Pet Peeves

[Janice & Mokey's Man]

...and I COULDN'T GET THE BOOK TO STAY OPEN!!!!! It's been a while since we've gotten a new book of sheet music, so I'd kind of forgotten what a pain that is. I HATE new sheet music books, unless they're spiral bound. What a pain!!!!
Erin

OMG, me toooooo!!

 

[Don'tLiveonMoon]

OMG, me toooooo!!

I've got a couple books whose pages are falling out from me bending it back so many times to try to keep it open! They don't have very good binding to begin with, though. I think someone could make a lot of money inventing something to get around that problem!
Erin

 

[Janice & Mokey's Man]

I agree!!!

In the meantime Erin, if ya can spare some dollars, copy your favorite songs on a copier, buy a few binders, some packets o' document protectors, and voila!---ya have yer own STAY-OPEN notebook! It's the only way to play!

Really!

It is!

 

[Don'tLiveonMoon]

Now THAT is a very good idea. *applause* And actually... we just got a copier/printer/scanner!! So I don't even have to empty out my quarters! On with the copying, and thanks for helping to save my sanity!
Erin

 

[Janice & Mokey's Man]

Now THAT is a very good idea. *applause* And actually... we just got a copier/printer/scanner!! So I don't even have to empty out my quarters! On with the copying, and thanks for helping to save my sanity!
Erin

Glad I can help!

Really!

Glad I!

 

[Don'tLiveonMoon]

Literary elitism. I'm so sick of hearing about which authors are producers of "literature" and which are not. Pretty much everyone I admire falls into the *not* category. I guess Mark Twain is considered great literature, and I've always loved him, but I don't give a flying fig about James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Samuel Beckett, and 90 percent of the people we studied in college. I've always considered "Lord of the Rings" pretty much the peak of literature, and most college English professors don't even consider it literature. It's just popular garbage. Included in that, of course, is everyone from C. S. Lewis to Stephen King. If it fits into any definable genre or was written with children in mind, it's not worth looking at. As for me, children's literature makes up the bulk of my voluntary reading material, rounded out mostly by fantasy (the two often overlap, though). And no one will ever convince me that James Joyce is a better novelist than J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, Samuel Beckett a better playwright than Rodgers and Hammerstein, and Ezra Pound a better poet than Paul Simon and John Denver.
Erin

 

[beatnikchick300]

1.Anti-environmentalists

2.Bad TV shows that are nonetheless extremely popular

3.Pepe-he is just a really poor character, and a lot of really good characters are being shoved into the background for him. It just burns me up...

4.Insensitive people

5.Being cold (like I am right now)

6.Male chauvinist pigs

 

[AndyWan Kenobi]

Literary elitism.

I'm with you there, Erin. It's interesting, though, to be in grad school for literature, because there are so many people with an academic interest in other forms of literature besides high-canonical works. There are always some popular fiction and children's fiction classes and conferences that are worthwhile. Actually, a ton of the people (grad students and professors) in my department are crazy about LOTR and Harry Potter--it's cool to see people who have to be so serious about "literature" all the time getting all geeked out to wait in line for the new movies or for a new HP novel! There are a lot of people in literature who are really interested in the boundaries between what we traditionally call literature and more popular works, but I completely agree about literary elitism. Of course, that's the way I feel about most forms of elitism...

 

[Jennifer12]

I too, was an English major, and am considering going for my MA (if I can just win that lotto!) but I have to say most of my classes had quite a bit of variety. I even had to read Harry Potter for a class. It was a children's lit class, but instead of sticking only to the older "classics" we read a few that were bound to be classics. Maybe you just have the wrong people trying to pound their ideas into you, Erin!

I know what you mean about literary elitisim though. My brother's girlfriend is like that, and I want to throw things at her constantly. People who live to compare everything to everything else and put them on some invisible rating scale irritate me. Why must something be better or worse than something else? Can't things have equal value? Is that getting into the realm of the math majors?

My two cents? Any form of art is a product of its time. There has been wonderful literature written for centuries. Learning about it within its context is not going to make anyone's head explode. The key is to find out why people relate to a given work in the past and in the present.

Jen

 

[Don'tLiveonMoon]

I don't want to sound like I hated my department, because I think all of the professors I had are really nice people and great teachers. But there definitely was an overriding sense of literary elitism that I caught. And it catches my eye when I'm reading reviews and that sort of thing, too; there was a letter to the editor in my grandparents' paper from a woman with a master's in literature saying how moronic all these people were who said LOTR was one of the great literary works of the twentieth century. She went on to say that all fantasy is simply escapism with nothing valuable to say.

I did have a children's lit class, and it turned out to be a class on teaching children's literature, intended for those on the education track, but I stayed in it because the material interested me so much. That was a great class, and I really liked what we read in it. And it was so nice to have a couple books that I could sit down and read in one sitting!! But it wasn't another literature class like the others offered at Behrend; its purpose was to concentrate on teaching methods for these books in an elementary school setting. One of the books was Harry Potter, but our teacher clearly didn't think much of it as a work of literature when judged alongside what we were reading in our other classes.

Yeah, I'm not a fan of elitism in any aspect of life; I'm just particularly sensitive to the literary variety since that's my major and the field I hope to contribute to one day. Hmmm, I wonder what Harold Bloom would have to say about one of my novels...
Erin