My fun paper story is the four-page paper I wrote on Richard III the night (as in, I pulled an all-nighter) before it was due. The next week, my professor turned to me at lunch and said, "You wrote a good paper....You should get the fuck out of biochemistry."

Another good one is the paper I wrote on Nevermind the day it was due. I think I started right after lunch and finished an hour before the 5:00 deadline. Not only did I get a good grade, but the professor quoted it before handing the papers back.

So, JZ hit up her Mom's bookshelf and found the book which produced the City of Invention metaphor with the Castle of Shakespeare etc.

And it very nicely addresses many of the issues we've discussed here - and even nicer, it does not take an extreme stance on it. Anyway, I'm compelled to type up some choice extracts from Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen by Fay Weldon:

I suffer myself from the common nervous dread of literature. When I go on holiday, I read first the thrillers, then the sci-fi, then the instructional books, then War and Peace, or whatever book it is I know I ought to read, ought to have read, half want to read and only when reading want to fully. Of course one dreads it: of course it is overhwelming; one both anticipates and fears the kind of swooning, almost erotic pleasue that a good passage in a good book gives...

Perhaps they will explain it to you better, at your English Literature course. I hope so. I rather doubt it. In such places (or so it seems to me), those in charge are taking something they cannot quite understand but have an intimation is remarkable, and breaking it down into its component parts in an attempt to discover its true nature. As well take a fly to bits and hope that the bits will explain the creature. You will know more but understand less. I do not wish (much) to insult Departments of English Literature, nor to suggest for one moment that you would be better out of their care than in it: I am just saying be careful. And I speak as one studied by Literature Departments...

You must read Alice, before it's too late. You must fill your mind with the invented images of the past: the more the better. Literary images of Beowulf, and The Wife of Bath,and Falstaff and sweet Amaryllis in the Shade, and Elizabeth Bennet, and the Girl in the Green Hat - and Rabbit Hazel of Watership Down, if you must. These images, apart from anything else, will help you put the two and twos of life together, and the more images your mind retains, the more wonderful will be the star-studded canopy of experience beaneath which you, poor primitive creature that you are, will shelter: the nearer you will creep to the great blazing beacon of the Idea which animates us all. No? too rich and embarassing an image?...

Hey, I have a signed Mark Doty poem on my wall. Don't know why I didn't include him on the list.

Ararat

Wrapped in gold foil, in the search
and shouting of Easter Sunday,
it was the ball of the princess,
it was Pharoah's body
sleeping in its golden case.
At the foot of the picket fence,
in grass lank with the morning rain,
it was a Sunday school prize,
silver for second, gold
for the triumphant little dome
of Ararat, and my sister
took me by the hand and led me
out onto the wide, wet lawn
and showed me to bend into the thick nests
of grass, into the darkest green.
Later I had to give it back,
in exchange for a prize,
though I would rather have kept the egg.
What might have coiled inside it?
Crocuses tight on their clock-springs,
a bird who'd sing himself into an angel
in the highest reaches of the garden,
the morning's flaming arrow?
Any small thing can save you.
Because the golden egg gleamed
in my basket once, though my childhood
became an immense sheet of darkening water
I was Noah, and I was his ark,
and there were two of every animal inside me.

-Mark Doty

The poem is on handpressed paper in Granjon type. There's an illustration from the Frankfort Laeyon Biblia of 1569 of the animals approaching the ark. The upper corner is flecked with blood from my dog's nose (dating to before I framed the poem) where she cut it on an expedition to the woods.

hayden, if you weren't already married, I'd be down on one knee proposing right now.

Edit: and not just because I'd own half of that framed poem that way.

In Doty-induced happy place now.

My favorite Doty poem is "Difference".

I tell everyone they MUST read it out loud the first time they read it, though, so it has maximum impact.

Listen to the Kristin. She's only telling you for your own good.

Damnit, Kristin's already married too.

t hearting Polter-Cow

Edit: Hee! And Jen!

This is my favorite Margaret Atwood poem (in fact, it was the catalyst for a huge change in my life long ago; the wrong change, as it turned out, but it was a catalyst nonetheless, and I respect that still):

Men with the heads of eagles
no longer interest me
or pig-men, or those who can fly
with the aid of wax and feathers

or those who take off their clothes
to reveal other clothes
or those with skins of blue leather

or those golden and flat as a coat of arms
or those with claws, the stuffed ones
with glass eyes; or those
hierarchic as greaves and steam-engines.

All these I could create, manufacture,
or find easily: they swoop and thunder
around this island, common as flies,
sparks flashing, bumping into each other,

on hot days you can watch them
as they melt, come apart,
fall into the ocean
like sick gulls, dethronements, plane crashes.

I search instead for the others,
the ones left over,
the ones who have escaped from these
mythologies with barely their lives;
they have real faces and hands, they think
of themselves as
wrong somehow, they would rather be trees.

Oh, lordy. I don't know if I'm in entirely the wrong place to be reading that right now, or entirely the right one.