Kenneth Grahame: 38-Year Old Virgin…
Monday, February 11th by Shane
Poor choice for Match.com picture
So of course when the author had a shot at a little loving, he went with some horribly annoying woman he wrote baby talk to. Then they had a squinty kid named Mouse, Grahame was almost shot by a lunatic, he wrote Wind in the Willows, and everyone hated it. Throw in a suicide and weird underwear and you have a man who lived and then died a very sad life. And no wild ride in this world is going to make him happy again.
Well, I just depressed the hell of out myself. May as well talk about the Virginia Tech shootings. You need a subscription (or 20 minutes at Borders) to read the entire n+1 essay about Seung-Hui Cho’s “creative” writing and what put him into a position to kill. At least that’s what Paper Cuts is saying. The snippet from the article doesn’t even mention Cho, so I’m just taking their word at the moment. Also, for anyone that hasn’t read Cho’s short stories, here is Richard McBeef. I have little to say about it except I never imagined college-level writing could ever be this bad.
Ok, now that we’ve lost our faith in humanity here is a round-up of the Itzkoff blowback. For anyone that doesn’t know, he pretty much said all books for kids are stupid. Why would he say such a thing? it’s probably because he has had two children die in the last year.
And finally, some people don’t agree with Zadie Smith (and in turn me) and her decision to reward no money in this recent short story competition. Ed has some decent points, but I just don’t understand how why he thinks Smith outlining a recurrent problem in hundreds of stories is possible or even remotely worthwhile. If she had awarded the money this demand would not be made, and the multitudes of writers who weren’t good enough would have that one magical winning story to brood over, dissecting it for the flaws their work didn’t have. This is not to say that I feel awards shouldn’t be given out. I’m saying that the best writers in the group who weren’t good enough will keep at it and write better stories, maybe even work harder. They don’t know what criteria Smith was looking for, so they are free to harness their own work without Smith’s opinion looming in the back of their minds. The lesser ones will do what they would have done no matter how many prizes had been given out- they will feel bad for losing, maybe bitter, and move on to watching Lost or drinking a six pack. I would like to elaborate this point further by referencing a line from Luís de Camões‘ Os Lusíadas … Ok, how about a scene from Willow? It starts about a minute in. Would you rather Willow have become Billy Barty’s apprentice at the beginning of the movie? Then he would never have had his amazing adventure and saved the princess or whatever he does. This is exactly what I’m talking about. Oh, and check out 4:48 in. The way he runs is hilarious.
