History of the English Studying Peoples

Well, this is sort of a sequel to the recent blog where I chose to illuminate the incredibles by writing a sequel. I just realized they should do this sort of thing in English classes, instead of the sitting around and talking about your feelings and impressions type thing. Creative writing!  You learn more by doing it yourself. And the students should perform their own writing and should perform other people's writing. In public. In local coffee shops or on the big grassy places colleges have, where people sit around and ponder the slow disintegration of their dreams. I'm kidding of course, since i would never have made English my major if they'd made us read in public. I'd have chosen something even more useless, which would be tricky. So tricky that it would have taken more mental effort to find that hypothetical degree than it would take to pass any course required by the English Major. I could begin a whole new field of humanities study, an entirely new Major, simply by requiring students, daring them, to find a degree more useless, more completely without any practical merit whatsoever, than an English degree. And I already know about Poly Sci.  And Pre-law and Pre-Med, and Personal Studies.  These are not contenders. We're looking for a very hypothetical entity.  There are very few people, I would guess, who would even understand how difficult this problem would be. It's almost a mathematical proof. The modern English Major is the culmination of years of organic selection pressure on universities and colleges, all seeking to produce graduates out of all caliber of students, from the few very smart to the many many very not-smart. These not-smart represent as much of a funding source as the very smart. And just as the myriad wonderful forms of life have evolved amazing techniques to compete for food with other life, so the universities have evolved Majors to lure dumb students and extract packets of government loans or parental savings in a minimum number of years. Thus the English Major.  When I sort of attended college, there was a choice of emphasis, for English Majors, between Creative Writing and British Literature. The more serious choice, the sober, responsible choice, of those two options, was British Literature; reading stories and poems written 100-1000 years ago. Not studying the history which was occurring all around the individuals who authored those stories and poems, just studying the completely fabricated stuff they dreamed up while they avoided any real work during, say, the Industrial Revolution. Try topping that, poly Sci Majors. At least Poly Sci, or pre med or pre law, are studying something real. The English degree with emphasis on British Literature was dedicated to studying Not Real things. And I did not choose that emphasis. It seemed a little too practical, too utilitarian. It reeked of job training. I chose Creative Writing, which is the purest distillation of the English Major. I've read about some abominable innovations in Creative Writing programs of late; courses designed to help students with the business side of writing; marketing; financial management, consumer trends! All part of a ghastly effort to help students with the practical side of creative writing. The well intentioned nimrods who design and implement such programs have lost sight of the true purpose of an English Degree with Creative Writing emphasis, which is to provide courses and a diploma to students who could not possibly make it through any course demanding real study, but who have as much money to spend as the smarties. Marketing? Financial Management? Bestselling Authors do not need such things. They will have ample time to ponder marketing while they wash dishes for Red Lobster, and as for financial management, the exciting hands on training provided by student loan defaults will drive home the knowledge and skills necessary for implementation of the financial management techniques most utilized by English Majors:  Top Ramen, Pabst, and the local Thrift Store. 

Couldn't find an appropriate illustration for discussion of college majors. Most people would put some kind of a graph, but I don't have a graph maker app. So I've included my Tribute to Thanksgiving. It's a dinner with pilgrims and Indians. I feel that the complete lack of any historical veridicy in the picture demonstrates my point nicely. If you don't see the connection, maybe you should have studied a little harder in that absurd lib Ed class you and your sciencey friends made fun of. 

Dear Pixar: I wrote your sequel and you can have it for a steal (no objectivism either)

Recently watched The Incredibles again. As I am a trained critic with an English degree (creative writing emphasis), I analyze every movie I see and every book I read using the cutting edge techniques I learned in college in 1989, and I was quite pleased with the insights I gleaned while watching the show again, so much so that I had thought to do a blog post blowing the lid on the whole Incredibles thing, but then I read the Wikipedia on the movie and it appears that many other people have already come up with the Ayn Rand comparison (don't listen to Brad Bird's lies, he's an Objectivist), which is not surprising as there are lots of English majors roaming the country, washing dishes and cleaning houses and teaching high school and analyzing whatever movies they can afford to watch. So I gave up on that post. 

But I also came up with my idea for a sequel to the movie which if it was ever made would undoubtedly be far superior to the actual sequel in production. 

