Reading Makes You a Better Writer (VI): "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button", by Scott Fitzgerald

Hey guys, have you watched the film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button? It was directed by David Fincher, starring Brad Pitt. This is the story of a man who ages in reverse and it was originally written by the celebrated American author Scott Fitzgerald. This week, I would like to encourage you to read such story and listen to the audio available here. If you choose the "slower listening speed" option, it will take you only one hour to listen to the two parts of the story. Come on, there is no excuse this time!
I hope you enjoy!

Reading Makes You a Better Writer (V): "Ask the Dust" by John Fante.

                 

To me, this is one of the best books ever written. And you can find it here! But I will remain silent this time and let somebody else talk about the novel. Did you know that Charles Bukowski was a huge fan of John Fante? He wrote an introduction to Ask The Dust that is worth reading before you swallow the book:

I was a young man, starving and drinking and trying to be a writer. I did most of my reading at the downtown L.A. Public Library, and nothing that I read related to me or to the streets or to the people about me. It seemed as if everybody was playing word-tricks, that those who said almost nothing at all were considered excellent writers. [...] I pulled book after book from the shelves. Why didn't anybody say something? Why didn't anybody scream out? [...]

Then one day I pulled a book down and opened it, and there it was. I stood for a moment, reading. Then like a man who had found gold in the city dump, I carried the book to a table. The lines rolled easily across the page, there was a flow. Each line had its own energy and was followed by another like it. The very substance of each line gave the page a form, a feeling of something carved into it. And here, at last, was a man who was not afraid of emotion. The humour and the pain were intermixed with a superb simplicity. The beginning of that book was a wild and enormous miracle to me.
I had a library card. I checked the book out, took it to my room, climbed into my bed and read it, and I knew long before I had finished that here was a man who had evolved a distinct way of writing. The book was Ask the Dust and the author was John Fante. He was to be a lifetime influence on my writing. [...] 
There is much more to the story of John Fante. It is a story of terrible luck and a terrible fate and of a rare and natural courage. Some day it will be told but I feel that he doesn't want me to tell it here. But let me say that the way of his words and the way of his way are the same: strong and good and warm.
That's enough. Now this book is yours.

Click and read!!!!!!!

Reading Makes You a Better Writer (IV): Stylish Book Covers

Dear students,

many of my writer friends on Facebook have shared this link today: "The 30 Most Stylish Book Covers". Looking at these beautiful covers reminded me of you. I think that  this selection is a good chance to recommend some classics. I know you are kind of overwhelmed by work now, but you might find some time to breathe and read at some point.

Anyway, my favourite covers appearing on the list are these ones:

 

          

I love these books, so this can be the reason why I like the covers too. In fact, I am re-reading Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar these days and I feel like devoting an entry to her soon. She was an extremely talented (and tormented) writer and deserves her own space here. As for the other titles: The Hound of the Baskervilles is probably the most thrilling Sherlock Holme tale. Have you seen the television series Sherlock? I really ejoyed this BBC adaptation, but I must admit I like the book much more. To me, reading is always more intense than watching -everyone to his/her own taste! Anyway, another book I would like to recommend today is 1984, a novel by George Orwell that describes a nightmarish society in the future which, unfortunately, is  somehow similar to the present day world. Finally, Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon is an unfinished novel, published posthumously, that I have not read yet. Nevertheless, this is on my wish list.

                              

What about you? Did you find any cover you like? As a Fine Arts ex-student, I would like you to recommend some covers or pictures to me too.

That's all for now, folks!

See you soon,

r

Reading Makes You a Better Writer (III) - Miscellanous Collection -

Dear students,


I have been asked to recommend some books this week. Lucky us! I am always glad to carry out such a task because I love talking about books. The only "inconvenience" is that there are thousands of titles we can share, and I do not want to bore you with my stuff. It all depends on your taste.  So, please, if you are looking for a specific theme or genre, just leave a comment below and I will try to find something. Besides, I know that some of you are very demanding readers and can help as well. Everybody is welcome to recommend a book - which uses proper English - below. Anyway, before starting, let me remind you of my previous posts on reading, because you might have missed them:

Reading Newspapers and Magazines 

Reading Raymond Carver

Reading Poetry

Reading "On the Road" by Jack Kerouac

Reading "The Flowers Look Like People at Last" by Charles Bukowski


Let's just proceed now:

