Reading Wednesday
Aug. 14th, 2024 02:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
frandroidWhat have you finished reading: Pirate Utopia by Bruce Sterling. Well, I've finished the novella, I still have to finish reading to post interview. But anyway. It did not get any better. So much potential, such wooden writing.
When I was in secondaire 1 (grade 7), we had a French creative writing assignment that was fairly open, so I decided to write a sort of American detective short story, like some sort of Noir thing even though I didn't know this genre name at the time. I made such a pastiche of it that my teacher accused me of plagiarism, and gave me a D instead of a better grade. I was too flummoxed and timid to challenge her so I got stuck with the grade. That year in general was pretty bad in French for me because it turns out that my elementary school had decided that some parts of the French curriculum were optional, and my peers from that feeder school had to play catch up in secondaire. ("Mais ou et car ni or"? What's that? Conjonctions de coordination? I'm still not sure.)
Anyway, I feel like Sterling wrote that novel in the same type of pastiche I did back then. It's so wooden. The only good thing about it is that when I saw a reference to Fiume in Pirate Utopias, I knew what that was and I still plan to hunt that French book down.
Actually the public library has a number of books about Gabriele d'Annunzio...
https://www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/search.jsp?N=&No=10&Ntk=Subject_Search_Interface&Ntt=D%27Annunzio%2C+Gabriele%2C+1863-1938.
https://www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/detail.jsp?Entt=RDM3957715&R=3957715
When I was in secondaire 1 (grade 7), we had a French creative writing assignment that was fairly open, so I decided to write a sort of American detective short story, like some sort of Noir thing even though I didn't know this genre name at the time. I made such a pastiche of it that my teacher accused me of plagiarism, and gave me a D instead of a better grade. I was too flummoxed and timid to challenge her so I got stuck with the grade. That year in general was pretty bad in French for me because it turns out that my elementary school had decided that some parts of the French curriculum were optional, and my peers from that feeder school had to play catch up in secondaire. ("Mais ou et car ni or"? What's that? Conjonctions de coordination? I'm still not sure.)
Anyway, I feel like Sterling wrote that novel in the same type of pastiche I did back then. It's so wooden. The only good thing about it is that when I saw a reference to Fiume in Pirate Utopias, I knew what that was and I still plan to hunt that French book down.
Actually the public library has a number of books about Gabriele d'Annunzio...
https://www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/search.jsp?N=&No=10&Ntk=Subject_Search_Interface&Ntt=D%27Annunzio%2C+Gabriele%2C+1863-1938.
https://www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/detail.jsp?Entt=RDM3957715&R=3957715