Reflections on today's class

I hope I'm not wasting anyone's time by posting this. Just thought it was sort of the use for the class blog.

So, in the middle of class I mentioned a Hemingway quote from our short story textbook and might have made it sound like I thought the stories were "true." I guess what I was trying to say was that they were true in the Tim O'brien sense, that whole: "yes, at some point he sat in a room and drank with his friend. But what matters is that there is a certain truth to that event, one that should be considered." I know John Keats had the same idea, and I don't feel I'm totally wrong in saying that, even though the meaning isn't as clear as some may have wanted it, that truth serves as a panacea for many readers.

I know that Hemingway liked Tolstoy. I don't know if he was familiar with Tolstoy's ideas on what constituted good art. I wasn't familiar until a week ago, when it came up in my philosophy class. Tolstoy thought that art should forge a moral community between people. Sure, late in life Tolstoy cracked out, and may have held religious convictions that were too strong for my taste, but I realized that, even if that community wasn't a Christian one, as Tolstoy wanted, there is some truth in the idea. I have trouble understanding why someone would have written countless drafts of a story and then decided that they wanted to make it completely inaccessible. I've also noticed that it seems like the most illiterate people sometimes gravitate towards those books that rely so heavily on their author's eurudition. Before I had read many books at all I read portrait of the artist as a young man and dubliners, and those books spoke to me. Joyce, in my opinion, for his reliance on allusion, was much more pretentious than Hemingway, and yet, I, in my completely illiterate state, just after high school, adored those books so much. Even if Hemingway was pretentious, I doubt that it was to drive a seperation between people or to flaunt it. I mean, I can read an entire book of Hemingway's without having to pick up a dictionary.

I've never really understood how someone can dislike a story because of how much effort an author puts into it. I've always felt that if the story be appreciated as a beautiful collection of words, and if people study the sentences, the format, regardless of who started what fight, they might come to see the same. I empathize with Derek's disgust at having to read something in class he already read and loved. When I form a personal bond with a work of art I hate it when people tell me I'm right or wrong, or even when they try to make me explain myself. Emotions are difficult to capture in words, and it seemed like that's part of the reason we tell stories. I certainly can't explain what it _feels_ like to read a story. Stories seem like the closest to magic in this world, to me, anyway.

I've read some books on writting and reading. A common thing authors seem to touch on is intertextuality: this story is related to that story and so on, culminating in one big story, the story that every story tries to tell. They're all the same. When I read a new author I normally have doubts; it takes me a while to understand the author. If it ever becomes to difficult, I think of something contemporary I've read, maybe look into an author I like, and try to find out where that author got their influences. Reading the books they liked most is the closest thing to stepping into the head of the person who wrote the book, not that side of the person that is the artist.

If someone happens to read something they don't like, just try to remember those things. The artist wrote the books to tell the reader something, and to make them feel something. Not because she wanted to bore people or make them talk in class. Don't get me wrong, class has value. And people are entitled to their opinions. And not a day goes by when I hear something in class I wish I had thought of for myself. Just figured it might make things bearable to look at a story in this way if anyone is reading something they dislike.