waybacktowaceliterature-blog

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Plays and Novels for WACE Literature - Back Then...And Now...

It’s been a little while! What have I done in the meantime?

I’m on the last of some antibiotics and painkillers. I had some meetings about a possibly stress-related condition. 

And I’ve started reflecting on how I need to do more things that are enjoyable, which includes working on this study! 

Sadly I’ve had to give up on going on walks due to the painkillers and antibiotics (self-imposed bed rest and a general removal from social media included with all of that) but I think I need to limit myself to focusing on smaller goals rather than do-absolutely-everything. There’s nothing wrong with just cleaning the house a bit and then calling it a day. 

I won a book voucher recently! I had every intention of buying a few books on my list, but ended up buying a book about The Face magazine, a copy of collected poems by Catullus and a book on Dante’s Inferno. A woman was leaving her Fremantle home to move to Melbourne, so I picked up a few second-hand books from her, including a copy of The Odyssey. It will help with studying The Penelopiad, I think, to go over that a few times. Certainly there’s a lot of commentaries about it out there!

In terms of directed study:

I’ve read Box the Pony and made a few mental notes about content. I’ll be visiting the library tomorrow to do some further reading and research. I was intrigued to see that Leah Purcell, one of the authors, is going to be appearing on an ABC painting show, having her portrait immortalised. I’ll have to catch that when it is available.

In the meantime, I have tracked down one of the novels I intend to study (The Woman Warrior) and will be getting a copy of the second novel tomorrow. I have glanced through the first and will be working on checking out a commentary on the second.

I also found, abandoned on a shelf, one of the first novels I had to study. Twice, in fact. I remember being unimpressed at the time; it was A Fringe of Leaves by Patrick White. 

I think I was not only too distanced from the subject matter at hand but also disillusioned by the teacher’s attitude... maybe I was just saddened by how there only seemed to be a few elements in the novel that made it easy to write about? But then, I was young (very very young), under a lot of pressure and largely alone at the time. I shouldn’t have been studying both English and Literature at the same time, that is for certain!

So, I have made a comparative list of ‘then and now’, to the best of my memory. It is funny how A Fringe of Leaves escaped me entirely, until I found it on a shelf.

Plays Studied Then:

·         Hamlet, Shakespeare.

·         The Perfectionist, Williamson. Dear god, this was a trial. Horrific to read, completely alien to a bunch of 80s students wondering why these adults were speaking to each other with such contempt and why their obvious privilege was considered such a torment! I note it is still on the list... along with Dead White Males, which is entirely scornful of post-structuralism and interpretation. 

·         A Doll’s House, Ibsen.

·         No Sugar, Davis.

·         Galileo, Brecht. I nearly forgot this one! Funny, because I ended up doing a bit of it for a Philosophy assignment many years later, and I have been fascinated by Brecht since. I suspect I did not do it justice at all back then.

Plays I Plan to Study Now:

·         Box the Pony, Purcell and Rankin.

·         Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Stoppard.

·         The Cherry Orchard, Chekov.

Novels Studied Then:

·         The Collector, Fowles. No longer on the WACE Literature list! This was my favourite book out of all of them and probably the only one I think about now and then - this section:

...funny how that has stayed with me all these years!!

·         Emma, Austen.

·         Bleak House, Dickens.

·         An Imaginary Life, Malouf.

·         A Fringe of Leaves, White.

·         The Chosen, Potok. I loved My Name is Asher Lev... and I was sad to read this one instead.

Novels I Plan to Study Now::

·         Striped Holes, Broderick. A copy is on the back seat of my car right now!

·         The Penelopiad, Atwood.

·         As I Lay Dying, Falkner. Just got a second-hand copy this week!

·         The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, Kingston.

·         Leaning Towards Infinity, Woolfe. An old favourite, that was not published back-then! Fairly recent in fact... if you call the early 1990s recent...huh.

·         Jane Eyre vs Wide Saragosso Sea?

Poetry? I’ll leave that for next time...

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The first play I’ll be studying.

LEAH: [picking up a garbage bag, twisting it and throwing it on the stage] Up’ome’der shopping was different for us [thump] there’d be a thump on the verandah. ‘Thanks, St Vinnie’s.’ Mum would yell, ‘Let’s go shopping!’ [Looking through the bag] We go for the good stuff, we had our dignity. Then we’d chuck the bag on a friend’s verandah down the road [thud] and so on down the street [thump]. Later you’d see a kid wearing the garbage bag with the corners cut out. Gunnar, gunnar … They really poor, eh.

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For those into the Way Back element... what was on TV when I first studied Literature? When dinosaurs roamed the earth and the wheel was the latest and greatest invention?

Well, this was typical Saturday viewing fare pictured above. There were only four television stations. 

Yep, no internet. And a video store which would sell you ten weekly videos at five dollars for a week’s rental... which meant you would have to be a member of at least two video stores in order to watch anything new after three years. 

I joined Planet Video in Mt Lawley, just so I could get foreign films and limited release overseas TV shows and documentaries. I loved comedy shows that didn’t depict sexist and racial stereotypes for cheap laughs (*ahem* Comedy Company was the worst *ahem*) and there were very few of those being broadcast on TV. So, I watched as much sci-fi as I could, like Star Trek and Red Dwarf.

