On Why Carl Sandburg is Amazing...

Taking a moment to fangirl, my adoration for Carl Sandburg and his works is kind of absolutely and undeniably insane. He is fantastic and his work just makes me go all dead inside. That being said, "Chicago Poet" is one of dozens of pieces I bookmarked in my mother's copy of his complete works--partially because I love the way it reads and partially because I'm still not entirely sure that I know what it means.

"I saluted a nobody. / I saw him in the looking-glass" (1-2).

(Okay, okay yes, maybe the concept is a bit cliche but just hold on...)

Beginning with the commonly-used idea of greeting--personifying, even--the reflection, "Chicago Poet" is more than just a reflection on, well, his reflection (didn't plan that very well, did I?). Stating that as the extent of the work's intention is like saying that the sky exists to be blue--it's a complete lie.

"He crumpled the skin on his forehead, frowning . . . Everything I did he did. / I said, 'Hello, I know you.' / And I was a liar to say so" (4-7).

And here's the thing about that--the narrator is watching his reflection, watching himself move in the mirror and yet feeling so separate from the way he looks. It's more than the distinction between self-view and actual appearance--at the heart of it, Sandburg is telling the story of a man who does not know himself.

But Caroline, isn't that a bit of a stretch?

Not really. People identify with their reflection--they know it's them when they catch sight of their reflection. (Most people don't do a double-take when they see themselves in store-window, simply accepting that it's their own image.) But this man? He sees a "liar, fool, dreamer, play-actor" (9). A man who makes his life being fictional, living in a world that is not his own, that cannot see what is right in front of his face. 

Not a writer, not a king, not a lover, a "soldier, dusty drinker of dust" (10). Prove to me that's a man who knows himself.

(And maybe you could; maybe you could argue that the narrator is just a man that doesn't like what he sees, but that's beside the point.)

The most intriguing part of this, though, is that despite not knowing his reflection--himself, his face, his truth--the narrator is none too blind to the intertwined future he shares with the man in the mirror. "he will go with me" (11) "When everybody else is gone. / He locks his elbow in mine, / I lose all--but not him" (14-16). 

There is no way of escaping the man before him--no way of separating the "liar" (9) from the narrator. There is no method of escape.

And okay, yeah, maybe it's not the happiest of themes--maybe it's a little depressing and morbid, but it's incredibly well crafted, if that counts for anything. The inability to separate who you are from who you want to be is something that most people can relate to, even if they'll never tell you--and Sandburg makes it tangible.

(Expect more, lengthier analysis of his other works later. The Complete Works gives me a lot of material to work off of... ;D)

Confused about Tandy...

When I first read through Sherwood Anderson’s “Tandy”, I was so focused on the blatant presence of drunkenness and drinking that a large majority of the rest of the story flew straight over my head. It wasn’t until, actually, until my third read-through of the story that the rest of the symbolism started to flare up in front of my eyes.
“Tom Hard, the father” (Anderson 120).
“…in the struggle with an appetite that was destroying him” (Anderson 120).
“Perhaps of all men I alone understand” (122).
The cadence of the overall piece—the diction, syntax, and imagery—is distinctly biblical. It’s riddled with the words of a man who is angry at the world for falling to Christianity, of an anti-preacher of sorts. And he “never saw God himself manifesting in that little child” (120). The irony, though, doesn’t stop there. Not only does his daughter  have God manifesting within her, but he has a complete stranger tell her to be—what is essentially—more than human.
And she takes it. At five years old this young girl who remains nameless throughout the piece demands to have a different name—she is no longer the girl she was previously, but instead, Tandy Hard.
And that’s where I had to stop and look; there are exactly two named characters in this story, Tom Hard and George Willard. Granted, the story itself is on the shorter side (just over three pages in my copy of the novel), but even within a piece that short, names can be given. But neither the young girl (otherwise referred to as Tandy) nor the drunken stranger have a name.
Change in name symbolizes a rebirth of a person, a change in identity and morals and truths, as it were. But what does a name change mean when the first name is unknown? That is a question that I don’t have the answer to—either as a writer or a reader or an analyst. What do you do with a character who changes names, but doesn’t tell you what they change from?
(So far, all I can really come up with is staring blankly at the book and scribbling really aggressive annotations in my book.)
But if change in name is a rebirth, maybe this is more of an initial birth. Tandy is five years old, but her mother is dead and her father doesn’t pay her much attention—the story seems to give the feeling that the young girl gets what she physically needs but is depressingly lacking in what she could use emotionally. So, by taking hold of the Stranger’s words, of his truth, could it be a birth?
Or is it the turn to a grotesque? After all, it isn’t until someone takes a truth as their own that they become one—or at least, that’s how it works in the eyes of the writer.
Honestly, reading this story analytically almost left me with more questions than answers, and I’m not sure that it’s very helpful, but it’s here… and I don’t know how to explain it.

