Re: Would like to discuss "Shakespear in Love"
Read more carefully, SC (and I really do think this thread has outlived its usefulness): the teacher who knocked me down a grade for misspelling his name became my mentor--that's many, many years of deep friendship and learning. He was the one who taught me how the publishing system worked, so when I finally became a published author I knew how to play the game, and gained the respect of the agents who were weary of dealing with amateurs.
The Beat poets were mostly all extremely well-educated. That's why they could break the rules. Being part of the counter-culture doesn't make one less a professional (in fact it was hardly a "flowers-in-your-hair" time; I rubbed shoulders with revolutionaries, drug-dealers and people with guns, not hippies or flower-children).
But I loved teaching, I truly liked my students and I enjoyed each and every day I spent with them. I got to teach eighth-graders "Hamlet" and short stories by Tolstoy; I taught tenth-graders Virginia Woolf and Graham Greene. I introduced Nabokov and Evelyn Waugh to ninth-graders.
I was merely (Jesus, why are we still on this?!) pointing out that if he or she submitted a paper with Shakespeare's name misspelled she might be in trouble. I did it gently, not sarcastically (I'm not by nature a sarcastic person), and frankly this is a screenwriting forum. One needs to develop a thick skin to become any kind of writer. This isn't a bad place to start.
Read more carefully, SC (and I really do think this thread has outlived its usefulness): the teacher who knocked me down a grade for misspelling his name became my mentor--that's many, many years of deep friendship and learning. He was the one who taught me how the publishing system worked, so when I finally became a published author I knew how to play the game, and gained the respect of the agents who were weary of dealing with amateurs.
The Beat poets were mostly all extremely well-educated. That's why they could break the rules. Being part of the counter-culture doesn't make one less a professional (in fact it was hardly a "flowers-in-your-hair" time; I rubbed shoulders with revolutionaries, drug-dealers and people with guns, not hippies or flower-children).
But I loved teaching, I truly liked my students and I enjoyed each and every day I spent with them. I got to teach eighth-graders "Hamlet" and short stories by Tolstoy; I taught tenth-graders Virginia Woolf and Graham Greene. I introduced Nabokov and Evelyn Waugh to ninth-graders.
I was merely (Jesus, why are we still on this?!) pointing out that if he or she submitted a paper with Shakespeare's name misspelled she might be in trouble. I did it gently, not sarcastically (I'm not by nature a sarcastic person), and frankly this is a screenwriting forum. One needs to develop a thick skin to become any kind of writer. This isn't a bad place to start.
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