beatnicks meet the 21st century & writing hints

COMMENTS:

 

 from rick dale on Sunday, January 29, 2012

 

"Marginalia! I routinely encourage my students to create marginalia when they read, not because I do, but because it is a habit that encourages critical reading. After all, isn't a dialogue with the author what we're really after as readers?"

 

BOOKS:

  

in my last blog, i talked about the similarities between charles frazier's "nightwoods" and jack kerouac's "the dharma bums". a basic similarity that i think i did not discuss is the fact that physical and spiritual journeys are taken in both books, though you could say that about many, many novels.

  

in addition, each has a basic story line: kerouac's, written in the first person, is about the mountain climbs and friendship. in frazier's novel, luce, a woman who lives by herself, is presented with extremely disturbed twins (a boy and a girl) left by her murdered sister. she has to find a way to raise them and help to find the killer of her sister. so it actually is a whodunit.

  

i have mentioned kerouac's influence on frazier. he also influenced allen ginsberg and ken kesey as well as musicians from the beatles to bob dylan. and he invented the word 'beatnik' to describe a generational movement.

  

please scroll back to read more about the two books.

  

"the dharma bums" can be found in a penguin classic and is 187 pages.

  

"nightwoods" is published by random house and is 259 pages.

  

WRITING HINTS:

 

check your punctuation. we all make comma mistakes. it's better not to make these errors, but i'm talking about two other easily avoided over- and under-punctuation problems. i just re-wrote a short piece about l.l. cool j, a piece i hope to submit someplace or other. i took it to a writing group, incorporated some good suggestions, and showed it to a son who was visiting. he circled all of the exclamation marks. i can not believe that i had four or five exclamation marks in a four or five page story!! see! this is something i would have marked immediately in a freshman comp essay. one exclamation point is o.k. many are not. your story should carry the excitement, not the punctuation.

my other suggestion has to do with the question mark. many people ignore the interrogation point when they are making a rhetorical question. remember to include it for a direct or rhetorical question.

plese scroll back for many writing hints.

 

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

 

Ohioana is proud to partner with the OSU Libraries Read Aloud program to present award-winning author, Gary A. Braunbeck. The Read Aloud will be held on Thursday, April 12^th from 3:00 to 4:00 p.m. Room 202 (Mortarboard Centennial Suite) of the Thompson Library on the OSU Main Campus.

 

audreylavin.com http://bit.ly/OhAudrey