How to Be the Top English Major

English is the most biased subject in universities. Your grade is an opinion on the quality of your opinions. Names are written on essays when profs mark them, so participation counts for a lot more than the 10% stated on the syllabus. I’ve seen many bright people walk out of English class with a crappy grade and no clue why. They don’t realize that the worst thing they could do is follow the prof’s advice and simply write something “weird” and “different,” with a “new perspective.” But had they stuck to one of the following two strategies, they would’ve succeeded big time.

1. The lobbyist

As the name suggests, you must lobby the professor and stick to him like a leech. This is the most sure-fire way to win big in English class. Sit at the very front and make your presence known immediately. Laugh the hardest at all the professor’s jokes, which he thinks have echoes of Tony Kushner and post-structuralist theory (how is that funny?). Bring him coffee. Raise your hand and be his go-to when the class falls silent. Make his office hours into your weekly church-going and find out details on his life and literary preferences. Incorporate these into your essays, i.e. make reference to his favourite authors. Be sure in your essay to quote the prof’s words religiously. Repeatedly write, “As we discussed in class...” Allude to trite observations and lines of thought that came up in class discussions. He will feel sorry for you, but flattered. When you get your first essay back, throw a little tantrum during his office hours, but don’t blame him: blame yourself. Say that if you don’t get a 90 in this course, it won’t be tolerated by your stepdad. (If your prof is LGBT-friendly, you can try coming out of the closet half-way through the semester, using him as your sensai.) The whole point of the lobbyist strategy is to get smack in the centre of the prof’s consciousness. You must be thought of as adorable and fragile and tireless, someone who worships his every word... maybe even someone who needs a 90 or else the school’s mental health ward will get a sudden spike in attendance. Victimhood is not a requirement for lobbying, but it’s always an option for the English major.

 

2. The pseudo-intellectual

This role is harder to pull off and closer to being an actual good student; it requires a few brain cells. Sit in the middle of the classroom, perhaps cross-legged or in some kind of half-lotus. Talk slowly and a bit sternly. You want to wear a beret and be seen rolling tobacco on your desk. In class, deliver mini-monologues that dissent from popular opinion. You want to establish yourself as an autonomous thinker, someone who has already reached a zenith of self-realization, however lame, and who the prof is slightly intimidated by. However, the whole beret shtick will brand you as a pseudo-intellectual, i.e. someone he can dismiss privately. After all, you will be “in your own little world” and won’t threaten his sense of self-validation. Become a kind of island of thought and be very assured, never showing fear or mixed signals. Pretend you are someone who is delivering a very sober speech at a left-wing rally caught on the six o’clock news. Write essays that are about 2000 words too long, with brutal asides about veganism, wildlife, and bird-watching. You could also handwrite the essays. At the end of the day, because you are a bit intelligent, a bit cool (in a fake way), and a bit of a brick wall, you will be in a position to get a good mark and he will be excited as hell to get rid of you.

Of Media, Massacres, and the Unchaining of Quentin's Neuroses

Canadians criticizing Americans is often criticized. After all, Americans don’t really give Canadians much thought. Yet many Canadians, in the Wikileaked words of a U.S. diplomat, “fall into the trap of seeing all U.S. policies as the result of nefarious faceless U.S. bureaucrats anxious to squeeze their northern neighbour.” One issue where Canadians and Americans couldn’t be more divided, where the oft-pathetic hippie finger-wagging at the United States is a nod in the right direction, is gun culture. The policy differences between the two nations is another topic, but suffice it to say that a culture of firearms seems almost as American as apple pie. After the mass murder at Newtown, Connecticut, there’s new recognition of this and calls for political action, but there’s also resistance to change.

 

Or at least change in the direction of fewer firearms. The National Rifle Association demagogue Wayne LaPierre called for more guns and blamed violent videogames and the mentally ill, who he clearly considers sub-human rats. There’ve also been fireworks when the CNN anchor Piers Morgan debated the conspiracy-obsessed radio host Alex Jones and the gun lobbyist Larry Pratt, resulting in a 100,000-signature petition for Piers's deportation. Many Americans consider the Second Amendment sacred, as if it frees America from despotism and tyranny. But who are they afraid of? The ghost of King George? Muslim terrorists? Extraterrestrials? A socialist U.S. government? Or just themselves?

