Ladies and gentlemints, i have not yet begun to promote this blog, so no one is actually reading it. Unless YOU are reading it, then well, well....YOU've got some nerve barging in here when i'm barely dressed! Better throw on some posts before the others get here.
I've been gazing lovingly at this blog, viewing it several thousand times per day. I'm thinking of where it can go. We're not blogging about Hannah Montana here, oh no this is serious literary business. Stephen Crane! If i mess up i risk getting beat down by the legion of Crane fans out there. Well let's not worry, this blog is in crapable hands!!
Perhaps i should introduce myself a tad more. I am presently 28 years old, the same age Crane was when he died. My profession, i am a jerk of all trades. I hold a journalism degree from a fine Jesuit university, but don't worry, you won't find any fine journalism on this blog! I run an online variety magazine & small literary press called LitVision, and i'm a member of the activist writers group, the Underground Literary Alliance (ULA). So god bless all here, buy me a drink sometime!
My Crane journey began in the sixth grade. I'd already proven myself unready for foreign language class, so while the other kids were parlez vousing and habling espanol, i was assigned to a special class called Reading. Now, i guess this was supposed to be a punishment, but sitting around reading books, disccussing them and writing about them was a dream come true for me. Some times we had books assigned, but other times the teacher let us pick something out of the skool library. I wandered the shelves and twirled the rack til i found a nice looking paperback with a dark cover and a photo of Civil War soldiers on the front. Pretty cool, and it wasn't even that long so i checked it out.
After reading The Red Badge of Courage i was already hooked on Stephen Crane, so i went to the public library and found an old copy of Maggie A Girl of Da Streetz and other stories, which i enjoyed even more than The Red Badge. I then spent the rest of my teen years seeking out and reading just about everything in the Crane canon. So you could say i gave Stephen Crane the best years of my life!
Even as my brain chemistry morphed from kid-dumb to adult-dumber, the works of Stephen Crane still held up. In fact his writing comes across with increased power every time i read it. He didn't have much time to perfect his craft, perhaps a dozen years? Yet Crane's best writings still outshine those of any other writer. At least, that's my opinion, and that's why i care, 108 years after Crane's death.
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1 comment:
A much needed, and certainly enthusiastic, blog. Keep it up.
Chester L. Wolford
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