Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious - an Essay

This is was the essay I wrote for UVA. I was tired, it was two hours before the deadline, and I had had enough with essays. So I pulled this out of the what-the-fierfek part of my brain...and I got into UVA. Just goes to show... (finish this sentence however you like).             

 “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” seems a cheap response to “what is your favorite word,” but I do not love it simply for its length. It brings back warm memories of watching Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke dancing in a cartoon fairyland; it harkens to a groundbreaking work of cinema and imagination; and it is almost delicious to say out loud. For me, words are everything; as a storywriter, I spend hours looking for just the right word – a task which often involves taking the word itself apart.

“Super” is obvious. In Mary Poppins, everything is super –imagination reigns, from the chimney tops to the cartoon penguins. As a child, I used to dream of living in a world where anything is possible; now I invest my time in making those dreams a reality.

“Cali” is not a reference to California – at least, not in my book. I prefer “calibrate,” reminiscent of adjusting and fine-tuning. I am not an engineer, nor do I plan to be one, but editing is integral to my life as a writer, changing a word here or a phrase there to create the best possible prose.

“Fragilistic” is Ozian grammar for “fragile.” Many of the things I love in life are fragile – languages, cultures, bonds between people, life itself - and perhaps it is their fragility that makes them so precious to me.  The frailty of these things makes capturing them, with a camera or a notebook, that much more important.

“Expiali” is more obscure. Words like “experiment” or “explore” come to mind, as well as J.K. Rowling’s famous “Expelliarmus!” I am an adventurer by nature, not a scientist or a wizard, but someone who enjoys exploring the hidden worlds of the imagination, and making it come to life.

“Docious” has, in fact, become a slang word for those who do not have the time to say its fourteen-syllable parent. However, whenever possible, I try never to abbreviate, for, as a famous slow-speaking tree once said: “It takes a long time to say anything in Old Entish. And we never say anything unless it is worth taking a long time to say.” And as I have already quite exceeded my word limit, I believe that I have spoken for long enough, and I trust that it was worth taking the time to read. 

Hunger Games: A Review

"Destroying things is much easier than making them," says Suzanne Collins in her novel The Hunger Games.  And I agree. Destroying this book (and the following movie) with a scathing review will be much easier, and perhaps more viscerally satisfying, than trying to write a better one. But with that in mind, I'll try to keep down my hipster disdain for popular tween/teen novels (a disdain reinforced by Twilight fans, among others), and write a balanced review.

The Hunger Games, for the few hermits who have somehow managed to escape hearing about it, concerns a dystopian world in which North America is divided into twelve Districts, ruled by the dictators in the Capitol. Every year, as a chilling reminder of who's boss, the Capitol decrees that "the 12 districts of Panem should offer up a tribute of one young man and woman between the ages of 12 and 18 to be trained in the art of survival and to be prepared to fight to the death" – on live television. The story centers around Katniss Everdeen, a girl from District Twelve who volunteers as tribute in the place of her younger sister Prim. On her journey to becoming the next winner (or is it survivor?) of the Hunger Games, she must deal with the blatant classism of the Capitol, learn to present herself with the poise and grace of a Miss America, fake a romance to gain audience approval, and, of course, kill a lot of people.

The book version of this tale varies widely from its film adaptation not so much in plot as in direction. Although Suzanne Collins did help in writing the screenplay for the film, it provides a completely different take on the story than her novel – not that that's a bad thing. I'll be looking at both in this review, in order. 

But first, a look at the world Collins has created, and the themes presented. Collins's world is a dystopia – a world where the few wealthy folks oppress the many poor folks. While this is not uncommon in dystopian fiction, Collins's Panem has a distinct air of class war to it – the opulence of the Capitol is made to look almost disgusting compared to the abject poverty of District 12, and even within District 12, the merchants and government workers are contrasted with the Seam citizens (the common people working in the mines). There's an unspoken cry of "Unfair!"  behind the whole picture – one that makes me think that, if the current government were overthrown, Panem could very easily, and with popular approval, be reshaped into another kind of dystopia – Communism.

