Reading the Reading List: Brooklyn College, MFA in Creative Writing

sweetsilentsessions: Glenn Feole on Shakespeare

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     Here is a essay from last year about the reading list recommended by Brooklyn College for an MFA in Creative Writing.  Inspiring.

2/1/16  Journal: Reading the Readiing List, Brooklyn College, MFA in Creative Writing

    As I course through my mid 60’s, an all-encompassing sense of fleeting time, remembrance of things past, goals not met, perfuse my days.  I especially return to my Freshman year at Princeton in 1970, I guess that was the most innocent, hopeful, exciting time of my life.   I even changed my email to use the name of the Proustian ivy covered dorm I was in, Cuyler Hall.  My roommate and best friend, one of the most sincere, gentle and intelligent people I have ever met, and I had high intellectual goals, studying Latin, philosophy, history, religion late into the night (no phones, TV’s or computers to disturb those magical peaceful evenings) and dreaming of our future lives, spouses and families.  My feelings are so deep that I have, for the second time, turned in my iphone to Verizon, canceled my Instagram account…and started reading.  

     My son, an English major, showed me the course requirements for an MFA in creative writing and I have reacted like a child in a candy store.  I carry the list, dog-eared and fraying, around with me, circling books to be read, checking off others, dashing into used book stores at every chance.  We were looking at the list in awe and he asked if I had any recommendations of books to start with.  I ran upstairs to my overflowing book case and pulled out a volume of Greek tragedies.  He thanked me and placed the book on his bed.  That evening, I saw the book still on his bed, took it, and within a few days I checked off three things off the list: Seven Against Thebes by Aeschylus, Lysistrada by Aristophanes, and Oedipus the King by Aeschylus.   The themes were almost of secondary importance; the poetry of some of the verses was breath-taking; the humor as well.  

     In Lysystrada (which, ironically, the same plot as the new movie Chi-raque), the women are withholding sexual favors until the men stop their fighting and war like activities.  Lysystrada keeps all the women in quarantine…but the women become “husband crazy.”  One woman starts to run away and Lysystrada catches her.  The woman says, “I am having labor pains and must see my mid-wife.”  Lysystrada says, “You weren’t pregnant yesterday.”  She replies, “But I am now.”

    Other books that have bit the dust (a phrase mentioned 3-4 times in Homer’s Iliad, by the way, which I just finished), were David Copperfiled (700 pages of love) and Oliver Twist, Joseph Conrad’s disturbing Heart of Darkness.  I had started Moll Flanders, have stopped reading Henry James and continued to peruse the eloquent but dark Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem.  

    And last night, I finished The Iliad.  Dactylic hexamter, over 15,000 lines, 24 books or chapters, and 600 pages.  I thought I would be elated.  I wasn’t.  I was surprised at my sadness.  This will be the only time that I have “finished The Iliad”; the characters are gone, the plots resolved, the poetry has touched my heart.  The “firstness” of these experiences are not reproducible.  The humanness, the relevance astounded me.  3.000 years has not changed human nature much.  I told someone that besides jealousy, revenge, anger, love, sadness, aggression, slavery, blood-lust, war, familial ties, gluttony, intoxication…nothing else was relevant to today’s world that I encountered in The Iliad.  The last few chapters were filled with pathos as Achilles, in deep grief over the killing of his best friend, Petrolakos), cried “swelling tears” first as he lay on his right side, then turning to his left, then flat on his back, finally pacing all night long.  I have been there.  

I will keep reading. 

Brooklyn College MFA reading requirements list

Books that I have read from the list this year, 2016

Aedipus (12/15) 

Aeschylus (12/15)

Aristophanes (12/15) 

Conrad, Jospeh: Heart of Darkness

DeFoe, Daniel: Moll Flanders

Dickens, Charles: Great Expectations (3/16)

Dickens, Charles: Oliver Twist (12/15) 

Dickens, Charles: David Copperfield (1/16) 

(Flaubert, Gustave: In Memory of Things Past) (started) 

Lysystrada (12/15) 

Seven Against Thebes (12/15) 

Shakespeare, William

     As You Like It     

     Hamlet

     Henry IV

     King Lear

     Macbeth

     Measure for Measure

     The Merchant of Venice

     A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream

     Othello

     Richard III

     Romeo and Juliet

     The Taming of the Shrew

     The Tempest

     

Trollope: The Eustace Diamonds (started)

Turgenev: Fathers and Sons

Wolfe, Virginia: A Room of One’s Own

Other books:

An amazing book not on the list: Hot Milk by Deborah Levy

Breath turns into Air

A Pattern Language (beautiful, spiritual, on architecture and communities)

P.G. Wodehouse (some)

Many others…