Success through failure

Posted on July 15, 2012 by Katherine Wikoff

The “Review” section of yesterday’s Wall Street Journal contained an interesting short article by Ken Bain, titled “Flummoxed by Failure – or Focused,” which was primarily about the un-fixed nature of intelligence.  Most people are just about as smart as they think they are or believe they have the capacity to become.  In order to learn difficult things, you must be able to overcome failure (see it as a temporary setback) and keep moving forward with the expectation that you will eventually figure it out. 

In other words, you need to be resilient.  And not only is intelligence a more flexible, malleable quality than previously thought, but it also turns out to be less important to academic success than resilience is.

The idea of “lifelong learning” has intrigued me for about 15 years now.  Not in the sense of recreational programs for senior citizens, nor in the sense of professional development seminars aimed at keeping job skills current – but in the sense of perpetual curiosity and continual, purposeful learning.  Whenever I read about artists and inventors, I’m struck by their insatiable desire to learn, and I wonder if somehow establishing such a culture of lifelong learning within a company or society at large would nuture a parallel culture of innovation.

Because I also am a huge fan of Pixar films, I noticed several years ago that the company had an in-house “university” offering an array of courses for all employees.  Randy Nelson, the former “Dean” of Pixar University, is now the “Dean” of Apple University.  I am in awe of his wisdom and insights regarding learning, creativity, and innovation.  If you’d like to find out more about Pixar University and Nelson’s approach to in-house “training,” several articles and interviews are out there online (for example, this New York Times article).

While writing a conference paper a couple years ago, I stumbled across this video clip of Nelson talking about his work at Pixar.  Two things jumped out at me right away, one of which is relevant for this blog post. 

First, let me say a few words about the item that isn’t.  It concerns the idea of “collaboration,” which is very relevant for my teaching and possibly for anyone working on large creative projects.  Engineers in industry work on teams, but Nelson’s concept of how teams should function is quite different from the way “teamwork” is commonly understood.  I’ll post on this topic later in the week, actually, because it’s something I want to explore in more detail, and writing is often my best avenue for discovery.

But back to the idea of resilience.  The other thing Nelson says in the video caught my attention because it runs so counter to the fear of failure that most of us have internalized.  He says:

The core skill of innovators is error recovery, not failure avoidance.

“Error recovery” is an interesting concept, because the larger culture certainly does not tolerate failure very well.  But failure (or, more specifically, analysis and then remediation of failure) is an important part of learning – especially for “innovators.”  When you’re involved in creative work, there often is no road map, no “best practices,” and no way to chart your path . . . except through trial and error. 

My job teaching future engineers has led me to the work of Henry Petroski, who writes frequently on the history of design.  More specifically, he highlights failure analysis and the crucial, yet undervalued and misunderstood, relationship between learning and failure.  I had never really thought of how important it is to fail well until I read his work.

Failure is not merely a mistake; its scale is larger than that, as is its associated cost.  Our fear of failure stems quite understandably from its disastrous consequences.

Despite the fact that every toddler falls many times before learning how to walk, getting up again doesn’t come so easily to most adults.  Internalizing the resilience to recover from failure requires practice, and unfortunately the only way to acquire that practice is to fail.

To err is human.  That much may be beyond our control, but how we respond to our errors is something we can take charge of.

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Creativity, “Mr. Patent,” Keith Richards, and me

Posted on July 11, 2012 by Katherine Wikoff

Following up on yesterday’s post on “Creativity and the importance of routine,” here is a link to a Fast Company article I recall reading ten years ago. 

Titled “Mr. Patent,” it profiles Marvin Johnson, a research fellow at Phillips Petroleum who has 212 patents to his hame.  (Or “had,” anyway, back in 2002.)

Why do I still remember this article?  Because of Johnson’s approach to innovation and creativity.  He said he looked for small, focused, solvable problems:

What’s really important is finding solutions to problems.  If you find a unique solution, then you have a patent.

Johnson likened his work as a chemist/engineer to another pastime he also enjoyed, solving the coded word puzzles called “cryptoquips”:

You have to have the patience to return to it.  Play with it for a while, go do something else, then come back when you have a new idea.  Each time you return to the puzzle, you pick up the same threads and weave a different cloth.  Eventually you get it right.