There's also a distinct air of the later Roman Empire's "panem et circenses" philosophy, which says that, given enough popcorn and bad movies, the citizenry will forget about political affairs, and let the government do as it pleases. This is a much more relevant theme, but one that goes largely unexplored. Collins makes sure to emphasize the brutality of forcing children to kill one another on live television. She also makes multiple references to Greco-Roman culture – the introductory chariot promenading, the Coliseum-like atmosphere of the arena, the names of some of the Capitol people (Cinna, Portia, Octavia, Flavius, Cato, etc.), and even the nature of the Games themselves. However, at least in the first book, she fails to explain just how this principle works. Aren't the Games more of a reminder of the outrageous travesties the Capitol has caused? Wouldn't they inspire rebellion more than put it down? And just how distracting is the entertainment, when every second of it reminds you of how the Capitol has oppressed you? The enslavement that television brings isn't explored widely in the book or the movie, and I wish it was. 
More on that later. For now, let's move on to the book. 

The first thing I noticed upon reading was the first-person point of view. Now, there's a lot of debate on this, but the general consensus is, while first-person may create the added advantages of immediacy (forcing the audience into the main character's shoes) and can create more detailed main characters (putting you into his/her head), it can be restricting. Collins cannot tell anything Katniss does not already know, so the inner feelings of the other characters, the inner workings of the Capitol, and the innards of anyone but Katniss are a mystery. Sacrificing this broader perspective gives us a somewhat more intense reading experience, and a better insight into Katniss herself. 

Many have praised Katniss as a wonderful example of a strong female character, as opposed to Bella Swan. However, I found myself, while certainly sympathizing with her, not empathizing with her. While Katniss's dedication to her sister is touching, and her skill with bows and arrows impressive, there seemed to be nothing concerning her personal growth throughout the story. By the end, she seems very much the same as when she began, if a little more traumatized and battle-hardened. Besides her dramatic and rather abrupt decision at the end of the Games, she has not changed noticeably. The skills she takes out of the arena are the same as the skills she took into it – a fierce desire to survive (and who doesn't have that), and wicked bow and arrow skills (which most of us do not have, but many of us are now attempting to acquire). She is strong, but in a way that makes us wish we were her, rather than feel that we are her. For a better illustration of this point, or if you happen to like the BBC series "Sherlock," see the link below.

http://misstransmission.co.uk/the-real-woman-why-molly-hooper-is-the-one-who-counts

That being said, I did care about Katniss – when someone's life is in danger, you tend to care a lot more than you would otherwise. Collins's other characters, on the other hand, are radiant – while they all seem rather secondary, due to the nature of the point of view, they are hugely memorable and nicely executed. There are a great many characters to juggle around in this tale, and Collins does it by defining them by one or two characteristics in such a way that we can remember every one of them. Collins treads the fine line between character and caricature, giving every minor character a certain level of respect, even Effie Trinket, one of the most annoying women in contemporary literature. I fell in love with Rue, Cinna, and even Foxface, to some degree. I largely ignored, however, the awkward Twilight-esque love triangle revolving around Katniss, Gale, and Peeta. 

A love triangle involving two incredibly handsome boys/men fighting over one indecisive girl/woman has been done before, and very badly, too. Collins manages to pull it off, but only just barely. There were times where I felt that the invention of the triangle had been executed simply to draw in the Twilight audience – it felt fake and unnecessary. A love triangle like that is every teenage girl's fantasy – or, in the words of Guinevere from the musical "Camelot":
Where are the simple joys of maidenhood?
Where are all those adoring daring boys?
Where's the knight pining so for me
he leaps to death in woe for me?
Oh where are a maiden's simple joys?
Shan't I have the normal life a maiden should?
Shall I never be rescued in the wood?
Shall two knights never tilt for me
and let their blood be spilt for me?
Oh where are the simple joys of maidenhood?
Shall I not be on a pedestal,
Worshipped and competed for?
Not be carried off, or better still,
Cause a little war?
Where are the simple joys of maidenhood?
Are those sweet, gentle pleasures gone for good?
Shall a feud not begin for me?
Shall kith not kill their kin for me?
Oh where are the trivial joys?
Harmless, convivial joys?
Where are the simple joys of maidenhood?

