Sadness makes the heart grow fonder

Dear Maria,
Good morning, it's Saturday, and in my preparations for work I've been pondering the interesting question you posed. We do seem to be drawn towards sadness and tragedy. Are we all just so cynical that we can't stop to notice the positive (albeit small) things in life? Do the positive things even exist anymore?

We don't live in a world where we step out the door and proceed to only run across negativity. The trouble is, we live in a world where it's okay, encouraged even, to see things in a negative light. I can't remember the last time I heard someone tell me to "stop and smell the roses" in a non-sarcastic way. The hardships in life resonate with us way more than the things we take for granted. Take last night for instance. I went to a Christmas party with my father and we ran into a woman who had watched me and her daughter frolic about in an indoor playground and have a fantastic time. I barely remember this afternoon (granted, I was five years old). Yet I could give you a shot by shot analysis of the uncomfortable moments of my life. I don't know how many times I've recited the skiing story, but it seems to be a favorite at dinner parties. If I was, y'know, invited to dinner parties.

So not only do we dwell on tragedy, but we connect through it. Through something tragic, we take the time to put our daily lives aside and tell our family and friends how much we love them--and to hope and pray for those affected by the tragedy. 9/11 was one of the most horrific tragedies we've witnessed in our generation; at the time, I didn't really understand what was happening, but I remember sitting in meeting for worship that Friday morning in school, and I felt one of the strongest connections with those around me. I felt a vibe of understanding with people I'd never met before. As a second grader, I couldn't truly grasp why people were sad--all I really got is that they were sad, and that having fellow humans around you can be one of the most comforting things in the world.

Even as there are raging political debates in the face of tragedy--most recently, the shootings in Connecticut, people come together to mourn the lives lost and the families suffering. Through this suffering, we find common ground.

In the midst of tragedy, it seems we are more willing to set aside our differences and just relate to one another. And that's one thing that's on many of our top priority lists: To have people understand what it means to feel the way we do, to think the way we think, to view the world in our eyes. Why do you think depressing songs become so popular? It's not like Hinder's "Better than Me" lyrics are horribly original, nor do they evoke grand philosophical thought; rather, everyone can relate to that feeling when someone is "so much better than me." In a time when you think you're the only one with that feeling, it can be relieving to realize that actually, everyone and their brother has that feeling.

But what I wonder is, at what point is it acceptable to turn tragedy into comedy? There are a few "tragic moments" that are a common theme amongst comedians--adolescence, mainly. The teenage years certainly didn't seem like something to laugh at at the time, but since everyone's gone through it and eventually pulls out of it with only a few battle scars, it's nice to share the memories of hell-ish experiences. Crushes, test taking, and acne battle stories don't cause any resentment. We're all just relieved that it's finally over.

But if I hopped up onto a stage next to Ellen D and Tosh.0 (I love this imaginary me) and started joking about eating disorders, there would be many more mixed reactions. Is this because not everyone goes through it? Or perhaps the adolescence thing works so well in comedy because the jokes are geared towards an adult audience--not people who are in the throes of adolescence. With eating disorders, there is no specific age where you're unable to experience that illness. You're more likely to hurt one part of the audience while only making another small section laugh.

So do tragic moments only require a grace period and target audience to create comedy? Where is the line drawn? We are drawn to laughter--but at what point to we stop laughing?

Peace and Ponies,
Kira

Tragedy Sells

Dear Kira,

To answer your question, I think that literary humor can be just as quote-unquote serious as regular, serious literature. I mean, I don't think I've ever laughed so hard as when I read Shakespeare's Midsummer's Night Dream (but maybe that's just me being a nerd). I mean, whoever said literature couldn't be funny? But I tend to disagree with you when you say that only humorous literature gets any attention; I'd like to point your attention the numerous succesful superhero film franchises. I mean, there's nothing funny about Superman, certainly not about Captain America, and the list goes on. And yet, there is something so universal about superheros. I mean, there's a reason little boys dress up as Spiderman for Halloween.

Of course, the typical superhero story is the hero quest or something of the like. In the typical superhero story, the hero has some sort of tragedy in their past that compels them to take up the mantel of righteousness or what-have-you. This has been a theme in literature since like, forever, and it's not funny either. If anything, it's tragic. In fact, I'd venture the opinion that tragedy sells even better than humor.

Not to be insensitive, but take a look at the average news channel. Whenever something horrible happens, it's plastered all over the television and everyone watches it. It's like a car accident, you can't look away. So, I pose a question to you. What is it that is so appealing about tragedy, in literature or otherwise. What makes a man in spandex tights such a cultural icon?

