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The Blue Bomber

From Kelly Blue Book website: 1995 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme

We’re going to do things a little differently today—I’m going to tell you all a story. (Names are changed for the sake of privacy.) This is as true as I can remember it, but of course, as the saying goes, time heals all wounds and screws up all memories. (That is the saying, right?)

This is a story about my next-door neighbor, James Fillippo. For some background, I have lived in the same house since I was eighteen months old, and the Fillippos (James and his wife, Greta) have lived in the house next door for years before we moved in.

Probably the best way to describe James Fillippo is “Jack of all trades, master of all trades.” While most people lack the ability to be an overall handyman, Mr. Fillippo was able to fix most of the handyman problems in our home. He grew up flying and working on planes; he had even gotten his pilot’s license before he could legally drive, which made him useful all around. I have an extensive list of things Mr. Fillippo has helped us fix—a dryer motor with a screwdriver stuck on it, the dining-room chandelier which randomly fell off the ceiling one day, and a helpful hand when we trimmed one of the trees on our property. Perhaps the most notable instance of his help was when the main waterpipe to our house burst. This lead to a three day excavation project, with my father, Mr. Fillippo, and one other neighbor digging the equivalent of a WWI trench in our front yard to get to the pipe. I was relatively young at the time, so most of my memories were of three men digging a hole in our front yard while we went to the neighbor’s to use the bathroom. Eventually, a plumber had to be called, but my guess is that Mr. Fillippo pulled most of the weight in that project. The plumber was only putting on the finishing touches. We haven’t had pipe trouble since. As entertaining as that story would be, however, this is about something entirely different.

When I was growing up, my father had a 1995 blue Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. This thing was old by the time I could first remember it; they don’t even make Oldsmobiles anymore. The exterior was blue, as were the seats on the inside, and it smelled funny, especially in the summer. Whatever that fuzzy crap was in the interior did nothing for aesthetics or the olfactory sense. It was hot as hell in that car due to the fact that the air conditioning didn’t work. Rolling down all the windows wasn’t an option, because the driver’s side window wouldn’t roll down. Once, when my grandmother was driving the car back from taking me to church, she realized this fact too late. As a treat, we were going to McDonald’s, but she couldn’t order anything out of her window. I rolled down my window, and she shouted the order out the backseat. When it came time to pay, she gave me her credit card, pulled up so the backseat was level with the cashier’s window, and I leaned way, way out to pay for our food. Grammy laughed so hard telling my mother all about it when we got home. That stupid car.

The 1995 Oldsmobile was older than my parents’ marriage and was affectionately (or not so affectionately) nicknamed “The Blue Bomber.” My father got this car when my parents were dating, and as such, it was not the most reliable thing. Eventually, along with the host of other problems, the stupid thing wouldn’t start. Getting to work obviously became a problem. Time to pop the hood.

I’ll admit, I don’t know the first thing about cars. But Mr. Fillippo does. He knows almost everything about non-organic things with moving parts. So when he saw that my dad had popped the hood, he came over to help. They were outside working on that car for hours, taking multiple trips to get parts and replacing things, which was complicated because apparently the battery is hidden among car parts that I will never understand. All day, they messed around under the hood of that car, and it wouldn’t work. Despite Mr. Fillippo’s best shot, he had to admit defeat for the day. The Oldsmobile won, and my mom and dad discussed possibly getting a new car.

The next morning, Mr. Fillippo was on our doorstep, ready for another day of pointless tinkering, or so I thought. This man really liked to play mechanic—it was Saturday morning, for crying out loud. No one wants to work on a car that early on their day off. Why in the hell—

“I know what’s wrong with your car.”

My dad blinked. “Really?”

“It came to me last night.” (If I wanted to exaggerate this for effect, I would say that Mr. Fillippo had stayed up all night working on that car in his head.)

I’m going to be honest, I don’t actually know what was wrong with that car. All I know is that it didn’t take long to fix.

A few hours later, my sisters and I gathered on the sidewalk in front of our house. Dad turned the key, and the engine of that ancient, stupid car with the broken window and no A/C turned over. We applauded.

Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end. That was not the only time that car broke down, and though Mr. Fillippo and my father faithfully repaired it every time it died, eventually The Blue Bomber was replaced by a Ford Fusion, which my father nicknamed “The Hotrod.” It’s definitely not the fanciest of cars, but after that blue monstrosity that sat in our driveway for years, it sure felt like one. I had a lot of memories with that stupid blue car. I’ll never forget the awful smell, or how you could sear your hands when you touched the metal part of the seatbelt on a hot day while the sun pelted down onto the car. When I got my driver’s permit, that was the first car I drove—once, around the block. It went poorly.