*ahem* 

Collins' tone is simple, easy to read, and very much Katniss – she pays special attention to every detail of the opulence of the Capital, especially the food, as a starved countrydweller would. I appreciate an author taking the time to really get into her character's head – unfortunately, she has picked rather an unpoetic head into which to go. Katniss has little artistry with her words, and writes rather simply – that in itself has its own sort of beauty, but I can hardly call her an artist of language. It may also have led to something else undesirable, which I will mention later.

On the upside, Collins creates some truly beautiful moments in her work – you can tell her background with television writing in the way she stages some memorable, beautifully handled bits of dialogue and action.  For instance, the end of Katniss and Gale's goodbye meeting could not have been made any better – Collins works very well with a lack of dialogue, using actions and Katniss's wonderings to make jewels out of events. At times, she replaces what would have been useless or inadequate dialogue with a bag of cookies, a piece of bread, or a closing door – manipulating details in such a way as to give them much more meaning than any words ever could. It's this delicate handling of emotion and action that keeps me reading – these small gems amid the rocks. 

There are also some terribly handled moments, as well – moments that are, too, wordless, but corny in a Russell T. Davies sort of way. When the whole of District 12 refuses to clap along with Effie for Katniss's volunteering, instead raising their hands as one in a sign of respect, it felt choreographed – outright emotional manipulation that made no sense in the world outside of television and fiction. Luckily, the number of good moments exceeded the number of bad ones.

Some of these special moments were preserved in the movie, but most of the good ones were not. Thankfully, these missed good moments were replaced with film moments that gave an entirely new perspective of the story. I talked earlier about how first-person point of view was restricting – in film, there is no such thing as point of view (unless you're talking about found-footage movies) – everything must be done in third-person. This allowed the film to go where the book could not – we see the world of the Capitol, the machinations of the top brass, and the minds of the Gamemakers themselves. President Snow gets to explain the mindset behind the Games, Cato gets a moment of desperate/insane/driven-over-the-edge bad guy monologuing that helps us to realize how far the Games have driven him, and we get to see the frankly very cool control room where the Gamemakers control the environment. The social and political implications of the novel are also fleshed out in the film, to great effect.

But these, too, must come at a cost. Because Katniss is not going to narrate all her thoughts out loud, the film was hard pressed to get moviegoers into her mind as the book did. The cinematographer, the one sort of point-of-view we as an audience are going to get, seemed to think that using a handheld for a good three-quarters of the movie would result in a more first-person sort of experience (again, think found footage). The only experience I got was a massive headache from the giant screen rolling and pitching, shuddering and fluttering in the dark room. 

Lucky for them, Jennifer Lawrence was able to bring a lot out of the character in a way that was tangible to her audience – a truly phenomenal actress, she kept a lot of the book in the film simply through her spot-on interpretation of Katniss. Still, the difference is obvious – in the book, it is very clear that Katniss is only pretending to like Peeta, but in the movie, that is a lot less clear. In fact, she seems conflicted, half the time, as to whether or not she is developing a romantic attachment to the boy with the bread.

I had a bone to pick with some of the other casting decisions. While I felt that most people were well-casted, particularly Rue, I disliked Cinna and Haymitch. Cinna had been one of my favorite characters in the book, simply because he was the artist that didn't feel the need to be as flamboyant as the stereotype – the book described him as looking not at all like the other Capitol fashionables. While he is certainly not in the same shocking fashions as the rest of the Capitol residents (by the way, major props to the costume designer for such daring outfits), he seemed to fit the stereotypical African-American fashion-man. Watch any fashion-related television show, find an African-American man, and you will see what I mean.  I think the studio had a chance to really be bold with a character here – find someone who looked quiet and seemingly normal, but with an insane sort of fire in his eyes – and they chose the safe way out: someone who looked as people expect a fashion designer to look, and who lacked the fire that makes a memorable character. My issues with Haymitch are smaller, but also important – he didn't look quite as disheveled, drunk, or just plain disgusting as the book stated. In fact, he reminded me of a well-groomed country singer. 