It’s interesting that a scientist/engineer would do this with a word puzzle . . . because it’s exactly the same thing I do (Ph.D. in English) with Sudoko, a number puzzle.  I pull out the page of the newspaper containing that day’s puzzle, fold it into a convenient size, and then work on it in tiny chunks of time.  When I get stuck, I quit.  Maybe I don’t get back to it for a couple of days, but when I do pick it up again, I can immediately see something I missed before.  As soon as that new piece of the puzzle is completed, several other parts of the solution fall quickly into place before I get stuck again. 

This is also how I work on writing projects.  When I wrote my dissertation, it was the longest thing I had ever written, maybe ten times the length of any single course paper.  I didn’t know how to do it.  In some ways, for me at least, the most valuable part of that final academic experience was coming to understand myself as a writer and accept the fact that my work style is quite different from most people’s.

It was very disconcerting back then for me to talk with the other grad students and hear them saying things like, “Yeah, I’ve finished Chapters 1 and 2.  My advisor has Chapter 3, and I’m working on Chapter 4 now.”  Because I had NOTHING “finished” until the entire thing was finished, all at once. 

This was the only way I found I could write: a little bit here, a little bit there.  I’d get an idea about a tiny little chunk of material, so I’d write it up.  Maybe it would be three pages.  Eventually all of my chunks started to organize themselves into categories, so I created “chapter” files in my computer and moved the chunks into their new neighborhoods.  But each “chapter” was just a jumbled mess of chunks.  Nothing that could really be called “finished.”  I was embarrassed to share anything with my advisor, and I have to give him a lot of credit for working with me on my terms.  He looked at my disorganized pages and gave me feedback but never made me feel ashamed of my discursive, nonlinear writing process.

Finally, by the end of the project, the entire “whole” of my dissertation began to make itself clear.  I couldn’t type fast enough to keep up with my vision.  At the end of each day, I could see the path ahead of me so clearly that I could have written nonstop for days or weeks . . . if only I could have stayed awake long enough to do it. 

When I read Keith Richards’ memoir Life two years ago, I could totally identify with his reason for using heroin.  When he was producing the Exile on Main St. album during the Rolling Stones’ actual “exile” in the south of France, Richards said the heroin allowed him to stay awake for incredibly long periods so he could see his musical ideas through to completion.  (Interesting aside: I was just double-checking the spelling of “street” in the album title and discovered that a documentary film called Stones in Exile came out two years ago, just a few months before Richards’ book.  Sounds intriguing; I’m going to check it out 🙂 )

It never occurred to me to use something like heroin, thank God.  What I did instead was to take time at the end of each work day to write down what came next, just jotted notes that tried to capture the gap between where I was and the completed “whole” I was trying to reach.  Then when I sat down to work again the next day, all I had to do was read my notes from the night before – and I was mentally right back in the same place!  I could see the entire, completed whole again stretching out ahead of me in my mind’s eye.

I’m not sure how or even whether my experience has significance for anyone else. 

But if your working style is more linear, like the other graduate students who were able to move through their dissertations chapter by chapter, maybe you could try working my way if you ever get “stuck.” 

And if your working style is messy and indirect, like mine (and I suspect we are a distinct minority), know that you are not alone and that learning to work in the only way you can work will make you a lot happier and more productive than trying to be efficient and organized the way you think you “should” be.

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Creativity and the importance of routine

Posted on July 10, 2012 by Katherine Wikoff

One of my favorite writers is Flannery O’Connor, a Southerner who lived and wrote for most of her life on a farm in rural Georgia.  Possibly you’ve never read her, or maybe you read one of her stories once and wound up, like me, repulsed and confused. 

Here’s what turned me into a Flannery O’Connor fan.  Several years ago, I had to read a whole slew of her short stories in about a week’s time because so many book clubs wanted to register for the same Great Books session on “Everything that Rises Must Converge” that I was asked at the last minute to come on board as a second facilitator.  When you read any writer’s work all at once like that, you start to notice little things.  In O’Connor’s case, I started seeing the word “sly” quite often in her stories, shading her characters and foreshadowing events.  Somehow in that one word O’Connor manages to summon up all the darkness of the human soul.

