Norfolk Terrace, UEA. Day 10. 23:28. The Creative Introduction (like in Men in Black)
You know, the second day of school is what it is. I switched my Nineteenth Century American lit class for American Gothic. The ladies in charge of changing modules were really nice, and even asked about Berkeley’s protest. One of the ladies’ friends lives in Berkeley, so the protest might not have actually made big news over here after all. But back to class changes, you know what sucks? All the modernism modules were offered last semester! UGH! And if a class is full, it’s full. No waitlist here. 40 is 40, even apparently if the professor says you can be in the class. Anna tried to tell the ladies that earlier yesterday and they refused to add her. Professors have less power here and that’s a little upsetting, ironically enough. Anyway I hope the Gothic class is good.
I went running with British Sean today, 3 circuits around the lake. He has an incredible running story. After a week of running for the first time in an Australian university on study abroad (after years of soccer, though), he was able to race in a 10K, didn’t do so hot, but he raced. In a couple of weeks, he actually made a team of some sort and they paid for his travel and hotel. Damn. As we were running, I was bothered by the fact that his running pace was annoyingly close but a little faster than mine. I kept up just fine, and by the second circuit, I was warmed up enough that the pace felt good and not contrived/competitive. I did this run and then changed my module, btw.
I went to the library for 90 minutes instead of walking back to Norfolk Terrace, found this really interesting book on old Cambridge lecture summaries on the nature of literature and the difference between poetry and prose and the four elements of good writing (perspicuity/clarity, accuracy, persuasiveness/charm, and appropriateness). Here is a quote that I just had to write down:
“Thought and speech are inseparable from each other. Matter and expression are parts of one; style is a thinking out into language. …This is literature; not things, but the verbal symbols of things; not…mere words, but thoughts expressed in language.” (Cardinal Newman qtd. in On The Art of Writing by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, pg. 28).
[HIGHLIGHT:] Right after this I had a really good 2-hour seminar of my Introduction to Creative Writing module. The tutor did a really weird way of having us introduce each other. We talked for 10 minutes to a peer next to us and for the first five minutes I talked about myself, and then the next he talked about himself (James and I used up a lot of his time to write stuff down so I didn’t get that much info about him). So the assignment was to use our notes and write about our partner as if we were writing the background information of an author at the back of his book. Well, while everyone else wrote about the author as he/she is now, I somehow took the instructions a little differently and given the little information I had about James, I actually wrote his author bio as he might be ten years from now. I even included how he used his degree (Environmental Geography and International Development) to go to third-world countries with his girlfriend and then used his experiences and the people he met in his first novel, Tales of A Striving Land. Somehow, I really felt like Jay in Men in Black when he takes the intelligence test: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w67dhHLUK3M&feature=related
Except I didn’t thereafter join a secret agency to defeat evil aliens and save the world. But you know, close enough.
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