Swift to Give Instruction

I hereby apologize for the punny title—I couldn’t resist (and also couldn’t come up with anything distinctly better). Hopefully you chuckled a little.

But onward to the topic: Kate Swift.

A subject of Sherwood Anderson’s short story or novel or what have you, the schoolteacher is an interesting character from start to finish. She is introduced as nothing less than an object of sin—of want and sexual desire and passion, of something corruptible and corrupting—and yet becomes something of a Christ figure. (At least in the eyes of Reverend Curtis Hartman.) She is “not known in Winesburg as a pretty woman” (134-135) and yet proves to be viewed sexually by at least two men within the work—Reverend Harman, as previously stated, as well as George Willard. (“He began to  believe she must be in love with him… You wait and see” [132-133].)

Kate Swift, similar to Frankenstein’s Margaret Saville, seems to be a less-prominent female character with a lot of meaning to her existence—and despite all that, or maybe because of it, I found her conversation with George Willard to be the most intriguing part of her characterization.

In “The Teacher,” Swift is more than passionate with her former pupil as she talks with him about his potential future. “ ‘If you are to become a writer you’ll have to stop fooling with words,’ she explained. ‘It would be better to give up the notion of writing until you are better prepared. Now is the time to be living… You must not become a mere peddler of words. The thing to learn is to know what people are thinking about, not what they are saying’ ” (137).

I’ll go ahead and take a moment here to admit to extreme bias: I would consider myself a writer; maybe nothing particularly wonderful, but a writer all the same. This is the third year I’ve been fortunate enough to be a part of AHS’s Literary Magazine staff and if I’ve learned one thing over the years (Thank you, Mr. Fortunato), it’s that writers write. Of course, there’s always the dreaded Writer’s Block and times that a break from writing is healthy—I know, I know, shocking—but to simply not write “until you are better prepared”? It’s a notion that I don’t understand.

Now maybe Kate Swift is trying to explain another phrase I’ve heard for countless years, in AHS 2013 Fortunatotion terms, “When you waste words, God kills a puppy.” Comparatively, I think Mr. Fortunato and Ms. Swift may be getting at the same thing—there’s a difference between writing and writing well.

But here’s my question for Kate Swift, and anyone else who wants to answer it: how do you get better at writing without practice? The quick-and-easy answer is you don’t. It’s like anything else, subjected to the age-old cliché “Practice makes perfect.”

I’ll wholeheartedly admit that this specific quote stood out to me because of who I am and what is important to me as such, but I still firmly believe that this passage is vital to the order of the story.

George Willard, the only constant character—and potential narrator (I’ll blog about that later)—is told to stop writing until he is older.

Did he take Ms. Swift’s advice? 

Why Wordsworth's Words?

Mary Shelley cites William Wordsworth’s “Tinturn Abbey” near the end Frankenstein’s eighth chapter, writing that “The sounding cataract / Haunted him like a passion: the tall rock, / The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, / Their colours and their forms, were then to him / An appetite; a feeling, and a love, / That had no need of a remoter charm. / By thought supplied, or any interest / Unborrow’d from the eye” (19-140).

Ironically, within the context of Wordsworth’s original work, this sample of the piece is used as a description of his former reflection upon a place that he’d been as a child—a sharp contrast to Clerval, who simply seems to find himself wrapped up in the beauty of the countryside, so new to his eyes. Even more interesting than the quote itself, I believe, is the part left out: “That time is past, / And all its aching joys are now no more, / And all its dizzying raptures” (84-86). These lines immediately follow the ones Shelley quoted and, I believe, extend a hand in explaining why she chose that specific quote. In the scene that Victor Frankenstein uses Wordsworth’s quote, he is describing his friend Henry Clerval not long before his death. “That time is past” (84). Is Victor Frankenstein not hinting at what is to come for his friend, whose life ends in a violent turn of events? So innocent and childlike, full of a writer’s passion and eye for detail, the young man is enthralled with the beauty of this waterfall (ironic because Henry was strangled and thrown into the waves to wash up on an Irish shore).

So, I suppose, it could be said that Mary Shelley uses “Tinturn Abbey” as a sort of warning or prophecy for the knowledgeable reader, a hint that Henry Clerval’s time of childlike innocence is soon to be gone—not just gone, in fact, but obliterated by the cruel hands of adulthood and rage. 

The Conqueror Worm: Edgar Allan Poe at His Most Pessimistic

Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Conqueror Worm” is not only a fascinating piece of poetry, but also a undeniably stimulating piece of social commentary. The work in of itself is a blissfully well-written work complete with imagery and descriptors that would make even JRR Tolkien jealous, but upon a closer look? Well… it speaks for itself.

