The Tiny T-Rex Who Didn't Know He Was Tiny

Have you ever had that moment where your whole way of thinking was completely proved wrong?  And it’s like your previous ideas died because you go through the stages of grief; denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. That was me, right now.  I may only have the brain size of a walnut, but considering my whole body is only the size of maybe a grapefruit, that’s not too shabby!  And my not too shabby brain was running five hundred miles a minute trying to put all the pieces together.  I consider myself pretty smart.  At this moment however, staring at the giant (or I guess, normal sized) bone structure of my ancestor, I have never felt so stupid.

I missed the lab.  I know, that’s crazy talk.  I missed the never-ending tests and experiments and being locked in a cage my whole life?  Definitely not!  But, I did miss how simple it all was, how naive I was.  The real world is scary, filled with no air conditioning, monsters, and truth.  I knew I was abnormal.  I could tell by the way the scientist in the lab looked at me, but their strange language was nothing but jumbled, incoherent cacophony, so I had no idea what made me so abnormal, until now.  Tyrannosaurus Rex (T-Rex) once roamed our Earth.  Known sometimes as the “King of the Dinosaurs”.  They averaged 40 feet long and about 15 to 20 feet tall.  Like I said earlier, not an amazingly large brain, but I knew enough, and I knew I was a lot less than 20 feet tall.

I continued reading about dinosaurs on the plaque at the museum that seemed to be closed during dark hours because there were no humans in sight.  Mass extinction whipped out the entire population of T-Rex.  Not true.  I’m here.  But how, and why am I here?  More importantly, that means there is no one else out there like me.

That can’t be true.  It must be wrong.  I have a family.  I know I do!  I don’t remember what they look like, what they sounded like, what they smelled like, but I know they are real!  They have to exist.  Right?

Now I really wanted to go back to the lab.  I set out determined there would be more, that I would find my kind, but it was all waste.  I didn’t care about the tests anymore, at least it gave me something to do, something to think about, because I sure was through thinking about this.  It made my walnut-sized brain feel like it was going to explode.

Tiny T-Rex by Cameron Clow

I walked out of the museum and the moon was fading, meaning the sun on the opposite side of the building was starting to shine.  I had to decide.  I could stay right on the steps and in a few minutes a human would find me and take me back to the cold metallic labs, or I could make a break for the forest of trees in my sight.  My size would allow me to go unseen.  I looked up at the moon and then back at the museum where I could see my ancestor’s bones arranged perfectly in the same shape as my body.  When I turned around is when I saw him, a man walking up the stairs.  I made a break for the woods.

Is he a hero, or just another glorification? So it goes...

            What makes a hero a hero?  Is it the actions they do or does it depend on how their actions affect others or is it the intent behind the actions?  In the 1962 film, Hell is for Heroes, this is one of the main themes.  The usual war story, the odds are against us, in this particular story it is six against a large force of Germans.  Reese, a rebellious soldier is the newbie in the squad.  Comparing Reese to Kurt Vonnegut’s main character from Slaughterhouse Five, Billy, the two have incredibly very little in common.  Reese is strong, makes bold decisions and is very authoritative despite his lack of experience with this squad.  Billy is pathetic.  He is insignificant and unimportant in the war and he is the laughing stock, out of place.  Reese is also a strong believer in free will.  He says people are all the same all around the world, “going with the tides.” His story ends with the ultimate act of free will on his part, sacrificing himself to bomb the German pillbox.  Billy believes in a deterministic universe, this way he can feel no guilt from war and cannot be responsible for any of his actions.  The only thing the two characters have in common is that they were both soldiers during World War II.

Billy relates more with the Polish soldier from Hell is for Heroes who is sent to get pens and paper for the other soldiers and just wants to be a part of something.  Billy wants to be part of something special so desperately, he create alien creatures from his subconscious called the Tralfamadorians who abduct him and teach him about the universe, such that there is no free will and all moments exists “like bugs in amber”.  In Hell is for Heroes, when the six soldiers learn they are alone against the Germans, most except their inevitable fate.  One soldier is asked how he is and responds, “I am great!  Because every time things seems bad, I focus on things in the past that were worse.”  This is somewhat similar to the Tralfamadorians’ concept of time.  They believe you can travel between moments, so there is no such thing as the present, just the past or future.  The present depends on where you are, but that can become the past in an instant.