The book made many sacrifices to fit the attention span of today's moviegoers. A lot of characters and moments were cut out, and much character development was lost (e.g. Madge giving Katniss the mockingjay pin, Gale's cut-off goodbye, Peeta's being drugged). And I found myself a little creeped out by how much I and my fellow moviegoers were rooting for Katniss – as if we wanted her and Peeta to kill everyone else and win. By sacrificing moments such as Cato mourning over the loss of Clove, and instead painting the other Tributes as soulless villains, the film lost sight of the book's goal – to reveal the complete wrongness of putting children/human beings on television and forcing them to compete like animals. 

Speaking of animals, how about those muttations? Frankly, I'm very glad they chose to stage the dog attack at night – any more light and we would have been able to see the sloppy CG. In fact, the genetic mutations idea in general, both in the book and in the film, felt poorly developed. Genetic mutations are a subgenre of science fiction in their own right – to casually mention them as a plot-pushing convenience to make your animals seem stranger and more dangerous is to do the principle an injustice. Concerning CG, however, the wasps were passable, but the dogs were inexcusably bad – with CG wonders such as Rango and The Adventures of TinTin coming out every few months, one wonders how anyone manages to get away with this. Obvious greenscreening and CG sloppiness abound in the chariot scene as well – the studio obviously knew this was not their strong point, since they kept most of the scenes indoors or in the woods. Too picky, you say? Perhaps. Maybe on a smaller home television screen the effects won't be as bad, but as a theatergoing experience, I was disappointed.

Obviously, I'm nitpicking quite a lot. Some would say far too much. But it's these little moments in a movie - particularly a science fiction movie, where so much relies on managing to suspend the audience's disbelief – that ruin everything. I felt myself getting absorbed in the movie…and then jerked back into reality by something flatly and unapologetically unrealistic – poor CG, unrealistic dialogue, or just the fact that somehow Peeta knows how to use mud to make his face look EXACTLY like a rock surface without makeup kit or mirror while bleeding to death. 
In the end, the Hunger Games is a pretty good book and a slightly-less-so movie. The concept behind it is unusual and exciting, and its execution fairly good, fluctuating wildly between the profound and the mundane. For YA fiction, I'd consider this a masterpiece, and quite an achievement, given what fiction of that ilk has been for the past few years. But it's hardly what everyone has hyped it up to be. 

In fact, I find the hype dangerous. Collins's ideas concerning the trivialization of violence in media and the moral dangers of "game" competition come out loud and clear in the book, and in the film, they are punctuated by the quite ghastly wounds that many of the characters endure. But it seems that many preteens are happy to ignore those messages and concern themselves only with Team-Gale-vs.-Team-Peeta, or what-District-do-I-come-from, or what-I-would-do-if-I-was-a-Tribute. The fact that Collins's book is so easy to read, and the fact that librarians and teachers quickly recommend it in their euphoria over preteens even wanting to read at all, continue to put The Hunger Games into the hands and minds of many who are probably too young or immature to pick up on these themes…and The Hunger Games, rather than warning audiences about desensitization, will only contribute to it.

Cooking the Books - an essay

I wrote this short essay (2000 characters total) for the University of Virginia.

Cooking the Books: a Lesson in Portion Size and Poetry

As a child, I was a voracious reader, chomping through Lord of the Rings in eleven days and devouring heady tomes of Austen or Homer without losing my appetite - and, until recently, I was on a novels-only diet. But a few years ago, while strolling idly through the science fiction, I came across “Nightfall and Other Stories,” a collection of short stories by Isaac Asimov. So, on that lazy summer evening, I began my journey into short fiction.

