But even before then I was deeply familiar with the genre; its many conventions have become baked into the everyday language of the Hong Kong I grew up in. My relatives all played Mahjong and much like with sports, discussions around these games borrowed heavily from the language of sparring martial artists. I’d ask at the end of every Sunday, what are the results of the battles. When asking for a family recipe, someone would joke that they’d have to become the apprentice of this or that auntie. Later, there was the world of study guides and crib sheets, all calling themselves secret martial arts manuals. The conventions around martial artists going into seclusion to perfect their craft and going mad in the pursuit of it take on new meaning as slang around cramming for exams.
Which is all to say, I really love wuxia.
The first time I felt God, I was squashed into a Pacific University dorm room. It was a party thrown by a few upperclassmen, thick with the cool kids who weren’t concerned about feeling fresh for the next day’s 9 a.m. craft talk and the faculty advisors who weren’t concerned about being caught cozying up to student poets. The counter was a potluck of liquor, almost-empty bottles of Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Honey and Kraken Rum. I found myself on a couch throwing elaborate hand gestures at a guy from my workshop, trying to impart how a-may-zing his essay was, as he shouted the same compliments right back in a terse debate of adoration. I was a week into my first residency as an MFA student, and I felt as if I’d lived more in this calendar blip than I had in the better part of a decade.
First, we need to distinguish between what makes for a fine essay and what makes for a good model. The status of “Politics and the English Language” as one of the most frequently assigned essays in beginning composition classes has generated an unfortunate halo effect, whereby we teachers fail to admit how poorly it serves the needs of our beginning and remedial writing students. This is not Orwell’s fault: he did not write his essay for first-year college students. Rather, he published it in Horizon, the leading intellectual journal in London during the 1940s. He originally intended the essay to serve as a guide for fellow journalists and readers of literary magazines devoted to serious political matters. As editor of the London Observer, his friend David Astor made the essay required reading for the paper’s staff writers.
Perhaps that explains why so many journalists, professional writers, and lovers of the English language (including many English professors!) cherish this essay. Perhaps it also explains why my own teaching experience with it has been disappointing. I have found that Orwell’s advice in this essay can actually undermine, rather than nurture, the developing literary skills of beginners.
It’s torture to me—no, really: torture, and I’d sooner undergo considerable physical pain rather than having to endure this psychic one. To what do I refer? Why, reading contemporary fiction, of course. For this, the last of my essays on reading for Lit Hub I’d like to discuss reading as a writer. I am a writer—and I do read; but whether or not you know my work, or feel it lends any weight to my opinions is probably less important than those opinions themselves.
Many years and one experimental fiction class at a liberal arts college later, and I have the language to explain why Lemony Snicket’s stories held such power over me. The series was, when you really think about it, a child’s introduction to metafiction, a word which here means a story in which the author intentionally shows their hand, tips their hat, and alludes to the artificiality of a work by parodying or diverging from traditional narrative conventions.
Rose has never practiced as a psychoanalyst, but her way of drawing the reader along, of thinking aloud and in many directions, feels like something out of a clinical session. Her real power, what makes her necessary as well as unique, may be how she teaches readers to ask probing questions on their own. The question “What do we not want to know about the past?” has no single or definitive answer, and no book can resolve it. But we must keep asking the question.
Schwarzlose, a neuroscientist at Washington University in St. Louis, writes with the zeal of an enthusiastic teacher yearning to share her passion with her students. For the most part she succeeds. Her prose is lively. She jettisons scientific jargon.