Mary O’Hare begged Vonnegut not to glorify the war like they do in the movies.  She asked him to call his book The Children’s Crusade and did not want any more wars to kill our country’s children.  I do not think Mary would appreciate Hell is for Heroes too much.  Reese’s death at the end is glorified as the climax point of the movie.  Reese gave up his life for the “greater good”, making him out to be the war hero whom everyone admires.  I would argue the validity of Reese’s “selfless” act however.  The sergeant told him to not attack the pillbox, but being the rebel he is, Reese went.  By the time Reese had reached the Germans, two of his men had died.  Was throwing himself in with the bomb really an effort to defeat the Germans, or was he saving his pride by not having to go back and face the blame for two deaths?

Hell is for Heroes does not make war out to be all happy though.  The soldiers are weary of war and are lead to believe they are going home after a long war, only to have the bone pulled away from their face.  A soldier writing a letter comments to another soldier, “If you say you’re coming home they’ll just censor it out.”  Hope was stripped away from the soldiers, much like the soldiers who were losing hope on the train car in Slaughterhouse Five.

While Slaughterhouse Five and Hell is for Heroes both take place during World War II, they show two very different sides and to different characters.  Billy really does not contribute anything to the war effort, while Reese has the war story Weary so badly wanted before he died, unknown, in a train car.  Hell is for Heroes glorifies a selfish activity a selfish man did that was warped into a selfless act that made him a “hero”.  Slaughterhouse Five conveys this selfishness an reality that is war.

The soldiers discuss strategy before attack the German pillbox in Hell is for Heroes

"Let's Go Fly A Kite!" and Other Disney Magic

This summer, I went on vacation with my best friend and her family.  Her little 3-year-old sister loves Mary Poppins.  It was one of my favorites as a child too, so we would spend hours singing, “Let’s go fly a kite!  Up to the highest heights! Let’s go fly a kite and send it soaring!  Up through the atmosphere!  Up where the air is clear!  Oh, let’s go fly a kite!”  Probably one of my all time favorite Disney songs.  Besides the catchy lyrics and uncontainable joy the song makes you feel, the words really go deeper, as does the whole movie.  Once again, showing there is more than just what meets the eye in literature.

            Mary Poppins herself flies.  If that isn’t symbolism, I don’t know what is.  She is the original Superman because she literally flies in and saves the day.  Foster mentions angels, having wings and harps, flight and music, like a bird.  Mary Poppins has the same, an umbrella to fly with and a wonderful gift for singing.  Of course, as all Disney movies have, there is a little bit of magic to keep the imagination at work.  So, the flying aspect helps with the wonderment kid factor, but I prefer to think of Mary Poppins as an angel, gliding in from heaven.

            The ending song really hits home Foster’s idea that “flight is freedom”.  Mr. Banks, the father is free from his problems at work.  The children have a fixed kite and a happy father.  And Mary Poppins’ job is done.  Happy ending!  Now that everything is as it should be, anything is possible, even flying.  Flying a kite is symbolic of real flying.  “With tuppence for paper and strings, you can have your own set of wings.  With your feet on the ground, you’re a bird in a flight.  With your fist holding tight to the string of your kite!”

            While in reality, flying a kite is not that exciting, and even a child usually gets bored of it quickly, it’s the symbolism in this scene that makes it so great and memorable.  Any other activity, such as building a snowman perhaps, would not have had quite the same effect on the audience.  Flying is so surreal and so completely impossible for humans, that we are obsessed with it.  So many books, movies, and plays use flying to intrigue audiences and to symbolize freedom, escape, and often have to deal with childhood innocence and the belief in magic.  Peter Pan also comes to mind.  Flying to Never land in a sort of out of body experience for only children, escaping the real world.  Or Matilda, who uses her powers of making other objects fly to gain her own freedom from her terrible family.  Flying is the ultimate release.  A soul “flies” up to heaven after the person dies and becomes an angel.  Even flying downwards (falling) is symbolic.  Flying/falling from an airplane to your ultimate death (depending on the parachute situation) can symbolize final release or some sort of freedom, even if it’s just freedom from gravity for a split second.  Flight can really improve one’s literary experience to infinity and beyond (they also flew in Toy Story).

"Under love's heavy burden do I sink"... or an iceberg.