 

Invective aside, the reverence for the Second Amendment in the United States is here to stay and means more guns and probably more massacres. I mean, consider a person who owns an assault rifle versus one who doesn’t – who’s more likely to point a gun at himself or others when he gets depressed, confused, or angry? Gun advocates like Wayne LaPierre stress keeping guns from the mentally ill, as if guns only bring tragedy when they’re in the hands of crazy people, not "real" people. But it seems dubious that a change in mental health policy or background checks alone could meaningfully reduce the rate of mass murders, if passed.

 

Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised that the Bushmaster XM-15 rifle used by Adam Lanza at the Newtown massacre was made by a company called the Freedom Group. Or that Quentin Tarantino, whose new film Django Unchained is an orgy of gore, shrugs off any link between movies and violent massacres. But my shock was most righteous when the following message appeared in my inbox, after ordering Raybans from Illinois-based Opticsplanet: “Stock Up On Firearm Accessories: Holsters, Cleaning Kits & More!” (my American friends who think that whereof I cannot speak, I must be silent should blame Opticsplanet’s market research team for thinking a Rayban-buying Canadian to be the target market for gun apparel; America came knocking on my door.)

Can you see the obvious marketing link? They're both black.
 

Anyway, the link between mass murders and gun numbers might be the domain of statisticians, and the link between mass murders and mental illness is – well, good luck to whoever grapples with that. But the link between mass murders and violent media, while abstract and murky, is pretty interesting to this wannabe writer. Now, it’s not trendy to say that video games and movies affect violence levels in the West. But media is now part of the oxygen we breathe. Quentin Tarantino must know this. He cancelled Django Unchained’s premier in the wake of Newtown, which might not warrant comment except that there are, like, a hundred gruesome murders in his new flick. And except that he positively refuses to address the link between movie violence and real violence, even telling a persistent British interview “I’m not your slave.” Go ahead and watch Django Unchained and tell yourself that violence isn’t what received almost half of Quentin’s tender loving care. Now, you might like the pulpy violence, the sheer entertainment, not to mention the vibrant set pieces and lofty Tarantino production, but can you tell me that he hasn’t received $100,000,000 to film his violent wet dream where blood sprays like champagne and limbs break apart like jelly donuts? Do Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained actually have a progressive historical bent (i.e. exacting revenge on Nazis and slave owners), or is that just a conceit so Quentin can play with himself and we pay to watch, like lambs to the slaughter?

Wait – I’m not saying that anybody who’s watched a Tarantino flick has committed a bloody massacre as a result. But the movie has grossed $125,399,000 in a couple weeks and Hollywood influences what’s normal, at least as entertainment. Even shelving the theory that violent media influences sick young men, it’s strange that we congregate in public to watch bloodbaths for fun, while considering other subject matter taboo. Basically, moviegoers’ daily lives are marked more by deviant sexuality and drug use than gore, yet a film that showed, say, teenagers having promiscuous sex and dropping tabs (cough, Kids) would be dark and scandalous, whereas Django Unchained is just an action movie.

 

I think that the coincidence of Newtown and Django Unchained’s release signals a depraved, violence-obsessed culture. But I admit that the impetus to call out Quentin Tarantino as irresponsible might be linked to the very mediocrity of his new movie. The late David Foster Wallace contrasted Tarantino unfavourably against David Lynch in his non-fiction book A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. Yet that was the Tarantino of Reservoir Dogs, a light-years superior movie to Django Unchained. Maybe my inner creative writing student is as appalled by the puerile script (“Niggales” is the black Hercules), flat characters (the crowd-pleasing Dr. Schultz is too one-dimensional to save us from dull Django’s lack of meaningful development), and plodding narrative as my moral, preachy self is annoyed by how much Quentin relishes violence.

 

I, too, play violent video games and watch violent movies. And I’m not going to argue for a ban or say that they cause massacres in the United States. But neither will I suggest that in our sleepless, media-drenched culture where young kids are almost tweaking, almost stoned with media, are hooked to an IV of connectivity and influence, and sometimes boil down to a set of “Likes” to be mined by corporations for profit – neither will I suggest that Quentin is “just making movies” and has moral impunity. Real war isn’t pornographic; Django-type executions are perpetrated almost exclusively by either Tarantino-esque cartoon characters or by the Seung-Hui Chos, Dylan Klebolds, and James Eagan Holmeses. Do we really know that there’s no precession of simulacrum? Can we really say that the orgasmic machinegun fire in the movie-theatre massacre of Inglourious Basterds found no echo in the shooting at the premier of The Dark Knight Rises? My view is that Quentin’s moral flicks do more to sicken our culture than to address historical tragedies. Even if I can’t prove that, still, the fundamentals of these movies, the guts of them, are very weak indeed.