Heretic Pride

I'm tired of looking at Blankets. Are you guys as psyched for Watchmen as I am? I love Watchmen. It's a story about real-life superheroes, which are really just guys who make sort of cool gadgets or are OK at fighting. But after 20 years, they're just old and fat.

Also, there's a naked blue guy who metaphorically represents "the bomb" and exists outside of time and space, and for some reason he's hanging out with the American government. I guess that doesn't make a lot of sense, but he looks neat, and can generate his own clothes. I wish I could generate my own clothes.

The host at a fancy restaurant would be like, "I'm sorry sir, but we require you to wear a jacket, allow me to clothe you in one of our own house jack-" and then he'd freeze, slack-jawed, because I'd suddenly be wearing a perfectly reconstructed Hugo Boss tuxedo, and then I'd say, "Sorry, sir, but I prefer to dress myself." Then everyone in the restaurant begins laughing, except for the host, who is hanging his head in shame as he turns in his name tag.

The Mountain Goats made a new video. They're a lyric-driven band who I like a lot. This song isn't bad, but the lyrics seem a little more generic than a lot of their other stuff. Either way, the video is neat.

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.

Visual Hyperbole

We're kicking off with Blankets, which I read the day before class started because I had spent the entire winter vacation sitting in my room wondering what it would be like to have friends who stayed in town during break. Even with all that wondering, every day, I still don't know what it would be like. All I know is what it's like to live with two people who leave the lights on when they leave the apartment and never do the dishes. I picked up a lot of extra hours at work, just to get away from the dishes. They're still there.

Waiting.




I was going to talk about Blankets as a whole (should that be italicized? I don't even care, it's the INTERNET) but I looked at the syllabus and I'm going to have to make four more blog posts about it before we're done, so I better save that stuff for last. Instead I want to talk about Thompson's use of visual hyperbole.

On page 16, Thompson's father opens up "the cubby hole," a space full of blank-eyed demons, insects, and other creatures. Thompson's father struggles with the clamping jaws of an alligator with the same sort of detached yet focused expression that he would have while mowing the lawn or hanging new curtains. This hyperbole goes beyond the typical "cartooning" of human actions and drifts into the realm of the fantastical, which is helpful and understandable, considering that our focalizer is a young boy. In text, we can understand the semantic meaning of "the cubby hole was very scary," or even the less direct, more evocative "the cubby hole was a nightmare, full of crouched, hellish figures," but neither of these gives us as direct and visceral an understanding of how terrifying the space is as the image of Thompson's father subduing the creatures living in the space.

We see an example of hyperbole again on page 60, when Thompson burns his drawings from years past in an effort to erase the memories of his tortured past. We see them expelled from his mouth as jagged lines, reminiscent of lightning, that resolve into the shapes of his drawings and escape into the night sky. This is a different sort of hyperbole than the cubby hole; while the cubby is detailed in a goofy, kid-scared-of-the-dark way, we are meant to take Craig's artistic catharsis as more heavily symbolic - as an inherently more dramatic act. This separation helps to highlight the separation of time periods found in the chapter.