Great midweek reading

Links to good reading on reading, writing, and teaching:

Joanna Scott on "The Virtues of Difficult Fiction":

The familiar criticism that difficult literature is elitist assumes that the reading public is not capable of learning more than it already knows. Do we need our athletes to explain the value of testing their limits? It is both logical and democratic to defend those books that test ours.  The familiar criticism that difficult literature is elitist assumes that the reading public is not capable of learning more than it already knows. Do we need our athletes to explain the value of testing their limits? It is both logical and democratic to defend those books that test ours. (Read the rest here.)

Catherine Nichols explains "What I Learned Sending My Novel Out Under a Male Name":

Total data: George sent out 50 queries, and had his manuscript requested 17 times. He is eight and a half times better than me at writing the same book. Fully a third of the agents who saw his query wanted to see more, where my numbers never did shift from one in 25. (Read the rest here.)

Amy Berard on her resistance to teaching like a robot:

I wore a bug in my ear. I didn’t have a mouthpiece. Meanwhile an official No Nonsense Nurturer, along with the school’s first-year assistant principal and first-year behavior intervention coach, “controlled” me remotely from the corner of the room where they shared a walkie talkie. I referred to the CT3 training as C-3PO after the Star Wars robot, but C-3PO actually had more personality than we were allowed. The robot also spoke his mind. (Read the rest here.)

Mindy Kaling on recycled tropes of television writing, including the recurring "Hot Serial Killer Who's Kind of Literary" plot:

He leaves sonnets pinned to the corpses. The murdered prostitutes all have the first names of Jane Austen heroines. The kindly police commissioner’s name is Chuck Dickens. The whole thing takes place in a tough housing project in Newark, called Stratford-up-by-Avon. A melancholy English actor plays the lead in this mystery-drama, and he uses his accent no matter what country it takes place in. This is everyone’s mom’s favorite show. (Read the rest here.)

And, finally, Jesse Ball on the joys of nonsense:

There’s a misunderstanding about what nonsensical things are—the idea that they're just funny, and that's the beginning and the end of it. Nonsense is not “not sense”—it operates at the edge of sense. It teems with sense—at the same time, it resists any kind of universal understanding....The wonder of it is not that it makes something out of nothing, or that it is without sense—but actually that it’s exploding with sense. It's not for when you have nothing to say, but when you have many things to say at once. (Read the rest here.)