Thanksgiving Break Hiatus

Fellow lovers of literature! In a surprising turn of events, we have come upon the holidays. Thanksgiving is upon us.

Mr. Barbaric Yawp will be taking a week-long break. Enjoy your turkey and potatoes and cranberry sauce and pie. But most importantly, enjoy the extra time with family and friends.

See you on the other side.

A Different Direction: Defining Literature

Quite a bit of my media consumption of late has been about Bob Dylan receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature. Initially, I had missed this announcement. I usually am uninterested in things like this, but here we are several months later and I am blogging about this unusual choice.

When I think of literature I think of Shakespeare, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Joyce. I don't normally think of Bob Dylan. Up until recently, I didn't even listen to Bob Dylan. I knew several of his songs through other artists, but I found his voice to be grating. Literature is poetry and plays and novels. Things that a reader can really dig into. I do not consider The Hunger Games literature. Nor do I consider The Martian by Andy Weir, although I absolutely loved that book. There is a lot that is not literature and up until recently, I would have had song lyrics on that list as well. But now everything is up in the air. 

So, I want to explore this topic in further detail. I have several things that I am going to be reading, watching, studying and I will post them here so you can follow along with my journey.

Here is the video that started me on this quest, check it out if you would like.

Dysthymia: Stagnant Traffic

I read this poem when it hit my inbox in Sept. but I needed to save it till now. I am writing this post on 11/1/2016; Halloween was yesterday and we have just launched into the Holiday Season. Fourteen school days till Thanksgiving Break and then just a short three weeks until Winter Break. We have at least four major holidays in our future before we get a break. So, with that in mind, now on to the poem.

Dysthymia: Stagnant Traffic

by Cate Lycurgus

the exit’s not marked    Post-
partum  Seasonal  Psychotic  or the often

merrier  Manic    not half the frolic     
of a holiday party   whole nights

drowning in punch lines   strong 
orchestra of laughter     to keep us from

crying      over the on-ramp’s
stubborn curl    ribbon a red loop 

nuisance to tug     un-loose back 
at home  with the heat left on   

and your scarf like a noose   no one
diagnoses          generic danger

strangling us     on a normal
basis       unwrapping a new numb

not so formal    it won’t         come 
buckle       the small       of your back

a caress     snuck up and     un-
seat belting   out a welcome so     

concrete who      would not soften 
who could not      resist

I love the message of this poem. I don't mean to be harsh, but the holiday season sucks. We try to cram so many things into a short amount of time with the intention of having fun. We want to make memories and enjoy time with our friends and family, but too often we just stress ourselves out and make ourselves miserable in the process. The holidays then become a disappointment rather than the most magical time of the year. Lycurgus uses images and diction to help cement this idea into the reader's mind. Words like psychotic, manic, drowning, crying, stubborn, nuisance, noose, generic, strangling, and numb help in this respect. The merry-makers are drowning in their punch lines, scarves around their necks like nooses. I also really like the formatting in this poem. The extra spaces almost act as line breaks which adds more ways to interpret the poem. Often you can read the word in isolation, but you can also read it in the greater context of the line, or sentence.

Lycurgus doesn't provide the reader with a solution either. The poem brings this problem to our attention, but does nothing to help us overcome it. We are stuck, as we are so often in life, with the problems and asked to solve them for ourselves.

Too Many Book Clubs? Coming Soon

I have been joining, starting, or suggestion book clubs all over the place these last few weeks/months. Cards of Grief was for a book club with my colleagues in the department, as was Silence. That book club has moved on to something that I have no interest in reading, so here we are reading a new fantasy novel. This time, I am reading with my two brothers. We were all able to purchase this book on the cheap as a Kindle sale option. We all like fantasy and we've all enjoyed The Witcher video games, so we decided to dive in and try the book which inspired the development of the video games. The Sword and Laser book club would be proud of us, having just finished this selection themselves. I think it will be an interesting experiment reading a book and discussing it with my brothers.

Review: Spontaneous

Spontaneous by Aaron Starmer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book was a wonderful palate cleanser. I needed something less serious, something just for fun and this book absolutely fit that bill. After reading Their Eyes were Watching God, Cards of Grief, and Silence I really needed that break.

I thought that Spontaneous was a hoot. It is such an interesting premise and the author handles it just perfectly. It isn't morose or too serious, he discusses high school students blowing up in a mass of blood and guts with enough levity to keep the book moving and not depress the reader. Not too much levity though, it wasn't irreverent towards life and the importance of life, but really helped to highlight the theme that life is so so important and that we should continue to just live day by day because you never know...

When I started I thought that Spontaneous would be another teen drama. I've read a couple and haven't been impressed with these author's ability. They usually are just story with lots of emphasis on the romance and the main character's feelings. While this did have romance and "feels" Aaron Starmer has some writing chops. There were sections where I was genuinely impressed with this teen drama author and his abilities. He is no Faulkner or Fitzgerald, but the man knows his stuff. Nice metaphors and wonderful use of anaphora to name a few.

The book moved at a good clip. I certainly wasn't bored while reading it. But I was disappointed with the ending of this novel. Throughout the whole of the book both the characters and the reader are trying to figure out what is causing these high school Seniors to blow up. There are a lot of theories, and I didn't like the way the novel handled the ending with all the theories. I won't go into much more detail than that because I don't want to spoil the end, but this could easily have been rated a 9 if not for that one thing right at the end that soured my experience.

Still, I really enjoyed Spontaneous and would probably read a sequel if Starmer wrote one. A fun, brainless read. And sometimes you just need something fun and brainless.

View all my reviews

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