If I were to do a sequel it would follow Jack jack, who would be in his early twenties and struggling at a small town college. He would be majoring in English of course, and having trouble taking it seriously. His family has been telling him stories of the glory days all his life, about fighting syndrome and other villains on the island, about the giant killer robots and of course about mom and dad's earlier glory days, before his brother and sister were born. It's twenty years after the events of the first movie. His parents are in their late sixties. His dad has health problems; he's too heavy at his age. Violet is married with several children, his brother Dash is a lawyer.  He's never actually seen anyone in his family use any super power. And they've told him all about the wild powers he has, but he's slowly realized that he's  never been able to do anything like the things in their stories.  He used to think he remembered doing those things, but it's dawned on him that he might just be remembering their stories. Strangely, he's talked to family friends who also seem to remember his powers. He thinks he has secret mental problems that cause him trouble, and he's tortured that his family and friends might find out that he's somehow lost his powers and stop treating him as a special person. What's worse, his parents often talk about how important will power and belief are to wielding super powers, and he feels guilt and shame for his failure, that he has some moral failing that prevents him from wielding his super powers. 

In the midst of this troubling time, a friend wins airline tickets in a contest, and Jack Jack goes to Hawaii with his friend. While there, he happens upon a tourist brochure describing a small island that looks uncannily like the pictures his father has shown him of Syndrome's island. Jack Jack and his friend take a ferry to the island, and there at the dock, they meet Syndrome, or at least a man who looks just like him, employed as a mechanic by the ferry line. They engage him in conversation, and to Jack Jack's astonishment, he knows the family. He appeared in an episode of their one season TV series, where they played a super hero family. Syndrome, or Buddy as his friends call him, takes them home for dinner, and they meet his wife Mira, who is Mirage, and their kids, a girl and a boy. There appears to be a strange tension between Buddy and Mira at dinner, as they tell Jack Jack about the episode filmed on the island. Mira owns a pub/restaurant which she's  filled with memorabilia from the time, with framed screenshots from the show and even props. The episode never aired and the series was canceled, so the mementos in the bar are worthless. It dawns on Jack Jack that his parents might be demented, and that no one in the family ever had super powers. It later comes out, after Mira hysterically intervenes in a short lived romance between Jack Jack and Buddy's daughter, whose name is Janet Jean and goes by "JJ", That Jack Jack's father had an affair with Mira during the filming on the island. After discovering the infidelity, Helen Parr refused to appear in the episode, which was eventually scrapped, resulting in the end of the family's acting career after the cancellation. JJ, Mira says between sobs, is the love child of Bob Parr. Buddy doesn't know. Horrified at dating his sister, Jack Jack leaves the island. The final scenes are a Godfather type fugue, with scenes of Jack Jack returning to his parents house, confronting his father, who nods sadly, and visiting his mother, who sits on the back porch of the house, staring creepily at a metal sculpture in the backyard, a sculpture of the killer robot from the first movie. These scenes alternate with Buddy in his backyard, soldering something with a blowtorch.  As Jack Jack greets his mother, we see JJ and her brother at a bedroom window, watching their father. Then Jack Jack telling his mother he's dropping out of school.  She nods sadly, and says "never forget you're a special person."  These words are spoken off camera, as the scene switches to JJ and her brother looking out the window, perspective changed so that we can't see what they're seeing, only flashes like welding sparks, lighting their faces. After the word "special", a sudden flash of blue white light illuminates them. They don't flinch, they've seen it many times before.  Their eyes shine with the light for one creepy moment, then the final credits roll. 

Holy cow, I get chills every time I visualize that last scene!  I can't believe they're going to make some typical Hollywood crap, when they could be doing this sequel and they'd barely have to pay me anything at all for it (I'm a terrible negotiator. I tend to giggle when I lie). 

I might try to do a picture of the last scene, if I can do it justice. But probably not due to the time thing

Guest artist

I'm going to break with a sort of tradition that I've adhered to in this blog and in my life in general, which is to never promote or talk about and most certainly to never display or post artwork by someone other than myself.  It's a sort of rule, you see. I made the rule for several reasons:  if I pretend there are not millions of artists better than myself by basically refusing to acknowledge or even look at their work, I can continue to assess my pictures with that totally uncritical love that children and mediocre art need to live and thrive. 

The other reason is more complicated and philosophical and esthetically based:  I have created a sort of comic book world in these posts, an alternate universe where all visual depictions are in the awkward cartoonish form of the protagonist's childlike vision. A photo or professionally done drawing or even mildly competent artwork would shatter the spell, breaking the narrative and jarring the reader with a hackneyed violence that no writer with true passion for the craft could ever stomach. 

But to be perfectly honest, since the reader described in the explication of the second reason is undoubtedly in an overwhelming majority of site visits simply a temporally progressed version of the writer - meaning myself alone, re-reading my own post, the second reason for the rule could be truthfully said to be just a pompous and verbose re-hash of the first reason, which has already been exposed as shallow and contemptible. 