                Sleep did not come easily that night. I found that the stories were like potato chips – you couldn’t eat just one. And, unlike chips, each was not only radically different and deliciously satisfying, a gourmet dish in itself, but it left you curious, and hungry for more. I visited worlds that had never seen darkness, and glimpsed a future where going out-of-doors was considered hazardous to one’s health. And in every story, I discovered a beautifully crafted “what if?” – sometimes answered, sometimes left open for the reader to explore. Both long and short stories were good meals – but while the former was a one-dish dinner, the latter was a pâté de foie gras with Chardonnay, whose flavor lingered in your mouth long after you swallowed.

                Since then, I have sampled collections and anthologies, from Chaim Potok’s Zebra and Other Stories to Halo Evolutions: Essential Tales of the Halo Universe. I have applied the “short is sweet” principle in my own stories, practicing word economy and polishing every sentence until it glows. I have realized that life is not one long epic, but rather a series of moments, each with its own joys or sorrows to savor, lessons or questions to receive and, perhaps, answer. And I have begun to live, as well as write, as well as read, like a food critic – taking my time to savor every word, every nuance, every flavor.   

With college decisions over...

...now is the time to start posting some of the essays I've written.

Most people find writing essays for college applications a chore, but I found joy in them, somehow. I suppose I had to, if only to keep me writing and keep me sane. But every essay I wrote was a foray into who I was.

So here's the essay that I used for my common application, meaning every college I applied to saw this - and some of them asked me about it.

Wait and See

You see that child? Yes, that one – the only one in the throng of five-year-olds who isn’t wearing a traditional princess dress. She’s dressed as Jasmine, because Jasmine is the only Disney princess who wears pants, and hence, the only one with enough mobility to have a good time – which she does not hesitate to do. Her brightly sequined, loudly jingling top and pants allow her to be almost everywhere at once, chattering away with her friends or organizing talent shows for an amused parent audience. When an adult gathers the little princesses together for a group picture, she’s the one striking a dramatic movie star pose, while everyone else sits prettily and says “cheese.”   

You see that kid? There, among the sweltering hordes of Disney World vacationers. She’s the one with the face paint and outlandish belt – taking full advantage of the park’s “Star Wars Weekends,” she and her brother have become vicious bounty hunters scouring the galaxy for targets…while waiting in line for a ride experiencing “technical difficulties.”  Suddenly, she points out their targets: two four-foot-tall Jedi in line behind them - sweaty, cranky, and wearing thin the patience of all within earshot.  Slowly, deliberately, the girl walks up to them, resting one hand on an imaginary laser blaster. “You two Jedi?” One boy gulps, and responds defiantly, “Yeah… what are you?” Winking at his mother, she growls, “Bounty hunters. We eat Jedi for dinner.” The other boy catches on, yells “Heyaah!” and the battle is on – plastic lightsabers versus finger guns – to the amusement of the other park-goers. By the time the miniature Jedi have vanquished the bounty hunters once and for all, the line is moving again. One of the mothers mouths a silent thank-you to the girl, now faking a severe limp as she moves up in line.

                You see that girl? There, in that mini-van speeding down the highway towards the Poconos. While the other teenagers argue over which ski slopes to hit first, she sits quietly, perusing a coil-bound transcript of “God and Country Radio”‘s program on John Calvin’s Treatise On Civil Government. Eventually, she looks up and asks its author, engaged at the steering wheel, “Pastor, you believe that the state should be under the authority of the Bible?” If he were to turn around, he might notice the gleam in her eye and attempt to forestall the coming storm; but, thinking her question to be merely mild curiosity – after all, he only gave her the transcript as debate team research material - he replies in the affirmative. “Why?” she challenges. “What about freedom of religion?” Thus begins a spirited dialogue spanning everything from Locke’s Second Treatise of Government to Catholic beliefs on separation of church and state – a dialogue that will last the rest of the two-hour car trip, through lunch break, and for most of the way back home, long after the rest of the car’s occupants have fallen asleep from exhaustion.

                You see this girl? Yes, this one right here, writing college essays with one hand and eating a chocolate cookie – nature’s best brain food – with the other. When this is finished, she will click “submit,” log off the laptop, and find some other adventure to embark on. Who will she be talking to, playing with, masquerading as, debating with?

Wait and see.