Blurry Interviews: Literary Liz

Hi Liz, thanks for agreeing to be interviewed for a Wandering in a Blur interview! As you know, we're all about art, literature, science, history, and all that great stuff. Let's start with something easy: What is your favorite piece of literature, and why?

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!

Literature

17

Literature.

Say it out loud. Listen to the way it rolls off the tongue—lyrical, magical, filled with promises and memories of hot cookies on Tuesday nights.

Literature.

Whisper it to the wind. Caress the brittle pages of the books Dad used to read when he was a child. Smile and shy from the smell—old, piercing, dusty books. But they’re stories. That’s why it’s beautiful.

Literature.

Fingernails and paper cuts. Remember the little streaks of blood on all the pages and the stains from tears and chocolate and ink and worse because books aren’t sacred and they long to be free.

Literature.

The stilted words and the jagged voice that makes you feel like your eyes are going up against a cheese grater. It’s terrifying. Enchanting. Boring. Wondrous. Not so much. That’s the opinion of it all.

Literature.

Literature.

Literature.

Pages and pages and pages and pages of yellow black white red blue and the smell of jasmine leaves and camel sand, distant places and dreams that come from dirty lamps and bottles that tell you what to do. Unfortunate colors, red wings, white wings, the things that make us fly tie us down to the world, but that’s all we have to go off of. So go we shall.

They get married in the end, you know. Or they all die. To be or not to be—it’s always the same question. Whether it’s sharper in the mind to record the flips and flops of literature—just literature. Yellow bellies, blue blood, red coats, white men with black minds and not even God to save them.

Passion, perdition, purgatory, peace.

Literature.

It’s a trip.

Taking Offense

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Flickr Credit: Celestine Chua

There are a few best things that have ever happened to me, but one I will never forget happened last year in my English class. We were reading part of Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion.

And I’ll be honest—it was great writing, but I didn’t like some of the ideas. Like, they made me uncomfortable. No one else seemed to mind, and it wasn’t a raw-shocking-graphic-bundle-of-horribleness-meant-to-scar-me-for-life. I read it.


But it bothered me. That’s when my English teacher gave me the most important lesson he taught that year.

“It’s okay to be offended.”

Woah.

What a concept.

And I pondered it. Like—it’s okay to be offended! It was liberating.

The paradigm shift exploded in my brain. And I thought about it. To some degree in the society I know and don’t always love, there’s this expectation that you will not get offended. In fact, it’s almost offensive to be offended.

Someone says I’m stupid—“Oh, don’t get upset. They’re just having a bad day.”

Someone commits a crime—“It’s really none of your business.”

Someone jabs at my religion—“Everyone can believe what they want; don’t hate on other people’s beliefs!”

It’s not that they don’t always have a point. Maybe that person is having a bad day, and I need to be extra forgiving towards them. It’s possible that the kid who committed a crime is having family issues, and it’s not my job to speculate. And my own response to the religion quip might have been made emotionally, rather than with kindness or reason.

But my problem is this: by making that excuse, that person is saying that it is wrong to have an emotional response to what I have just experienced.

How I present that emotional response is another matter entirely—I know.

Nonetheless, I think sometimes we forget that it’s okay to take offense. Attending a public high school, I’m familiar with many four-letter words, and it’s easy to become desensitized to their meaning. But maybe we shouldn’t. One of my favorite episodes from the TV show Arthur is called “The Bleep,” where D.W. learns a curse word. At first it’s a funny thing she’s learned and she shares it with her friends, but later, when she’s distracted and angry, she yells it at her mother—you can imagine she’s in trouble.

And I always liked the way Mrs. Read explained it to D.W. later. “It’s like saying ‘I want to hurt your feelings.’”

There are a lot of things out there that are controversial, and sometimes people take offense at things that should be no matter at all, and sometimes people ignore things that, logically, should really hurt them.

As readers, we run into things that may offend us sometimes. More than once books have been banned because someone has been offended, perhaps over a small thing. People will defame an author for a discrepancy and shame readers for enjoying what they’ve read. It’s not cool.

But I also understand.

There should be a middle ground, in my opinion. Some things happen in books that we should not promote in real life, and there are books that are appropriate for some ages and not for others. Death is much more permissible in fiction. You’ll notice that 50 Shades of Gray doesn’t show up in many elementary school libraries. There’s a separation.

