Wednesday, March 18, 2015

Splash du Jour: Wednesday

I do feel that literature should be demystified. What I object to is what is happening in our era: literature is only something you get at school as an assignment. No one reads for fun, or to be subversive or to get turned on to something. It's just like doing math at school. I mean, how often do we sit down and do trigonometry for fun, to relax. I've thought about this, the domination of the literary arts by theory over the past 25 years -- which I detest -- and it's as if you have to be a critic to mediate between the author and the reader and that's utter crap. Literature can be great in all ways, but it's just entertainment like rock'n'roll or a film. It is entertainment. If it doesn't capture you on that level, as entertainment, movement of plot, then it doesn't work. Nothing else will come out of it. The beauty of the language, the characterization, the structure, all that's irrelevant if you're not getting the reader on that level -- moving a story. If that's friendly to readers, I cop to it.
-- T.C. Boyle --


Have a great Wednesday!
*****

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well,you are not very friendly with your readers,Cip,are you?
Why do you write,Cip?
I write entirely to share with others what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. And become better and wiser...
What about you,Cip?

Cipriano said...

I am actually very friendly with my readers. But I delete your judgemental and muddled comments, Anonymous, mainly because you are anonymous.
If you are a writer, or a poet or both, why don't you provide a link to your own blog or website and then the playing field would be fair. And I can then post comments on your page about poems of yours that I hate.
I would remind you, as an Anonymous commenter, that my Poetry page is a place for MY poetry to appear, not your own re-writes of my poems.
By the way, most of your comments make absolutely no sense. I have zero idea of what you are trying to say.