Viewing entries tagged
Literature

ARTISTIC INTEGRITY

ARTISTIC INTEGRITY

I’m just going to come right out and say that I totally used to believe that Mad Men’s Megan Draper was somehow going to turn out like the tragic Sharon Tate and that I believed that simply because in one scene she wore the same tee shirt that Tate was once photographed in for a magazine spread.  It didn’t fully matter to me that the show’s creator all but went on the record to say that the theories abounding about Megan’s fate were all wrong – I believed anyway.

But now that Mad Men is wrapping up forever tonight (that’s right:  for the most part, only the tremendously important shows come back eventually, like the upcoming reboot of Full House that has made me contemplate the collective intelligence of the universe at large), I finally believe Matt Weiner.  Seems the show’s creator was telling the truth about the whole Megan thing and I know this to be true because the show currently takes place in the very early seventies and the Manson murders took place in late 1969 and Megan is still alive, but I’m obviously curious about how the show and its characters will conclude and I have read some pretty interesting theories that guess at what could happen.

THE THINGS I CARRY

THE THINGS I CARRY

If I have ever truly cared about you, at some point I gave you a copy of The Things They Carried.  

I’m not really a mixed messages kind of girl.  You can literally weigh my devotion to you based on whether or not I ever handed you that book.

My devotion to that novel is intense, but it’s not one that stems all the way back to my childhood.  I actually never even heard of the book until I became a teacher and realized I was expected to teach the thing after I finished The Catcher in the Rye, an experience that did not end well.  I had to calm my students down when they became furious by the book’s somewhat ambiguous ending that refused to lay everything out neatly and then tie the strings of the narrative into a sweet bow.  Something I’ve learned over the years?  The average reader wants to be left with absolutely no questions – the average reader wants to have everything resolved perfectly.