1. why do the first two sentences contain qualifiers ("oddly enough," "however")?
2. why does ellison suggest that his audience might be "fans of the animated cartoons"?
3. why does ellison think a book about bird-watching might be more edifying than a biography of parker?
4. why does ellison say "hung the bird on charlie" (para. 2) instead of "nicknamed him"?
5. what is the effect of ellison’s references to the story about the infant jesus (para. 3)?
6. why does ellison provide the mockingbird’s scientific name (mimus polyglottos) (para. 4)?
7. how does ellison manage to make this description of jazz sound so jazzy: "by long-continued successions of notes and phrases, by swoops, bleats, echoes, rapidly repeated bebops — i mean rebopped bebops — . ." (para. 4)?
8. what is the effect of the dashes in the phrase above?