Mr. Fillippo has fixed many things for us over the years. But I like this story best; it’s probably the best example of how his mind works. He breathed machines, and he kept everything, so if you needed a tool, he would absolutely have it. My dad worked in Mr. Fillippo’s tool shed a lot, because he had the tools my father didn’t. He was the neighbor who was always working on a project.

Not so much anymore. Mr. Fillippo is in his nineties, and when I went over to his house recently, he told me he was having trouble even walking one time around his small house. He has a chairlift on his stairs, which he hates because it takes away his ability to exercise. I’ve never met anyone else like him, and I doubt I ever will again. Anyone who could make that damn car turn its engine over truly had a gift.

Why is the Noodle Incident like Duncan’s Murder?

Why is Calvin and Hobbes like a Greek tragedy, or like Macbeth? This question can be answered in many legitimate ways—it probably has as many answers as the question posed by the Mad Hatter in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: “Why is a raven like a writing desk?” (Fun fact: Lewis Carroll wrote this question without an answer in mind, but when pressed, he said that both can produce a few notes. I, however, an unsatisfied with this answer; my favorite is “Poe wrote on both.”) Unlike Carroll, however, I did write this question with an answer in mind. My answer: because all three leave things to the imagination.

Plays, like movies, are a visual and auditory medium, that each have certain constraints and freedoms. Movies can easily move the camera from one set to another, but camera shots must be planned carefully to show only the important information because of the edges of the screen. Plays are able to bridge the gap between audience and actor more easily, because stage actors have the ability to touch the audience. However, stage acting is limited by set pieces that can’t move (unless you’re Broadway; apparently Broadway just has an unlimited amount of money) and the fact that people will have a difficult time seeing an actor’s face. Movies, however, do have one significant leg up over plays: they can show violence well.

Violence in stories is absolutely not a new concept; in fact, Greek tragedies were doing horribly violent things to their characters long before the introduction of modern-day special effects. Most good playwrights, however, would write action like that offstage. But why? Was it because the Greeks were simply too upright and couldn’t stand such things? Hardly. We’re talking about the society that produced The Iliad, one of the most violent works I’ve ever read. (Seriously. It makes the baptism scene in The Godfather look tame.) The reason that Greeks kept this stuff offstage was because of something that Horace explains in “The Art of Poetry.” He explains that usually, it’s better to “show, not tell.” This refers to storytelling techniques where the audience gets to learn about a character or plot through the actions in the story, rather than being told in something like a voiceover or a Star Wars crawl text. Horace says that usually things are better absorbed if people get to see it rather than hear about it, except with violence. The reason: violence looks fake as hell.

Okay, so he didn’t say exactly that, but that was his general point. Violence simply doesn’t look good onstage, and for a long time, it didn’t look good in movies. Making a bloody death look as realistic as possible would require, well, an actual bloody death. Not only would this be unethical, but it would be difficult to replace actors. Contract negotiation alone would be a nightmare. Movies, even now, tend to follow this rule, or at least ones that aren’t rated R. Typically, the camera pulls away at the last second before a villain hits the hero over the head, or sometimes both characters are shown only in silhouette (conveniently eliminating the need to show blood), or in some cases, all you can hear is the scuffle. Movies that are rated R now have the ability to showcase violence in all of its “glory” because of advances in the movie and theater industries. Fake blood looks almost like real blood, makeup and prosthetics can simulate severed limbs, and CGI special effects can make up for the deficit. (Though I know that there will be people who say that CGI always looks tacky.) But why does it have to look so great? Who cares if it looks fake?

Most of you have probably already answered this question: the audience doesn’t want to be reminded that they’re watching a movie, or that they’re being told a story. People are willing to suspend what they think reality looks like in order to enjoy a book, movie, or play. But live-action movies and plays have an interesting problem: their world looks like ours. If fights look ridiculously fake, or blood looks like ketchup, you’ll be reminded that the people on the screen are actors, not characters. Once, when I was in high school, my teacher put on the clip in Julius Caesar where Julius is stabbed to death. This was clearly a low-budget production, because the clip was a group of men surrounding Julius, calmly lifting their swords up and down as Julius “writhed” on the floor. We all laughed, because it looked ridiculous—stabs are quick, short, jerky movements, not fluid and slow. This would be why Macbeth is better; Macbeth killed Duncan offstage and thus the audience isn’t subjected to a shoddy recreation of murder. Consciously or not, Shakespeare followed the tragic Greek formula for violence, and in doing so, he did the play a favor. Besides, I demand only the highest quality in my murder recreations.

