Chimera Lesson #2: “Winter Dreams” & Homecoming King
Essay is worth 200 points and due as an upload on November 19.
In essay 3, you are comparing two works that address similar qualities of a chimera.
What is a chimera?
A chimera is an obsession or a brain hijack in which people pursue a false idea or a false principle that they think will make them happy, whole, and complete when in fact the chimera is a false substitute for what they need: real change of their inner character. Rather than work on building their character and virtue, they follow a chimera. For example, a guy with low self-worth thinks he can become a "somebody" by going to UCLA and buying a Tesla, but UCLA and Tesla are merely cheap substitutes for what the guy really needs, self-confidence. The examples I gave are somewhat trite and basic, but they clarify the notion of the chimera.
To understand the chimera in more detail, here are some of its distinguishing characteristics:
- The chimera gets deep inside our heads and becomes an obsession.
- The chimera has a drug-like effect on us, intoxicating us and making us forget the real world.
- The chimera is addictive. We will use other people to get our fix, so to speak.
- The chimera never delivers, so we’re always disappointed. In this regard, riding a chimera is a hellish bipolar trip with high highs and low lows.
- The chimera often becomes a substitute for basic human needs we have that aren’t being met such as power, love, belonging, purpose, meaning, creative distinction, success. In the case of Howard Ratner, he suffers from wounded masculinity and he seeks power in the black opal.
- The more the chimera grows inside us, the more unhinged from reality we become.
The Assignment
Choose one of the following "Chimera Pairs" and write a comparison essay in which you analyze the causes and effects of the chimeras revealed in the stories, movies, or documentaries:
Comparison One: In “Winter Dreams” and Homecoming King, Dexter and Hasan go on a futile quest for the Great White Princess as a way of achieving status and belonging. The Great White Princess is a racial myth or chimera that Dexter and Hasan pursue in the hopes of achieving status, belonging, and self-worth.
Comparison Two: In White Hot and Good Hair, the documentaries address how cultural and racial ideals brainwash people into conforming to the “perfect look.” The white aesthetic becomes an obsession that reveals much about the racial mythology, hierarchy, and beauty standards that inform American culture.
Comparison Three: In Fake Famous and LuLaRich, the enticement of the easy life--Hakuna Matata--and celebrification impede people from living a real, authentic life.
Comparison Four: In Uncut Gems and Private Life, a black opal and the promise of a baby serve as a chimera for happiness, fulfillment, self-control, and status even as the characters’ lives unravel into more and more self-loathing and chaos.
Comparison Five: The Millennial Lifestyle Dream: consumerism and working from home: Read Derek Thompson’s “How a Recession Could Weaken the Work-From-Home Revolution” and “The End of the Millennial Lifestyle Subsidy.” The chimera of the cool urban life in the digital age in which employees enjoy working from home, using Uber, and receiving gourmet home-cooking meals like Blue Apron seems to be more of a chimera or a fantasy in the face of the economic realities they face in a recession and a volatile stock market. Also see the YouTube video “Why Bosses Won’t Let Offices Die.”
Comparison Six. The Chimera of “The Dream Job” or The Dream Job Myth in which we study the following: Arthur C. Brooks’ essay “The Secret to Happiness at Work”; Tiffany Gee Lewis’ “The Myth of the Dream Job”; Cal Newport’s “Danger of the Dream Job Delusion”; Alison Green’s “Your Dream Job Is a Myth”; Jordan Peterson: Dream Job video on YouTube.
The Method (Outline)
In paragraph 1, your introduction, define the chimera and give a salient personal example.
In paragraph 2, your thesis, develop a comparison thesis that shows 4 common points between the two works you're analyzing.
Here are a couple of examples of comparative thesis statements:
Example #1:
The protagonists in Uncut Gems, Howard Ratner, and Private Life, Rachel and Richard, seek wholeness through a gemstone and a baby respectively when in fact their chimera quest reveals their emotional impoverishment, which entails a lack of self-worth, a sense of a squandered life, an addiction to "the hunt" rather than enjoying the present, and the sickness of comparing their achievements to others.
Example #2:
Whereas Dexter Green's pursuit of The Great White Princess results in the squandering of his entire existence on a cipher and a chimera so that his whole life is that of a lost soul floundering in a private hell, Hasan Minhaj's similar quest ends in time for him to be reborn out of the ashes of his grotesque obsession and move forward with post-chimera wisdom.