But what I want to talk about today is creativity, specifically the importance of cultivating a creative “practice” for anyone who aspires to be an artist of any kind.  Flannery O’Connor deserves mention here because of her disciplined work habits.  During grad school I first encountered this quote of hers:

I don’t know if the muse is going to show up or not on any given day, but by golly, I’m going to be at my desk from 8 to 12 every morning in case she does.

Don’t you love that image of O’Connor sitting at her desk, ready to greet the muse?  Although no one can forcibly will creative work into being, anyone can be present and open and attentive – poised to capture any glimmer of inspiration that may reveal itself. 

O’Connor called her work ethic “the habit of art,” which she explained more specifically as an artist’s worldview, or way of being: “The scientist has the habit of science; the artist, the habit of art.” 

Writing is something in which the whole personality takes part – the conscious as well as the unconscious mind.  Art is the habit of the artist and habits have to be rooted deep in the personality.

O’Connor’s description sounds a lot like Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, which advocates personal growth through creative practice, as a way for “recovering” artists to find their spiritual center in a society that does not value art. 

It makes me happy to think of creativity as a “habit” or “practice” – an ongoing activity continually performed – instead of a personal attribute (as in a “creative” person).  Anyone can “be” creative if to be creative means engaging in creative activity.

Consider these words that come to mind when I think of creativity as daily practice:

Routine – derives from the French route, meaning “road” or “route,” with the –ine suffix indicating the diminutive.  So a “routine” is a small road.  I like that.  If you want to go somewhere creative, a routine is a road you take to get there.  But it’s not like driving a flat-out freeway, where you grip the steering wheel and concentrate on speeding along with traffic in the pneumatic tube of an interstate.  Instead, it’s more of a back road, like the “blue highways” driven by William Least Heat-Moon.  You drive it, but you can enjoy the scenery and meet people along the way. 

Discipline – derives from the Latin roots disciplina (“instruction”), discipulus (“pupil”), and discere (“to learn”).  So discipline is less about strength of will and forcing oneself to perform than it is about curiosity, teaching, and learning.

Perseverance – derives from Latin by way of French, with the original meaning coming from per (“by” or “through”) and severus (“serious,” “severe,” “strict,” “grave,” “dignified,” “earnest”).  My old American Heritage Dictionary describes “perseverance” as having a favorable connotation, suggesting patience and continuing strength in withstanding difficulty or resistance, whereas “persistence” and “tenacity” imply dogged resolve that is willful, unreasonable, annoying, and perhaps aggressive.  So “perseverance” is less about winning at any price or being grimly determined not to quit (grrrr . . .) than it is about just showing up every day with a calm steadfastness and doing the work.

Filmmaker Woody Allen is famous for saying that much of success in life is a matter of just showing up.  (Exactly how much is a little unclear to me.  Sometimes it’s quoted as 90%, sometimes as 80%.  But we can safely say “much” of success, in any case.) 

Showing up.  That’s what it takes to have a successful creative practice.  How simple is that?  (And hard, at the same time.)

Allen is an excellent example, in fact, of someone who shows up and does the work.  For close to fifty years he has methodically maintained an output of about a film a year.  And for thirty years now (1982-2012) he has released a new film every single year.  Not only does he direct, but he also often writes and acts.  Plus, he is a jazz musician (clarinet) who has toured the world with a New Orleans-style band for about a half-century as well.

Routine.  Discipline.  Perseverance. 

You show up and do the work – so if the muse appears, by golly, you’ll be there to meet her.

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Fun with the Periodic Table (and math)

Posted on July 7, 2012 by Katherine Wikoff

What is it about the Periodic Table that inspires so many take-offs? Look at all these fun makeovers:

Actually, the real Periodic Table is pretty interesting, too, even for someone who hated chemistry class (me).

I bought this book, The Mystery of the Periodic Table, for my kids, but I ended up being the person who enjoyed it the most.  The history of how elements were discovered and the Table ordered is fascinating, especially its uncanny mathematical precision in prediciting the properties of as-yet-undiscovered elements based on their empty-square positions in the Table.