Merry Christmas,
Maria

Your Horse was so High, it was up in the Sky

Dear Maria,
good evening, it's Wednesday, and I must admit, I'm slacking on the reading front. I open up Atonement with this grand intention to indulge myself in intellectual thought, when one of two things happens:
1) I realize my stomach is growling very loudly at me, and I must go and hunt for pudding. Except, wait, there is not pudding left at the convenience store. So then I have to drag my feet ALL the way downtown to buy an insatiable amount of dessert at Mclanahan's and everyone just looks at me like they know I'm wasting my life away in calories and sugar. Or...
2) How I met your Mother looks ever so tempting on Netflix, and my evening turns into a black hole of television.

Perhaps this is why I didn't accomplish as much as I'd have liked in high school. And while I agree that you were on your high horse whils't reading Shakespeare and Dickens while the rest of us subjected our friends to long and painful rants about boys (my humblest apologies), I realize it's not an entirely bad thing to be on your high horse. It just means you were past all the petty arguments and obsessions that most immature teenagers are in the midst of, and put your time to better use. And for that, I admire you.

However, as any good revelation tends to be complex, there are two parts to my epiphany: There is absolutely a necessity to catch up on the classics (in which I am sorely lacking knowledge of). So that is the answer to why I'm putting so many classics on my reading list. I mean, I'm fairly certain I'll enjoy them (thus far, Jane Eyre has been a quality read), but it also serves the purpose of being educated and thinking about the world. But I also know my taste in reading: I enjoy modern literature about people and their lives far more than older literature, and because of that, I am not totally depriving myself from John Green and Jodi Picoult. There is a time and place for modern literature, but it can't always be waved off as unimportant or "easy reading." There are many complex themes in John Green's books, and my understanding of humankind has been immensely wider after reading The Fault in Our Stars. So after much thought, I've created this lovely little reading list that may or may not be fully checked off after many nights playing Angry Birds:

1) Jane Eyre
2) Pride and Prejudice
3) Sense and Sensibility
4) Looking for Alaska
5) An Abundance of Catherines
6) The Vampire Lestat
7) Oliver Twist
8) Great Expectations
9) Slaughterhouse Five
10) Candide
11) Wuthering Heights
12) Midsummer Night’s Dream
13) The Sun Also Rises
14) The Member of the Wedding
15) The Scarlet Letter
16) Uncle Tom’s Cabin
17) Emma
18) Anna Karenina
19) Les Misérables
20) Tuck Everlasting
21) The Casual Vacancy
22) Persuasion 

 Wow. Not gonna lie, that looks slightly intimidating. My attention span better start kicking itself into high gear. 

Speaking of avoiding work, I took a lovely yoga class yesterday in attempts to ignore my finals, and I stumbled upon this lovely little poster:

At first, I was all, "why would they spend all that time creating a poster with a made up chart?" After sharing this picture on facebook, I got my answer. A lot of people think to share more humorous things, stuff that will make people giggle--maybe because it's easy to comprehend, maybe because people need in their lives, but whatever the case, it's more smart advertising. So that got me thinking. What is it about humor that is so striking? Obviously tragedy evokes plenty of emotion too, but in the busy-ness of our day to day lives, something funny seems to stop us in our tracks more than something sad. Does the kind of effect this poster has on us work in writing as well? When I'm browsing through books, trying to decide what to read next, I'm more likely to pick up a book that begins with something amusing, or witty. This could just be due to personal taste, but it seems that humor brings a strong resonance in our lives.

But then again, laugh-out-loud books are regarded less as fine literature and more as casual, easy reads. A lot of the memoirs I've been reading, such as David Sedaris' Naked and Tina Fey's Bossypants are enjoyable, but they aren't serious literature.

So would it be smart to sacrifice one's reputation in order to catch the common reader's eye? Or is serious literature just as catchy?

Peace and Ponies,
Kira

Summer Reading and Why Break Isn't Really a Break

Dear Kira,

To answer your well posed and, admittedly, well sourced (I like Briony from Atonement too) question I refer you to "What is Literature" by noted French person, Jean-Paul Sartre (which you'll probably have to read in a few weeks anyway). Sartre makes an argument that I happen to find very appealing; he says that every work, fiction included, only exists as the reader perceives it, which means it communicates a different thing to every reader. Thus, the reader must enter into reading the book as an act of free will; in writing fiction, the author's primary purpose is to appeal to freedom. 