In paragraphs 3-6, support your points.
Paragraph 7, your conclusion, is a dramatic restatement of your thesis.
Your last page, your Works Cited, is in MLA format and has 4 sources.
Study Questions for "Winter Dreams" in the Context of the Chimera
How does the story introduce social class anxieties into Dexter’s personality and how do these anxieties fuel Dexter's chimera?
America is supposed to be a democracy, a country where "everyone is equal," but this is empty rhetorical cant (hypocritical and sanctimonious talk). In truth, Americans have always been obsessed with social class.
Upon America's founding, America has used slave labor to get the hard work done. In Nancy Isenberg's book White Trash: The 400-Year Untold Story of Class in America, she writes about America's class hierarchy using "lower classes" to do dirty work. Americans abhor the thought of being in the underclass and are obsessed with class status.
Today, we can see the social class status at play at restaurants that require valet parking. The shiny silver Mercedes is parked right in front of the restaurant while the 20-year-old rusted clunker is parked several blocks away behind a decrepit liquor store.
This class division causes shame and anxiety for many, and Dexter Green is no exception.
Dexter Green's Class Anxiety
Dexter Green grows up haunted by the idea that he is perceived as lower class, a mere caddie or grocery store clerk.
We see in the story that Dexter’s dad is “second best,” the owner of a second-best grocery store, evidencing working-class roots.
Dexter works as a caddie, a servant to the upper classes, and he finds this humiliating.
He reads the bleak weather as an omen of his doom while living in the underclass, working as a servile caddy for professional players and tastemakers, people who matter.
He feels irrelevant and irrelevance stirs resentment and depression in his veins. Americans want to feel like they are on center stage.
Dexter sees life as extremes, those who have and those who have not; the dreary Northern spring and the gorgeous fall.
Dexter is desperate for something that will lift him above everyone, and give him a sense of being at the top of the American Dream. He must either be at the top or be a complete failure. There is no in-between.
All or Nothing Universe of Perpetual Adolescent
Dexter creates this false binary universe: We call this the All or Nothing Fallacy. Judy Jones has become a symbol of "making it in America," being the object of everyone's envy. In this sense, Judy Jones is the embodiment of "winter dreams," the phony, superficial class status or "Chanel No. 5" moment that feeds the souls of so many American souls who sacrifice their whole lives to prop up this tinsel image.
Dexter's Chimera is Judy Jones, his "Winter Dream":
The dominant drive of Dexter is to acquire his "winter dreams" by being rich and having Judy Jones, the ultimate trophy. Seeing people envy him is the drug that diminishes his class anxiety.
He is a man with a chip on his shoulder who needs class supremacy over others, or so he believes, to be happy.
We read that after the depression of spring, October brings him hope and November brings him “ecstatic triumph.”
We see Dexter’s vaulting ambition to get away from the lowly caddy job. He’s “too old” for it, he thinks, at 14.
What compelled Dexter to hurry away from his caddy job?
An 11-year-old girl, Miss Jones, described as “beautifully ugly” and “who are destined after a few years to be inexpressibly lovely and bring no end of misery to a great number of men.”
Indeed, beauty can unhinge men and dislocate men from reality, as we shall see in the story.
But not just beauty—beauty combined with the aura of upper class money: This is the noxious cocktail that will undermine Dexter Green.
Projection, Not Love
We must emphasize Dexter is not in love with Judy Jones the person, but he image of his own projection. Too often "falling in love" is a person projecting his inner needs and fantasies so as to worship an abstraction or idea but to be blind to the person he presumes he's in love with. In truth, Dexter's objectifying Judy Jones makes her more of a thing than a person.
Dexter Unhinged by Beauty as a Symbol of Old Money and Privilege
The girl addressed Dexter as “boy,” a sign of his lowly servitude, and this has an emasculating effect on him.
His sense of emasculation is further reinforced when the caddy-master shows up and says to Dexter, “What you standing there like a dummy for? Go pick up the young lady’s clubs.”
He quits from compulsion: “The enormity of his decision frightened him. He was a favorite caddy, and the thirty dollars a month he earned through the summer were not to be made elsewhere around the lake. But he had received a strong emotional shock, and his perturbation required a violent and immediate outlet.”
His perturbation is the great anxiety that makes him compulsive and unhinges him. He’s high-strung and compulsive.