But is that the only reason violence is better offstage? If you can show it if it looks real, why do some movies still shy away from showing it? This would be why Macbeth is like Calvin and Hobbes: sometimes, leaving things to the imagination is just as effective, if not more effective, than showing it. Longtime Calvin and Hobbes fans will remember “The Noodle Incident” referenced in the comics. Internet theories abound, but all the strip tells us is that Calvin came home from school early (apparently there were sirens), his parents don’t appear to know what happened, and there were noodles involved. Bill Watterson, the writer and illustrator for the comic, says that he leaves the incident unexplained because his readers could come up with something much more imaginative than he could. (I personally think that Calvin blew up the teacher’s lounge microwave.) The same concept applies to Macbeth, albeit more graphically. Macbeth comes from offstage, his hands smeared in blood. The audience can imagine the murder—did Duncan stir? Did Macbeth hesitate, even a little? Where’d he stab him? Did he look back at Duncan’s body? If he did, was he triumphant, or remorseful? The lines afterward indicate a trembling man, but an actor could choose to inject a moment of triumph if he desired.

Imagination can sanitize or terrorize as much as a person allows. Some Calvin and Hobbes fans think that Calvin’s “Noodle Incident” was that he played with his food at lunch; others, like myself, have crafted more elaborate stories. It was left up to the readers, and many playwrights and screenwriters trust their audience to do this. As many people know, the monsters we imagine under our beds at night are always worse than what we find when we flick the light switch.

This post was last edited on December 24, 2020.

Why (I think) Flannery O’Connor Needs to Chill

Photo from Angelus News. (Originally from CNS Photo.)

WARNING: If you are in love with O’Connor’s work, the following may trigger, disturb, or cause emotional distress to you. Do what you will with this information.

Have you ever watched a movie based on a book you haven’t read? Typically, if you watch the movie with a bookworm, they’ll completely understand the plot and where the movie is headed, and more likely than not they’ll lean into you halfway through the movie and say something like, “This part was way better in the book.” Ignoring that obnoxious behavior, sometimes the more obnoxious part is not understanding the movie at all because the director assumed you read the book. (Looking at you, Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief. Also Divergent.) Books usually provide context and motivations that don’t always translate well to movies. But I am firmly of the opinion that if a book is going to be translated to the silver screen, it has to make sense without having read the book. For example, The Hunger Games can be watched without reading the books; the world is coherent and character motivations are shown through acting. The Lord of the Rings might have more depth in the books, but you don’t have to read them to watch the movies. When I go to a movie theater, I go to be entertained. I don’t want a thousand plus page trilogy assigned as homework. I want to be inspired to read the book, not told to read it to make sense of the movie.

I feel the same way about books. In order to understand the point that an author is making, I shouldn’t have to dig through outside scholarship for hours. I have two reasons for this: first, my four years of digging through outside scholarship for hours, and second, my assertion that human beings are supremely lazy. If you assign “homework” to something that’s supposed to be for pleasure, then most people won’t do it. This would be why most people don’t know why Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings: he wanted his books to be to the English people what the ancient myths were for the Greeks–a kind of pre-historical web that people passed down from generation to generation. As it stands now, only people who have actually studied Tolkien and his work know this. (Though the YouTube channel Wired has put out some excellent videos on Tolkien lately.) LOTR is now just a fun novel-esque story that only “nerds” get really into.

Making people fish around to understand intentions doesn’t really work–though I may have been too harsh. It’s not actually because people are lazy; it could be because people don’t even realize there even is something beyond the canon. Would it occur to a casual reader of LOTR that they should read Tolkien’s letters? Probably not. His purpose was lost not necessarily because people are lazy (though this is still a fact) but because people didn’t realize there was more.

Don’t assign a handbook to your work. Your brain is a complex web of motivations–it’s arrogant to expect everyone to understand what you’re doing. You shouldn’t assume stupidity on behalf of your audience, but don’t you dare assume they know what’s going on in your head, even that they even care. If you are an author, it is your job to make me care, and you cannot make people care by assigning outside source material.

Which is why I really just don’t like Flannery O’Connor’s work.

