rough draft, Essay 1

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.