LOST IN THE PLOT

Oh, how the plot of a standard good short story turns me on! Love those rising obstacles!

Enough with politics. Jesus. After my useless trek to the polling station yesterday, I'm sick sick sick of it all. 'Any pig will do' is what John Waters used to write on his ballots (as per Lynn Crosbie in yesterday's Globe & Mail. Read her column every Tuesday incidentally: Pop Rocks. It's good fun and smart and everyone needs some crazy old Anne Sexton quotations littering their morning commute. Yesterday's column was about the Hockey Night in Canada song and she still found an A. Sexton quote that relates ['music remembers better']).
And he's right, John Waters, I mean. Politicians are pigs. Lipstick or not---Uggh, just mentioning pigs and lipstick bores me to death. Actually, I love pigs and I love pitbulls, so let's from now on vow to never again include them in political discourse.
Enough!

Anyway, now for something a little different. Some literary wisdom and laughs. It's from Harper's via Bookninja, by Chris Offutt, from “Excerpt from The Offutt Guide to Literary Terms,” published last fall in Seneca Review. Offutt is the author of several works of fiction and nonfiction.

nonfiction: Prose that is factual, except for newspapers.

creative nonfiction: Prose that is true, except in the case of memoir.

memoir: From the Latin memoria, meaning “memory,” a popular form in which the writer remembers entire passages of dialogue from the past, with the ultimate goal of blaming the writer’s parents for his current psychological challenges.

novel: A quaint, longer form that fell out of fashion with the advent of the memoir.

short story: An essay written to conceal the truth and protect the writer’s family.

novel-in-stories: A term invented solely to hoodwink the novel-reading public into inadvertently purchasing a collection of short fiction.

clandestine science fiction novel: A work set in the future that receives a strong reception from the literary world as long as no one mentions that it is, in fact, science fiction; for example, The Road, winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

plot: A device, the lack of which denotes seriousness on the part of writers.

chick lit: A patriarchal term of oppression for heterosexual female writing; also, a marketing means to phenomenal readership and prominent bookstore space.

personal essay: Characterized by 51 percent or more of its sentences beginning with the personal pronoun “I”; traditional narrative strategy entails doing one thing while thinking about another.

literary essay: Akin to the personal essay, only with bigger words and more profound content intended to demonstrate that the essayist is smarter than all readers, writers, teachers, and Europeans.

lyric essay: An essay with pretty language.

nature essay: An essay written by a person claiming to have a closer relationship with the natural world than anyone else does; traditional subject matter is sex, death, and how everything was better in the past.

pop culture essay: An essay written by someone who prefers to shop or watch television.

academic essay: Alas, an unread form required for tenure.

composition writing: An academic development in response to the economic needs of recently graduated MFA students.

experimental writing: The result of supreme artistic courage when a writer is willing to sacrifice structure, character, plot, insight, wisdom, social commentary, context, precedent, and punctuation.

poem: Prose scraps.

prose poem: Either a poem with no line breaks or a lyric essay with no indentation. No one knows.

deconstructionism: A moderately successful attempt by the French to avenge the loss of Paris as the global center of literature.

anxiety of influence: A term popularized by Harold Bloom to suppress poets and elevate the role of critics.

text: A term used by critics to conceal ignorance of precise definitions.

See, now wasn't that a nice change? My anxiety of influence is already dissipating.