“An angel throng, bewinged, bedight/ In veils, and drowned in tears”

Yes, the lines are eloquent and yes, I wish I had been the first one to write them, but the fact of the matter is, they mean something. But what? And who cares what Poe had to say?

To answer the first question, it’s easiest to just… look for a moment at the poem, to carefully read over it. (Click here) You feel something, right? Something a little heavy but not exactly sad or hopeless. Something that’s just… weighted. And that? That’s exactly what Poe’s going for; the slight discomfort and strong sense of impropriety. The feeling that something about the work—maybe the meaning, maybe just the words—is inherently wrong.

And yes, there is, which is part of Poe’s point. The poem—which covers angels watching what is, essentially, the play (or tragedy, as Poe points out) of humanity—is fairly clear from the start. Humanity is not running their world right, isn’t properly considering the repercussions of their actions. They’re running through the world “hither and thither”, unable to really communicate or get their point across. He refers to them as mimes, which is incredibly significant, I think, because it just emphasizes the solidarity of their existence. When you think of mimes, how often do you think of a cluster of them? How often do we really even see several together at once? Almost never.

Mimes, as Poe refers to us, are distinctly solitary by nature. (Why spend time with someone you can’t speak to?) But this leads to an interesting point—we’re so wrapped up in ourselves that we not only don’t communicate with others, we can’t. Humanity isn’t just a set of mimes, though, they’re puppets as well—useless to their own bidding and reliant upon some “vast, formless things” to guide them.

What are these things?

I’ll tell you in one word: sin.

“And much of Madness, and more of Sin,   

   And Horror the soul of the plot.”

What other entity has connotations so strong as these? If we’re a play—if we’re entertainment and mindless and mute, what kind of story are we? A tragedy. Not a comedy, not a love story, a tragedy.

So what’s his point?

Self awareness. Humanity is so blind to its own flaws that it misses everything—the transformation to puppets and, in the end, the conqueror worm—SIN, as the angels sit back and watch humanity fall.

“That the play is the tragedy, “Man,”   

   And its hero, the Conqueror Worm.”

From "YOLO" to "I Know"

Picture your stereotypical never-grew-up high school jock. You know the type--in their late twenties and still partying like it's high school; the kind of guy who has way too much money and too many girls, the kind that seems too unruly to even attempt managing and leaves his friends to do damage control. Terence King is all of this and more.

A prominent character in USA's Necessary Roughness, TK is exactly what you'd expect of a man who has too much talent and not enough discipline--a mess. More than that, though, he's an example of a “Joker.” Jung's archetype is specific--a character that lives with a no-care attitude and has no problem playing jokes to keep the mood airy; someone who says YOLO (or the slightly classier “Carpe Diem”) as an excuse for every stupid thing they do. Again, all of these traits are evident in our go-to irrational character. But what else is there to TK? What makes him matter?

He learns; and with him, so does the audience. Terence, for all his attitude issues, for all his pride and irrationality and moments of pure stupidity, starts to see past himself. He picks up on the importance of other people, of his actions, and of his past. He starts down the slow path to self-awareness. That’s not to say that TK is perfect; he stumbles sometimes, makes some stupid choices and ruins his own opportunities, but that’s what makes it real. Jokers aren't perfect and no one changes overnight--especially in a show that centers around therapy.

Again, though, we are drawn to the "So what?" Besides being an age-old cliché, why should we care about him? Yeah, sure, we learn life lessons, but we could do /that/ listening to a country music station for a few hours (ignoring the drinking songs, of course). Why does TK matter?

The answer is simple—his character provides hope. In the dozens of cases that the show has filtered through, a smattering of successes and failures and even, in the most recent season, suicides, TK makes the steady trek towards growing into himself. And in growing into himself, he grows out of the Joker mentality. The show’s creators aren’t just providing another “you can do anything you work towards” cliché or dreams-come-true Disney moment, even in his growing up, Terence faces trouble, but in the process of that, he also provides a goal. A dream for the viewers—TK as a better person, as someone who makes the right decision not because it benefits him, but because he knows he should.

It’s an easy thing to say, but quite difficult to do; no one is perfect or good or rational all the time; no one is enough to be the ultimate “after” story. But the fact that we keep trying—a fact represented in Terence King, as well as other characters throughout the show—proves that we want to achieve something greater. We believe that we can be better, so we try.

On the trek from Joker to “Rational,” Necessary Roughness has made a resonating point through their never-grown-up jock: we may not be able to do anything we set our minds to, but we can do something if we want it bad enough.

“Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.”

-Lemony Snicket