Lit & Civ: Ezra Pound

I am not a realist.

That is one of those things you vaguely know about yourself but are rarely confronted with actually admitting such a label aloud, or here, through a blog. I do not like Ezra Pound's poetry, plain and simple. (At least the pieces we were required to read.) The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism states that Ezra Pound believed that poetry should "imitate spoken language rather than conventional meters and should contain 'nothing, nothing, that you couldn't, in some circumstance, in the stress of some emotion, actually say'" and that his slogan was "Make it New."

*Heavy sigh* That's like people who argue that "real movies" don't have happy endings because "life isn't full of happy endings." Yes, which is exactly why I don't want to pay $12 to see a movie end badly: there are enough bad endings in real life! I watch movies for the romantic notion that things do end happily ever after, that good triumphs evil, that the protagonist always gets his girl.

To me the very point of poetry is the beautiful, lyrical language employed by the poet, not to hear everyday language. Will contemporary poets soon be using texting slang in their poetry? Will they insert LOL after certain couplets? Shorten people to ppl? Insert brb instead of breath marks?

Label me a romantic, but I prefer my poetry to be poetic.

Literary Theory: Intro to Fairy Tales

I can honestly say that I have never enjoyed an introduction of any book as much as I enjoyed the introduction to The Classic Fairy Tales, edited by Maria Tatar. I am sitting in my bedroom at my lakehouse, doing homework aside three of my best friends after an afternoon on our seadoos. I was guffawing so loudly they insisted on having me read aloud. I mean really, how is spinning straw into gold the same story as downing seven plates of lasagna??

Joking aside (really only the first page is laugh-out-loud funny), I am pleased to learn that fairy tales are 'indispensable," even in times of war. I'm a bit surprised that fairy tales are second only to the Bible but maybe that's for the same reason - most people know Bible stories just like most people know fairy tales. The familiarity is what makes both comforting.

In another class, Lit & Civ 2, we were asked to define Literature and had to identify whether Shakespeare, a car manual, comic books, and a picture book about the state fair were all considered Literature. I was thinking about this discussion while reading about "the merit" of fairy tales.

The mention of "happily ever after" struck me as odd, because not all fairy tales end happily! American fairy tales do because Americans like happy ending. Many fairy tales are based on the Grimm brothers stories and in the original German of these stories, most all of them end with "und wenn sie nicht gestorben sind, dann leben sie noch heute" which roughly translates to "and if they're not dead, then they're still alive today." That's not only not "and then they lived happily ever after," but it ends that way to remind the reader/listener that the stories are FAKE because if they weren't, the characters would still be alive. (I should note I took a course on German fairy tales. I'm a German major.)

Okay, off my soapbox for today.

P.S. Ladies, comment if you definitely do NOT dream of being Sleepy Beauty, as page xiii claims, but rather dream of being Mulan and saving yourself and your country. (I realize Mulan is not technically a fairy tale but hey, it's Disney, so I'm going with it.)

Lit & Civ: A Clean, Well-Lighted Place

The conciseness of the language used in Ernest Hemmingway's "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" is what makes the piece such a quick read as well as adds to the overall callous tone. But the tone is a direct contradiction, in my opinion, to what the piece is really about. The sentence defining this is "He had a wife once." I love pieces that slap youth across the face with the idea that "old people" are not "nasty things," as the waiter claims, but that they were young once too and that young people could find themselves to be the sad old man looking for a clean, well-lighted place to drink. Hemmingway also suggests that youth arrogantly believes that their time is more valuable than the time of the elderly, as seen in the following exchange: "I want to go home to bed." "What is an hour?" "More to me than to him." How sad. I feel exactly the opposite. I imagine that time would seem much more precious the older you get.

One fairly irrelevant note: one thing about this piece that struck me was the inclusion of the sentence, "The girl wore no head covering and hurried beside him." I love tiny details like that.

Another theme I scoffed at was the idea that money equals happiness. Now normally I laugh at that, saying that obviously no one ever bought a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel if they think money can't buy happiness. But in all seriousness, I wanted to smack the waiter for not being able to imagine why someone with plenty of money would want to kill himself. Money isn't everything; it certainly doesn't solve all of your problems aside from money-related ones!