Good Storytelling

Fig. 1: John Milton. Fuck this guy.

One of the biggest problems with being an English major is that only about 20% of our credit hours in English (which excludes gen ed credits) is spent studying anything written after the year 1900. The way the major is set up, we have to spend most of our time reading stuff like Chaucer or Milton, which is a humongous pain in the ass because those texts don't resonate with the common man anymore. Yeah, we can study them and look at what they say and what times were like back then, and that's what being an English major is, but they don't tell you that going in. They're like "Hey, you love books? Sweet! We love books too! Read books and get a degree!" and we all run happily to our guidance deans and switch our majors, and then, every semester, we read twenty books about white people doing exceedingly boring white things. This trend of "boring white people" peaks with Victorian Realism, until Hemingway says "ok that's enough of that" and starts beating some ass. People in books were still pretty white, but they weren't so boring anymore.

Fig. 2: Ernest Fucking Hemingway. Look at how ripped he is. He probably snapped that shotgun in half right after the picture was taken. Jesus Christ.

The point is, most of my time getting my English degree has been kind of crappy. I can see how it can appeal to a certain kind of person, the kind who enjoys spending hours inside of a library looking up critical analysis that tries to read Beowulf colonially, before colonies even existed. But me? I'm just kind of here. I like books. Mostly I like writing. I'd like to think that my degree is helping me with that, but I don't think my ten-page paper on metaphysical conceit in John Donne's poetry contains anything I want to use as an author. I don't even know what metaphysical conceit is, and I used that term three times a page in that paper. It was in my fucking thesis. I got an A- on it.

So that's why Blankets is important to me. It represents a move away from dense theory and using words like "contextual analysis" and returns to the root of why I like words: STORYTELLING. A shift that takes us from rote memorization of metaphor and irony and concentrates on the feeling evoked from a work.

I'm a sucker for a good love story. When I say good, I don't mean intricate, or simple. I don't mean funny or sad or spiteful. I just mean that I like stories where love is the primary motif, because I spent all my time from the ages of roughly 11 to 19 obsessing about love; what it was, how I was going to get it, why getting it was such a pain in the ass, and every different form of failure a person can achieve while in pursuit of something so abstract.

Blankets evokes the three main things I can identify with concerning love: 1) being a geeky white male with no real social ability, 2) becoming interested in a girl who is fucking crazy, and 3) generally screwing up and doing/saying the wrong thing at any given time. These all apply to me in high school, of course. Now, I am a shining paragon of sex appeal and mysterious calm.

Fig. 3: Ladies.

I guess it's fitting that a blog post about good storytelling and evoking emotion should neither tell a story, nor evoke an emotion. Also, lack a satisfying conclusion.