wednesday, january 17, 2007
What is up with all this blawgging?
Some history and philosophy of the College of Creative Studies, via the googled writings of former students:
Jervey Tervalon (‘78) talks about learning from the person who started this college:
[Marvin] Mudrick was fascinated by people, and he loved people in books, and he didn’t make a big distinction between the two, except for the fact that you’ll know people in books far better than you will know people in life. Here’s the advice he gave me: Read literature like we read the newspaper, skim the boring parts, read carefully what interests you — just keep reading. What Mudrick couldn’t stand were tastemongers, chasing some intellectual hobgoblin of the modern aesthetic; kitsch culture; the cult of family dysfunction; more about slavery; more about the Holocaust…Mudrick believed writing was a function of reading. If you read with passion and intelligence, you’d eventually come around to wanting to write.
Karen Christensen (‘81) also talks about being a Literature major in the Mudrick era:
Mudrick would assign us a new novel every couple of days, and we were asked (though perhaps not expected) to get through piles of Shakespeare (whom he called a misogynist), Chaucer (“just pretend it’s horribly misspelled”), and Milton (again, no favorite of Mudrick’s).
He said, for example, that the measure of fiction was that it had a human story that would interest anyone, of any age, anywhere. Mudrick believed that students were able to write good stories — really good stories — because, as he said to one class, “you’re at the right age, you’re still about to get in touch with your own language…[but] you can’t write expository prose. You can’t write professional prose of any kind, you’re not skilled enough yet.”
That, for me, is Mudrick’s legacy, or at least something he helped to strengthen in me: fascination with the whole of life and a fearlessness about digging into a new bank of knowledge.
Plus, from a review by the New York Times:
In several of these essays, Mr. Mudrick seems to believe that the only way to judge a literary work is by the lusty willingness of its heroine or the vigor and explicitness of its sex scenes.
comments (0)
comments are off. for new comments, my email address is brittag@gmail.com.
