| Recent Posts | About the Author | Navigation |
|---|---|---|
|
|
David is an occasional blogger, software engineer, Nintendo fanboy, liberal, news magazine addict, voracious TiVo user, and bibliophile. He was born in St. Louis, grew up in southern Indiana, and returned to St. Louis to attend Washington University. He hasn't managed to escape yet. He's a fan of free wine tastings, too many tv shows to name, and eating out. David makes his living developing web applications used internally by his employer. He doesn't blog about work because he's heard too many stories about that causing workplace troubles. There's more on the about page. |
|
| Recent Comments | ||
|
|
||
| Recent Photos | ||
|
|
||
18 September 2002 - 12:55 am
Last fall I was in a student in Prof. Rosenzweig's Chief American Writers course. I was particularly ill-suited to be taking this course, though, since I seem unable to grasp the underlying symbolism and meaning of many of the texts we read. And because I didn't latch onto more than plot and general tenor, I didn't fare so well during the class discussions. I just found it hard to discuss the homoeroticism of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance when I entirely missed every clue that the book wasn't really about the two male-female relationships that seemed to be at its core, but was rather about the male-male relationship that didn't really exist. But the Blithedale Romance was, fortunately, the low-point of the course. Following Blithedale, and settig aside that horrid Herman Mellville, we had The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner, and The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway. Admittedly, reading Faulkner was a bit strange, and our in class discussions of As I Lay Dying were even stranger, but I still enjoyed it. And The Invisible Man and The Sun Also Rises were amazing. I'd read some F. Scott Fitzgerald works before, and expected, because Hemingway and Fitzgerald were contemporaries, that The Sun Also Rises would have a similar feel to, say, The Great Gatsby. Let's just say that I was very, very surprised by The Sun Also Rises. Hemingway brought 1920s Paris to life for me (the postumously published A Movable Feast accomplishes this from a non-fiction standpoint, and makes for an excellent read), and even transformed things like fishing and bull fighting from rather mundane and possibly grusome acts into a kind of dance. I loved every word of it.
So what's the moral of this very long story? Sometimes its best to leave your comfort zone and try new things. Because occasionally even things that don't start well can have a very positive outcome. Chief American Writers certainly did for me. As I write this my new copy of A Farewell to Arms sits about nine inches from me, and as soon as I'm done here I'm going to dive back into it.
Posted by on 18 September 2002 at 12:55 AM
Comments