Your generation is supposed to have enjoyed the magic of the Harry Potter book series, by J. K. Rowling. As you probably know, after gaining worldwide attention, J.K. Rowling was awarded many times and sold more than 400 millions copies. I am sure that you contributed to her success when you were kids, and that many of you have one or more Spanish translations at home. Therefore, I do not think it will be a big deal to click the link below and get a pdf of the first Harry Potter book. It is easy to read and contains many words and expressions that can enrich your vocabulary:

Harry Potter and The Sorcerer's Stone -Book 1

 

Apart from Harry Potter, I have been thinking about other fascinating (short) stories that you might like - something brief and light but sophisticated too - and a title has come to my mind: The Happy Prince, by Oscar Wilde. I have read this story many times in my life and its beauty has always touched my heart. Even though, in a sense, The Happy Prince is a sad story, I believe there is something blissful and marvellous about it. You might have read this story when you where kids, as I did. Now we have the chance to read it in English and "hear" Oscar Wilde's real voice. In order to do so, you just need to click:

"The Happy Prince" by Oscar Wilde

 

 

Do you also want to listen to the story? Just play the video below:

As I know there are many fantasy and sci-fi lovers among us, I would also like to recommend a short story by the great writer Ray Bradbury. You can listen to the famous actor Burgess Meredith while reading the Pdf file available HERE. If you feel curious, you can also have a look at this webpage full of resources and continue researching a bit on this short story and others. 

Together with novels and short stories, poems are excellent learning companions. They are short, musical and, sometimes, unforgettable. I am especially fond of British and American poetry so today I would like to introduce you to Mark Strand. He is a Canadian-born poet, essayist and translator. You can watch the video below and listen to Mark Strand reciting one of his poems, The Couple. If you feel like reading the poem at the same time or more slowly, click here.

I hope you enjoy this crazy list as much as I do. I will be back soon with new titles. Finally, as I said before, you are welcome to suggest books, graphic novels, comics, poems, academic essays (yeah!) or any written text you consider worth reading below.


Read you later, my dearest students!

Compare & Contrast: "Zadie Smith On The Psychology of The Two Types of Writers"

 On March 24, 2008, two years before she penned her oft-cited ten rules of writing, the immeasurably brilliant Zadie Smith delivered a lecture at Columbia University’s Writing Program under the brief “to speak about some aspect of your craft.” Appropriately titled “That Crafty Feeling” and included in Smith’s altogether enchanting collection Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (public library), the lecture outlines the ten psychological stages of writing a novel. Here you are a couple of excerpts from her lecture:

I want to offer you a pair of ugly terms for two breeds of novelist: the Macro Planner and the Micro Manager. You will recognize a Macro Planner from his Post-its, from those Moleskines he insists on buying. A Macro Planner makes notes, organizes material, configures a plot and creates a structure — all before he writes the title page. This structural security gives him a great deal of freedom of movement. It’s not uncommon for Macro Planners to start writing their novels in the middle. As they progress, forward or backward, their difficulties multiply with their choices. I know Macro Planners who obsessively exchange possible endings for one another, who take characters out and put them back in, reverse the order of chapters and perform frequent — for me, unthinkable — radical surgery on their novels: moving the setting of a book from London to Berlin, for example, or changing the title [...]

I start at the first sentence of a novel and I finish at the last. It would never occur to me to choose among three different endings because I haven’t the slightest idea of the ending until I get to it, a fact that will surprise no one who has read my novels. Macro Planners have their houses largely built from day one, and so their obsession is internal — they’re forever moving the furniture. They’ll put a chair in the bedroom, the lounge, the kitchen and then back in the bedroom again. Micro Managers build a house floor by floor, discretely and in its entirety. Each floor needs to be sturdy and fully decorated with all the furniture in place before the next is built on top of it. There’s wallpaper in the hall even if the stairs lead nowhere at all.

Do you want to read the complete text? Just click here.

And this is Zadie Smith reading her paper at the New York Public Library. Please, pay attention to the way she compares and contrast these two types of writers she is talking about:

Reading Makes You a Better Writer (II): Knowing Yourself as a Reader

Dear readers,

reading is one of the best ways to learn a foreign language, especially if you are interested in what you read. Motivation is the key component of any language learning process. This is the reason why I would like to recommend a bunch of various online newspapers and magazines. Pick the one you prefer and start spending some of your spare time reading. I have classified the magazines into different categories in the hope that I can help you develop a reading habit.

