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November 25, 2022 It's The Journey That Counts! Life's journey is not to arrive safely at the grave in a well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, totally worn out, shouting, "Wow! What a ride!" 
Anna-grams
● Beginning and Published Writers! Think about joining Southern California Romance Writers at: https://socalrw.com/ We meet once a month on the second Saturday of the month. Join us. ● Happy Birthday to my niece Anne and her daughter Kelly. Anagrams ● Smoking causes cancer = Menace sucks on cigars. ~ Mick Tully (2008) ● Chronic Fatigue Syndrome = Cry "ruin", sing "face the doom!" ~ Lawrence (2004) ● Mentally handicapped = A cheaply planted mind? ~ Rick Rothstein (2005) ● Multiple Sclerosis' = Lo, it perils muscles. ~ Gerardo B. Polanco, M.D. (1999) Weekly Quotes ● “Remember that the happiest people are not those getting more, but those giving more.” ~ H. Jackson Brown Jr. ●“Since you get more joy out of giving joy to others, you should put a good deal of thought into the happiness that you are able to give.”~ Eleanor Roosevelt ● “No one has ever become poor by giving.” ~ Anne Frank, diary of Anne Frank: the play ● “A bone to the dog is not charity. Charity is the bone shared with the dog, when you are just as hungry as the dog.” “You have not lived today until you have done something for some-one who can never repay you.” ~ Unknown You Had One Job....
World Cup Scoccer?
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Surrealism Continued
THE IMPORTANCE OF SURREALISM
Surrealism emerged as a direct response to World War I. In that terrible war, people all over Europe experienced the devastation of industrialized warfare for the first time – brave soldiers charged headlong into machine gun fire and were cut down in their masses like cows in a slaughterhouse. The war also brought such horrors as chemical warfare and the deliberate bombing of civilian population centers; the sheer scale of the war was unprecedented. And it left an entire generation deeply traumatized.
In the wake of these horrific events, nothing seemed to make sense. The old certainties that had given life meaning – religion, nationalism, etc. – had burned up in the fires of war. How could artists and novelists create anything meaningful in a world so bitter and damaged? One answer was surrealism. By embracing the world’s chaos and irrationality, surrealist artists helped European culture recover from the trauma of World War I.
Today, surrealism is less popular than it was in the immediate aftermath of the war, perhaps because the traumas of war are not as broadly shared. But there are still many artists, writers, and filmmakers who feel that surrealism is the best way to express their worldview and create beauty out of meaninglessness.
EXAMPLES IN LITERATURE
● Example 1
Not all literary surrealism is quite as weird as the Andre Beton passage we saw in section 2. (On the surrealist spectrum, that quote falls closer to absurdism than to magical realism.) In some cases, authors create a narrative that seems easy to understand, but that has bizarre and irrational events. In Franz Kafka’s A Country Doctor, for example, the doctor experiences an increasingly strange sequence of deaths before ultimately being stripped of his clothing and laid into bed with a man whose body is decaying while he is still alive. Like much of Kafka’s work, the story is chilling in its details, and very accurately replicates the experience of a nightmare, but at the sentence level it is written quite clearly.
● Example 2
“What miracle is this? This giant tree.
It stands ten thousand feet high
But doesn’t reach the ground. Still it stands.
Its roots must hold the sky.”
Mark Daneilewski’s House of Leaves is composed of small snippets of text, all pasted together in a seemingly random collection lacking chronological structure or order. Each snippet makes some sense on its own, but not much – and it’s hard to connect the different snippets together. By reading carefully, though, readers can discern multiple horror stories that have been stitched together into a single book. Indeed, some of the snippets come from books about the book, and books about those books, and so on.
RELATED TERMS
● Realism
Realism, clearly enough, is the idea that literature should be realistic. That is, it imitates the real world as much as possible, and tries to avoid saying anything that does not make sense.
