Denizi Yitiren Denizci itibaren Yukio Mişima içinde LIT biçim

Manohar Lal juskar42 — Bu kitabı kaç kez okursam oku, her zaman favorilerimden biri olacak.

Stephen Duplantier _tephendu — Dan Brown is a genius and a visionary for making millions on the "jesus dipped his wick before playing the savior" urban legend that's been around for centuries. People make me sad.

Majed Almanaa mejoooo77 — Not that it was a bad thing, but no matter how you look at it this was a tough read. Paul West writes in a style that is meant to challenge even the most enlightened audience. Reading should be every bit of an intellectual exercise as writing, and this book will confound and frustrate anyone who does not like to be forced into thinking. I picked up Master Class on a whim, perhaps I was feeling inquisitive that day, but I didn’t know what to expect, so I came at it with an open mind which ended up being crucial. This book is not meant for someone looking for a series of techniques that they can use to improve their writing. Paul mentions that creativity isn’t a laundry list, you can’t follow a formula and come up with something meaningful. Instead lessons come in oblique angles forcing the reader to search for more esoteric messages. “There are undergraduates who would love to have such a list of requirements or inducements because, they’d expect, it would somehow match something they were to be examined on. Chances, however, would be that I’d examine them on something wholly inapposite - Milton’s use of proper names, say, or paraphrases in Dickens. I gave up teaching undergrads when I realized I was teaching grammar, not creativity.” I have to admit that I don’t posses the literary knowledge to follow most of his references obscuring many of his points from my view. It does seem that he has a difficult time relating to people who do not posses his knowledge and experience which makes his writing a little inaccessible, and I can sympathise with others who find this off-putting and pretentious. “The same happens as before. They write it down with an almost creative relish, whereas I, who seem to have had most of these commandments by heart for at least some of my career, can hardly imagine the state of mind that sees them as discoveries.” I don’t fault Paul for this, and I would never ask him to water anything down for my sake. I recognize that I’m meeting someone who is striving to reach the loftiest heights of literature, and along the way is attempting to lift others up into the same rarefied air. I do fear however that I would be eaten alive in his seminar: I’m not sure if he would give me the time-of-day. Even so there’s something about his tone that makes me feel Paul isn’t trying to put me down, but instead attempting to lift me up else I fade into the distance and become another page-turning subway reader. “Then do read Helena,” I tell her with my most noble smile, my mind on something that has long bothered me: that people, avid for opinion and bloated with knowledge, spend so much of their lives small-talking about life that they never create any thing to be left behind them, and their lives end up a sluice of cliches, street-smarts, and anecdote. He wouldn’t say that if he felt the reader couldn’t respond to such a bold statement: otherwise he’s just senile. I thank him for his generosity, and instead of being offended I take this chance to realize I have miles yet to go. There’s an unfortunate fatalist tone to his work. Paul mentions a few times the battles he’s had with publishers and the decline he’s witnessed in the industry. He ponders whether it’s right for him to push his students into writing novels that won’t produce best sellers; he’s fully aware that the inquisitive thought provoking style he fosters doesn’t sell. For Paul the future is uncertain, but for me all I can do is be thankful that there are still people like him in the world who hold writing to the highest standards continually molding prose into works of art. “And then it comes over me again, the ravaging sense that all I am doing is grooming these brave souls for the plank: walking it. The better they write, the worse their fate will be in a world in which all bad writers write alike the same corrugated cardboard prose without even thinking about it.” . . . "If there's a battle of the books, it was over long ago with the arrival onstage of a huge skim-reading public that cares no more about sentences than about how an ostrich wipes its rear. These are the condom readers, I suppose, to be seen at airports and on planes, racing ahead through their page-turners to a destiny as illusory as the one at the end of their 500-miles-an-hour charge."