Mashup: Proyce and Joust

[Dave Monroe]

On 4/23/07, Monte Davis <monte.davis at bms.com> wrote:
> A wonderful post at languagehat.com today:
>
> "For a long time stately, plump Buck Mulligan used to go to bed early....

   "That was the best of the courses I was taking, too.  Creative
writing is really--well--creative.  At the beginning of the course the
professor told us that it was only in our time that the subject had
been taught in a resonable way.  In the old days, she said,
creative-writing students would just sort of make things up themselves
[...].  And yet, she said, they had the example of art courses for
hundreds of years to show them the right way to do it.  Aspiring
artists had always been set to copy the works of Cezanne and Rembrandt
and Warhol in order to learn their craft, while all aspiring writers
were urged to create was their own blather.  Handy word-processors
changed all that, and so the first assignment she gave us was to
rewrite A Midsummer Night's Dream in modern English.  And I got an A.
    "Well, from then on I was teacher's pet, and she let me do all
sorts of extracredit themes.  [...] ... so I took on some pretty
ambitious projects.  The hardest one, I guess, was to rewrite all of
The Remembrance of Things Past in the style of Ernest Hemingway,
changing the locale to Germany in the time of Hitler and presenting it
as a one-act play." (p. 81)

--Frederik Pohl, The Merchants' War (NY: St. Martin's, 1984)