MAYBE you were lucky, and late at night the TV arial would pick up SBS (aka French-subtitled soft porn, the occasional overseas soccer match and some snarky commentary by a newsreader)! SBS was pretty much the education you got in terms of anything close to non-hetrosexual, non-mainstream, non-meat-and-two-vegetable fare back in the day. I even became a Peter Greenaway and Italian-horror movie fan because of SBS. I saw Trois couleurs: Bleu by Kieslowski, and my mind was completely blown. 

You start by turning on the telly some godawful hour of the morning but keep it tuned REALLY QUIET and sit about two centimeters from the screen, so you could watch early morning cartoons and not wake up the rest of the house. If you were older (as I was), it was time for The Factory, after you fell asleep after watching as much Rage as you possibly could on Friday night.

Music of that era I listened to? Violent Femmes, Nirvana, Died Pretty, Ratcat, The Clouds, Yothu Yindi, Falling Joys, Sound Unlimited Posse, The Disposable Heroes of Hiphopracy, Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine (or “Carter USM” in front of your parents), Cosmic Psychos, You am I, and Not Drowning Waving. I listened to a lot of TISM, They Might Be Giants, Pet Shop Boys and Doug Anthony Allstars. 

Then you’d get kicked off the TV when everyone else got up for breakfast, so you didn’t get ‘square eyes’, and then it was time for Burke’s Backyard. It was the show that the laundry and ironing would be done to, lunch eaten in front of and it would inspire the elders of the household to get outside and tidy up the garden so it wouldn’t disgrace the neighbourhood.  At noon, you’d catch a re-run of Doctor Who! That was Sylvester McCoy running about with a baseball-bat wielding Ace, making with the smart arse comments as they ran through increasingly budget-cut looking scenes while comedians like Hale and Pace nodded off to sleep as extras in a town invaded by aliens. 

Then, it was HEY HEY! Nowdays it seems impossible to sustain what was then a ‘mock-live’ show for that long a screening on television, but Hey Hey It’s Saturday was where the bands, the alternative comedians, the mainstream media reviews and dreadful jokes appeared to be repeated first thing at school on Monday. If you were younger (or your parents didn’t approve of the vulgar double entendres), you watched Young Talent Time and sang along with the team’s smarmy diabetes-creating cover versions of Beatles songs. Oooooh, wa-ooooo, ooooooh, wa-ooooo... oooo, oooo, oooo, you’d chorus along during the request segment.

What next? The evening movie. Imagine the range... What Happened to Baby Jane? Or would you like to watch 21 Jump Street and see a young Johnny Depp sulk his way across a high school courtyard? Or just lie on your bedroom floor hoping a friend would call up on the press-button phone that lived on the hallway table, because there was nothing else to do but the homework due the next morning? I read a lot. I dreamed a lot about American TV shows, like the latest Twin Peaks episode, or maybe some news and current affairs or Open University lectures on UK TV.

Maybe you’d prefer to see a Nordic-crime TV series in one binge-session, but just kidding, they didn’t translate that kind of niche content or even have the technology back then beyond you hiring every single copy off the shelf in the video store, and since they could only fit one or two episodes on each tape, you’d need a truck to get them all home. I saw Queer As Folk by sneaking in one or two tapes every fortnight. I certainly never watched them while my family was around.

Times have indeed changed. Thank freaking christ.

[waybacktowaceliterature-blog]

What did I listen to when I was first studying Literature as a teenager? This track comes to mind... 

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How It Begins - The TAFE English Literature / WACE Literature Project

The Syllabus: “In the Literature ATAR course, students learn to create readings of literary texts and to create their own texts, including essays, poems, short stories, plays and multimodal texts. Students engage with literary theory and study literary texts in great detail. Students learn to read texts in terms of their cultural, social and historical contexts; their values and attitudes; and their generic conventions and literary techniques. They enter the discourse about readings, reading practices and the possibility of multiple readings. Students learn to create texts paying attention to contexts, values and conventions. Students learn about literary language, narrative, image and the power of representation. Students experience the aesthetic and intellectual pleasure that reading and creating literary texts can bring.“ This is the course that is studied by an estimated 1400 (and it appears to be dropping every year) students in the state of Western Australia. 

Around 2010, the course was changed and T.E.E English Literature became WACE Literature. Therefore, Literature is not the course I studied an estimated twenty-five to thirty years ago. 

However, it’s the course I’ll be sitting the exam for as a private candidate in November, 2019.

The Contender:

Student by day, renegade Literature student by night. I read too much, listen to too many podcasts, watch a lot of science fiction and I should be doing something better with my time, I’m sure.

But I’m looking for a challenge. So, with sincere apologies to the Julie/Julia project, a gift of a generous birthday book voucher and the TV series The Handmaid’s Tale... I am starting my own studies in Literature. 

Minus The Handmaid’s Tale, because I’ve read it to death back when it was published, and I suspect it’s been written to death by students now. 200 days. One exam. One student and a kitchen table littered with toast crumbs and what appears to be half of a chewed cat collar.

How far will this go? To the very end. This is Way Back To WACE Literature, a journey with my past and future Literature studies.

Coming soon to a computer terminal near you.