cold facts delivered from God above directly into my brain with no human interference. call it a light bulb experience if you feel the need for a cliche.
yes, really, this novel took all of 3 hours. or most of 3 hours. i spent some of that time pouring myself a tall glass of water, and another little bit of that time rolling my eyes/sighing in disgust/scribbling tacky commentary in the margins. the book is probably three times longer than Bend Sinister. BS took me fully 12 hours to read, and certainly wasn't a sigle-sitting book. it was great. the novel inspired all the horrified/sympathetic emotions and moral questioning that JK's novel attempts, in fewer-but-better-chosen words. and it does it with taste and zest and all sorts of mind-boggling twists. ketchum's novel is a pointless rehashing of child abuse that i think he probably enjoyed writing.
it isn't a case of violence helping to tell a story. it's a case of a story (more bare-bones plot arc than story, even) serving as a framework on which to hang the glorified violence. anyone who knows me can tell you that i am not all that easily disturbed by violence. my mind can almost always come up with worse, and i only add the almost on principle. i've never failed to provide worse, more gruesome pictures and events than the thing i'm reading. but i'm sure it'll happen some day. thus the "almost."
and perhaps this is just a fluke, and ketchum isn't one of those writers. still, after reading the afterward by the guy himself, i know the writing itself isn't going to be any better in a different book. i doubt the plot will. yikes.
really, the only point of including something on a reading list is so that students can read it, gleen information from it, use it in their analysis of other course-related materials, and perhaps even emulate it. in the last case esp, i may just leave off at "dear God in heaven, get me out of here."
instead, i'll pretend that the one-up-manship won't include the items on our reading list, and that i won't be subjected to peer-crafted violence porn in addition to the already present traditional porn.
and here's the point where it becomes my best interest to simply discontinue the post.
love, peace, and escapism
life lesson one: i am an intellectual snob.
life lesson two: it's in everyone's best interests if i stay away from the rest of jack ketchum's novels.
life lesson three: it's never wise to depend on your instructors to have good taste in reading material chosen for a class.
life lesson four: there are times when it is just plain the better course of action to devote yourself to saying very little in class, esp when the alternative is proclaiming a textbook to be violence porn with no merit or redeeming traits. (note the use of traits here rather than qualities. i refuse to attach the concept of quality to this novel, even in the negative sense.)
those are the lessons i've learned today. i did not know these things at noon. i was starting to realize them at 1:00, and i'd gotten the gist of them by 2:00, but by 3:00 i had come to accept these lessons as hard, cold facts delivered from God above directly into my brain with no human interference. call it a light bulb experience if you feel the need for a cliche.
yes, really, this novel took all of 3 hours. or most of 3 hours. i spent some of that time pouring myself a tall glass of water, and another little bit of that time rolling my eyes/sighing in disgust/scribbling tacky commentary in the margins. the book is probably three times longer than Bend Sinister. BS took me fully 12 hours to read, and certainly wasn't a sigle-sitting book. it was great. the novel inspired all the horrified/sympathetic emotions and moral questioning that JK's novel attempts, in fewer-but-better-chosen words. and it does it with taste and zest and all sorts of mind-boggling twists. ketchum's novel is a pointless rehashing of child abuse that i think he probably enjoyed writing.
it isn't a case of violence helping to tell a story. it's a case of a story (more bare-bones plot arc than story, even) serving as a framework on which to hang the glorified violence. anyone who knows me can tell you that i am not all that easily disturbed by violence. my mind can almost always come up with worse, and i only add the almost on principle. i've never failed to provide worse, more gruesome pictures and events than the thing i'm reading. but i'm sure it'll happen some day. thus the "almost."
and perhaps this is just a fluke, and ketchum isn't one of those writers. still, after reading the afterward by the guy himself, i know the writing itself isn't going to be any better in a different book. i doubt the plot will. yikes.
really, the only point of including something on a reading list is so that students can read it, gleen information from it, use it in their analysis of other course-related materials, and perhaps even emulate it. in the last case esp, i may just leave off at "dear God in heaven, get me out of here."
instead, i'll pretend that the one-up-manship won't include the items on our reading list, and that i won't be subjected to peer-crafted violence porn in addition to the already present traditional porn.
and here's the point where it becomes my best interest to simply discontinue the post.
love, peace, and escapism
posted by Rehkmira @ 15:25
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home