In my first three
years of high school, I was taught to look beneath the surface. We as humans
should look beneath the surface of everything and everyone, whether it is a
performance or just a person in general. In the first chapter of “How to Read
Literature like a Professor” Foster talks about how many people skip over what
is most important. I catch myself in different situations always questioning
“What does that signify?” Whether or not I can figure it out is another story,
but hopefully with the help of Thomas C. Foster and his ‘Lively and
entertaining Guide to Reading between the Lines’ it will become easier for me.
One of my favorite
movies “She’s the Man” starring pre-2013 Amanda Bynes, that falls into the
category of ‘Stupid movies that should not be movies” it focuses on a teenage
girl named Viola Hastings who enters her brother, Sebastian Hastings’, school
in place of him, pretending to be male, in order to play with the boys’ soccer
team. Sound familiar? Well if my movie summary skills aren’t up to par with how
they should be sorry, but this movie is actually based on William Shakespeare’s
“Twelfth Night”. Although my nine year old self didn’t realize this while
watching it in theaters my dad, an advocate for the arts and a senior literature
teacher sure as heck wasn’t going to let me out of that theater scot-free without
a lesson on the symbolism of everything in the movie to the play. It was then
that I first realized that everything is deeper than it seems.
Currently I am at a
summer intensive at the San Francisco Conservatory of Dance and I was able to
attend one of their performances earlier this week. One of the pieces entitled
“Collisions” really stuck out to me. The dance featured three dancers whom one
by one danced a solo and at the end came together and danced simultaneously. What
stuck out to me was not the dancing (although it was phenomenal) and Cello
Suite No. 1 in G major is one of my favorites but it wasn’t the music either. It
was the voice in which was being played while the dancers danced and the music
was played. The voice was the choreographer’s voice who was reading off
different commands such as “you’re fine”, “it’s okay”, “keep going”, “don’t
stop”, “that was good”. As the commands were repeated I thought about each of
them and realized that those are commands that as a dancer you are told more
than anything. I was fortunate enough to be able to talk to the choreographer’s
sister, who is one of my peers at this intensive and she told me that the piece
was inspired by her sister’s old dance studio and how they pushed her to be more
and how she never felt good enough in that type of environment. She would
collide with her fears of not being good enough with the commands being tossed
at her hence the title. Now I know what you’re thinking, “What does this have
to do with the book?” and I can honestly say I’m not 100 percent sure, but what
I was trying to get across is how not just in books, Mr. Foster, do we need to
read between the lines but in everyday occurrences as well. In conclusion I state
that I do agree with what Foster says in the first chapter, in which we should
not be as dense as we are made out to be.
