Just a little note today. Not really tied into work—though that keeps progressing as normal—but more just a thought that's been on my mind over the last few days.

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So, I'm no great poet (there's documented proof of that), but there's a new poem floating around on Twitter, purportedly written by an 8th grader:

Our Generation

Our generation will be known for nothing.
Never will anybody say,
We were the peak of mankind.
That is wrong, the truth is
Our generation was a failure.
Thinking that
We actually succeeded
Is a waste. And we know
Living only for money and power

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This year Bob Dylan has received the Nobel Prize in Literature. As this is the first time the prize has been awarded to a singer-songwriter, it has caused no end of heated discussion in educated circles about whether this was the right decision. Traditionally the prize has gone to novelists, philosophers and poets. But the times they are a changin’, and the prize committee appears to be now more open to alternative ideas about what constitutes ‘literature’, and willing to take a look at more

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A simple question.

Which girl from the game Doki Doki Literature Club is your favorite?

Sayori, Yuri, Monika, or Natsuki?

The most significant fact about 20th-century English literature is that it was dominated by cliques and entangled with politics, from the very beginning of the century.  As I explained in "Modernist Manifestos & WW1: We Didn't Start the Fire—Oh, Wait, we Totally Did", this process began in France in the 1850s, when, in response to the overcrowding of the Paris Salons

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From the title, it's obvious that this has prejudice, so I'll try to be as clear as possible.

A book whose information is false, is full of clichés, has an empty speech and content is a garbage book, therefore this is garbage literature. In other words, a book made not to express but to sell.

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I like to snark at Europeans who say personal liberty started with the French Revolution. The American Revolution created a representative government with guaranteed civil liberties. The French Revolution created a representative government that terrorized its own people. The American Revolution had a lot more American-on-American violence than high school textbooks admit--for instance, Washington marched an army against the militias of Western Pennsylvania--but a lot less head-chopping than

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Hello! It's been some time. I suppose I should keep everyone abreast of the latest goings-on in my life, which, alas, include no MLP fanfiction.

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I thought a lot of you might find this upcoming Coursera course pretty cool:

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This post is an attempt to fill in a bit of the gap in the history of the Literary Left between 1970 and now, by summarizing trends in (Lloyd-Jones & Lunsford 1989, Davis & Mirabella 1990, Elbow 1990, Leitch 2010, Harbach 2014). It's the last in its "series" of grumpy-old-man

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Western civilization began with the ancient Greeks, and the ancient Greeks agreed unanimously that their religion, ethics, and poetry began with The Iliad. So that's where my review of Western literature will begin.

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There was an interesting article in the New York Times a few days ago about the Open Syllabus Project. It gathers syllabi from college course websites worldwide, and counts how often different books and publications are assigned reading.

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Many of the comments to my previous blog entry were asking if there was any way of acquiring the fantasy books I mentioned. As I said, my goal is to get an agent and then a book deal, so at this time I've decided against self-publishing.

That isn't to say, though, that I'm opposed to sharing them. If you'd like, you can PM me with a good email address, and I'll happily send along one or both. I'm fairly proud of them, so I'm happy to let people read them.

My haters do an awful lot of complaining about the grammar in my fics.

Well this is aimed at non-haters, who can try to understand (Since my haters prefer to stick to their guns)

Well,

1: Nobody's Perfect, and as long as you get the idea of what was MEANT to be said, you can just go along with it. It's not like I'm writing a real book here, we all make mistakes, and heck, even my haters make errors (Some worse than I do)

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Here's Monika's First Writing Tip of the Day:

Here's Monika's Second Writing Tip of the Day:

Here's Monika's Third Writing Tip of the Day:

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I have recently developed a passing curiosity about Arthurian Legend. It seems every story ever written about King Arthur is some sort of fan fiction. While stuck at home, I read T.H. White’s Once and Future King (1958), which is Thomas Malory fan fiction. Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur (1485) is a translation and compilation

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It's Better to Burn Out than to Fade Away
By FireRain

Applause sounds more like a disease the more I hear it,
Claps of thunder and appraisal scream as they cheer and chant my name.
That is the price of fame: recognition.
It comes in the form of a storm and it shakes the world around you like the wind blows a leaf.
Shock caused me to stand stock-still when it first happened, sometimes even now.

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