to my poor readers, I would like to say one thing: I am grateful that you read my blog when you do, but by no means do I expect you to read every piece. I'll be posting quite a lot for the next six weeks while I'm still in this endeavor of academic asininity officially titled "English 120". so if you see a big one and you're pressed for time or short on attention, remember I hold no grudges over an un-commented post. I'm putting these works out here much like a message in a bottle... nobody has to read it, but the thought that one might is almost comforting.
on with the show! I had to turn in a rough draft today - three pages responding to a short story ("Too Many Bananas" by Dave Counts). there was no way in Jerusalem I could say that much about it, so here's the result...
"Too Many Bananas" - Critical Response
[insert introduction and one paragraph of scholarly-ish BS here]
That thought isn’t leading anywhere, so now I’m going to talk about why this piece is adequate writing but not great. To say that it is adequate though, we first have to establish that it does not suck in any way.
The story begins:
The woman came all the way through the village, walking between the two rows of houses facing each other between the beach and the bush, to the very last house standing on a little spit of land at the mouth of the Kaini River.
That doesn’t suck. If this short story sucked, it would start off, “We never knew just how much we would learn from moving to the jungle and getting rid of our money,” which it doesn’t. So far, so good.
Now look at the following sentence:
When the woman offered to sell us the watermelon for two shillings, we happily agreed, and the kids were delighted at the prospect of watermelon after yet another meal of rice and bully beef.
That’s a beautiful sentence. It starts off with “when”, but Counts is on top of things and gets that comma in there. Then there’s another comma right before a coordinating conjunction! With that, he’s free to tell us the kids were delighted at the prospect of watermelon, all without having to stop and take a break at a lousy period. Beautiful, Mr. Counts. Now he has a non-sucky introductory sentence and a black belt in punctuation going for him. But I promise things don’t end there!
Fortunately for the reader, Counts - I feel like I can call him Dave – breaks up this whopper into three easy to swallow sections. But that in itself doesn’t contribute to not sucking. What does, however, is his clever titling of each section. We begin with “No Watermelon at All” (except in caps lock), then “Too Many Bananas”, then “Not Enough Pineapples”. If this piece sucked, the sections might be called “Part 1”, “Part 3”, and “Part 2” (in no particular order).
I’m pretty sure I could go on for countless pages about my buddy Dave’s writing prowess, but I don’t want to give him a big head. So now I have to attempt to explain what keeps this piece from being great. I say attempt because that which is lacking is not quantifiable. I can’t go over the story with a red pen and circle the lack of greatness.
That is precisely my point: whatever it is that makes a work great instead of good is just not there in this piece. Sure, it’s interesting. It provides me with a perspective I’ve never considered before, and Dave deserves some credit for that. But at the end I find myself thinking, “Yes, things are different in a culture where ‘reciprocity is the rule and gifts are the idiom.’ So what? Thanks for sharing I guess. It was well written.”
To be fair, not much you’ll read is going to be Earth-shattering or mind-blowing or paradigm-changing. It’s rare that something like that comes along. So “Too Many Bananas” fits somewhere near the upper end of the middle of the pack. It makes a good bedtime story – you’ll enjoy it, yawn, and go to sleep.
[I'll preface this by saying... it's a rough draft for my English class. I didn't know where I was going with this even half way through. Then it came together :] The argument alluded to at the end is based on discussions from the past, but it isn't actually necessarily real. ok? ok!]
We are meant to believe that when you go to a museum and you see an exhibit of modern art and you see a lump of nothing that means absolutely nothing, you can’t call it stupid. That would be closed-minded. Instead, this art doesn’t speak to you, or maybe your life experiences don’t lead you to draw much meaning from this perfectly legitimate artistic expression.
In the late 1460’s, little Leonardo was getting slapped upside the head because he hadn’t quite mastered the vanishing point and his perspective was just slightly off. Now you can paint red a dollar ninety-five plastic headband and it’s a museum piece. One might praise the progress of mankind in being able to create art in anything and find meaning anywhere, but I beg to differ and posit that our standards have devolved. Good art takes talent, and I’m annoyed we forgot that.
But let’s not dwell on the art hanging in museums and exclude music. Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin… To simply say “they had talent” is a sad effort at using the English language to your advantage. How they could compose a score of such awfully, breathtakingly good music – and for an entire orchestra – is completely beyond me. That takes capacity for musical genius that I can’t even fathom.
Fast forward to the 1950s. There was a broken guitar amp that created the first distorted electric sound, then Rock and Roll, now every buffoon with an instrument and two friends is a musician and a composer. Sure, there were the Beatles and some noteworthy acts along the way, but I’m trying to say that, again, we lost something. Art lost something.
“You can’t argue taste.”
I’ve heard it many times from many friends, and each time it annoys me. Yes, you can argue taste; we’re doing it right now. And yours sucks.
But you can’t just say that, can you? We go to college and learn there is no right or wrong, there’s only what you feel is right for you and that may be different than what is right for someone else. Well I call shenanigans.
Back to music! It’s a fair generalization that popular music in our era is played in small groups with guitar-like instruments (plus percussion and maybe a keyboard). And that’s not going to change anytime soon. Fine. If this is what musical art is now, then we will be selective and look for the good.
Good art of any medium creates a unique environment about which the soul is free to wander. It sets up a beautiful or terrible snapshot of life and invites us in to find our own way out. Good art is like the song “At the Bottom of Everything” by Bright Eyes, rife with multi-faceted metaphors one after the other, none of which ring insincere, forced, or cliché. Bad art is like Coldplay lyrics. “Closing walls and ticking clocks… etc.” That means nothing to anyone. There is no deeper meaning to it. Coldplay is bad art. I win, Chris.