We read a warning of his compulsive nature: “As so frequently would be the case in the future, Dexter was unconsciously dictated by his winter dreams.”
Glitter, Not Substance, Feeds Dexter's Winter Dreams:
We read a famous passage from the story: "But do not get the impression, because his winter dreams happened to be concerned at first with musings on the rich, that there was anything shoddy in the boy. He wanted not association with glittering things and glittering people -- he wanted the glittering things themselves.”
What does this passage mean?
Dexter believes he can, through hard work, embody “glitter,” that is to say the apotheosis of success. America is not a country; it’s a dream. America is “Winter Dreams,” the idea that we find personal fulfillment, meaning, and higher purpose through the attainment of “glitter.” It is this very sick idolatry that will undermine Dexter Green.
We also read that while he become successful in business, he suffered certain “denials,” and that the story is about one of those denials, and that would be the denial of acquiring Judy Jones, who for Dexter is the highest example (apotheosis) of “glitter,” of Dexter’s “Winter Dreams.”
For Dexter Green, the chimera is about the aura of wealth and power.
As we read about Dexter’s rise in the laundry industry and the rich patrons who frequent his establishments, we learn what about old and new money?
Old money has a certain aura, a certain “heritage,” and a snobbery attached to it. On the other hand, new money, the rags to riches story such as Dexter’s, has humble beginnings and class insecurity attached to it even as the person of new wealth amasses riches because in part he will always feel a bit like a fish out of water and he will always have memories of his poor beginnings. Moreover, he may not know all the codes and linguistic tics that the old rich use in their arsenal of being smugly rich. He may have some of his old caddy behaviors, which he thinks about when he returns to play golf at his old course—not as a caddy but as a man who’s “made it.”
We can surmise perhaps that Dexter is not just desperate to be rich but is desperate to have an identity of being rich, of not being looked down upon by those with old money, and his delusion is that winning the affections of old-money Judy Jones with all her intoxicating beauty is his ticket to happiness.
Old Money Vs. Nouveau Riche
Old Money has cachet and is considered superior to nouveau riche, also called arrivestes, parvenus, and vulgarian small potatoes.
But much of his quest is in his own imagination. Therefore, his quest is an illusion or a chimera, and it is this chimera that will unhinge him.
Judy Jones' aura is built on her sense of entitlement:
One of the brilliant things in this story is the way Fitzgerald quickly exposes Judy Jones’ personality at the golf course where she hits a golf ball into Mr. T.A. Hedrick’s abdomen. What do we learn about her in such a brief passage?
Judy Jones is self-centered, entitled, and used to not being accountable for anything. In other words, she is somewhat of a cipher and wastrel. She makes messes and expects others to clean them up. She can hurt others, but feel no empathy for her actions. In other words, she’s an empty-headed, repellant narcissist.
Judy Jones the chimera is just a narcissistic cipher:
And here lies the story’s tragedy: Dexter Green has hinged is whole notion of happiness on going on a Love Quest for Judy Jones, a Narcissistic Cipher. His “winter dreams” are futile, delusional, and empty. They will bring him nothing but a handful of ashes and dust.
Another important observation from this scene is that Dexter watches the old-money golf players gawk and admire Judy Jones’ beauty, doing so with a certain misogyny and lasciviousness.
Their remarks make her all the more a compelling “trophy.” Dexter is diseased by the need to create an image through the amassing of trophies, what in Latin is called the libido ostentando. Dexter’s lust for ostentatiousness will blind him from the fundamental emptiness that defines his existence.
The chimera is a drug that intoxicates its victim, becomes an addiction, and leads to madness:
After seeing the adult beauty Judy Jones at the golf course, Dexter goes on a night swim and hears piano that he associates with the correct life path he has taken: “The sound of the tune precipitated in him a sort of ecstasy and it was with that ecstasy he viewed what was happening to him now. It was a mood of intense appreciation, a sense that, for once, he was magnificently attuned to life and that everything about him was radiating a brightness and a glamour he might never know again.”
The chimera is a trickster:
How does the above passage speak to The Trickster as part of Dexter’s Quest to find his Winter Dreams?
“Winter Dreams” is essentially a chimera story: A man quests for his chimera and is crushed by the emptiness of his dream. Therefore, a chimera can be called a Trickster. A Trickster is a character or an idea that carries us through the four levels of emotion: earthly, angelic, mystical, and demonic.