There’s a similar book for grownups,  The Disappearing Spoon (etc., a really long title), by Sam Kean.

The ancient Greeks were really on to something when they discovered the “golden ratio.”  If you can tolerate one more link in a link-heavy post, this old (1959) Walt Disney short, Donald in Mathmagic Land, has the nicest explanation ever of the mathematical underpinnings of the universe.  It shows the inherent mathematical structure underlying architecture, music, nature – and even games like billiards or pool.  Informative and very entertaining.  Used copies of this DVD can be found on Amazon for under $20, and you can also usually find this 27-minute cartoon on YouTube, too.  Here’s a link to the movie on YouTube, and if it has been removed by the time you click through, you can probably find it easily by searching for the title.  Someone else will probably have reposted it by then.

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Barefoot summers

Posted on July 5, 2012 by Katherine Wikoff

Driving home yesterday, we saw a woman crossing the street, barefoot and limping.  Was she hurt?  More likely, we suspected, she was reacting to the asphalt under her feet.  With the outdoor temperature hitting 100°, the street probably felt like a hot griddle.

“When I was a kid, that blacktop wouldn’t have bothered me at all,” I bragged to my husband.  Maybe in May, but not by July 4th. 

None of us kids wore shoes in summer.  We went barefoot from the day school let out, and the acclimation process every year was almost a ritual.  At first our soles were so tender that walking on gravel was like a thousand knifepoints.  Running to the Payless grocery store for milk required strategy; we walked on grass as far as we could, and once grass was no longer available, concrete was by far preferable to asphalt.  When we had to cross the street, we hobbled and hopped across the bubbling tar. 

(Literally, on the tar thing.  Either they make streets differently today, or the sun doesn’t beat down as hotly, because I never see tar bubbling anymore.  But, as I recall, one of our favorite pastimes on a hot summer day was puncturing tar bubbles.)  

By midsummer our feet had toughened to shoe leather.  We would race down our alley with nary a twinge.  The glorious day we could finally walk across hot pavement without wincing truly marked our independence from school and grownups and rules.

Then came the end of August and a shopping trip for back-to-school shoes.

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Thoughts on “Blade Runner” thirty years later

Posted on July 2, 2012 by Katherine Wikoff

I recently joined a LinkedIn group called “World Cinema Critics” to be part of a community engaged in serious film discussions.  Lately we’ve had a comment thread going on the subject of Blade Runner, a movie I hadn’t seen since its theatrical release back in 1982. 

The Blade Runner movie poster.
The film © 1982, 1991 The Blade Runner Partnership
Poster artwork © 1982 The Ladd Company
Source: http://www.impawards.com/1982/blade_runner.html

Last Friday I finally made time to watch it again, partly inspired by the early-June release of director Ridley Scott’s latest film, Prometheus, but more immediately prompted by the World Cinema Critics discussion.  

In that conversation, Blade Runner has gotten mixed reviews – praise for its visionary sets but lukewarm regard for its story.  This surprised me.  Although I certainly remember Blade Runner for its dark, atmospheric design, the one thing that has actually stayed with me most all these years is the story itself . . . particularly one key scene. 

If you’re not familiar with Blade Runner, it is about a cop (or, Blade Runner) who hunts down and “retires” escaped “replicants” in the gritty, crowded city of Los Angeles in the year 2019.  Humanlike creatures who have been bioengineered for use as slave labor off-world, replicants are designed to have limited emotional capacity.  They must be strictly controlled to minimize danger to humanity, and they can be distinguished from humans only by evaluators trained to measure their empathic response through biometric data collected during interrogation sessions.

Former cop Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), the most talented Blade Runner ever, has been called out of retirement to track down and kill those four escaped replicants.  Complicating matters, though, is his discovery that Rachael (Sean Young) – the assistant/protégé of Tyrell, the man whose company makes the replicants – is actually an experimental replicant herself. 

What I recalled so vividly from watching Blade Runner in the theater was Rachael’s attempt to prove to Deckard (and herself) that she is human by showing him a childhood photo of herself with her mother.  Deckard counters with a recitation of Rachael’s most indelible childhood memories – demonstrating to her horror that her sense of “self” is nothing more than implants of memories originally belonging Tyrell’s niece.

