Playing Catch Up with Creative Writing 20

So, I assigned a slew of short stories for the CW 20 class I teach. As I was reading over some of their responses I thought..drat, some of these stories are lame. Kate Chopin's "A Story of an Hour" remains excellent. "Penny in the Dust" remains lame.

Peter Panzerfaust

So lets take the Peter Pan story and apply it to World War II. Better yet, don't bother! Lame!

The List is Endless

The opening essay by Michael Chabon is interesting in that it will lead me to read Raymond Chandler's "The King in Yellow" and F. Scott Fitzgerald's " Crazy Sunday" and Walter Benjamin's "The Storyteller" and Lewis Hyde's Trickster Makes this World. Furthermore, it reminds me of that crazy essay on what a novel is and is not that I had to read in my Modern Literature class, quite possibly the hardest class I have ever taken. My copy has been shredded by multiple readings and highlightings and is stored safely at school in case I lose it in a fire. Sadly, it's an excerpt from some book whose title has disappeared from my world. Much like Wurzburg has. This may be obvious, but I don't think I will ever read "every book I own" because I am easily distracted by more. And that may actually be the whole point of this exercise.  

The Novel has No Definition

Was reading Poets and Writers and somebody said this was the best book not about 9/11 but about 9/11 they have ever read. So far, it's just anecdotes that "the author" has been keeping on recipe cards in an attempt to discover/write a novel. Much of the random triva is interesting, some not so much. For example, "A seascape by Henri Matisse was once hung upside down in the MOMA in New York--and left that way for a month and a half" (interesting); "Brahms had blue eyes/As did Abraham Lincoln/And Hitler" (not so much). Turns out this is a great "novel", so I ordered more of his work from the library.