The Trickster must give us hope and promise of finding a land of milk and honey only to throw us down from the heavens and into the inferno of our own making.
Beneath Judy Jones' False Exterior Lies a False Interior:
Even though Judy Jones is a flirt and a shallow coquette, she inadvertently asks Dexter an existential question during their first dinner: “Who are you, anyhow?” How does her question touch on one of the story’s major themes?
As an American, Dexter believes he can reinvent himself anyway he wants. He is a chameleon, and he is free to dream himself into the kind of person he wants to be. The idea that we can become our dream is uniquely American.
The irony is that in many ways he doesn’t know who he is since his energies have created a façade to others and to himself.
In fact, his answer to Judy’s question is unwittingly true. He says, “I’m nobody. . . . My career is largely a matter of futures.”
In fact, he only lives in the future, not the present, and this is part of his unhinged character: to be disconnected and disengaged from the present as he looks to the future when he will finally be worthy of achieving the American Dream. But he will never be worthy. His hope is a chimera that pushes him to constantly look ahead into the future and never in the present moment.
When he assures Judy he is not poor and she kisses him, her kisses arouse a “surfeit that would demand more surfeit.” In other words, his desires will always outrun his capacity to fulfill them, and Judy Jones is the embodiment of his excess desires or concupiscence.
What we have, then, is a mutually self-destructive symbiosis or interdependence. What’s scary is that that unhealthy symbiosis is the very foundation of Dexter’s “Winter Dreams.”
The chimera is an addiction that consumes its victim:
Much of the story chronicles Dexter’s addiction to Judy Jones like a junkie hooked on drugs. Explain.
We read, “Dexter surrendered himself to the most direct and unprincipled personality with which he had ever come into contact.”
The unhinged man is so needy and compulsive that he surrenders his self-interest to an unethical, morally bankrupt force in the name of his carnal and monetary idolatry.
He has no moral combat to save him from pursuing someone as unprincipled as Judy Jones.
We can further explore Dexter’s unhinging with Judy Jones by looking at her as a drug. She is less human to Dexter and more of a substance of his addiction. And in turn Judy Jones is addicted to the power she has over men by her power to intoxicate them. She in turn is addicted to seeing men addicted to her.
We see that Dexter is no needy for Judy Jones that he sacrifices his dignity and self-respect to pursue her. For example, he knows she loves other men in her shallow capricious way and that she sometimes “loves” in the same pathetic, superficial manner, and she even tells him so, but rather than be upset he accepts her imperfect, disloyal love. We read, for example, that after telling him that she was in love with another man earlier the same day as they lie in bed, he finds her words “beautiful and romantic.”
When she lies to him and says she did not kiss a man earlier the same day, Dexter knows she’s lying, but he’s okay with that because he is “glad that she has taken the time to lie to him.”
The chimera is an immoral creature:
Because Judy Jones is aware that he has no standards of behavior that she must adhere to, she knows she can get away with anything. Deep down, she can’t love him because he lacks self-respect, but she herself lacks self-respect because if she had it, she would not be in a relationship with someone she doesn’t respect. Both of them are degraded in the relationship, a fact that neither wants to see. Both are unhinged in this manner.
As you read the story, you will see that the narrative has many parallels with drug addiction as it pertains to Dexter Green’s relationship with Judy Jones.
The chimera will send you to your own personal hell:
Over and over again, we see that Judy Jones, the consummate Trickster, sends Dexter into hell through neglect and infidelity, but then gives him just enough honey so he’ll come back to her. She does this to many men, not just Dexter. We read, “Whenever one showed signs of dropping out through long neglect, she granted him a brief honeyed hour, which encouraged him to tag along for a year or so longer.”
She is clearly a sick person and the men who become addicted to her are just as sickly. They live in a demimonde of no-respect and emptiness.
Like a drug addict, Dexter becomes unhinged and cannot be civil to others when she unexpectedly disappears at a social event. He panics and is overcome with anxiety that causes him to lose his polite facade.
We read that Judy Jones is not a self-possessed person in her compulsion to torture men: “Judy made these forays upon the helpless and defeated without malice, indeed half unconscious that there was anything mischievous in anything that she did.”
Even the “strong and the brilliant, “play her game and not their own.” She always has the upper hand.
Her beauty is her power, but as we shall see, using beauty for power and identity is a sure failure because beauty is transitory.