This scene, in which Rachael realizes she’s a replicant, is far shorter than I remembered – ironic, considering its focus on unreliable memories!  Maybe that particular moment assumed such significance in my recollection because the idea itself was so powerful. 

Who are we, after all, without our memories?

A few years ago I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for the second time.  In my first reading (which coincidentally occurred at about the same time Blade Runner was in theaters), I was far more interested in the book’s father-son motorcycle trip than the philosophical musings interspersed with the plot.  I remember impatiently skimming those boring sections to get back to the motorcycle story.  However, in my second time through the book, I was amused to realize that I kept skipping over the motorcycle trip to return to the far more interesting philosophical discussion of “quality” instead.  

Similarly, Blade Runner is not the same film for me thirty years later.  But it holds up remarkably well. 

Last Friday night, I noticed aspects of the film’s production design that didn’t even register the first time I saw it in the theater.  In particular, I was struck by the way its deliberate anachronisms speak to each other to form a surprisingly coherent overall visual experience.

The buildings’ interiors and exteriors are either Art Nouveau or Art Deco, styles that flourished from about 1890 through the 1930s.  Daryl Hannah’s replicant character, Pris, wears leg warmers, a look briefly fashionable during the 1980s, which may have made her a more attractive as a “pleasure model” for a 1980s audience.  The clothing and makeup of other characters (especially Rachael and Detective Gaff) have a distinctly 1940s look that, joined together with design elements like Venetian blinds and low-key lighting, creates a “film noir” feel.

A quick check confirms that Blade Runner won an Academy Award for art direction – an honor well deserved!

In the end, though, it’s the visceral response of my 30-years-younger self to the STORY that I keep circling back to.  What makes Blade Runner a classic, for me, is its central theme of identity and what it means to be human.  While my 2012 self has to smile at Blade Runner’s 1982 vision of Los Angeles in 2019, this film also makes me think quite seriously about Bill Joy’s 2000 Wired Magazine essay “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us” and Ray Kurzweil’s speculations about the coming “technological singularity.” 

Someday humanity may need to confront difficult questions about what it means to be human, who “counts” as human, and what inalienable “rights” belong to the machines we create.  Blade Runner presciently points the way toward that discussion.

At the same time, Blade Runner strikes far closer to home in exploring another human mystery that remains satisfyingly unfathomable: the union of one man and one woman.

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Little Free Library

Posted on June 29, 2012 by Katherine Wikoff

Have you heard of the “Little Free Library” yet?

Boxes like birdhouses full of books are popping up in front yards around the metro Milwaukee area.  My own neighborhood has several.

What a nice idea this is . . . and how simple!  A Little Free Library box is basically a weatherproof book cabinet on a post.  You set in up in your front yard and put a few books inside that you’re finished with.  Anyone walking by is invited to take any that look interesting, and people are encouraged, but not required, to pass along books that they’ve finished with to new readers.

Any kind of book is okay – kids’ books, novels, cookbooks, how-to books, coffee-table books.  People browsing or replenishing the stock often meet each other, and the Little Free Library becomes a neighborhood focal point and gathering spot of sorts.  It’s not a replacement for the city library, but it has its own special place in readers’ lives.  It may even serve to bring books to nonreaders, especially in poorer neighborhoods where trips to the larger library may be rare and bookstores don’t exist.

Several articles have been written about the phenomenon, which was started by two men in Madison, Wisconsin, and has spread across America and into other countries.  If you’d like to read more, the Little Free Library website contains links to several news stories in newspapers and television, including this USA Today article that details the project’s beginnings.

If you’re handy, you can build your own Little Free Library with free plans from the website.  Otherwise, you can order one in a variety of styles for a cost of $250 – $400.

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Leaving the nest

Posted on June 28, 2012 by Katherine Wikoff

One of the baby chickadees left the nest early this morning, around 5:30 a.m.  (See video of the nest I shot about a month ago here.)