Flannery O’Connor spent her life battling two things: lupus and nihilism. Eventually, O’Connor died of lupus at thirty-nine years old, and never gave into nihilism. If you’re just a casual reader of her stories, though, you might think otherwise.

Don’t let the beautiful watercolors on her books fool you–O’Connor’s stories are typically dark. One story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” follows a grandmother riding in a car with her son, his wife, and their children. The car crashes and a man called The Misfit kills each member of the family individually, including an infant. The grandmother is the last to die, and the story ends with her being shot. The grandmother is a pusillanimous woman, thinking much of herself and her appearances. If you read the story “correctly,” however, you can tease out a brief moment of grace before the grandmother is shot to death–she forgives the Misfit and sees him as a child of God. The Misfit appears to possible have a brief flash of grace but kills the old woman anyway. A supremely hopeful reader thinks that perhaps he will turn his life around someday.

While the story doesn’t end in a particularly hopeful vein, though Flannery leaves the door to the Misfit’s redemption very, very slightly ajar. Flannery writes her stories in a way to shock the reader. The Misfit is such a horrible, evil man, that the reader is supposed to look at the Misfit and be shocked by the consequences of his nihilistic philosophy. The reader is also supposed to relate to the small-souled grandmother and be shocked with her at the Misfit. This revelation at the end of the story enables her to escape her pusillanimous prison and have an epiphany of grace just before her death.

I object to this for two reasons. First, if that explanation is not given, Flannery’s work is incredibly difficult to decipher. Most readers, unaware of Flannery’s Catholic roots, would just read the story and remark on the fact that it’s a little dark. Most people will not be teasing out the meanings behind short stories; let’s be real, not everyone took a short story class in college. (I sure didn’t.) Most people I know who like the stories enjoy dark literature and would have no problems with the story above, even without the explanation. Before moving on to my second reason, let’s assume for a moment that the reader picks up on this way of writing and the meaning behind it. My second reason for disliking Flannery’s writing is that I object highly to the idea that only evil can shock a small-souled person out of their shell of a world. In my experience, evil hardens people and tends to close them in more, not less. It is in the nature of evil to divide and make people isolated. In fairness to Flannery, her characters can be read as either giving into nihilism or holding out hope for a new beginning, but most Flannery scholars focus on the idea that there is hope shining through the darkness in her stories. It is my personal belief that kindness and beauty are the more solid options than a more roundabout route.

I’ve also had teachers explain to me that there is beauty in her stories, but it’s harder to find, just like in real life. This is a perfectly valid point, and my objection to this point isn’t so much a reasoned argument, rather than a personal preference. I do not like dark short stories. In my personal opinion, they are entirely too nihilistic and the lack of closure I expect from a plot. Life is already too dark, and I do not need to be reading dark literature in my spare time.

I have been told that readers must be humble before the work of an artist, because it’s always better to give the benefit of the doubt. As has already been established, the human mind is complex and there could be a good message hidden behind the words. I highly encourage you do act this way towards new authors and new works. There does come a time, however, where your logic and opinion matter. Artists aren’t above criticism just because they’re artists. I respect the work Flannery O’Connor did, but in my own personal opinion, I believe she failed in her mission. I realize, however, that people much smarter than I believe she succeeded. Perhaps someday, unlikely though it may be, I will come to appreciate the work of Flannery O’Connor.

Veteran’s Day Poem Analysis

In honor of Armistice Day (and Veteran’s Day) on November 11, I’m going to be analyzing a poem written during World War I. I am not what most people would call a “poetry person,” but this is one of the very few poems I will read aloud to others. The poet’s name is Ewart Alan Mackintosh, and he fought during the Great War. He never saw the end of the struggle, as he was killed in action in November of 1917. This is a poem he wrote to honor one of his soldiers.

Before I continue, this post is dedicated to all men and women who have served or are currently serving the United States of America as a serviceman or woman, and in a special way to all of those who have given their lives for their country. I thank you for your sacrifice, your bravery, and your honor.

In Memoriam for Private D. Sutherland

So you were David’s father
And he was your only son
And the new-cut peats were rotting
And the work was left undone
Because of an old man weeping
Just an old man in pain
For David, his son David,
That will not come again.

Oh, the letters he wrote you
And I can see them still,
Not a word of the fighting
But just the sheep on the hill
And how you should get the crops in
Ere the year got stormier
And the Boches have got his body
And I was his officer.

You were only David’s father
But I had fifty sons
When we went up in the evening
Under the arch of the guns
And we came back at twilight,
O God! I heard them call
To me for help and pity
That could not help at all.

