Nit Picking at Its Worst

 

I’ve been watching re-runs of Northern Exposure* on Amazon Prime. It’s a wacky show, not to be taken seriously by any means.

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Except . . . A note rang true for me in the Season 6 episode, “The Graduate.” Let me give a bit of background information.

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Since the beginning of the series, Chris Stephens (John Corbett) has been expounding about literary works with professorial wisdom in his job as a disc jockey at the local radio station. Now, he is trying to earn a master’s degree in comparative literature.

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Except . . . he never earned a baccalaureate degree.

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Interesting or just plain dumb? Taking literary license too far? Definitely!

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Anyway . . . His major professors come to give Chris his oral examination.

 

Except . . . Since when did a major professor ever reach out to a student, even if he was located in the back woods of Alaska?

 

The professors ask pithy questions and expect pithy answers, which Chris provides. The pithy questions bring to Chris’ mind the idea that the professors are so busy picking the literary works to pieces that they completely lose the intended meanings of them. To illustrate his point, Chris re-enacts Ernest Thayer’s poem, Casey at the Bat. He takes the professors to the baseball diamond, where he pitches to one of the professors, who portrays the mighty Casey. When he strikes out “Casey,” he says, “That and the feeling in your gut is what Casey at the Bat is all about.”

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Exactly! Mr. Thayer wrote about a usually excellent batter who had a bad day and struck out, causing his team to lose the game and all his fans in Mudville to be brokenhearted. That is what he meant, nothing more.

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That is exactly how I felt in literature classes when I was in college. The professor asked what the author meant about whatever work we were studying. I gave the meaning as I had grasped it. The professor looked at me like I should have been demoted to the first grade, then launched into a lengthy exposition that left me frantically re-reading the work and searching the footnotes for some hint of what the professor was talking about. I never found the answer, only a question: If the lengthy exposition is what the author meant, why didn’t he just say so, instead of hiding it behind so much flora and fauna?

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Methinketh that the world would be a much happier place if schools allowed students to enjoy the works they read, rather than expecting them to understand meanings that just aren’t there for the reader to see.

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*  Falahey-Austin Street Productions / Universal Television, 1990-1995.

 

Read Casey at the Bat. Casey at the Bat by Ernest Lawrence Thayer (https://www.poetry.com/poem/12844/casey-at-the-bat)

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