Monday, October 1, 2007

El Boom: class curriculum in 'the magical, marvelous real'

Abracadabra.
This word of medieval magic is traced to a mythical Persian sun god, summoned to the magician's aid. But also, in numerology its letters add to 365, so that it encompasses the entire year, and the powers of the 365 attendant spirits of the Lord. It is not a corruption of the Cabalistic Hebrew habraha dabar, bless the object.
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This course will, essentially, attempt an understanding of the literature termed "magical realism," or lo real maravilloso, translated literally from the Spanish as "the marvelous real."

Further, the course will be a half-reading, half-writing , half-discussion class. Since this is a course for writers, examination will consist of testing both the literature and ourselves by responding with creative and interesting writing. We will do this to better understand and show how the literature provokes. We will not set out to imitate the literature, but to widen the road--to find something in this literature of and for ourselves, and to move in that direction.

I will ask as prerequisites a substantial literature background and, at very least, two creative writing courses, including an advanced creative writing class--fiction, poetry, or drama.

Each member of the class will be responsible for the reading list, one book not on the list, and the extra book's author--or a topic related to that book.  I'll ask that you prepare a short report on both the extra book and its author for the class. I will provide a separate list of these books from which to choose.  All readings will be in English, though some of you may choose to explore the original languages. The course will cover some North American and Eastern European works, but Latin/South American writers will constitute the majority. We will also look to some early influences on this literature, particularly Surrealism and Dada.

In a word, this will be a class in "el boom." (This is not to be confused with John Lee Hooker, who just recently passed away, and his fine song "Boom Boom," memorable in its own right for its uncompromising lyric: "Boom boom boom boom, boom boom boom boom....")  This is the recent Literature of, and a Welcome to, the New World.

Try this as a starting point: Monday, Sunday, Saturday, Friday, Thursday, Wednesday, Tuesday, Monday.

You know the words, and you know the pattern. But listening to these words backward: If that shakes us up, if that surprises us, imagine what else might be possible--all in the middle of what is absolutely familiar.

If we assign only names and not numbers to the days of the week, if we do not get older, or younger, but simply see Monday again, we have some new sense of time--still ordered, but moveable in more than one direction. Looked at this way, in this particular order above, what is routine or mundane starts to look odd, almost misspelled, and not so easy to say. Time is for those who have watches, and look there. Or Time is for those who notice things, and look there.  Time as quantity or quality--this is a new way to think about time.  It's things like this that we'll be discussing.

So begins the adventure of the New, made of what is Old. Magic, maybe, out of the regular. The magical, the marvelous, real. Or, the more or less real: approximate reality, heavy on the leeway. Reality driving down the leeway freeway. It is all in where we look, and even more so in the value we assign to that glance.

Don't worry, or think that you are lost. It's too late. In these worlds, you are never lost, because to be lost you need to know where you have been, which may not be where you thought. You will not--cannot--get lost; you will, simply, always be somewhere. Perhaps this requires a new kind of patience; but, its reward, too, is a new kind of seeing. This is the equation of writers. This is the best poem, the best part of the story, the strongest moment in a play: being somewhere.

Our job, out of all of this, will be simple. Our plan will be to find movement in standing still. This will be a wonderful class.
 
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