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Tragic figures One of the most tragic figures in all of literature is Marvin the robot in the Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy series by Douglas Adams. I know there are thousands, or millions, of people in the world who would scoff at this comment. There was a time in my life when I would have been amongst them. They would scream and shout, "But what about Shakespeare, Faulkner, Chaucer, Milton, or a hundred others?" Well, that is all well and good, but I've read them. I have killed the hours en masse plowing through volumes of dead authors' works. I have read the literate canon. I have written innumerable papers on the analysis of this and that in the work of so and so. Sure, One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez is one of my all time favorite books, and happens to rife with tragedy, but I stand firm in my first statement. So if you disagree I say "Nanny nanny poo poo, stick your head in doo doo." I have a degree in writing and another in literature. While I was in school I had volume after volume of 'real' writers shoved down my throat. I read more literature of English windbags than I care to remember, and not once did we touch on anything not published or discussed in the annals of academic halls. Never had we read anything regarded as Science Fiction, Romance, or just light reading. Never was there a Vonnegut, Pratchett, Gaimen, King, Boyle, or Robbins that cropped up on the itinerary. I was being bred to become a literature snob. I had no idea what I was missing. I had to find Chabon, Barth, Barthelme, Cunningham, Cheever, Carver and a hundred others all on my own. I have rebelled, I have lived, I have loved on different planes of being than I knew possible while slogging my books to and from one stuffy class to another. Anyone in need of a reading recommendation will gladly be provided a quick dozen at the first request. I have nothing more to say on this subject, so I think that I will write another entry in a completely different and random direction from this one right now. TTFN! (ta ta for now�geez, get with it!) |
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