What you are seeing is a selfish shellfish

Now, I know what you're thinking, you're thinking "this is a lot of intellectual mumbo jumbo that doesn't even really make sense anywhere besides your head and your head is a really strange place", while I agree with you that my head is extremely weird, this idea is simpler than it seems. It is a manifestation of the idea of "art for life's sake" as opposed to "art for art's sake" which, in no uncertain un-intellectual terms, is SELFISH art. Don't be a lobster, write art with a purpose. To paraphrase Sartre (who is without a doubt my most favorite French person), freedom is the act of recognizing the freedom of others. No one writes in a vacuum, so, when you write you must give people the freedom to interpert your work and understand your work in ways that you didn't really intend it to be read and that's what literature is all about: freedom.

While that is lovely sentiment, however, it is not the reason I'm going to be reading a whole lot of literature this winter break/summer. Now, I don't know if you recall, but I kind of got on my high horse back in high school because I read some classics; while the rest of the world was having obsessive crushes and covering up their acne I was reading Shakespeare and, I might add, getting the jokes! Weird as that is, I've realized that this isn't so impressive in college where most people have to read all these books anyway. So, the homework I am giving myself over break is to find and read obscure literature and to get the jokes. My theme for this year is ancient Greek drama, ancient texts in general, and other non-related things. Actually, I'm not sure how many jokes there are going to be to get in Greek tragedy so, we'll see about that. But, regardless, here is my reading list:  

1. The Aeneid by Virgil
2. Argonautica by Apollonius Rhodius
3.  Lysistrata  by Aristophanes
4. The Divine Comedy by Dante
5. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
6. Paradise Lost by John Milton (again, because I'm not sure I understood it the first time)
7. Faust by Goethe
8. Doctor Faustus by Marlowe
9. The Enemies of Women by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez (and everything else this author ever wrote because his novels have some seriously interesting titles) 
10. Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen
11. The Crucible by Arthur Miller (because once is never enough)
12. A Dance with Dragons (because A Song of Ice and Fire is a song I like to listen to) 
13. The Magicians by Lev Grossman
14. American Gods by Neil Gaiman
15. Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman
16. Persians by Aeschylus
17. Oresteia by Aeschylus
18. Medea by Euripides
19. Trojan Women by Euripides
20. The Gods of Our Fathers by Herman Stern (for some good, old-fashioned, healthy non-fiction)

If I actually read all those books, I'll let you know. So, Kira,  I pose you the question, feel free to answer it however you like, what are you reading and why?

María

The Write Place

Dear Maria,
So, ironically enough, I'm procrastinating a horrid English essay as I type this. I can't help but think this essay looks like I just ranted all over the place because I'm having the end of semester blues, and just want to go back to writing YA Vampire novels, like a normal person. That's most likely my main problem for filling five pages with clichés, simplified claims, and quotes that could easily fill up a page. Yet I've also been feeling dull and un-inspired due to constantly sitting at my desk, seeing the same five pictures, the same pillow pet that makes it almost impossible to not want to nap, and the same lamp with dangly things that would make any "attention defecit ooh shiny!" disordered sort want to procrastinate up the wazzoo.

Would this not keep you from writing all day long?

So I'm thinking it's time for a change of pace. I normally choose to right on the same desk, or, more likely, on the same bed. But as Charlie McDonnel points out, inspiration often comes from outside encounters, people you meet, places you see. I guess this is similar to our introvert/extrovert chats. As an intro-extrovert, I can see how inspiration can come from within, especially if an emotional dilemma is so present in my own life, I just have to write it out, but not in a whiny, "my life is over!" sort of way. But my extroverted side needs some sort of place, even if it's not filled with people, to get me in the writing mood. For me, natural atmospheres seem to work best for inspiration. It could be because most of my "growing experiences" have happened in more secluded areas, or I'm just more aware of such internal growth in natural environments. Whatever it is, get me near some mountains, and I'm writing up a storm. At Shoshoni, I never felt a lack of inspiration. Even when I wasn't actively writing, I was thinking about how I could incorporate the Rocky Mountains into a story, or how the dynamics between characters in an ashram may work. But seeing as I can't book a flight to Colorado every time I need to put a few words on a page, I guess I should re-think my writing inspiration place.