But while her beauty is in its prime, she is Dexter’s drug, as we read: “The helpless ecstasy of losing himself with in her was opiate rather than tonic.”
When you think about the above line, many of us love the drama of a tormented obsession, and we therefore choose to stay entrapped in our torment because to lose that drama would force us to face the abyss or the existential vacuum that defines our empty existence.
In many ways, the story teaches us that we are our own worst enemy. Sadly, many of us “unhinge” ourselves from reality for lack of anything better to do.
Another way of looking at Dexter’s “Winter Dreams” is that he was feeding off the sick energy of desperation that Judy Jones created between her and her bevy of lovers.
Dexter knows he’s an addict, at least on an unconscious level. This makes him a divided soul: Part of him wants to escape his addiction to Judy Jones. He even gets engaged to another woman as a hopeful “cure” for his disease. Imagine getting engaged to someone you don’t love as a “cure” for a love addiction. That is a cogent sign of being unhinged.
His Judy Jones substitute is Irene Scheerer. Unlike Judy Jones who is described as a refined beauty, we read little of Irene’s physical charms except that she is “a little stout.”
We have to wonder if the world is full of Judy Jones archetypes that enchant men, leave them, and damage the men so that they can never love other women because these damaged men are forever fixated on their own personal “Judy Jones.” Perhaps we can call this the Angelina Jolie Factor: One look into her eyes and you’re permanently damaged, unhinged, and ready to abandon reality as you know it.
Even as he tries to love Irene, he keeps thinking about the manner in which Judy Jones beckons, torments, and insults him, and he is desperate to convince himself that he cannot pursue Judy Jones any longer. But as an unhinged man, as a man possessed by the IDEA of what Judy Jones represents—complete power, ecstasy, and abandonment—he finds his drug addiction incurable, and as such he hates himself and he hates Judy Jones—the very woman he cannot free himself from.
At night, he argues with himself about Judy Jones, going over a laundry list as to why she’d be a horrible wife. But that is the cortex in his brain. The limbic part of his brain, where emotion and reptilian desire reside, continue to rage a protest for acquiring Judy Jones.
He sees Judy Jones at a dance and he realizes that he had long ago been “hardened against jealousy.” He still wants her. He’s twenty-five, he has devoted 14 years to obsessing over Judy Jones, and he is about to marry Irene Scheerer.
About to get married to Irene, he still obsesses over Judy Jones, wondering if she still cares about him, and Irene is nothing but a backdrop to his life, “no more than a curtain spread behind him.” She will be part of a marital façade, but his demonic possession will still rage on.
The chimera tends to prey upon narcissists:
Dexter Green is empty; he has no self. He only has an idea of what the successful self looks like to others, what Kristin Dombek in her essay "Emptiness" calls "selfiness." In many ways, Dexter is a narcissist.
Dexter imitates an image of success at the expense of others whom he uses in the service of his grand performance.
Empty, loveless, and without any real connection to other human beings, Dexter focuses on all he knows: creating a "hologram of the superpowered self" or what elsewhere Dombek calls the "simulacrum of the superpowered self."
In other words, Dexter doesn't work on building a real life for himself. Rather, he becomes a curator of his fake life, which becomes a "reality" to himself and others. In doing this, he fulfills Pascal's insight that most people hate their real life but prefer to create an imaginary life for themselves and for others.
For Dexter Green, people are not people. They are tools to help him hone and chisel his successful image.
As a narcissist, Dexter disregards content, substance, morality, and integrity. He only worships one thing: the "hologram" of the Super Self. That is his "winter dream." He is smart enough to know that the "winter dream" is a destructive illusion, but he does not care, but he has invested too much of his life in this "winter dream" and this dream is all he knows.
Nothing embodies this "winter dream," this "hologram" of superior success, more than Judy Jones. The tragedy and farce of the story is that Judy Jones is a mediocrity, a cipher, a hoax, a complete illusion.
Dexter Green "gets played" by the very illusion that he worships above all else.
Comparing & Contrasting “Winter Dreams” and Homecoming King
Notice how “Winter Dreams” is such a dark story with no character transformation. Dexter’s demise and his steady disintegration is evident in all attempts to write a thesis statement about him.
Look at these examples:
Sample Thesis Statements
Sample #1:
Dexter Green's obsession with Judy Jones as the winter dream of social status becomes his cocaine, which diminishes him into a junkie evidenced by _________________, __________________, _______________, and ____________________.
