August 24, 2008 – Bear Witness

Continuing my absolute wave of nostalgia for music I grew up with, here’s my excuse to post three more videos: they all play with animation that imitates comic book art. They are also GREAT songs, and I hope you enjoy them. But you can also notice how directors in the mid-eighties, still connecting story with song, started stealing from comic books (which were having their own revival in the mid-eighties!) for structure. Danny Wilson experiments with what looks like paper cuttings and French-styled comics; Alan Parsons Project with old 1940s comics; A-Ha with transforming live action into comic style (anyone remember the The Lord of the Rings movie back in the 80s?–animation overlay on live action). Anyway, enjoy the nostalgia if you remember these songs, and if you don’t remember them, enjoy the style of art.

We used to gather around the TV for Friday Night Videos, and MTV was born to house these videos, all day, all the time. Videos were the new mini-movie–a mini storyline set to a popular song. I guess we still have videos, but we don’t flock to them like we used to. We do still have the best hair, though!

Enjoy.

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Danny Wilson, “Mary’s Prayer”

Alan Parsons Project, “Don’t Answer Me”

A-Ha, “Take on Me”

In case you were wondering what we were reading for the Novel Writing course, here are a list of texts.

We have two “How to Write” books:

Plot and Structure by James Scott Bell

No Plot? No Problem by Chris Baty (to be used during the NaNoWriMo experience)

and one novel: Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton

and two texts available online:

“The Bear Went Over the Mountain”–Alice Munro, a novella that became Away from Her, the movie

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Don’t worry about Bell’s text being from a suspense/thriller author’s point of view. A) his points are valid and tips useful for whatever you might be writing and B) I’ll be supplementing his tips with advice from a literary standpoint too. This class is approachable then from both a popular and literary fiction standpoint. Storytelling is basically the same in either camp–it’s just whether you want to take a canoe down the river or shoot the rapids in a kayak.

Most of the novel/novella reading we’ll do in September and October, leaving you November to write the first draft. If you want to read ahead, feel free. The Munro piece is small, and the Fitzgerald novel is thin. But they balance out the types of novels/novellas we’re looking at closely, so that students can choose the type of novel they want to write knowing that we’ve looked closely at several types.

Please contact me at jstueart@yahoo.com if you have any questions about the course.