Links and Thoughts 5: 12 May 2014
Super bass Punjabi style Dhol remix
Good Morning.
It’s a Monday. (I don’t know if I’ll do something special on Mondays with these posts, but I thought I’d float that as an idea and see how I like it in a week or two)
Tech: “All programming teams are constructed by and of crazy people”
Programming Sucks : stilldrinking.org
Media Diet: update your rss feeds as needed -
“That’s what this blog is going to be about. I’ll share some of what I learned for the book—with some stuff that I didn’t include. And unlike the book, I’ll be giving some of my impressions of drinks and bars, and maybe even a little bit of my own life in the kitchen, standing in front of homemade ginger beer or a shaker full of ice, wondering what to pour in next.”
Thinking on the Top Shelf: Welcome to Proof – a new Wired Science blog
Education:
“Charter schools benefit from a massive double standard, taking public money without being subject to the regulations or oversight applied to traditional public schools. That lack of regulation and oversight has a cost, in students’ educational experiences and in dollars. More than $100 million, as a new report from the Center for Popular Democracy and Integrity in Education shows.”
…
“While some of the most egregious cases are found out, leading in some cases to prison sentences …we have no way of knowing how many similar situations haven’t yet come to light.”
Weak charter school oversight leads to fraud and mismanagement
##
Today’s Book Recommendation is The Noble Hustle, “Pulitzer finalist Colson Whitehead’s hilarious memoir of his search for meaning at high stakes poker tables, which the author describes as ‘Eat, Pray, Love for depressed shut-ins.’” – Whitehead has been making the rounds of NPR shows, which is where I first heard about his book – perhaps obviously I personally haven’t read it yet, but damn: that premise.
##
Diary entry for 12 May:
Yesterday I heard an amazing conversation on the radio (On Being, an APM production often heard on NPR affiliates) about fairy tales and modern storytelling:
Maria Tatar — The Great Cauldron of Story: Why Fairy Tales are for Adults Again
Lucky for you, the full audio is at the link.
“Maria Tatar is the John L. Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University, where she also chairs the Program in Folklore and Mythology. Her books include Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood and The Annotated Brothers Grimm.”
One could take the new TV shows Grimm and Once Upon a Time as just more (yet more) examples of originality-bankrupt Hollywood running out of ideas and resorting to recycling, and autolysis. Another interpretation: The TV networks were looking to riff off (or rip off) Willingham’s Fables without actually paying anything for it.
Myth and legend—and yes, fairy tales—have been grist for the media mill for a while, though — not just Diz ripping off Grimm in 1939 (and ever since) but also the Brothers Grimm: Jacob and Wilhelm didn’t write new stories in 1812, they traveled the countryside and wrote stuff down. Old stuff. I’m not sure if Los Dos Bros Grimm even knew (at first) just how deep the rabbit hole went [ha, heh]. They tapped into a deep vein of collective unconscious that both Freud and Jung went all, well, Freudian and Jungian on a century later. The tales themselves had been handed around for quite a few centuries prior. I’m not going to write a dissertation comparing Ovid’s Metamorphoses (itself 1st century AD compilation of older myths) with Grimms’ Fairy Tales, but I could see value in the analysis [and for you grad students out there: hey, free dissertation topic].
If we add on Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey (the “monomyth”) and Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion — hell, now you’re writing with fire.
My own process involves a whole lot of reading — not just the theory and monomyth and metamyth (which might be the best way to describe the links in the diary entry up to this point) but also as much genre fiction I can cram into the limited reading time I have — after all, if all you read are books on how to write – the only ideas you’re going to get are how to write books on how to write books and you’ll be dragged downward into a recursive whirlpool between massive writer’s blocks [ref. Scylla & Charybdis] [too far, too smug, too cute?].
Watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer is going to do more for your craft than reading Man and His Symbols, or Moses and Monotheism (no, really) — so don’t feel guilty about your ‘guilty pleasures’. Especially if you’re marathoning all of it. (while you’re at it, binge-watch Full Metal Alchemist).
A grounding in ‘theory’ is certainly worth pursuing — But be careful: if you think too much about storytelling, myth, psychology, craft, form, and art — you just might find the time spent learning gets in the way of time spent writing. —M.
[subscribe: rss – twitter]
[bookmark these: http://www.rocketbomber.com/category/links-and-thoughts/]