●Magical Realism
Magical realism is an outgrowth of surrealism. In this literary style, the world is basically believable, but it contains a few supernatural, surreal, or bizarre elements. For example, the film Pan’s Labyrinth has a basically realistic plot, but its main character is a little girl whose world is full of monsters and magic – the line between imagination and reality is never entirely clear.
.
● Absurdism
These terms all lie along a spectrum, from most absurd to most realistic. Absurdism is the most absurd – so absurd that it comes close to complete nonsense. Surrealism may seem normal on the surface, but any attempt to make sense of it quickly fails. Magical Realism is fairly realistic, but has certain fanciful elements. And Realism lacks all fanciful or absurd elements.
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Source: Taken word for word from https://literaryterms.net/surrealism/
except for copies of M.C. Escher's drawings of staircases.
Surrealism Continued
THE IMPORTANCE OF SURREALISM
Surrealism emerged as a direct response to World War I. In that terrible war, people all over Europe experienced the devastation of industrialized warfare for the first time – brave soldiers charged headlong into machine gun fire and were cut down in their masses like cows in a slaughterhouse. The war also brought such horrors as chemical warfare and the deliberate bombing of civilian population centers; the sheer scale of the war was unprecedented. And it left an entire generation deeply traumatized.
In the wake of these horrific events, nothing seemed to make sense. The old certainties that had given life meaning – religion, nationalism, etc. – had burned up in the fires of war. How could artists and novelists create anything meaningful in a world so bitter and damaged? One answer was surrealism. By embracing the world’s chaos and irrationality, surrealist artists helped European culture recover from the trauma of World War I.
Today, surrealism is less popular than it was in the immediate aftermath of the war, perhaps because the traumas of war are not as broadly shared. But there are still many artists, writers, and filmmakers who feel that surrealism is the best way to express their worldview and create beauty out of meaninglessness.
EXAMPLES IN LITERATURE
● Example 1
Not all literary surrealism is quite as weird as the Andre Beton passage we saw in section 2. (On the surrealist spectrum, that quote falls closer to absurdism than to magical realism.) In some cases, authors create a narrative that seems easy to understand, but that has bizarre and irrational events. In Franz Kafka’s A Country Doctor, for example, the doctor experiences an increasingly strange sequence of deaths before ultimately being stripped of his clothing and laid into bed with a man whose body is decaying while he is still alive. Like much of Kafka’s work, the story is chilling in its details, and very accurately replicates the experience of a nightmare, but at the sentence level it is written quite clearly.
● Example 2
“What miracle is this? This giant tree.
It stands ten thousand feet high
But doesn’t reach the ground. Still it stands.
Its roots must hold the sky.”
Mark Daneilewski’s House of Leaves is composed of small snippets of text, all pasted together in a seemingly random collection lacking chronological structure or order. Each snippet makes some sense on its own, but not much – and it’s hard to connect the different snippets together. By reading carefully, though, readers can discern multiple horror stories that have been stitched together into a single book. Indeed, some of the snippets come from books about the book, and books about those books, and so on.
RELATED TERMS
● Realism
Realism, clearly enough, is the idea that literature should be realistic. That is, it imitates the real world as much as possible, and tries to avoid saying anything that does not make sense.
●Magical Realism
Magical realism is an outgrowth of surrealism. In this literary style, the world is basically believable, but it contains a few supernatural, surreal, or bizarre elements. For example, the film Pan’s Labyrinth has a basically realistic plot, but its main character is a little girl whose world is full of monsters and magic – the line between imagination and reality is never entirely clear.
.
● Absurdism
These terms all lie along a spectrum, from most absurd to most realistic. Absurdism is the most absurd – so absurd that it comes close to complete nonsense. Surrealism may seem normal on the surface, but any attempt to make sense of it quickly fails. Magical Realism is fairly realistic, but has certain fanciful elements. And Realism lacks all fanciful or absurd elements.
□
Source: Taken word for word from https://literaryterms.net/surrealism/
except for copies of M.C. Escher's drawings of staircases.
