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Thursday, September 27, 2012

Schools Matter: A Little Too Ironic

Schools Matter: A Little Too Ironic:


A Little Too Ironic

Maybe you're not 44 and so are not conversant with the movie Reality Bites (its genesis and presentation 20 years past), but I am.

The down-and-out 20-something "losers" (heed my punctuation, please) in that film did not exemplify me.  I had a job as an English teacher in a parochial high school in St. Louis, MO and was raking in a massive 18k.  The mise-en-scene of this movie with which I did not identify was the marketing juggernaut called "Seattle Grunge."  In any event the protagonists have relationship issues, job issues, artistic issues, Pearl Jam shows up, maybe Alice in Chains, maybe Soundgarden, I don't really remember.  But I do have, apparently, permanently etched in my memory, a scene, an offhand, tossed-off scene, in which Winona Ryder's character and Ethan Hawke's (Oh Captain, my Captain!, sorry, different movie) discuss the fact that she cannot properly define irony and suggests