Shortly after letting the dogs back in, I glanced out the kitchen window and saw a bird, too small to be one of the adults, poking its head out of the knothole and looking around.  Up, down, left, right . . . sort of scoping out the situation.  Then another bird popped its head up and pushed its way to the opening.  Just like any other siblings, they jostled for position and finally settled for sharing the view, taking turns sticking their necks out.

At last, the first bird decided it was time.  It hopped from hole to branch, just as its parents have done so many times.  There it sat for about two seconds . . . until it lost its balance and tumbled off.  Tiny (and I mean TINY) wings fluttered in a blur, making the fall slower as it wobbled downward.

Once it landed, the baby chickadee sat motionless in the grass for a long time, probably befuddled by what had just happened.  A ground bee moving past hovered slowly closer, and I wasn’t sure what to expect.  Would it sting the defenseless little bird?  As the bee moved in toward the bird, the tiny chickadee shot its head forward and pecked at it.  The bee backed up and flew off. 

Finally the chickadee took flight again, struggling to get higher than a straight line about a foot off the ground.  It made it to the top of our fence, then sat there for several minutes recovering from the effort before fluttering in a low, lurching line across our neighbor’s driveway to a bush at the edge of her patio.  Our neighbor has a bird feeder, so at least the baby chickadee will have some other birds and food around, if it has the wits to stay there until it’s stronger.

The adult returned to the tree at this point, perching on the rim of the knothole and leaning inside with food.  I wondered what it thought . . . or even whether it thought.  As a parent, I would be frantic to discover one of my children gone.  Do birds think this way, too?  Or does the expression “bird brain,” implying a mind incapable of complex thought, have any basis in reality.

The adult entered the nest, stayed for a few moments as usual, then slipped back out of the knothole and flew off. 

Not much later, a tiny chickadee face peered out.

 

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Sullivan reinstated at University of Virginia

Posted on June 26, 2012 by Katherine Wikoff

The big news this afternoon in the world of higher education is the reinstatement of Dr. Teresa Sullivan as president of the University of Virginia.  Two weeks ago she resigned under pressure, igniting an explosive response from that institution’s students, faculty, and alumni, who rallied immediately to her defense.

Why is this story so important?  Because it is bigger than just who is in charge of one university.  It represents an early battle in what may become a full-scale war over the integrity and purpose of the 21st-century university.  It’s a conflict that has been brewing for several years, especially following the 2006 publication of the Spellings Comission Report. 

The Spellings Commission, led by U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings under President George Bush, was charged with reviewing the state of post-secondary education in America and recommending strategies for reform.  Significantly (fatefully?), the report uses the language of business to describe higher education, calling it “a mature enterprise: increasingly risk-averse, at times self-satisfied, and unduly expensive” (p. 14).  Alleging that most universities are not nimble enough in responding to challenges in the global marketplace, the report warns ominously that, “History is littered with examples of industries that, at their peril, failed to respond to—or even notice—changes in the world around them, from railroads to steel manufacturers” (also p. 14). 

Such a “business” perspective is compelling for its focus on “efficiency,” “accountability,” and “return on investment” – certainly urgent considerations in an era where dwindling financial resources are coupled simultaneously with pressures to “keep up” with global competition. 

Yet employing business terminology in discussions of higher education is problematic, because . . . what is the product?  A degreed person?  A well-trained worker?  A better-informed citizen?  A self-actualized individual?  Creation and dissemination of knowledge for the sake of advancing the human race? 

All of the above?

If higher education is evicted from its ivory tower and relocated to an industrial park (or perhaps outsourced to a call center in another hemisphere), does it follow logically that an ideal university should be a factory of sorts, where “edu-widgets” can be churned out efficiently, using state-of-the-art manufacturing methods?  (Online learning!  Flipped classrooms!  Social media!  Technology!)

Here’s what the “philosophical difference of opinion” cited by Dr. Sullivan as the root conflict between herself and the Board of Visitors – especially  Helen E. Dragas, a real-estate developer with a graduate degree from Virginia’s business school – really boils down to: a fundamental schism between polar-opposite views of not only how Virginia should be run but also how ALL American colleges and universities should be run. 

More to the point, Virginia’s showdown between the Ph.D. (Sullivan) and the M.B.A. (Dragas) is a precursor of the intense struggle yet to come between scholars and managers over the future of higher education itself.