It's never going away, but I won't always be there when I need it

Do you get inspiration from a place, or is it solely internally that you gain your inspiration? Maybe it's the lack of distraction mountains bring, and I didn't have to worry about everything beeping and tumbling and tweeting at me, but nature seems to bring out the inquisitive side of me. Below is a poem I wrote at Shoshoni about a mountain called The Sleeping Giant:

The quietest to demand attention,
the Sleeping Giant stretches his nose
into soft cotton ball clouds.
He settles into the Ponderosa’s sigh,
lets her branches tickle him into deep
slumber.
A patient rest, no shifting positions,
he sniffs the clouds’ hopeful scent of rain,
for the browning grass to soak,
for  the crickets to drink,
as they happily chirp with the sun’s rays.
The pink rays glide across the giant’s forehead,
sinks into the crevices of sister mountains,
until only suggestion of color mists onto the moon.
Giant bids goodnight--
to Long’s Peak, to the weary hikers,
stomping to the base for rest and awe
at the thousand year dance led by the
mighty push of glaciers.
Blanketed by the sheath of black sky,
Giant sleeps.
Awakened by no force of movement,
his sighs sent into the tranquil forest.
He sleeps. 

 For now, I'll have to ponder this inner versus outer inspiration in the walls of my dorm room. But I hope to eventually trek back through the mountains to add some more natural writing into my repertoire.

Peace and ponies,
Kira

To identify with, or to yearn to become?

Dear Maria,
I doubt the success rate of first time NanoWriMo-ers is terribly high. I mean, first you have get comfortable with just thinking about scribbling out 50,000 words; only then can you jump over those obstacles. Without the preparation, it's difficult to attain the success. Honestly, the point of NanoWriMo doesn't seem to be to win (even if that free certificate is pretty darn enticing)...it's to get people excited about writing.
Sadly, my December thus far has been sorely lacking in all things creative. Mainly I'm just pounding out blog posts and pretending to study while we have an America's Next Top Model marathon or two (or five). But I have been getting much more into reading, recently, and I pretty much devoured John Green's The Fault in Our Stars in an entire night. That usually only happens when the book's about French people. Or cheese. I've always been a big appreciator of cheesy literature (see what I did there? Heh...heh). But just because I've never had cancer before, nor have I ever ventured anywhere near video games, I could still identify with Hazel and Augustus because they carried so many traits that we find in almost all of human kind. I mean, when I first started reading Green's novel, I was all, "who is this Augustus and why on Earth was he stuck with such an unfortunate name?" By the end of the book, I was sobbing my eyes out and felt as though I'd known Hazel and Augustus for years.
I know this is where we start to differ--I've always drifted towards realistic fiction whose characters are similar to someone you'd see walking down the street, while your holiday reading is The Illiad (which I'm still heavily impressed by). And I don't think there's a right or wrong way to view a book or which genre they should enjoy--I'm just wondering, what is the ultimate goal of fiction? Is it to give people an escape? To make us better informed citizens of society? Or is it simply to just...tell a story?

In Ian McEwan's Atonement, Briony is a girl who primarily lives internally. She focuses on the world of the characters in her plays, consequently, she has a strong hold on what motivates many different personalities and what makes people tick. However, she is not interested in indulging in any character studies; rather, she'd much prefer to work on plot twists and intense stories: "Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight of fancy, of the imagination?" (147). Briony prefers to harp on  dramatics, which is essential to any story whose goal is to entertain, but without a deep focus on character study, the story can fall flat. So should the two modes of fiction bounce off each other, or does one take precedence? Is writing more about creating personalities and human characteristics, or exposing them? 

Personally, I dive into stories with characters I can relate to, but I understand the appeal of devouring novels about war heroes and firey chasms of death (cough, cough, Twilight, cough).

Peace and Ponies,
Kira

Failure is Sweet

Dear Kira,

So, as you've probably guessed, I did not finish NaNoWriMo. Now, this is a good and a bad thing. It's a good thing because I did not totally ignore all of my classes for a month and fall completely behind in everything just in time for finals. So, that was a positive thing. But, of course, I didn't win, which in most cultures is considered negative.

Not to say that I didn't do well; I wrote about 40,000 words but, the truth is, I had a choose between NaNoWriMo and good grades and I choose grades. Now, I know that you didn't finish either, but what I've been thinking about is if it is really possible to write a novel of 50,000 words in a month and, what's more important, to make it good. This is not to say that I don't think NaNoWriMo is a good idea or that I'm not going to do it again, it's just that the creation of the best books, it seems, includes a lot of introspection and planning. I suppose, in all fairness, you could plan out your novel before NaNoWriMo, but even then, is it fair to you or to your work to try to create a piece of literature in a month?

I totally would have finished too if it wasn't for those blasted finals.

Maria