Dan Benapfl

February 28, 2006

ENGL 490 – Williams

Portfolio: Reflective Essay

            My parents brought me to pre-school when I was four years old.  When I went nuts the first day of class, crying hysterically and hiding from the teacher by burying myself in the sandbox, however, they decided that my schooling could wait another year, figuring that I just wasn’t mature enough to handle it.  But that’s not what I think happened.  I think I knew, deep down inside, what was really going on.  I think I knew that once I took that step into the classroom… well, it would all be over.  All of it.  All my best memories.  Dragging my Mom to the local pool, spending all day swimming.  Wrestling on the bed with my Dad.  Lunch in front of the TV, eating Campbell’s chicken noodle soup and watching Winnie the Pooh.  In my memories it’s always Winnie the Pooh, I don’t know why.  Perhaps it’s a tad melodramatic to say that those were the best years of my life, but there it is….  I figure it was all pretty much uphill for me since I started school.  But what does all this have to do with my career as an English major?  Perhaps all this is irrelevant, but perhaps not.  If you will allow me the cliché, my career as an English major has been a lot like growing up: sure, I’ve made progress, but at what cost?

            The first piece up for consideration, from my sophomore year, is a lot like the earliest years of childhood.  Both are simple, far too short, and full of rampant drug use.  Obviously by this time in my scholastic career I had learned the importance of word choice for conveying subtle meanings, because I just go crazy with it in this story.  Did everyone catch that, or was I not obvious enough?  You see, what I do is I use words that have to do with smoking to foreshadow the punch line of the story.  I describe the plant’s presence as “thick like smoke.”  A feeling “lit” inside my protagonist.  Do you get it?  Aren’t I clever?  Boy, howdy.

            This piece sets up a thread that will continue throughout my papers: an overuse, or rather a misuse, of humor.  “Houseplant” isn’t so much a story, as was assigned, but a thinly veiled joke.  The truth is that I knew ahead of time that I was going to have to read the story out loud, and so forsook any ideas I had that would not induce laughter.  I have trouble presenting things that aren’t humorous.  Were I to psychoanalyze myself, I would say that I do this because were people to take me seriously they would no doubt be disappointed.  But I’m bumming myself out, do I digress….

            The next paper in the portfolio, chronologically, is a Shakespearean research paper, also from my sophomoric period.  In it, I make the argument the the Bard uses precise imagery to show that Macbeth is quite literally plunged into Hell as a result of his actions.  All in all, this piece isn’t bad.  I buy the argument I made, and think there was ample evidence to support my claims.  My critique in this case would be that they aren’t really my arguments.  I assume the paper was supposed to be a response and not a research paper, and I use very few of my own ideas.  To be perfectly honest, I probably used too few of my own ideas.  But I was young, and, being young, my head was blissfully free of disturbances such as “ideas.”

            In English Theory and Criticism, my class was assigned a “close reading” of Henry James’ Turn of the Screw.  We were quite restricted as to the scope of our paper, but I did what I could in that limited space.  And, to tell you the truth, I am sort of proud of this one, especially the title: “My Turn to Screw: Henry James’ Happy Ending.”  Genius, right?  Important in its progression from the Macbeth paper, all the ideas, as plausible and well-referenced as in my Macbeth paper, were totally my own.  This can be seen as either a positive or a negative.  Having these “ideas,” since growing a little bit more, I find myself less able to enjoy literature as I used to.  Appreciate it more, perhaps, but enjoy it less.  I have been conditioned to be concerned with “themes” and “criticisms,” which, quite frankly, takes a lot of fun out of things.

            Getting back to the point, I read a variety of criticism on Turn of the Screw, and not one of the “scholars” made any of the points I make in this short piece.  Which is off to me; I understand that some of the ideas seem outlandish, but I truly believe that they were correct.  I know that, were I an accomplished author, I would try to sneak sex-jokes into my works.  Anyway, this paper represented a new era in my career, in which I was “creative,” a characteristic that would run a little crazy as I used my new thoughts to create opinions of my own.  Perish the thought.

            In my paper entitled “A Theoretical Dialogue About Hypothetical Issues,” I go completely over the edge, most notably in the parts where I compare my penis to a massive train and allow my thoughts to be taken over by Xi’ Lek, and alien from the eighth dimension.  Like a teenager, I flail about wildly with little regard for consequence.  I have these thoughts, but cannot harness them.  To be perfectly honest, this paper was the result of my not having completely understood the assignment prompt and deciding to, you know, just say “fuck it” and write whatever came into my head.  Which doesn’t really instill confidence in my state of mind, but whatever.  Similar to my Turn of the Screw paper, this essay digresses near the end as I try to make a joke out of not (not really very) hard work.  But I think it’s funny.

            The final essay of my portfolio, on John Sayles’ Oscar-nominated film Lone Star, could be seen as a culmination of my career as an English student.  It is formatted perfectly in MLA style, full of original and interesting ideas, and somewhat boring.  My papers, which in this reflection stand in as representations of myself as I grow – in case you were having a little trouble with the metaphor – have been forced to grow up.  But them’s the breaks.  This essay was written seriously, and, possibly, was even taken seriously by those who read it.  The idea of a college degree is to prepare me for the grown-up world, after all, and there’s very little place for penis jokes in the workforce, no matter how much I’ll miss them.  I don’t know… perhaps it was inevitable.  The saddest part of the story is that Christopher Robin can’t remain a child.  He must, of course, grow up, and Pooh must be cast aside.  Sometimes a joke isn’t appropriate.  Or at least that’s what they tell me.  There’s still some question over whether or not it’ll take. 

            To continue my self-reflective theme, wherein the conventions of the genre become the content of work, I will end this essay with a joke: This camper wakes up and decides to cook himself some breakfast.  So he heats up a pan, throws in some sausage and some bacon.  The sausage turns to the bacon and says, Hey, is it hot enough in here for you?”  And the bacon says, “AHHH!!!  Talking sausage!!!”

            He he.