At a performing arts school such as Booker T, the “norm” is to be as abnormal as possible.  Standing out is such a priority for us young artists that the ones that back down a little and stay out of the spotlight tend to stick out the most.  Artists pride themselves on being original, unique, creative, the first.  As an artists myself, I was confused, and slightly angered by Foster’s statement, “There’s no such thing as a wholly original work of literature.”  By the end of the chapter, however, Foster had me convinced and intrigued.  It’s like the theory that every face in your dreams is one that you have somehow encountered in reality, even if just passing by on the street.  After reading Chapter 5 of Thomas C. Foster’s How to Read Literature Like a Professor, I did a mental memory lane of all the books I’ve read for school, for pleasure, tv shows I watched as a kid, Broadway musicals, and connecting them all to each other.  It all ended up being this sort of web of what Foster called “intertextuality”.

            What’s a story without a little bit of love?  Not much.  One of the most well known, and most tragic love story of all time, is that of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.  Now, me and my teenage girly-ness, when I think of Romeo and Juliet, I think of Leonardo DiCaprio.  And when I think of Leonardo DiCaprio, I think of The Titanic.  Obviously, good old Oscar-less Leo plays the lead male role in both movies.  This connection was merely superficial, but the more I thought about it, the more connections between the two stories I found.  In The Titanic, Rose is a member of high society, being forced to marry a high-class man by his parents.  Juliet’s parents have it planned for her to marry before she even turns 15.  It’s love at first sight for both Rose and Jack (R&J) and Romeo and Juliet (R&J…. hmmm… coincidence? I think not!).  Their feuding families forbid Romeo and Juliet’s love, while social classes forbid Rose and Jack, since Jack is far from high-class, he won the tickets.  Tragically, fate steps in for both of the star-crossed lovers.  Romeo and Juliet both commit suicide because neither of them wants to live in a world without the other, and Rose loses Jack to the freezing see after the boat hits an iceberg that night.

Romeo & Juliet (1996)

            Foster says, “If we don’t see the references, it means nothing.”.  The first time watching the movie, I was not thinking of Shakespeare, I was focused primarily on willing the boat to not sink.  However, now that I see these ties, I can appreciate and understand the story a little better.  The characters Rose and Jack become deeper without saying anything simply because I recognized they shared initials with the original star-crossed lovers.  I can spend a lot more time on Romeo and Juliet, as I have recognized the same characters in West Side Story, The Fault in Our Stars, The Notebook, Twilight, and basically every good love story.

            At the end of the chapter, Foster begs the question “But we haven’t read everything.”.  He acknowledges this is true and that young readers just need practice to understand all these little connections in literature.  While I believe this is true, I also believe that a young reader could recognize a reference, even if they are not exactly sure what it came from.

           

            Recently, I read a book titled The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon by Stephen King.  The book was a short and fairly direct narrative when it comes to King, about a 9 year old girl named Trisha who wanders away from her bickering family on a hike, and finds herself lost in the woods for the next few weeks on her own.  The book is overflowing with symbolism, metaphors, foreshadowing, and all sorts of literary goodness.  While trying to escape the woods, the little girl learns a lot about herself (self-knowledge? A quest?), the world around her, and the subaudible, which is a sort of passive god her father believes in.  The second she realizes she is lost her world flips.  Everything is unfamiliar and frightening, a sort of Alice in Wonderland experience of falling down a rabbit hole.  The only contact she has with her old world is her Walkman, which gives her the play-by-play of her favorite team, The Boston Red Sox, and her favorite player, Tom Gordon.

            The longer Trisha stays lost, the more she loses her sense of reality.  She starts to believe Tom Gordon is with her, and at one point she encounters the God of the Lost, an embodiment of the subaudible, and a wasp-faced supernatural being that represents her fear.  The whole hallucination reminds me of Scrooge’s night with the three ghosts from A Christmas Carol.  While reading the book, I interpreted the wasp-faced creature just as a symbol of her fear, but after reading this chapter from How to Read Literature Like a Professor, I thought it might have been an allusion to some other literature, but it was nothing I could think of on my own.  When I Googled it, one website said it was from Lord of the Flies, but having not read that I was not able to make the connection.  Even without the direct bridge in my mind, I enjoyed the book and the characters and plots it had to offer on its own.