Sample #2
"Winter Dreams" is a cautionary tale about a shallow narcissist whose relationship to Judy Jones is analogous to that of a junkie and heroin.
Sample #3
"Winter Dreams" is a Faustian Bargain tale about a man who sells his soul to the devil for unexamined ambition, a bargain that dehumanizes him like a junkie hooked on crack.
Sample #4
"Winter Dreams" is a fable about how class status anxiety can overtake us and compromise our humanity through blind ambition, using other people as trophies, and trading real life for a false representation of life.
But not all are doomed.
But not all who fall prey to the chimera are narcissists doomed to a life of personal hell and decline.
In contrast to the narcissist Dexter Green, Hasan Minhaj is a man of substance who, like Dexter, falls prey to the chimera of “The White Princess.” But unlike Dexter, Hasan shows in his Netflix comedy special Homecoming King that he is able to work his way out of his chimera.
If you decided to compare and contrast Dexter and Hasan for your essay, you might want to address the following:
- Hasan struggles with American freedom and his father's strict authoritarian control.
- Hasan and Dexter share the freedom to dream and enjoy "the audacity of equality." They both believe they can become what they want, but we see no moral compass inside Dexter. In contrast, Hasan learns forgiveness, a value imparted to him by his father.
- Hasan must find belonging in a country that smears him with racial stereotypes. Hasan loves the American Dream even though racists, especially right after 9/11, want to stigmatize him as a "terrorist." In contrast, Dexter's whiteness makes it easier for him to join "the club." But even the white Dexter never feels validated. In what appears to be insanity, Dexter attaches white privilege to his white princess Judy Jones. He never sees his insanity. In contrast, Hasan realizes how insane it was to attach white privilege with his own white princess Bethany Reed. Hasan's realization helps him let go of his chimera and restore his sanity.
- Hasan finds connection and belonging with his fellow Americans through popular culture. So does Dexter. But this popular culture that gives us things in common to share also has a status system, and for Dexter "winter dreams" refers to the "tinsel" that elevates people's status in the eyes of others. Dexter never goes beyond this tinsel. In contrast, Hasan digs deeper into his heart for meaning and core values that he has received from his family. Dexter seems to lack such core values.
- Both Dexter and Hasan have a chip on their shoulder in that they feel they've never "made it" or found the status they desire. At one point, Hasan seeks revenge on someone who he feels betrayed him and must learn a valuable lesson.
- Dexter and Hasan both have a white privilege chimera: Dexter is obsessed with Judy Jones; Hasan is obsessed with Bethany Reed. "You Are My White Princess" would be a good essay title.
- Dexter's story is horrible and full of despair with no redemption. In contrast, Hasan's story is hopeful and full of redemption.
Sources
For your sources, you can use "Winter Dreams," the Netflix special "Homecoming King," the New Yorker article, and the AV/TV Club article.
Sample Thesis Statements for the Above
- Dexter Green and Hasan Minhaj are examples of the hopes and anguish of pursuing the American Dream of success, privilege, and personal reinvention and how those dreams get channeled in a chimera of a "lost love."
- Dexter Green, who operates on white privilege, and Hasan Minhaj, who navigates through racial stigma, both desire ultimate validation in a white world, and they both express their desire for this ultimate veneration in their adulation of a "white princess" who embodies all of America's apex privileges.
- Dexter Green and Hasan Minhaj show us that the desire for validation in America's power hierarchy is so strong that this desire for validation often leads to insanity and self-destruction. The difference between Dexter and Hasan is that Dexter's through-line is from being a lost soul to being a complete lost soul evidenced by his squandered existence. In the case of Hasan, however, his journey into darkness is interrupted by wisdom, forgiveness, and redemption.
Using Block or Point-by-Point Paragraph: Block Paragraph or Point by Point Comparison
In the point-by-point, you analyze Dexter and Hasan in each paragraph.
In the block method, you spend half the essay on Dexter and the other half on Hasan.
Both forms are appropriate, but I recommend using the block method in part because students are more confident in that format.
More Sources for Homecoming King:
Porterhouse Review: "The Audacity of Equality"
New Yorker: "Hasan Minhaj's "'New Brown America'"
Vulture: "Hasan Minhaj's 'Homecoming King' Is an American Story"
AV Club: "The Daily Show's Hasan Minhaj crafts a hilarious, spellbinding immigrant story"
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