Plus you’ve already done your parody assignment. Work smarter, not harder.
Right? I had a similar experience in high school, where I thought the essay I wrote was bullshit. I still kinda do–but what I’d done was demonstrate rhetorical skill, which is a nicer name for bullshit.
It’s like I tell my students in math: I’m not interested in them telling me what 37+42 is, I already know the answer to that and I don’t need them to tell me. I’m interested in seeing how they solve it, so they can solve similar questions in their own life without needing my help.
Same thing here. The teacher already knew her opinion of Huck Finn or whatever, she didn’t need a teenager to tell her how to understand the novel. She needed to see that the teenager had the necessary skills to reflect on other works, and more importantly to express their opinions in cogent, coherent writing. Whether they were expressing their honest opinion was completely irrelevant to what the teacher needed to know.
My point was that mike_curtis claiming that there is no such thing as an objective fact is a completely insane thing to say, akin to a certain poster convinced that he is the universe. I used the objective fact that clouds are made of water (which I had already brought up) as one example of an objective fact, but other objective facts I could have mentioned include:
In spatially flat vacuum the speed of light is around 186,000 miles per second.
The energy of a proton at rest is around 938 MeV.
In flat Eucledian space a triangle has three angles totalling 180 degrees.
A molecule of water consists of one atom of oxygen and two atoms of hydrogen.
That was my context–not plays on words or “gotchas” based on the ambiguity of the English language–it was an assertion that there are very much a very large number of things that are objective facts.
I realize that the state of someone’s mind isn’t something testable and verifiable at any point in the universe like the above listed objective facts, but I’m willing to believe that Flannery O’Conner knew what she was planning when she was writing and was not lying in the anecdote, and therefore I accept provisionally that “the hat was just a hat” is a fact, and that speculations on the “symbolism” of it are mental masturbation.
Some of these reinterpretations are insightful and interesting, and some of them are less so, in my opinion. It’s hard to reinterpret Ursula as a heroine and have anything like the film we see (but certainly possible to look at Triton’s parenting with a dubious eye).
On the other hand, you could probably have a decent version of the Karate Kid, and make it about Johnny (arrogant karate champ loses girlfriend, and cheats in championship, but grows enough to sincerely congratulate the kid who beat him, and to abandon his evil sensei (character growth!)) or about Kreese (a tragedy about a man who lets his ambition and hatred lead him to losing everything, even the respect of the kids he trained) without changing anything about what we see (just adding enough scenes to fill in the gaps). And the theory about Ferris being in Cameron’s imagination does contain some truth about how bad a friend Ferris really is.
In my college intro poetry course, I was once hurting for a poem (we had to write five a week) and so, in a flash of “inspiration”, just copied the ingredient list on my shampoo bottle and called it Modern Alchemy. The teacher gave me good marks on it but, in retrospect, I’m pretty sure that was more approving of my moxie and the tongue-in-cheek nature of how I reached five poems rather than thinking “This is brilliant poetry”. And, while I thought I had totally pulled one over on him and bragged to my friends, I knew it wasn’t an indictment on the field of poetry and didn’t think I could mail this into some famous poetry journal or anything. Sometimes teachers just act like people.
Anyway, back to the OP, I heard Puff the Magic Dragon today and it reminded me of the time I was singing it in the shower while my wife was getting ready in the bathroom. When I reached the last verse, she accused me of making it up because she had no idea it was so depressing. I think that, much like You Are My Sunshine, a number of people only ever hear the first verse and assume it’s a happy little kid’s tune. Especially among people who didn’t live through the songs’ initial popularity and heard it more second-hand.
I cannot let this one go by without mentioning, for those that might have missed it, that Netflix has three seasons, and a fourth on the way, of Cobra Kai with Daniel, Lawrence and Kreese 35 years older and played by the actors in Karate Kid.
I assume there’s already a thread here about it, but the point here is that we get at least some bits of “how things looked from the other side” in Lawrence talking about the events.
Maybe not, but “if no answer is incorrect, then no answer is correct” is. And if there is no correct or incorrect answer, it is a useless question.
“Literature” is the dusty old books schools force children to dissect to teach most of them to hate reading.
Haven’t watched those, but have heard good things about them.
Yeah, I was going to say, your re-interpretation of The Karate Kid is pretty much exactly what Kobra Kai does. The first season, especially, I thought was an extraordinarily finely balanced mix of genuinely funny humor and genuinely moving drama, which depicted both Daniel and Lawrence as sympathetic but flawed protagonists.
Not every question has a correct answer, and not having a correct answer doesn’t make a question useless. “How do you feel?” isn’t a useless question, or one with a correct answer. Neither is “Did you like this book?” Neither is, “What did this book make you think about?”
If a giraffe could leap, pound for pound as 'igh as a grass’opper…e’d avoid a lot of trouble.
Of course “how do you feel” has a correct answer–the correct answer is the way that the person feels.
RE: Raiders of the Lost Ark.
I never thought about that. But maybe Indy had arranged to leave with the idol via plane while the rest of his group hoofed it back. Hell, maybe that’s why his team kept betraying him!
Right. Now extrapolate that to the third question I posed, and explain again what your problem with reader response is.
The difference between asking “how do you feel about your grandmother getting cancer” and asking “what is the purpose of your grandmother getting cancer.”
What?
It’s just mikecurtis, no underscore.
Are you sure of that fact?
Asking how someone feels about their grandmother’s cancer has a real answer–it is a description of the real emotional state within their mind. That is the equivalent of asking “what is five plus five”. Asking someone about the purpose of their grandmother’s cancer is a meaningless question because it has no meaningful answer.
I think it’s interesting to read how people who are not neurotypical ingest art.