Hal's TV-ad essay: glacial reverence, red yawning skull
wrote about TV-advertising’s demise with a reverent tone that sounded like the events had taken place at the misty remove of glaciers and guys in pelts instead of just four years prior
Context
Hal's earnestness-register, and the adult irony that answers it. The seventh-grader treats four-year-old ad history with archaic, glacial reverence — and "with a compassion Mr. Ogilvie found surprising in a seventh-grader" for the doomed Networks — while Ogilvie, in the margin, draws "a big red yawning skull" out of impatience. The exchange stages the theme in miniature: a boy's genuine, over-solemn reverence about the machinery of manipulation, met by a bored teacher's reflexive ironic marginalia. Hal means every glacial word; the grown-up answers meaning with a doodle of a yawning death's-head. Earnestness and its ironic deflator, red-penned in the same paragraph.