In any case, the other artist I'm posting is my own father. Since we share the same last name, his work still qualifies as "hagenart."  And genetically we are 50% identical, so what's the difference?  (Hint: it's the same number as the mathematical similarity, see above). 

I recently scanned several sketches from my father's notebooks. I don't know if he meant them to ever be seen, or had in the manner of our family some kind of imagined scenario for how or who or when he wanted them to be seen or discovered in the rubble by the archaeologists of the far future digging through the dirt of the titanic Yellowstone eruption that will annihilate the western United States most likely at the very moment when we've got self driving cars and surgically implanted iPhones and genetically engineered Google glass skulls, but I got them and I scanned them and this one's my favorite:

It's an owl reading the Book of Mormon. My father was devout. I don't know if he liked the owl after he drew it. The owl does not to me look as if he is enthralled by what he is reading, so I wonder if my father disliked the picture and did not use it for whatever he had intended. I can't even imagine. He was delightfully half-hearted with many of the unpleasant standards that the community he grew up in demanded of him, and all the time seemed genuinely disappointed in his own free inclinations. I never knew if he was putting everyone on.  He was as gentle as a dove with the feelings of his loved ones, even myself, his undoubtedly most disappointing son. 

I intend to color in this picture and all the others I scanned, it's a basic pleasure of children and infantile men, to add to a picture that someone else has already done the heavy lifting on, but instead of crayons I'm planning to use the photo processing software that eliminates much of that drudgery of colorization which is the last bastion of penance left to the mediocre doodlers. 

Where is Mr Sea Anemone?

I've begun a powerful new artistic technique more suited to my current lack of temporal resources. Here is an example, the title is Mr Sea Anemone:



Actually I don't know how to embed or place picture files, or graphic files, in blog posts. I know how to upload picture files to the blog, and I think I know how to insert a picture file, but the picture never goes where I want it to go, so if Mr Sea Anemone did not appear at the end of the colon...
Of course I was about to make a funny pun, and those of you familiar with the sophisticated verbal gymnastics of punning will no doubt be in the middle of or recently finished with a resounding bray of guffaws that erupted from somewhere inside you (don't read this in a car) the moment your eyes scanned the word 'colon', and you've been momentarily unable to continue reading for a few precious moments. Don't worry, you've missed nothing but the literary equivalent of one of those smug post zinger smiles that have made it very difficult for many people to enjoy live comedy.
Here's another portrait. I call it Mr Bunny Man:



Usually the pictures in my posts don't make an appearance until the bottom of the page, all in a row that takes forever to download because I don't know basic internet file management principles. I think more tech savvy people use imgur or Instagram which I intend to learn how to use after I've thought about it for a while, by which I mean thinking about the decision whether to begin to learn how to use them, I don't want to leap ahead and just decide to begin to learn how to use them on a whim, when free time is at a premium.



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Nature "Cooked" and in Ferment

Just read Cooked, by Michael Pollan, the guy who wrote Omnivore's Dilemma, which I have not read but intend to read now, although I can already hazard a guess as to the overall theme; mass produced food is bad and makes you fat and diabetic and prone to heart disease. In other words, it will make you an American.
That was his general point in Cooked anyway, which was written to persuade Americans to cook, and it worked, even on me. Now I want to cook, or at least I wish I already learned how to cook, which is what I usually mean when I say I want something.
In any case, back to Cooked. Its a journalistic book in the best sense of the word, even handed and thorough, and the author even successfully came up with a beautifully designed and esthetically pleasing outline and stuck with it to the end, a feat of perseverance which as an amateur writer I find even more miraculous and unbelievable than the ancient fire water air earth theory of the elements that he pays homage to with his outline structure. It's a pleasing idea, but to be perfectly honest it forces some arbitrary and unhelpful categorizing in his book, as does any outline. I think he got overexcited with the pleasing dichotomy he worked up between fire cooking as masculine and water cooking as feminine, but didn't have a third gender on hand to categorize fermentation with, and at that point he had to find something in fours.
But the book is interesting. I bought most of his argument against processed food, and for home cooking, even if I think American obesity and health issues is a fairly trivial problem, on the scale of things. If there are children actually going hungry in some parts of the world, who cares that more Americans could die in their forties and fifties instead of their seventies and eighties? I say this, of course, as an almost fifty American male who would himself prefer to live for at least a few decades more. But who cares what I would prefer? I had an awesome childhood, and only went hungry at scout camp (by choice).
But I mostly agreed with him. I did take issue with all the times Pollan uses the words "Nature" and "Community-based" in the book. It began to seem a little calculated after a while, as if an editor suggested more buzz-words or something. If it wasn't calculated, and Pollan honestly believes in Nature as the source of all goodness, then it's a little worse in my view. Journalists should be cynical and atheist, which is how Pollan comes across for most of the book, except for his "what have we lost?" nonsense.
I could go on about the true "nature" and source of modern Nature worship, but I will be dissecting Nature Worship in my massive thesis on The Hierarchical Nature of Homo Sapiens, which constitutes the fruit of twenty years of thought, still in ferment. Please note that I will be incorporating the word "Nature", as it should be used, in the title. Also please note that I used the word "ferment" to describe it. I use that word in a calculated fashion because the main success of Cooked, for me, was that the third section (divided unnecessarily into two parts just to fit Pollan's Fire Water Air Earth outline) goes into fermentation of food and induced me to purchase the Art of Fermentation, by Sandor Katz. I am excitedly delving into Art of Fermentation, and will hopefully soon be reporting on the success or failure of my own preliminary fermentation efforts!

