Poetry Projects: Day 5; Woody Allen: Without Feathers

Please complete your film documentary projects today in the lab. If you do not complete your project, please complete it on your own time at home, etc.

If you finish early today, please begin reading the Woody Allen collection: Without Feathers. As you read, please use the following to help you understand what you are reading.

As you read his collection Without Feathers, understanding "the joke" can be helpful with a little background. Those of you who read widely will probably find more humor in his work. See the information below to help you figure out what you're reading and what Allen is poking fun about.

Much of Allen's humor requires a little knowledge about form, content, or knowing a little bit about his life (or the life of a Jewish New Yorker intellectual). To help you, please refer to his bio and this page for explanation of some of the allusions and humor in Woody Allen's book.

• The title: Refers to Emily Dickenson’s poem: “Hope is a thing with feathers.” Ergo, if you have no feathers, you have no hope.
• Selections from the Allen Notebooks & The Early Essays: Both these essays parody the publishing industry’s love affair with memoir, creative non-fiction, and publishing a well-known author’s private writings after they have died. Hence, the humor of these weird insights into the famous “Woody Allen” journals. Traditionally, creative essay form always used the same form: the word “ON” and then the subject of the essay.
• Examining Psychic Phenomena: The supernatural is always a good subject to parody. In this case, a review of a newly published “non-fiction” book on Psychic Phenomena. Look up Psychic Phenomena on the internet to see the sort of thing Allen is parodying.
• The Guide to Some of the Lesser Ballets: When you attend an opera or ballet, inside your program you often get the story synopsis. Since opera is usually in another language, and ballet is hard to follow if you don’t know the story, these sorts of program notes are helpful in interpreting the performance. Allen, of course, is poking fun.
• The Scrolls: A few years before the book was published, the Dead Sea Scrolls were uncovered. In the early 70’s this sort of thing caused a lot of controversy between religious scholars and scientists. They wondered if these scrolls were part of the Bible. Allen is also Jewish, so the humor relates to this fact as well.
• Lovborg’s Women Considered: The playwright Henrick Ibsen (the guy who wrote A Doll's House and is considered the Father of Modern Drama) is the bane and love of many literary scholars and theatre students. Woody Allen is poking fun of the field of literary criticism (scholars who write about books, authors, and their “private” lives).
• The Whore of Mensa: Allen is parodying the hardboiled detective novel made popular by writers like Dashielle Hammett (The Maltese Falcon). Think of Humphrey Bogart as the narrator and you’ll have the idea. Mensa is a national program/club – entry into which is based on I.Q. The idea then of whores who intellectually stimulate their johns is a very funny idea.
• Death, A Play: Allen was a philosophy major in college. He is also interested in psychology. The two main philosophical ideas this play refers to are existentialism and Nihilism. Existentialism is a type of writing or the study of answering the question: what is the meaning of life? Existentialism tries to explain what the meaning of life is. Some people believe we are alive for a reason, others are Nihilistic, and say that there is no point in our existence--that there is no purpose to our lives. Kleinman is representative of everyman. He represents all of us. We sometimes don't know what our purpose in life is (Kleinman doesn't know his purpose in the play, for example). By the way, we are all being "stalked" by death, just as Kleinman is being stalked by the maniac. Death is the great equalizer. All living beings are going to die. Along with LOVE, DEATH is one of the most common themes in literature. Woody Allen made this play into the film: Shadows and Fog.

HOMEWORK: Read Without Feathers: pp. 7-106. Complete your poetry film project.