Joe Cooke
For some time now, I have explored British, American, Spanish and Italian literature, reading synoptic chronologies or period surveys. I have always enjoyed reading poetry and short fiction; but I don't usually write much, because I am content to explore what is known and to share in what has just been discovered. This keeps me busy. I do write informally, in my own personal journals, on topics of interest. My interests include literature, language, history, art, philosophy, music.
This year, I joined the Master Class site and took classes from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Ken Burns, Billy Collins, Neil Gaiman, David Mamet, Walter Mosley, Herbie Hancock, Futura and Steve Martin. I did some posts in discussion groups, but haven't developed any ideas further.
When I was in college, I liked to roam the stacks, ranging further afield than the texts we were taught in our literature survey classes. My alternative syllabus derived from M.A. Abrams' Dictionary of Literary Terms, a concise handbook for puzzled English majors. I used the definitions and the bibliography to find out more of the history of literature, a topic that had begun to interest me, ever since I read my first chronological anthology of poetry. Some day, I will write the story of those adventures.
I can still remember reading Ernest Baker's History of the English Novel. Some of the books could be read by anyone; others required more critical preparation to glean the value. Still others were relics of discarded styles and strategies; anachronistic ephemera. In a Borgesian sense, I tried to imagine the work of a critic/writer who disregarded these caveats to discover his own unique path through the labyrinth of literary history to evoke the immanent past within the present, our precursors (or perhaps to mythologize or falsify it).
Then, I dared to imagine that this might someday become my story as well.
While it seems only that I do a lot of reading, thinking and imagining, yet I hope that something may come of this someday.