* Serious readers worried about world issues: THE GUARDIAN 

* Fans of science and technology: I FUCKING LOVE SCIENCE

* Globetrotters:  NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC TRAVEL MAGAZINE

* Incurable gossips: HELLO!

* Mad about (mostly indie) music (in English): NME

* Fashion lovers: DAZED & CONFUSED

* Poets and muses: POETRY FOUNDATION


Finally, click here if you want to read some tips about how to develop your reading habit.
And click here if you want to take a funny quiz and know what "type of book" you are... (I got the "Well-Loved Book")

Reading Makes You A Better Writer (I): Poetry Foundation

After having read your blog entries this weekend, and in view of the success of the "Fear of..." experiment, I have realised that some of the students taking part in this course are very fond of poetry. For this reason, I would like to recommend the following American webpage: POETRY FOUNDATION. This is a literary organization committed to "discover and celebrate the best poetry and to place it before the largest possible audience"- they say. Well, you can just browse the web and try to discover something you like.

I have already selected a poem to start the week, Monsters by the great Dorothea Lasky:

This is a world where there are monsters

There are monsters everywhere, racoons and skunks

There are possums outside, there are monsters in my bed.

There is one monster. He is my little one.

I talk to my little monster.

I give my little monster some bacon but that does not satisfy him.

I tell him, ssh ssh, don’t growl little monster!

And he growls, oh boy does he growl!

And he wants something from me,

He wants my soul.

And finally giving in, I give him my gleaming soul

And as he eats my gleaming soul, I am one with him

And stare out his eyepits and I see nothing but white

And then I see nothing but fog and the white I had seen before was nothing but fog

And there is nothing but fog out the eyes of monsters.

You can listen to her speaking these lines HERE.
You can see her HERE.

And, finally, here you are some tips to use reading to improve your writing, CLICK HERE.

Describing Someone: "Cathedral" by Raymond Carver

Last week, we studied the process of writing a descriptive paragraph. One of the passages we read - as an example of how to develop a personal description - was extracted fron Raymond Carver's Cathedral:

I've never met, or personally known, anyone who was blind. This blind man was late forties, a heavy-set, balding man with stooped shoulders, as if he carried a great weight there. He wore brown slacks, brown shoes, a light-brown shirt, a tie, a sports coat. Spiffy. He also had this full beard. But he didn't use a cane and he didn't wear dark glasses. I'd always thought dark glasses were a must for the blind. Fact was, I wished he had a pair. At first glance, his eyes looked like anyone else's eyes. But if you looked close, there was something different about them. Too much white in the iris, for one thing, and the pupils seemed to move around in the sockets without his knowing it or being able to stop it. Creepy. As I stared at his face, I saw the left pupil turn in toward his nose while the other made an effort to keep in one place. But it was only an effort, for that eye was on the roam without his knowing it or wanting it to be.

I commented on the idea that the first sentence can be considered a sort of "topic sentence" that prefigures what is going to be said next. From the subjective point of view of the narrator, the blind man embodies a first contact with "the unknown". This character is described as a weird creepy person who neither uses a cane nor wears dark glasses, as one would expect from a blind man. The narrator's tone reveals certain uncertainty (and a very subtle sense of humour). There's tension and suspense. After all, this is the first time he meets this person, as well as the first time he meets someone who is blind. Moreover, the circumstances under which they meet are a bit strange, and the main character's feelings are projected onto the blind guy. What I find interesting here is the fact that Carver manages to fix the reader's attention on exactly the detail (e.g: the eyes), the opinion (e.g: at first, this guy looks creepy), and emotion (e.g: uncertainty, suspense) that he wants to emphasize by manipulating the point of view. In this sense, the first sentence of this paragraph works perfectly well, since it creates a point of view: the narrator does not really know that person and, therefore, what we are going to read might be beyond what is normal and expected.

If you feel like reading Raymond Carver's short story, CLICK HERE and enjoy!!

