Comments on: A Moment of Uplift

By: steve

steve — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 14:22:21 +0000

Life can be beautiful, but only because you understand and not because you “should”.

I think it’s crazy for anyone to dictate what should and should not be, tunnel vision is never good for exploration because there is so much more.

By: pinhut

pinhut — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 03:23:33 +0000

You’ve not seen what these writing programs have done to publishing. Lived in the US? No.

By: pinhut

pinhut — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 03:22:22 +0000

You knock one thing on the head there. See how many short stories now begin with the protagonist’s name (particularly US ones) due to the homogenising effect of the ‘wisdom’ dispensed on Creative Writing courses.

(This comment comes to you by somebody picked out of 30000 submissions as one of the best young writers in Britain and the Commonwealth, don’t let that bother you)

By: pinhut

pinhut — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 03:20:31 +0000

There are no good books by Professors who work on Creative Writing programs.

There are no good books by Writers Program graduates, particularly Iowa.

If you want to take up the challenge, you can cite five books by Creative Writing Program professors or graduates that are better than anything by Samuel Beckett, James Joyce or Thomas Bernhard. Not a single literary heavyweight is going to emerge from a middlebrow enterprise, just as the next Mozart is not going to burst through via Pop Idol.

By: ricardoquaresma

ricardoquaresma — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 15:38:17 +0000

You also wrote about the ‘clear and present danger’ of students submitting creative work ‘to a hierarchy of academic staff’, as though there’s a concrete expectation within the Academy that all – or even most – students will publish work, that there’s a recognised literary formula to maximise their success (‘Start the story with the protagonist’s name!’), and lastly – but again most patronisingly – that these pointy-headed academics are themselves blank slates, with no more discrimination or taste than a pot plant.

I dont believe that part at all.