[ExI] silly 'rules'

[Ben]

"spike" <spike66 at att.net> wrote:

     >Many or perhaps most of us here are techy types.  In our school
    years we were required to take lit classes but plenty of us just
    went through the motions.  (Did you do that too?)  Then when the
    college days were over, some of us looked back at what we missed,
    and learned that it requires a different way of thinking. The math,
    the physics, the chemistry, all those comfort zones for so many of
    us, didn?t help in explaining why some kinds of literature makes us
    feel.  I didn?t really learn to feel until after they had already
    handed me a diploma and an invitation to go off and invent things. 
    My vocabulary is still limited in those gray-area fields, for I
    didn?t even start developing those areas of the brain until long
    after those synapses were already being occupied by calculus and
    details of astronomy, programming languages and all the usual cool
    stuff.



I hated 'English Literature' (and still do. That Hemingway stuff, for 
example, is just incomprehensible to me.  Some guys in a bar, talking 
about what?  Nothing.  What's the point?  What's the story? I really 
don't get it.  Most short stories are the same: Meaningless rambling.  
Ditto poetry).  Maths is also a foreign language to me, which I'm still 
not comfortable with, and only know some of the basics, so I don't 
really know what the hell my synapses are occupied with!

Adrian wrote:

     > even adults, but definitely children, might appreciate certain forms
     > of art more if they have at least dabbled in the rudiments of the
    craft,
     > rather than leaving the whole thing as a black box to them.


Well, that doesn't seem to work for me.  At least not with literature.  
I've written short stories of my own, here's one:

Last night, I woke up in the small hours.  There was a fly buzzing at 
the window.  When I went to let it out, a cat in the street looked up at me.

That's what short stories are like.  I see no difference (apart from 
length) between that and the Hemingway one that Spike posted.  What do 
people see in them?  I have no idea.

Ben Zaiboc
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