Now that “Iron Man 3” is released and rapidly taking over the world, the avalanche of big-budget summer movies has begun. Once that first blockbuster is out of the gates, we can expect at least one giant movie release per weekend until about the middle of August. So what attempt at counter-programming do the geniuses of Hollywood decide to grace us with for the follow-up to “Iron Man 3?” That's right. “The Great Gatsby.” Which is even showing at select theaters in 3D.
Are you kidding me?!
I might have breezed over this in my origin story, but even though I knew early on I was going to be a teacher, settling on the elementary world happened a little later in the timeline. I planned to begin college as a music major, aiming to become a band director until I quickly realized I didn’t have the chops for it. I started thinking about switching to English instead since that was another strength for me, until one of my high school teachers told me that my writing would be wasted in the classroom. I believed her since I was an ignorant and headstrong teenager, but after one Mass Comm class I learned it was more about advertising than anything else, which left a really bad taste in my mouth. I was a declared English major by my sophomore year.
Here’s some advice for the kids out there who might be thinking about someday biting the bullet and pursuing an English major: Prepare yourself to read a lot mind-numbing books you’ve never heard of written by authors you’ll never hear of again. Yeah, there are some writing courses that slide in there, but they are a precious, precious few, and depending on who the writing professor is even they can’t be taken much more seriously than a Saturday Night Live sketch about a creative writing class. I wish I could remember the quote or where I heard it or who was supposed to have said it, but the best description of English professors I’ve ever heard said something about how they teach their students how to overanalyze obscure books so those students will someday be able to teach their own students how to overanalyze the same obscure books. Trust me people, this is a statement not so far removed from the truth.
I suffered through my English major for exactly one academic year, which gave me just enough credits to realize I could automatically and painlessly add an English minor to my resumé a month before graduation, for whatever worth it might prove to have someday, which so far is zero. I can’t even estimate how many books I read in that year, or how many different classifications or genres of literature I had to wade through. To this day I have The Complete Works of William Shakespeare and The Complete Works of Edgar Allen Poe bookending one of my display shelves. I endured an 8:00 A.M. class titled “Survey of 18th Century British Literature, Part II” because part one didn’t have enough room on the syllabus for all of the boring. I had one quarter with nothing but lit classes and had to keep track of my progress through five different novels I had been assigned to read during a two-week period. I had to watch an acquaintance of mine slowly deteriorate over a period of weeks because he once dared to raise his hand and name Sidney Sheldon as a popular American author, which earned him academic leper status from all of the pretentious pseudo-intellectuals that too frequently populated our classes.
One of the few lasting things I have after my year in the English department is a complete inability to even think about reading any book that would be described as A Classic. Ironically, a lot of literary classics -- books like The Grapes of Wrath, To Kill a Mockingbird, Wuthering Heights, Great Expectations and the like -- are considered too mainstream or simplistic for the hardcore English nerds to take seriously. To this day I can't bring myself to even consider reading landmark books like those.
I’m not saying I limit my personal reading to the kinds of paperbacks always on that one rack you can find next to the magazines in the grocery store. I like challenging reads, sometimes. I love reading authors with written voices that can stand as monuments to the power of expressive thought. And sometimes, yeah, sometimes I’ll burn through a John Sanford murder mystery over a slow summer weekend. And I’m looking forward to making a trip down to Barnes and Noble sometime soon to pick up Jim Gaffigan’s new book Dad is Fat and hopefully laugh myself stupid while reading it. No apologies for that. I want to read something that’s going to engage me and temporarily pull me out of what’s going on in my life for a few hours, to the degree where I have to stop and remind myself where I am when I put the book down. But The Classics? No. Never. The don’t engage me. They can’t. Believe me, I’ve tried. But they all just feel too much like homework.
So in conclusion: If you were eagerly awaiting a 10-Word Movie Review of “The Great Gatsby?” Don’t hold your breath too long.
