procrastination, baby!
Sep. 16th, 2004 07:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
iceinyourmusicMabel, take a note: Suggestions for the betterment of the world. New paragraph. Some people are too stupid to live. Comma. And they should be put out of their misery. Full stop. Having them just shut up for good might work as an interim solution. Full. Stop.
I wish I could remember what I was reading when I was fifteen. The cognitive impact poetics lecturer (why does his American manner make me so happy?) said that he read Wordsworth at fifteen, and it was the first time he really felt the poetry. And I pictured a little fifteen-year-old suburban boy getting Wordsworth, and thought, automatically, that that's not what's supposed to happen at that age - that you're supposed to be reading Enid Blyton, mostly. But that is wrong, isn't it? I was fifteen when I started high-school, right? And the writing group was from thirteen or fourteen to sixteen(ish?) and we read Camus, which must indicate something. But that's all I remember...
At the final writing group session, the teacher told each of us what she expected our first published work to be - that T. would start turning out popular fiction in no time at all and that J. would deliver us that 600-page-long esoteric-philosophical science fiction novel, and also that I would probably write a novella about an old-maid librarian whose sole joy in life is secretly reading erotica on Friday nights. Now, you have to appreciate that sort of foresight, don't you? (Write what you know, they say.)
So I play mah jongg again. I perfect my game. Stare at the tile, I say, for the tile is the essence, the tile is the life. Does the tile make you shiver with joy? Then it is a good tile, and you must do your utmost to keep it. If it doesn't, it is an evil tile, and you must remove it at all costs. You'll hardly ever win, but you'll know you've played the good game. Feel the tile. Become the tile.
I wish I could remember what I was reading when I was fifteen. The cognitive impact poetics lecturer (why does his American manner make me so happy?) said that he read Wordsworth at fifteen, and it was the first time he really felt the poetry. And I pictured a little fifteen-year-old suburban boy getting Wordsworth, and thought, automatically, that that's not what's supposed to happen at that age - that you're supposed to be reading Enid Blyton, mostly. But that is wrong, isn't it? I was fifteen when I started high-school, right? And the writing group was from thirteen or fourteen to sixteen(ish?) and we read Camus, which must indicate something. But that's all I remember...
At the final writing group session, the teacher told each of us what she expected our first published work to be - that T. would start turning out popular fiction in no time at all and that J. would deliver us that 600-page-long esoteric-philosophical science fiction novel, and also that I would probably write a novella about an old-maid librarian whose sole joy in life is secretly reading erotica on Friday nights. Now, you have to appreciate that sort of foresight, don't you? (Write what you know, they say.)
So I play mah jongg again. I perfect my game. Stare at the tile, I say, for the tile is the essence, the tile is the life. Does the tile make you shiver with joy? Then it is a good tile, and you must do your utmost to keep it. If it doesn't, it is an evil tile, and you must remove it at all costs. You'll hardly ever win, but you'll know you've played the good game. Feel the tile. Become the tile.
no subject
Date: 2004-09-16 12:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-09-20 08:33 am (UTC)ahahaha. i do so love that. of course, our poets of that era were mostly, like, old rural women spinning yarn and crying, or something, but still.
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Date: 2004-09-20 10:11 am (UTC)Your poets were our poets, comes with the whole one country thing ;). Or well, at least until 1809.
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Date: 2004-09-20 10:47 am (UTC)Oh no they were not, you grabby imperialists! um, no, wait...
(*ponder* dostoyevsky: domestic lit or not?)
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Date: 2004-09-20 01:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-09-20 10:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-09-20 01:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-09-17 05:07 am (UTC)I know *exactly* what I was reading at 15! I kept a journal! And i never put anything in it except what I was listening to and what I was reading.
There was a bit of scifi - this book called The Girl Who Owned a City where all the adults get some disease and die and this older girl runs a city (very Jeremiah). And there was Margaret Craven's I Heard the Owl Call My Name which I cried buckets over, there was Catcher in the Rye which I thought was highly over rated, and there was Arthur Clark's Childhood's End which Gainax say inspired Neon Genesis Evangelion. There was a lot more of course but those were the interesting ones.
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Date: 2004-09-20 08:38 am (UTC)grr. I envy you. I kept a journal, too, but I never ever wrote anything useful in it. grrr.
But I'm pretty sure I never read any scifi at that time. Catcher in the Rye, though, probably yes, and it was very comical in that in the very special '60s translation there was a very special glossary in the back explaining all the slang terms used. Though of course by now I know that there was nothing comical about that at all as is Great Classic of Finnish Translation and thus must be Respected.
(oh i feel like such a tool responding to lj-comments days and days after the fact!)
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Date: 2004-09-21 06:37 am (UTC)I read a lot of scifi at 15 - kind of lost interest after that age so my scifi literature knowledge is about 20 years old. LMB was very new to me.
(oh i feel like such a tool responding to lj-comments days and days after the fact!)
Don't fret - I do it all the time. :)