Oh, never will I forget you,
My men that trusted me
More my sons than your fathers’,
For they could only see
The helpless little babies
And the young men in their pride.
They could not see you dying,
And hold you while you died.

Happy and young and gallant,
They saw their first born go,
But not the strong limbs broken
And the beautiful men brought low,
The piteous writhing bodies,
They screamed, “Don’t leave me, sir”,
For they were only your fathers
But I was your officer.

A quick note: “Boches”(pronounced “bosh-ez”) is a derogatory (and offensive) nickname used by the English to refer to German soldiers. Many such nicknames were used among soldiers of both sides.

For those familiar with analysis, this is going to be slightly more informal than a typical poetry explication, and for those who aren’t familiar: analyses are mostly used to show how the mechanics of a poem work together to achieve the overall effect. Without further ado: the analysis.

This is probably one of the most horrible poems I’ve ever read in my life. The poem itself is broken into five stanzas with eight lines each, with a relatively simple rhyme scheme (abdb, defe). (In other words, the second and fourth lines rhyme, as do the sixth and eighth lines.) The meter is not entirely regular, which suggests the poet is more concerned with a general feeling of rhythm rather than following a specific metrical pattern, though overall the poem could be described as “iambic,” one of the “easiest” meters for poetry in English. The simplicity of the meter and rhyme scheme aid the poem in conveying its message directly, as there is no reason to be distracted by the meter. The direct nature of the poem is best represented in the second stanza, when the speaker abruptly moves from describing a rustic lifestyle to David’s missing body.

While the poem overall evokes a sense of loss, the tone of the poem is bitter, made even more so by the hint of jealousy the speaker seems to have. It seems as if the speaker would rather be one of the biological fathers of the fallen soldiers, as he says “they were only your fathers.” If he were the biological father of one of these soldiers, he would only have to endure the loss of one son, and like these fathers, he would ignorant of the horrors of war. Each father only sees his son as “happy and young and gallant.” The poem strongly implies that the officer has the worst job–perhaps even worse than that of the dying soldiers, because he is “helpless.” He feels like a cog in a great machine (typical imagery from the time period, even if not explicitly stated here), unable to stop his “fifty sons” from dying gruesomely in front of him.

The bitterness is even more pronounced when the speaker changes who he addresses. The first three stanzas address David’s father, but in the last two stanzas, the speaker turns to address his dead soldiers. This pivot functions as an introspective turn for the speaker, as the young men he addresses cannot hear him; he can only address his memory of them. In the first two stanzas, the officer recounts how David would send letters to his father, urging the man to do the farm work before the storms came in. The reader, however, already knows that this very work is being left unattended because David’s father is in mourning. David’s father has a rustic and simple life, contrasted with the “arch of the guns;” David himself also knew of this contrast, as he deliberately kept “word of the fighting” out of his letters, so as not to bring the horrors of war home. Unfortunately, despite David’s efforts, war rudely interrupts the pastoral scenes in the last two lines of the second stanza which point out David’s death and missing body. The third stanza begins the speaker’s introspective turn, as he begins to liken himself to the troops’ biological fathers. By the fourth stanza, the biological fathers have been forgotten, and the speaker is left to address the haunting memories of the men he led in battle.

As soon as the speaker addresses the men, the true horrors of war–death and suffering–are laid bare. Worse than death is the gut-wrenching duty of the officer to watch his men as they lay dying, as he gazes on their “piteous writhing bodies.” The officer implies that it is a far easier task to accept the death of a son rather than to watch them die in this manner. The final stanza is perhaps the most poignant, especially as the speaker quotes his dying men: “Don’t leave me, sir”. In that line, the quote is marked off by commas, indicating caesuras (or pauses) in the poem. As the poem indicates, this line is “screamed” by the soldiers, making this quote a kind of crescendo to the poem. The caesura after the word “sir” forces the person reciting the poem to slow down, letting the full force of that scream sink in. After the screams of the soldiers, the final two lines are quieter, made more poignant by their quiet inflection.

Despite the somewhat lengthy explication above, I believe that if a poem is truly well-written, it does not need an analysis. It convey emotion strongly without needing to be picked apart. This poem is indescribably sorrowful, and perhaps the saddest thing about this poem isn’t anything written on the page. It’s the fact that only a generation later, the sons of the shattered veterans of World War I were asked to make the same sacrifices as Private D. Sutherland.

The United States of America thanks the men and women who have made those sacrifices throughout the course of its history.

