Favorite piece of literature... I would say it's a tie between A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett and Watership Down by Richard Adams. The two are very different, but both are well-constructed stories with extremely lovable characters - and extremely hateable characters, for that matter.
Ooh, what are some of the hateable characters?
Miss Minchin in A Little Princess - she's the woman who runs the school in which Sara Crewe, the main character, lives - and in Watership Down, General Woundwort, the tyrannical (not to mention violent) dictator of Efrafa, another warren.
I'm familiar with Miss Minchin. I've seen the movie, and also Sierra Bogress was in the musical a while back! I really like when we get to see literature in many different forms—I think of Pride and Prejudice based on our *cough* previous discussion. Do you like seeing literature brought to life in other ways, and do you have any examples?
I always find musical adaptations of literature fascinating, though it doesn't happen very often - a few years ago I saw a musical version of Sense and Sensibility and liked it a lot. Apart from that... I'm mostly disappointed by movie adaptations, unfortunately. And of course I'm always up for seeing live/filmed performances of Shakespeare and other plays, if that can be counted as literature!
Yeah, movie adaptions are a little tricky, for all of us. But if the AP Board says that Shakespearean plays are okay on the test, I feel like we can count it as literature, too! Switching gears a little bit, let's talk about art. Define art.
Art. Oh, goodness. That's really, really tricky. See, I recently took a class on art and music and basically the end argument was that art is whatever you say it is. For example, there's a piece called Fountain - created by Marcel Duchamp, a Dada artist - which is literally a urinal laid on its side. That's it. I think it was supposed to be a political statement. On the other hand, you can have something that's purely created for aesthetic appeal or whatnot, like many of the commissioned pieces from before the 1800s. That being said... I suppose I have to agree. Though I personally like art better when it's created for aesthetic reasons, or at least romantic ones (looking at you, Fuseli) art is, at its core, whatever we plop down and say is art.
As Guinan might say, it's in the eye of the beholder. How do you incorporate art into your daily life?
Short answer is, I don't - not intentionally. At least I think I don't. The closest I can get would be that I tend to notice things about the world around me that could be called artistic, whether it be the symmetry of a flower or a weirdly shaped roof or the drawing technique in a Calvin and Hobbes comic. Other than that - I don't think I incorporate it much.
It's funny, because whenever I come to your house I feel like it's always so much more artsy than mine. Your brothers are musical and inventive, and there's always books and rich discussion hanging around, so it's funny that we should have a different perspective of your life. All right, one last question. Wandering in a Blur is about life and the blurry messiness we all experience as we live. What is a question you have that is part of your blur?
Blurry messiness, huh? I guess the primary question (always in my face when I'm at college) is "What are you going to do with your life?" Sometimes I think I know, and sometimes I think I have no earthly clue.
Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. Thanks so much for doing this interview with me!
Liz is a Colorado humanities student, which means she studies all things awesome and having to do with how great humans are at their humanness. In her free time—and even in the time that isn't free—she reads obsessively and terrorizes her residence hall as the "crazy book girl." She can usually be found wrapped in a comforter, recovering from her latest book hangover. You can find her at her soon-to-be-blog, Literary Liz!
