Professor Carver’s Feedback

(Cut epilogue from Saturday Mornings Forever.)

Professor Carver's Feedback: 

     “Charlie Bluesmith.” Two words I find myself involuntarily repeating, out loud. Your interestingly titled project, Saturday Mornings Forever, is quite frankly, the anomaly of the pack. Knowing what little about you over the course of this and the preceding semester didn’t prepare me for the kind of project you submitted.

Firstly, I commend your commitment to dig deep for what seems an exhaustive recount of the most intimate and private parts of your life. That being said, I must attempt to breakdown whatever your project is through a critical perspective. I will not comment on who Charlie Bluesmith, the young woman is, as it is not my job, nor place to needlessly analyze. Perhaps the only thing I will say, is that your thoughts read like they go a hundred miles per hour, at all times, as-if Holden Caulfield were to narrate a John Hughes film.     

     Throughout this piece, your strange and often hyperbolic narrative combines stream-of-consciousness with a slog of expansive, pseudo-exploratory dialectics (to which, I will skip the pages of ill-transposed stage play, adapted from long and arduous, near nihilistic conversations about nothing in-particular). To put this more into perspective: most of your peers were able to redact and/or concisely extrapolate small, intimate moments of their year into creative outlets of expression. 

     One example I would like to direct you is the project of Maureen Mackelroy entitled, Taking it by the Hour. Her work serves as a perfect encapsulation of what was expected this semester as per the course outline and grading rubric: Over the period of a year, Maureen focused on the time she spent babysitting her younger siblings, reflecting as to what a future of motherhood meant to her. What themes she highlighted from her journal were near axioms in-context to subject matter, and the level of intimate details she shared were at most, platitudes and Pollyanna. 

     Not once throughout my tenure, including the two courses you attended, have I ever request a class project reveal inappropriate personal details, nor contain sensitive aspects of any student's private life. While I do recognize we explore the conceptual and abstract in my class (i.e., “honesty” in writing), I provide every opportunity to ensure students the ability to make a case if they do not want - nor can’t - write about their personal lives, however seldom in occurrence. It seems, in-part, due to the small size of our town and its relative slow pace of life, the vast majority taking this course exhibit eagerness to provide details about themselves. In fact, most of my students here demonstrate a resounding difficulty to elicit even minor profundities from their journals. This I assume, may be due to the simplicity of which we live our existence amidst this lakeside town, and the canopy of fog that surrounds us. 

      Your project did succeed in exploring nostalgia, “coming-out-of-age,” and sexuality, with a unique, verbose, almost manic if-existential, tongue-in-cheek deconstruction. Rich themes of identity, consumerism and consciousness were expounded on, but at the expense of revealing intimate details of your struggles with mental health. The writing itself, ample and rife with a distinct voice throughout the text, ultimately becomes drowned out by your exorbitant amount of pop-cultural sprinklings, which fundamentally detract from its relatability and universality of a message. From the outset, Saturday Mornings Forever immediately comes off as a tangled, indulgent mess between two competing concepts: one, an exploration of dreamlike fugue states about age and lost youth, and the second, conversely, being Saturday mornings as a two-fold meaning, both literally and symbolically, representing an ongoing call-to-action for new beginnings, and personal liberation within sondering narrative.  

     In laymen’s terms, at its most purest and raw form, your project reads as a love letter to the past, and a personal shrine preserving nostalgia. Even now, as I sit over your notebook, I find myself nodding with small pleasure, remembering segments of your work that provoked a physical, second-hand embarrassment in me. Although there were sections within Saturday Mornings Forever utterly mired by idiosyncratic and myopic drivel, I do feel that what has been unearthed here is something equally ridiculous, though self-serving, even cathartic, but nonetheless, special.

I believe Charlie Bluesmith, that what reads here feels compelling, even if on face value alone. Despite what I imagine others amongst my profession would call the project you submitted as nothing more than an un-glorified diary, I have to say, it’s more akin to an open wound on paper. 

     There are revelations within its indulgent emotionality and hyper-sentimentality, fetishized through personal consumerism so tied directly as means of futilely linking the past to present. Saturday Mornings Forever reads as romantic poeticism, drunken in its efforts to dually thwart and oxymoronically propagate an unaware yet, at-times, sentient hodgepodge of semi-self-aware diatribes. Furthermore, the length of this project has greatly exceeded what was asked, though what I read of its emotional brevity and earnestness in-attempt to assess itself, did engage me, even if on a (somewhat) voyeuristic level.

     I do think you will do, and have done, many great things, despite what you write about yourself. It has been nothing short of a pleasure to have you in class, regardless of what you may have inferred otherwise. Reading some of your thoughts makes it clear you have been through hardship, as is much often the case with the underclass. There is more to life than aesthetics or achievements, Ms. Bluesmith, and what insight you have exhibited can elude the everyman without so much as another thought. Treasure your heart and do not give it up, because that is what gives life to your writing. 

In closing, many elders like myself have been all too aware of our township’s fledgling populace. This place seems to decay more and more to the ephemeral, every day. Speaking briefly to what you mentioned of stolen land: We will not find heaven on a garden of sin. Sometimes, small towns such as ours, need time to pass on. I cannot speak with certainty about the future, but I think you will do best to spread your wings once more, before it swallows you up. Aging is a privilege so few get to enjoy, though it does feel as a curse. 

A curse is something of folklore, but I look forward to seeing what changes you are a part of, in the future. 

B minus. 

Next time, format your project as requested, and attempt to edit yourself. Good luck, child, 

                          - Professor Carver 

© 2021, A. M. D’Angelo