Happy Veteran’s Day.

Image: Unsplash.com Photographer: Aaron Burden.

Connecting Dots like Batman and Sir Percy Blakeney

The human brain is remarkably lazy, in part because it is very easily overwhelmed. This is why the field of clear vision in humans is so limited. If you’re reading this post on a desktop, then your eyes are filtering out the ribbon on the edge of the screen and even the other words in this paragraph. Even if you’re reading this on a cell phone, your eyes can really only pay attention to one line. If your brain were actually able to process all of the information in the ultra-HD resolution your focused vision has, your skull would have to be significantly larger. So, our smaller brains prioritize and try to create shortcuts to make things easier.

One of those shortcuts is pattern recognition. Patterns are basically cheat codes that help people get through life. Obviously, some people are better at recognizing patterns than others. (There are those genius children who just somehow know the prime numbers, for instance.) Even if you aren’t one of those instant pattern recognizers, your brain still operates on patterns. Your body (theoretically) has a circadian rhythm that works with sunrise and sunset, and people repeat their morning routines over and over through habit. Following the pattern means the brain doesn’t have to think as much. Our brains are hardwired to find order and make connections, even if there are no real connection to be made.

All of that is a long-winded way to say: we’re talking about T.S. Eliot and his idea of “tradition,” from his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” For those who know their Tolkien, tradition vaguely similar to Tolkien’s theory of “the pot of story.” The (very basic) idea of tradition is that all stories and related things (like poems) are connected to each other. Every time something new gets added to the mix, it slightly alters the meaning of everything that came before it. For you visual types, this metaphor might be helpful: all of the books are on one big library shelf. Every time a new book gets added, all the other books have to shift around a bit to accommodate the newcomer. Obviously, not all of the old books are affected in the same way by the new books–some will have to shift around more and some will barely move a millimeter. But how exactly does this idea actually work in a non-metaphorical way, and what does it have to do with patterns?

Perhaps the easiest way to understand the idea of “tradition” is by looking at it in action–through the eyes of just one individual. And to make it really simple, let’s take a stupid example. Let’s say Jane watches Disney’s Pocahontas and she loves it. The characters in that movie are stable and mean certain things: Pocahontas is a brave Native American who teaches a white man what the earth means to her people, and John Smith is a hero who learns how about another culture with an open mind. Now let’s say Jane has a serious lapse in judgement and watches Pocahontas II: Journey to the New World. (Spoilers, but seriously, don’t watch this movie. It’s a travesty.) In this movie, Pocahontas goes to England, and John Smith is no longer a curious hero; he’s. . . well. . . he’s a bit of a jerk, and Pocahontas finds another man to marry. Now, let’s apply the idea of tradition. If Eliot is right, Jane won’t be able to watch Pocahontas again without her view of the film being influenced by her knowledge of the second movie, even though the first movie was made without a sequel in mind. Nevertheless, it would be very difficult to watch the relationship in the first movie again without it being soured by the knowledge of what happens later. That’s what tradition looks like in action–new things influence the old canon. But . . . how does this apply to patterns?

The idea of tradition is actually at the root of people finding random connections (patterns!) between ideas in books. Things don’t have to be as closely related as the two Pocahontas movies and often aren’t. For example, if you read To Kill a Mockingbird in high school, then maybe the ideas you picked up about race relations from that book would carry over and influence how you would read Shakespeare’s Othello, a story about a Moor in a cast of white characters. Your brain might say, “Oh, these two books have race as a theme. They aren’t historically connected, but maybe I can take what I learned about race from this 1960s book and apply it to the Shakespeare play.” Our brains like to lump things into categories in order to make sense of them; patterns make it so much easier. And that’s how the two ideas relate: Eliot’s idea of tradition is what legitimizes people finding those patterns and themes across books in different genres.

Eliot’s idea was somewhat revolutionary. The idea that old stuff influences new stuff is obvious. The old is the muse for the new–for example, Batman is heavily inspired by the vigilante justice found in The Scarlet Pimpernel. After all, people really only can be inspired by what already exists, because they can’t use the future as a reference point. Eliot, however, asks a different question. What if Batman could influence Sir Percy Blakeney–“that demmed elusive Pimpernel”? Now isn’t that an interesting thought. Obviously the woman who wrote about Sir Percy didn’t have Bruce Wayne in mind, but imagine Jane read the Batman comics first and then read about Sir Percy. She would probably expect certain things of Sir Percy because her brain found a shortcut between the two men with pattern recognition: socialite hiding vigilante operations. And that’s just one example; there are hundreds more. Eliot captured in one word how the human mind operates and its love for patterns.

