Literally Blogging

I was reading The Jabberwocky, the other day, marveling at Lewis Carroll’s obvious insanity.
Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
Well, really. Could anything that cool have ever come out of a sane mind?
Insanity, mental illness, and personality disorders are rampant among literature’s elite. They aren’t the only ones, of course; artists and actors and musicians are also famous for a shortage of marbles. One of the saddest quotes I’ve heard is from Van Gogh: “If not for this disease, what I might have been.”
But it’s the …read more

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The Victorian novel almost always starts with a winter.

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Natalie Goldberg, in one of her many fabulous essays on creative writing, praised the mysterious “Southern writing gene” possessed by writers born in the South, and elusive to anyone else who seeks to imitate the distinctive writing style.
I inherited this gene, and it is the most valuable thing I inherited from the land of heat and humidity, a land I’d wanted to leave for a long, long time. I recently did so, moving across the country, as far as you could get from my childhood home.
But that gene is pervasive. No matter how far I move or how high into …read more

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A professor developing a program to summarize works of great literature into cell phone text messages? In a word: yuck.

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Tom and Huck, those classic icons of boyhood, still color my perception today of what childhood should be like: sunrises and fishing trips, wholesome packed lunches and adventures with schoolyard chums.

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We’ve all heard ‘write what you know.’ If that’s true, why are there such spectacular successes of people writing things they know nothing about?

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This could develop into a diatribe on censorship, but what I’m concerned with here is, What books are we ‘supposed’ to be reading? And who decides that?

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I was watching the “Gingervitus” episode of South Park last night when these thoughts came to me.

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My name is Rhys Alexander, and I am honored to have this opportunity to try my hand at Literally Blogging.
I think it is impossible to understand the passion someone can hold for literature unless you feel that same love, an existence of words in your blood and fire in your mind and heart.
My love affair with literature began when I was two years old, when my aunt brought over a stack of Little Golden Books she’d purchased for me at a garage sale. Scientists say you can’t remember things from when you were two years old. But …read more

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