Headbanger’s Ball

What’s this? You need an excuse to bank your head in that nice head-shaped divot on your desk? We here at SB HQ are happy to assist, as is Zumie, who sent me these excerpts from her creative writing textbook, The College Handbook of Creative Writing by Robert DeMaria.

Excerpt the first, from page 16:

“Male-female relationships have become very complex since the so-called sexual revolution of the 1960s. Nowhere has the loss of tradition and structure in society caused more confusion than in the relationships between men and women. Romeo and Juliet may have had their problems, but they knew exactly where they stood and what was expected of them. Today’s proliferation of paperback romances may be an escapist reaction to the confusion, or even a simplistic way of dealing with the varieties of interpersonal problems. There are also, of course, many worthwhile literary works on the subject, most of them by women who have been writing with greater freedom in an atmosphere of liberation—writers such as Alice Walker and Cynthia Ozick.

 

But wait, there’s more! Excerpt the second, from page 20:

The broad literary spectrum ranges from the silliest kind of romance or comic book adventure to the works of such major literary figures as Herman Melville and Jane Austen. Some critics try to draw the line and create criteria for what they call true literature, as opposed to mere entertainment or downright junk. Drawing a precise line is always a bit arbitrary, and not really necessary. What we have is a continuum from the very trivial to the very important. Since the range is very wide, some of the material between these extremes can prove quite interesting without actually being worldshaking. What good fiction, poetry, or drama does for us is leave us with the feeling that our experience has been expanded vicariously and that perhaps we know something afterward that we did not know before. In other words, good literature has an impact that, in some way, changes the reader. Trivial literary entertainments such as thrills and romances and television dramas, however, cannot be dismissed with contempt. They have a role to play in the lives of many people, and many of the writers involved find such work a pleasant and profitable form of employment, though significance in such works is clearly minimal. Their aim is to thrill, chill, and titillate. Frank Lloyd Wright once described television as “chewing gum for the eyes.” It’s an excellent description of that medium and might also apply to most of our light literature. Chewing gum gives you a lot of action but no nourishment. Great literature, on the other hand, is full of emotional, spiritual, and intellectual nourishment.

I love the dancing tango of “Have I insulted you? Have I? No, how about now? How about now?” that DeMaria is playing here with that added dollop of piquant elitism. It’s not necessary to draw a line between the erudite and the junk (but romances are junk) and even romance has a role to play in the lives of their readers (ignominious fools though they are). Jesus fucknuts, what kind of self-absorbed superiority fix is this guy on in the quest to teach creative writing? Thrill, chill, and titillate in the absence of emotional, spiritual, and intellectual nourishment? MY ASS, SIR.

I bet he giggled when he typed “titillate,” too.

What an outrageous pity that this boneheaded statement is being used to instruct a venue of creative encouragement. Discouragement is more like it. Pass me a romance. Preferably a hardback. So I can aim it at his groin.

 

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Ranty McRant

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  1. AG, the author of the Creative Writing Handbook is also the author of “The Empress” and “Clodia.”  Here’s the entry for “International Who’s Who of Authors and Writers 2004”:

    http://books.google.com/books?id=phhhHT64kIMC&pg=PA138&lpg=PA138&dq;=“college+handbook+of+creative+writing”+demaria&source=web&ots=e_qrGXLxuy&sig=YOncCqrxWDmp1aJCqW11ibE5Z5A&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=4&ct=result

    I hope this clears up any confusion!  The writing styles in the textbook and the Roman historical novels seemed way too similar for it to be a coincidence. 

    expected96: Yup, it was just as I expected all along.

  2. AgTigress says:

    Thanks a lot for sorting that out, Joanne.  I should think that Professor Dr. Robert DeMaria of Vassar, expert on 18thC English fiction, Visiting Lecturer at Oxford, etc. etc., may be pretty damn pissed off that he is continually being confused with this other Robert DeMaria!  Unless Creative Writing/Turgid Novels DeMaria is Vassar DeMaria’s dad, in which case, I suppose, he would make allowances.

    I even wonder whether the use of the ‘creative writing’ textbook in colleges is sometimes based on a misidentification of the author, on the assumption that it is written by a professor of literature at a high-ranking college!  Though Turgid Robert DeMaria seems to have been a college teacher himself. He is now 80 years old.  Hmm.

  3. snarkhunter says:

    Re: DeMaria’s identity—SonomaLass, above, cleared that up. The Vassar Lit professor is the son of the elderly novelist/creative writing textbook author.