Many times, the connections drawn between works are really only useful or meaningful to the people who’ve found them, and in my last post, I implied rather heavily that historical context should always be taken into account when reading literature. Patterns are not sufficient for literary analysis. But I can’t force people to turn off their brains and stop making connections. The insights people have actually can be useful in helping other people better understand their metaphorical bookshelves. So who am I to tell people not to connect the dots? The picture is different almost every time–connect away!

Why I hate English

I once had a teacher who gave the excellent advice: Seldom affirm, seldom deny, always distinguish. This advice works well in most circumstances, especially in debates where both sides have a lot of nuance. But there are two places where this doesn’t work particularly well: YouTube thumbnail titles and headlines. So, apologies for the unnecessarily dramatic headline. But if it got you reading, it worked.

And actually, to be perfectly fair, the title of this post isn’t entirely untrue. I do hate English–at least, I hate the conventional way English and literature is taught in schools. I abhor the kind of English that kids complain about in high school. That kind of English has become an internet joke:

Book: “The curtains were blue.”

English Teacher: “The blue is meant to symbolize Thomas’ deep inner sadness and desperation.” (Or insert something else completely made up here)

What the author meant: “The curtains were blue.”

Yeah. That English. The kind where a high school kid can pick up a copy of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (a medieval poem that cannot be read by modern English speakers without a translation), see the word “gay,” and assume it means homosexual. (I mentioned translation, right? And…medieval?) We live in a world where students can make up whatever they like, and teachers absolutely eat it up. Which is why today we’re going to be talking about the pitfalls of a school of thought called “New Criticism.” Before we do that, though, we’re going to talk about target audience.

First, we have the idea of an “Ideal/Implied Reader.” (For those who care, this is terminology pulled from reader-response criticism.) The words sound esoteric, (and they are, welcome to academia) but it’s basically a person who shares roughly the same assumptions as the author. In laymen’s terms, it’s the target audience. The Ideal Reader of a Shakespeare play is the person watching it in Shakespeare’s day; they have roughly the same cultural mindset, and the audience member would understand all his jokes without needing footnotes. Even YouTubers have “Implied Viewers.” If you follow one YouTuber for any length of time, you’ll notice that their videos start to become more niche, and they might even have inside jokes with their audience that new viewers might not understand. That YouTuber knows who his Ideal Viewers are, and he caters to them and their expectations.

The second (and related) concept is the “Informed Reader.” The Informed Reader is the person who is not a part of the target audience, but someone who can do the leg work and figure out what’s going on. That typically means doing a little bit of research–for example, to be able to judge a Shakespeare play, sometimes you need to read the footnote that explains a joke. (It’s probably sexual, by the way. Basically half of Shakespeare is sex.) The Ideal Viewer of one of those sappy Christian movies is a Christian, but that doesn’t mean an atheist can’t watch one and critique it. If the atheist were an Informed Viewer, he’d do a bit of hunting around to see why Christians thought that way.

Do those two concepts make sense? Good. Forget about them for now; we’ll come back to them later. We’re going to be talking about New Criticism. Obviously, I can’t cover everything in one blog post, but I’m going to do my best to boil down the Most Important Idea. Today, I’m going to be pulling from an essay called “Criticism as Pure Spectulation” by John Crowe Ransom, one of the most influential New Critics.

The most basic part of New Critics is this equation: Literature=fact+”x”. This may sound strange, but the equation actually works very well. The “fact” is the subject matter. For example, the “fact” in Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven” is that there is a man standing in his doorway, a raven flies into his study and keeps saying “Nevermore,” and the raven freaks him out. The “x” is all the fancy stuff–the meter that makes the poem sound all creepy, the word choice, and the repetition that simply doesn’t work in outside of poetry. A teacher once told me that the “x” is what’s lost in translation; try as you might, if you translated this poem into Spanish or German, you’d lose part of what makes this poem this poem. No matter how good the translator is, there is no way he can capture the essence of a poem in its native language. They can get the “fact” part across all right, but the “x” eludes them. This is what distinguishes literature from things like science and essays. (This blog post, for example, could be translated into another language with very few problems, but poems are a different ball game entirely.) Because literature is so distinct, (it’s the only discipline that has an “x,” after all) usually New Critics analyze only the text itself.

