English Class

I started reading David Foster Wallace's Consider The Lobster last night. I'm trying to see if I like his style without jumping right into Infinite Jest, a book I will never read on a Kindle: over 1,000 pages long with nearly 400 endnotes, the formatting just won't work electronically. Plus, if I pick up the paperback, I'll be able to carry a huge tome around -- and as we all know, size correlates strongly with quality. Hiyoooo!

I really like "Lobster" so far. I just finished the first essay, which is about the 1998 Annual AVN Awards and porn in general. It's not even the first essay about porn I've read: Chuck Klosterman wrote an essay called (go figure) "Porn" in his Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs. I'm not going to write about (icky!!) porn here because I am a gentleman, but the whole thing does kind of remind me of my high school English class. We shot porn in my English class.

Based on a true story

That's not true at all, actually. Sorry. We did have to follow very strict rules about writing, though. I got pretty mediocre grades in English classes; my essays never really connected with the "correct" answer. I didn't follow The Rules because I'm a dark, mysterious figure with a body that just won't quit. So when I see someone like DFW write an essay about porn (!!) and use run-on sentences and footnotes, it reminds me of how little I use everything I learned in those tedious AP English lectures.

What I Learned In English Classes

1. Kneel before your formulaic gods. Only Five-Paragraph Essays. Er, okay, fine. It's a general form. I can see it, kind of. Oh, the first and last paragraphs are shorter than the others? Each one is three sentences? Weird, but -- the other paragraphs are 5-7 sentences? Listen, I don't know why we're setting limits -- and the first and last sentences of each paragraph are spoken for? The former summarizes what follows, and the latter summarizes what preceded? Do I get to bring a formula sheet to the exam? What do you mean, I should stop using rhetorical questions?
2. 19th-Century England is boring as hell. Why is everyone visiting each other for like a month at a time? Linton Heathcliff is sick for his entire life. He's got a serious disease and no one helps him. "Just a sickly constitution," they said. YOUR CHILD HAS HAD TUBERCULOSIS FOR FIFTEEN FUCKING YEARS. GET HIM A DOCTOR.
3. Dystopias are bad. You'd think that the name would give it away. As an extension of this, everyone will now have an opinion on how the US is but one misstep away from becoming a totalitarian police state. Ron Paul 2008.
4. Semicolons are weird and pretentious. No joke, I stopped using semicolons in my essays because a teacher actually told me to use periods instead. "A cleaner stop," she said. A related note: I don't know what the "--" thing is, but I fucking love using those now. They were discouraged back in the day! (Ostensibly this is because I did not know what they were for. Still don't. Get at me, haters.)
5. Any object is given more than a cursory description? Discuss for an hour. Hey, guess what? I write things -- jokes, mostly, but it's the same idea: Sometimes adjectives aren't revelations. Can't we just have nice descriptions of things without rehashing the same Man v. Self argument over and over?

6. To break Rule #1 or #4, or to have an interesting style at all, you must be universally acclaimed. Joyce is allowed to write arguably the weirdest introductory paragraph in all of literature and Dickens can write the shit out of a run-on sentence, but, see, they're extremely famous now even though we never really talk about how they were received upon release back in the day so we're mostly worshipping everything in hindsight while completely ignoring the present and why haven't you punctuated this part of your essay you lose three points.

Louis CK has a bit about how technical high schools exist to narrow dreams:

We raise kids and tell them they can be whatever they want. We send them to technical high schools and say, "You can be one of these eight things."

C'mon, English classes everywhere. Step your game up. I'm going to write about dragons. Singing dragons.