    And while we’re on pet peeves:

    Any time a teacher/professor started a sentence with “What the author was trying to say here is …” I would automatically tune out—you know this how?

    Well, I can tell you how we know. Many of us (I teach college, not high school, but I imagine this is also true of some high school lit teachers) spend years studying these texts and their contexts. We read the authors’ letters and commentaries. We are familiar with the tradition in which the author is writing, the approach the author is taking, etc.

    Believe it or not, literary study is not all bullshit. It can be subjective, but that subjectivity is grounded in a wealth of knowledge of literary and cultural history and an understanding of how such texts function.

    So, yeah, sometimes it’s bullshit. You can write a pretty good bullshit paper on a book, if you feel like it. (Think of Dave Barry’s awesome essay about how to be an English major—it’s something about how the whale in Moby Dick represents the Republic of Ireland [a ridiculous assumption, by the way, since the RoI didn’t exist].) But that doesn’t meant that all literary criticism is bullshit. Done well, it can offer insight into not only the work itself, but also the culture in which the book exists or is read now, and into how we perceive such books today.

  4. Chrissy says:

    Complete sentences.  Rock.  So hard.

    Not to mention… why is it the twerpage insists on peeing all over poor Bill Shakespeare?  Romeo and Juliet were not healthy relationship role models.  It’s like all the buttheads trying to sound clever and wise by quoting Polonius.

    Umm.  Comprehension good.  Pedantry bad.  grunt grunt

  5. sandra says:

    So, good literature gives us “the feeling that our experience has been expanded vicariously and that perhaps we know something afterword that we did not know before”.  By this narrow criterian, the only ‘good literature’ I have read was Robert Graves’ The White Goddess, back when I was 12 or 13.  I understood about one word in ten, but afterwards, I felt as if my brain had been expanded.  Looking back on it from the perspective of someone considerably older than 12, it was probably all crapola. Spamword is seem51, as in ‘Things seem different to a woman of 51 than they do to a pubescent girl’.

  6. Lee Rowan says:

    Mr DeMaria, Senior, is just mad as hell that his hot-blooded Roman epic isn’t selling as well as the romantic drivel written by women, who upset his little applecart by getting uppity when the Pill was invented.  1960 was when it all went downhill—women’s lib, peaceniks, civil rights…  He can’t even find a publisher, and these girls are writing about sex and being paid for it!  How dare they!

    Le yawn.

    “attack14” … no.  I refuse to have a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent.

  7. This is why I decided not to specialise in Creative Writing. We thankfully never had to use that textbook, but the content more or less corresponds to my professor’s constant rants about ‘genre fiction’, which he despised.

    I will read absolutely anything if it catches my interest, whether it’s Twilight or Wuthering Heights. This has been known to garner me strange looks in the library, and my masters’ thesis on Alexandre Dumas sent one of my examiners into a rage because Dumas is considered popular fiction and not literature within the French canon. I someday hope to augment my doctoral dissertation (on representations of fifteenth-century queens consort in late medieval/early modern literature) by writing about historical fiction depictions from the eighteenth century onward. In short, the DeMaria Seniors of the world are among my least favourite people.

  8. Marta Acosta says:

    I studied creative writing in college, and we never used any texts.  I loved my professors.  I had a deliciously snarky ex-Jesuit who tried to make everyone drop the class, a marvelous Southern novelist who always wore tweed, a high-strung short story writer…  None of them ever dissed genre fiction.

    I loved sitting around and talking about fiction and writing. 

    My favorite high school teacher was in a crackpot cult (well, the FBI hadn’t raided them yet), used to tell us about her escapades with lovers in Paris, thought she was reincarnated from a Valkyrie, and said I had a nice bright aura.  She was fantastic and let us write whatever the hell we wanted.

    They were all passionately in love with books. 

    Maybe you can’t teach creativity, but you can nurture and inspire the creative spirit.

    Cheers to all the brilliant and wonderful teachers out there!

  9. Deb Kinnard says:

    This rubbish sounds very familiar. I had the misfortune to have been a high school senior in 1969 (the summer of love). At mom’s insistence (“You’re always scribbling in those spiral notebooks anyway, why not get credit for it?”) I took Creative Writing that year. I wanted to write of teenage love/angst/joy. My teacher wanted teenage peace/love/dope. He gave me a C+ for the year and warned me not to consider writing seriously because “you will never amount to anything.”

    Five books later, I would love to find the pretentious drip and shove one up his nose.

    Here’s to art! That is, romantic fiction.

  10. HilciaJ says:

    I’m going out for some chewing gum.  Anyone one else want some?

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