This is the way most people are trained to “do English,” whether they realize it or not. English teachers have their students identify the “fact” (What is this story/poem about? What happens?) and then, they have students analyze the “x” (What type of meter is this, and how does it contribute to the poem? Do the color of the curtains add to the story, and if so, how? What is the tone of this poem, and what words indicate this?).

Obviously, this is an oversimplification of New Criticism, but this idea is one of their core tenants. And their equation is actually very useful, as far as it goes. Applied correctly, New Criticism works pretty well for modern people reading modern things–Americans can read and understand things written in the colonial era and beyond with very little explanation. As an American, the ideas of freedom and liberty just make sense to me. I don’t really need any context for Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense.” I can read poems written in modern English and separate the “fact” from the “x” to write a poetry analysis, and that’s a skill I have thanks to New Criticism. And it works really well for literature where I already have a basic understanding of the history.

The problem is that this system easily lends itself to abuse. Remember our Ideal and Informed Readers? New Critics can very easily fall into the trap of assuming that they are always the Ideal Reader, no matter what. After all, if you take the text all by itself, you’re allowed to assume the book means whatever you’d like it to mean. You don’t have to do any research into why or how the book came about. This is why that teacher is able to say those curtain symbolize Thomas’ inward depression spiral. She doesn’t have to figure out why the book is that way; she can make the book however she wants.

Obviously, no one should judge a system only by the abuse of that system. Most people don’t judge playgrounds for being dangerous if one child climbs to the highest point and then jumps off of it. But if multiple kids start to climb up and jump off, the question is eventually asked: What is it about this playground that makes children want to jump off of it? Why is this playground easily abused? Maybe it’s because it’s too easy to get to the top, or maybe it’s because the playground is too boring and kids want to make it more exciting. New Criticism doesn’t exactly encourage people to get whatever they like out of the text, but there don’t appear to be any barriers either. They don’t force a reader to take history into account, nor should they, but gentle encouragement might be helpful.

To illustrate, in the beginning of the movie “Hitch,” Hitch explains that 60% of human communication is body language, 30% is tone, and 10% is words. Imagine if all you ever got was the words. While Hitch is probably exaggerating, the point stands: Text matters, but context is everything.

Welcome to my new blog!

Why hello there, my fellow procrastinator! If you have stumbled onto this blog so early on, my only assumption is that you are either family, a close friend, or someone who meant to type in the words “hopeless romantic” and accidentally misspelled something. I am willing to overlook your simply atrocious spelling skills and welcome you with open arms and a somewhat judgmental smile. Don’t worry. You will get to judge me in time.

Who am I, you ask? Well, as you asked nicely, I am a recent college graduate and therefore ex-English major who has realized that the academic schedule, while demanding as hell, definitely had its perks–such as a two week long Christmas break and a whole summer to fritter away on nonsense. (Nonsense like acquiring skills vital to entering the workforce, but I digress.) While I am decidedly not missing midterms and ten-page papers on hopelessly boring things, I do miss learning and interacting with material. I now work an 8-5 desk job, which doesn’t fulfill much of my learning quota. Yes, the experience and skills I’m learning should help me in the workforce later on. But I miss writing papers.

Well, I suppose I should be more precise. Not “writing papers,” per se. I believe the constant stress of picking out a topic and making sure everything was worded just so before I printed it out and inevitably finding an obnoxious typo–that is not what I miss. I miss researching things and putting together pieces of a puzzle–finding out what scholars thought and then ripping them to shreds. Because to be honest, I found a lot of people with graduate degrees out there saying the most ridiculous things known to man. Did you know that there’s a vein of academia that doesn’t want you to brush your teeth because, according to people who follow this logic, brushing one’s teeth is a social construct and if one brushes one’s teeth then it means one buys into the oppressive system?

All I can say to that is: your dentist must freaking love you.

And that, folks, is why you don’t believe everything you read, even if the guy has an alphabet of degrees after his name.

With that out of the way, I suppose it is now time to explain what this blog is to be about. As my forte in school was literature and philosophy, most of the content on this blog is probably going to revolve around that. (Making it accessible, of course–no one likes a stuffy philosopher.) I do not, however, feel like locking myself into that genre specifically, because I am young and frivolous. I like to read and watch movies, so thoughts on books and videos will probably crop up here from time to time. I might even write a story or two, depending on whether I can actually come up with an inspired idea. Who knows?

As is made abundantly clear by the rambling blocks of text above, I have no idea what I’m doing.

Let’s rock ‘n roll, folks.