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Rave review for Pixar’s “Brave”!

Posted on June 25, 2012 by Katherine Wikoff

First, a quick disclaimer: WordPress won’t let me use italics in the headline, which is why I’ve put quotation marks around the title “Brave.” 

I usually italicize titles, as called for by the style guide for my field, the MLA (Modern Language Association), which is the standard documentation style taught in English classes.  However, I do recall from reviewing books for our local newspaper, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, that their editorial style guide called for quotation marks around book titles.  In fact, according to its online “Ask the Editor” FAQ page, the official Associated Press Stylebook “doesn’t use italics in news stories. That includes newspaper names and magazine references.  No italics.  The stylebook uses italics for examples only.” 

So I guess WordPress leans more toward journalistic writing than academic.  I’ve actually started using the journalistic lowercase for writing blog post headlines instead of the uppercase titles customary in MLA because it looks better and seems more appropriate for blog entries.  Similarly, I’ve begun using an en dash with spaces instead of an em dash for breaks in this blog because it’s easier to read on the screen. 

Anyhow, now that these punctuation formalities are out of the way . . . I am very happy to report that Brave, Pixar’s newest film, is wonderful! 

I had approached my trip to the theater yesterday with some trepidation after reading lukewarm reviews on Friday.  In the first review, a critic said Brave was “less a film in the lustrous Pixar tradition than a Disney fairy tale told with Pixar’s virtuosity.  As such, it’s enjoyable, consistently beautiful, fairly conventional, occasionally surprising and ultimately disappointing.”  Another critic called Brave a “shake-and-bake hybrid” that reflects Disney’s “penchant for princesses and appetite for anthropomorphism.” 

Nice alliteration there at the end, but I disagree with the charge of anthropomorphism.  It’s completely logical that someone who is turned into a bear yet retains human consciousness should exhibit human traits.  And besides, before Disney came along, Pixar did just fine on its own in giving human characteristics to animals and inanimate objects like bugs, fish, rats, cars, and toys.

I also take issue with the “Disney princess” and “Disney fairy tale” characterizations.  For one thing, Brave has no handsome prince, thus lacking a standard element of every Disney princess story.  Nor is there a scheming, evil villain in the usual Disneyesque, Machiavellian sense.  Finally, while the Disney “formula” requires the heroine to be an orphan or similarly lacking guidance and protection from a parent (usually a dead mother), Merida, the heroine of Brave, has two living parents, both of whom care deeply about her happiness.   

Although there may be merit in the critics’ descriptions of Brave as a “fairly conventional” film that “shrinks its aspirational promise into a mother-knows-best-size life lesson,” I wouldn’t say that convention and familiarity are necessarily bad, especially if well done.  All fairy tales are conventional, after all, and Brave certainly has drawn elements from fairy tales and myths.  In fact, once you’ve read the work of Joseph Campbell, especially The Hero with a Thousand Faces, his book on universal archetypes in world mythology, these “conventional” patterns become recognizable in many other films.

For children, such “conventional” stories and “life lessons” provide reassuring familiarity.  As an adult, I personally find the ending of Toy Story 3 both appropriate and poignantly inevitable:  Andy decides to give Woody and Buzz away to a little girl who will play with them, and as we know from the earlier films in the series, being played with is the one thing toys yearn for above all.  However, younger viewers not ready to part with childhood might have preferred a more conventional “happy” ending . . . in which, perhaps, we flashed forward to see Andy’s grandchildren playing with Buzz and Woody on a visit to Grandpa’s house.  As much as I love Toy Story 3, a more conventional ending wouldn’t have particularly bothered me, either.

One final note: I was surprised yesterday when everybody starting leaving the theater as soon as the credits began to roll.  Don’t they know there is always a payoff for sticking around at the end of a Pixar movie? 

In this go-round, there were two rewards.  The first was a statement in the credits that Brave is “dedicated with much love to Steve Jobs,” a tribute that elicited murmurs of appreciation from the few other people remaining in the theater.  The second was a cute, very brief epilogue that provides a clever follow-up to an event from earlier in the movie.

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