Thoughts on the Shafter Press

The Shafter Press, I am told, was once a conventional newspaper. It delivered information. How boring. I like it better now that reading it is more of a literary experience.

What do I mean?

Metaphor is at the heart of literature. For Aristotle, metaphor was composed partly of a difference - calling something what it was not. But for a metaphor to work the name had to have a hidden connection to the named thing. The fun of metaphor comes, not from any specific information it delivers, but from the search for the hidden connection. Metaphors implicitly raise a question. What does "picture" have to do with "memory?" What does "running" have to do with "flying?"

In the same way, while reading the Shafter Press, I often find myself asking questions like - what does this picture of City Council Member Fran Florez have to do with the caption below it about the Maple Junior High girls volleyball team? or what is the relationship of "Cindo de Mayo" to the more familiar Mexican holiday? Connections in the Press are elusive and metaphorical.

The October 14th issue explores the relationship between headlines and stories. For example, one headline above pictures of a volleyball game reads, "Shafter drops two contestants." "Contestants" is a word usually reserved for beauty pageants and cake walks, but sometimes games are called "contests," so, "contestants" could be players (maybe dropped from the team for disciplinary reasons), or the opposing teams ("Nice try contestant, but you've been dropped!"). Reading the story, however, one learns that Shafter lost two matches, which makes me wonder what "drops" means here.

Another example comes from the opposite page, where the headline reads "Colonels defeated Tigers." The headline draws our attention to the fact that most headlines are written in the present tense, even though the events they refer to are in the past. Otherwise this seems pretty straightforward - Good job, Colonels. Congrats on the victory... But then I read the first sentence "...as the host Tigers defeated the Colonels 22-14." Now I am wondering how to reconcile the headline and the story. Layers and layers.

Good stuff, Press. Blows my mind.