            Foster mentions the “aha! factor”, “the delight we feel at recognizing a familiar component from earlier experience.” This joy is the same we may get from completing a challenging puzzle, or understanding a math theorem.  The connection of literature to other literature is exciting for readers.  I know I had fun making these connections, and continued having fun connecting The Suite Life of Zack and Cody to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer’s Night Dream in the next chapter.  And, while some people may say it makes stories “predictable” or takes away the “creativity”, I believe it is up to the writers still to create unique combinations or borrowed characters and keep the readers guessing.

It's Raining. It's Pouring.

            Humans, though sometimes think differently, are slaves to nature.  DNA, fatal illness, natural disasters, natural selection, and even something as simple as the weather, have a way of dictating our lives, and changing original plans.  Especially rain, which Thomas C. Foster focuses on in his chapter titled “It’s More Than Just Rain or Snow” from How to Read Literature Like a Professor, has a paradoxical effect on mankind.

            Drowning is one of man’s worst fears.  Ironically enough, we also need water to live. The Earth is 71% water and our own bodies are 60% water and a human can only survive roughly 3 to 5 days without drinking water.  Rain is a terrible inconvenience to us, yet the absence of it results in drought and lack of vegetation.  At the same time, too much causes flooding and with high wind speeds, could produce deadly hurricanes.  Everyday, humans shower themselves in water to cleanse their bodies either before they start their day or before they end it.  However, when it’s raining, we use umbrellas to shield our hair and clothes and face from the same substance.  Looking at all the contradictions that society has about water, it can be understandable as to why authors use rain and other weather conditions such as fog, snow, or even the lack of bad weather to symbolize, foreshadow, create a mood, or even to add irony to a scene.

            In movies it is common, and sometimes seen as clique, to have ran falling down in the graveyard during a funeral.  It’s the icing on the cake of the mournful, sorrowful mood.  It is also common to see couples kissing in the rain after perhaps a fight, repairing and starting over their relationship.  Both the “misery factor”, as Foster calls it and the “April showers bring May flowers” approaches of rain are used in literature, and it is the job of the reader to decipher which one, or both in some case, the author is using.  In The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the rain is coming down on Gatsby and Daisy during their reunion, but as the situation becomes more comfortable for both characters, and their love redevelops itself, the rain lets up and the sun appears yet again from the dark clouds.  The emotions of this scene are obliviously being mirrored by the weather.

            Weather is a great tool for foreshadowing.  In real life situations, we check the weather of the day to alter our plans around it.  If there are dark clouds approaching, we will most likely rain check our day at the beach and maybe head to a museum instead.  The all too famous “It was a dark and stormy night” usually lets the reader know something bad is about to happen.  “It’s raining, it’s pouring, the old man was snoring.” Right? We all know what happens next.  The old man’s accident could have been predicted by the weather stated in the beginning of the nursery rhyme.  As mentioned many times before, rain is a two-sided sword.  The rain could be foreshadowing change and new beginnings, and alluding to the bible story of Noah’s ark, where God flooded the earth to start over.  Once again, it is up to the reader to discover the author’s intent behind the weather.

            Foster uses The Dead by James Joyce as an example for snow used in literature.  In the book, the main character realizes that snow is “the great unifier” (page 81).  Snow is usually more graceful and cleaner and beautiful than rain.  The look of the “winter wonderland” and the holiday season it usually comes during help to create an ironically warm, cuddly, and peaceful mood.  Unless, of course, you are stuck outside in it, in which case it is cold as death and stifling.  In Let it Snow, a collection of holiday romance short stories by Maureen Johnson, John Green, and Lauren Myracle, the snow is the reason for the story.  Without the snow, there would have been no conflict.  A blizzard on Christmas Eve stops a train in front of an all night diner and introduces, and reintroduces, characters to each other that would have never meet had the skies been clear that night.  I was reminded of this cheerful holiday story at Foster’s mention of The Three Strangers by Thomas Hardy, where three strangers are forced into meeting after taking shelter from the rain.

            Weather can foreshadow, set the mood, or drive the conflict.  The weather, or even lack of weather should be seriously considered when analyzing a book.  As the title of the chapter suggest, it’s more than just rain or snow, and Foster’s short chapter on the weather in literature opens a rather large can of worms that can be furthered explored in both one’s reading and writing.