Therefore, I think we should learn to take offense gracefully.

I googled “How to be Offended” and aside from the first hit, everything else advises you how NOT to be offended.

This is the one link, and I think it’s worth the read, but I think I’ll add my own procedure for learning to be offended, especially because it is so easy to run into reading material that may bother us.

Now, there’s always the option of just closing the book or the window and saying, “I don’t want to read that,” which is fine. There are things not worth your time or your energies. But sometimes there is material we’re stuck with, in which case I find it better to use this method:

1. read it twice—rereading something familiarizes you with the text, which is going to be important for the next steps
2. pinpoint the offensive parts—in most circumstances, you can describe why something in particular is offensive
3. reread the offensive parts specifically—there’s almost always a reason someone writes something; the unfortunate truth may be that it is intended to hurt your feelings, but it’s also possible that this person merely wants to be informative or is trying to make a point
4. understand—figure out the exact meaning of what this person means, be sure to take into account irony or any other factors
5. make a decision—did this change your mind? Maybe it did and maybe it didn’t, but I’ve always found it affirming to state my conclusion.
1. “Even though I’ve read something that bothers me, it turns out that I still have the same opinion I did before.”
2. “Wow, this really changed my mind about that issue.”
6. reconcile—do you need to take action? (NOT: do you need to ban this book?) Do you need to discuss your value system with someone? Do you need to find a website or a person so you can ask more questions? Or is this a case where you should close the covers and say, “I’m glad I learned something about another perspective—but I think I’m done for now.”?

The exact timeline of this process can vary. It took me the duration of the assignment to figure out how to deal with being offended at Joan Didion’s piece. But I’m glad I read it, and that I did it, because I have a better way to handle emotional blows now.

So, go be offended, I guess. Enjoy it. And, when you’re ready, decide what you’re gonna do about it.

How do you handle a situation when something offends you?

Turns of Phrase

If you've been following this blog already for a short while, you can't have failed to notice my regular sign-off:

Khodafez.

Khodafez is a very interesting word, with a very interesting etymology and definition, that I try to use it when possible.

Khodafez is essentially a parting-term in Farsi, very common in Iran. A "good-bye", or "farewell", or "fare thee well", if you will.

The official phrase is khoda hafiz, which means literally "May God be your guardian". Most Persians just shorten this to khodafez, which I personally prefer. That is the history of this strange term.

I am a language nerd. I look up etymologies of words in other languages and study their etymologies and original meanings and spellings. I compare words in different languages: for example, the Spanish rojo, the French rouge, the Italian rosso, and the delightfully unrelated Portuguese vermelho. English itself is a language hog. It has selfishly taken and borrowed words from other languages and adapted them to its needs. The result? We speak French peppered with some Spanish, Italian and other languages, and speak it with a German accent.

Part of the allure of languages are the different phrases used. Below are some of the phrases that different languages have. Can you guess what they mean?

slainte
entre nous
segun San Lucas
mahalo nui loa
Animo!
ab aeterno
folie a deux
joie de vivre
cri de coeur

This is a weird topic, I know. But it's still interesting to learn languages, or at least parts of them. For in learning languages, you gain insight in their culture and history, too. That's why etymologies are so fascinating.

In addition, some of the lesser-known languages here in the West have a certain allure that the European ones can't equate. Everyone can guess what "adieu" means, but how many people, how many of you, readers, before reading this post, knew what "khodafez" meant? Exactly. My personal motto in life is "style over substance". In this case, it works perfectly. The allure, the intrigue, over a mysterious language such as Farsi is much more fulfilling than French. This is not to say I hate French or am denigrating it - quite the opposite. I love French. Je suis un etudiant de la langue. But it is worth discovering other languages, not just the common ones that everyone and their mother knows or is learning.

There are an estimated 6800 languages in the world today. Try and discover a new one today. For the esoterically inclined, there's Aymara and Oubykh. For those who want something that's rather well-known but want an exotic flair, there's Hawaiian, or Korean, or Danish. Discover something.

Now, I bid you, dear Reader, adieu, or as you might expect:
Khodafez.

-R.R.