Leonard: “[The narrator of this story is] an overeducated, completely inexperienced, sexually inadequate girl who’s got rich parents who give her everything. She’s got nothing to say so she sits around and thinks about Jane Austen all the time. I don’t give a shit about that person.”
Shivani: “The conventions of literary fiction are that the bourgeois hero (more likely the heroine) be vulnerable, prone to shame and guilt … and on the same banal moral plane as the ‘average reader’….”
”- That first quote from this article is from a character in a play about students in a writing workshop. I only include it because Leonard is played by Alan Rickman, and I love to imagine him saying this.
The second quote is from a real person, Anis Shivani, who makes a living out of shitting on creative writing M.F.A. programs, faculty, students, and alumni. Sometimes Shivani’s criticisms are valid; but they are never original, have always been discussed with more thoughtfulness by leagues of others, and invariably have a pomposity that enrages me. I won’t be reading his new work, Against the Workshop, because it will just make me angry. The last quote in the article, where he answers the question of how a writer is supposed to succeed without engaging with the academy, makes me absolutely livid.
“Marry a rich (or at least a self-sufficient) woman. It’s a time honored custom.”
Seriously? Fuck you, Shivani. Fuck your sexist, elitist crap. Fuck everything.
Happy fucking Tuesday.