A Poem to Start the Week

 

Gee, You're so Beautiful It's Starting to Rain
by Richard Brautigan

Oh, Marcia,
I want your long blonde beauty
to be taught in high school,
so kids will learn that God
lives like music in the skin
and sounds like a sunshine harpsichord.
I want high school report cards
     to look like this:
Playing with Gentle Glass Things
     A
Computer Magic
     A
Writing Letters to Those You Love
     A
Finding out about Fish
     A
Marcia’s Long Blonde Beauty
     A+!

from The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, 1968
Houghton Mifflin Company, New York, NY

On Topic Sentences and Reading, on Inspiration and Bluebirds

Reading is probably the best way to learn to write, not only because it can provide you with new words and expressions but also because it expands your imagination and your inspiration. At least, this is what happens to me when I read the literary works I like most. I can feel I have access to a new universe, full of images and sensations that connect to my inner self and help me fly a little.

This year, we are supposed to learn to write essays (basic stuff: descriptions, letters, opinions, etc.) but learning to write anything without the magic of literature seems senseless to me. As far as I see it, fiction and poetry are not so distant from (scientific and academic) essays. Have a look at the article linked here if you do not agree with me. Even the most serious scholars need a touch of literature at some point of their careers. A recent example: some Swedish scientists "have been amusing one another by seeing who can conceal the most Bob Dylan lyrics in their scholarly articles"

As I said in class last week, when writing an essay - as well as when writing fiction - you need at least one stunning sentence. We call that sentence a "topic sentence". The topic sentence usually conveys the main idea of the paragraph/article, so it should always be able to attract the reader's attention. For the topic sentence to be interesting, you need to narrow your topic as much as you can, and try to SAY something (as original as you can) that creates a lot of expectation on your reader. It means you need to "claim" something and show it. Then, to make your readers believe what you say, you need to support your topic sentence through "supporting sentences". Three basic techniques we can use to develop such sentences are: details, explanations and examples. (I am not going to bore you too much with this. Just read the Presentation I screened in class.) Finally, you should close your paragraph/text with a "concluding sentence". This final sentence repeats or insists on the main idea, but using other words. This is something you can find in many texts. Let's read a poem by Charles Bukowski to make this point clear. (You can listen to it while reading if you click here.)


BLUEBIRD

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I'm not going
to let anybody see
you.

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pour whiskey on him and inhale
cigarette smoke
and the whores and the bartenders
and the grocery clerks
never know that
he's
in there.

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say,
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to screw up the
works?
you want to blow my book sales in
Europe?

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody's asleep.
I say, I know that you're there,
so don't be sad.

then I put him back,
but he's singing a little
in there, I haven't quite let him
die
and we sleep together like
that
with our
secret pact
and it's nice enough to
make a man
weep, but I don't
weep, do
you?

Charles Bukowski
(The Last Night of the Earth Poems, 1992)


The first lines in Bukowski's poem sound like a "topic sentence":

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him...

These lines contain a metaphor that contains the main idea of the poem: "there's something beautiful, sensitive and fragile in my heart but I can't show it, I am a tough guy". The following stanzas repeat this idea but not in a facile (= simplistic) way. Bukowski provides details, explanations, examples (he says he pours whiskey on the bird, he says he is too tough, and only let the bird out sometimes...) - these are his supporting sentences. Finally, he concludes:

...it's nice enough to
make a man
weep, but I don't
weep, do
you? 

 Again, Bukowski insists on what he said at the beginning of the poem: "there's something nice here but I am too tough to show it", "I don't cry, man". However, and this is the beauty of the poem, it is impossible not to notice, when reading, that Bukowski does have something fragile inside. He says he does not weep, but we know he feels something important deep inside. We know there are "birds" inside Bukowski, even though they are hidden because of a "secret pact".

To sum up, reading (good literature) might help you to build good topic sentences, as well as to develop supporting and concluding sentences. My piece of advice is that you read whatever you find interesting and try to remember the words in English. Remember that translating from Spanish is not a good idea. So explore, research, try and try again, fail and fail better, as advised by the great writer Samuel Beckett. Charles Bukowski himself had to undergo a lot of criticism, being subject to countless misadventures before becoming recognised as an author. But such misadventures are part of any learning process, aren't they?

 Picture by Dara Scully, Your Branches/My Bones

***

If you feel like reading something and you do not know what, here you are a couple of amazing books:

ON THE ROAD by Jack Kerouac (we read an extract in class, remember?)

THE PEOPLE LOOK LIKE FLOWERS AT LAST by Charles Bukowski


 Enjoy!!