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Tribute to Top Notch "Snowy Day"

New picture from the Art Department, a Tribute to The Snowy Day, by Ezra Jack Keats. This is part I of a new series I've been planning, a Hyper Critical Review of Children's Literature, complete with pictorial tributes to Top Notch Books. There will also be some suggested improvements for other books that require them.
The Snowy Day has that dreamlike, fresh from the subconscious feel that all the really Top Notch kid books have, especially the Margaret Wise Brown books, without going overboard like The Night Kitchen. The Night Kitchen is like a funny uncle who wears T shirts and puts food on his face for a laugh and gets really into the Lego Star Wars battles and the kids laugh and laugh but with some nervous starts and they never feel quite safe around him. And no matter what people say, kids should always feel safe and openness can go too far. But I know it's won some awards. It was written to win awards. It's very poetic and would make an interesting spoken word piece and the pictures are good. It just doesn't tell a story.

The Snowy Day is just as deeply meaningful, and the pictures are good, and it was obviously written for children to understand and enjoy, or even if it was written to win awards, it doesn't read like it was written to win awards. This makes it Top Notch.

This review would make a good advertisement for the Snowy Day, but the true test of a successful Ad Firm would be to write a glowing review of a book that sucked, or needed improvement. This worrisome element of the Ad business, discussed in previous hagenart blogs (link not necessary), has come to haunt Hagenart Advertising, even as we celebrate the planned renovation of the Art Department. The renovation will be based on Peggy's office from Mad Men Season 4 (if the blueprint graphic was done it could be linked here. Another missed Opportunity - unacceptable!)
Hagenart headquarters will be based on Don's office as far as the couch and the liquor cabinet and the uniforms, Season still to be determined.
But as exciting and challenging as these business plans are, the spin issue is casting a pall over Hagenart staff, highly trained for Esoteric Criticism in college


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New Verbal Progress Bar Feature

It's taking me too long to try and find time to draw a proper picture for my Douglas Adams entry, so I've basically given up on the authors series for a while. For those one or two readers who may have been looking forward to the next installment, have no fear. I fully intend to move on with the series, and I actually do perform work on that project every week, but I should communicate, as clearly as I am able to, the available free time per week that I am able invest in the authors project, in a sort of written verbal version of the progress bar that is universally used in all GUI software to give the user a quickly apprehended conception of a particular application's progress towards a particular task. I believe that this graphic may not always be imparting a perfectly honest image of the actual progress to the user, but I am firmly believing that the image has prevented more psychotic rages than any medication devised by man, simply by increasing the length of a colored bar by a few pixels every few seconds. But in cases where the process may be progressing at a rate too slow to be visibly indicated by the bar, the information imparted by the image can be agreeably enhanced by a numerical percentile or even absolute quantity of bytes loaded, indicated on or near the bar. This number or percentage can indicate slight change when the bar appears to be frozen, assuaging many an agitated nerve ending.
My verbal progress bar for this week is -90 minutes. The hyphen means "minus" or "negative", like "negative 20 degrees". Obviously this means I was not able to donate any time to the Douglas Adams tribute picture this week. I did not indicate zero minutes because that would indicate that if I had managed to spare 10 extra minutes of free time, I would have been able to briefly work on the Douglas Adams tribute picture. But any spare time up to 90 minutes or so last week would have been devoted to completing a project for a client of my advertising business. Only after working on the project for 90 minutes or so would I have felt justified in devoting some time to a personal project like the authors blog series. So I would say the current value for my verbal progress bar, or VPB, is -90 minutes. I hope this exercises a calming effect on any reader or readers who are overcome with anticipation for the next installment in the authors series.