The surprise television hit Ted Lasso, about an American college football coach hired to manage a struggling Premier League football club, continues to earn critical accolades and inspire an ever-growing viewership. Even those with little interest in sports seem to be won over by the show’s themes of progressiveness and kindness, and perhaps the pandemic’s timing has facilitated a certain degree of its popularity. Yet there’s an underappreciated but fundamental quality that propels the show: a keen attention to the power of words. From the first time we see our eponymous hero, as he exits a plane’s toilet to return to his seat and a copy of Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums, to the text-only dating app Bantr featured in Season 2, Ted Lasso pushes our understanding of what words are and what effects they have in our culture. The show is, in a word, literary.
When approaching a piece of literature, I frequently urge my students to do something rather intimate: “Try it on.” I then remind them that they’d never purchase clothes or shoes without first trying them on, and they then remind me that online shopping has turned my exhortation into something quaint and nostalgic. OK. But visualize those angled mirrors that still exist in clothing stores, whereby you see yourself not only in the front but also from the side and even in the back. You see your butt. (The mirror is indispensable: you can’t do this without it.) Books of literature are mirrors of this sort. They see “inside” their characters (we can’t), but they also see their characters in the round (also off-limits to our vision of ourselves and others).
And they often see into the “beyond,” a place where the individual can be lost or eclipsed. This can range from delivering an entire city rife with change, even alienation (as Baudelaire does for Paris and as Joyce does, in countless different modes, for Dublin in Ulysses), to imagined, fantasized voyages (such as the masochistic speculations of sexual betrayal generated by Proust’s jealous narrator or the Faulknerian one made, in Absalom, Absalom!, by two Harvard students in 1910 into a Confederate camp in 1864). Or the fictional voyages can be literal, such as the one on a raft on the Mississippi undertaken by a runaway white boy and an escaped black slave. Sometimes literature reprises actual historical documents, such as Melville’s narrative of the real sea captain Amasa Delano who encountered things on a Spanish slave ship that exploded his worldview entirely, while challenging ours.
Understanding emerging photographic possibilities is crucial to better inform the practices that will profoundly influence this evolving sense of self.
We will continue to cherish this expanded suite of image types in our physically, digitally, or cerebrally stored family albums.
The thing about creating an elaborate trap is knowing when to make it snap. The premise is easy enough, but how the author can bring it to closure another thing entirely. Although I like the puns and references and artfulness of it all, I wondered the whole way through about how it might achieve closure. It does, but to give away the elegance of the solution would be unforgiveable. The plot is resolved in a “never saw that coming but should have” way, but it is aesthetically beautiful and riddlesome in its finale.
Depending on how you measure it, the roots of John Darnielle’s third novel, “Devil House,” date back to 2004, the ’80s era of Satanic panic or the late 14th century.