Poetry from a dozen years ago

I mentioned in passing recently that it's been a while since I've written poetry. Most of it has not been confessional but it often is based in my experiences, sometimes on work or relationships. These are, I think, the last I had worked on. In 2009 I was teaching creative writing and produced these as examples for the classes. I wanted to present them before I publish the new work, maybe to show the changes I'm making, the focus I'm recalibrating. 

ON THE APPEARANCE OF KURT VONNEGUT
IN A RODNEY DANGERFIELD MOVIE 

This face that looks like it has covered a lot of ground

Or ground much under it.  This face looks
Like it has ground much and covered much.
This face is a dog’s lapping unconcernedly at water.
This face considered granfalloons and I hear the sirens, I hear
The call to my karass.  It would fit so beautifully next to
Dangerfield’s, with whom he never shares a
Scene, GE PR beside aluminum siding.  Nixon, Hitler, Pol Pot,
They would not fear this face, this sleepy, disheveled
Face with a crazy son and coughing while he’s dying.  I see
Frustration and laughter, anger and resignation, this face
Cracking under the strain of living too long, asking for not much, a glass
Of water, some of my time. 

Of Your Rope
You’ve reached it not
when everything
stops, but
when nothing
is anymore,
when it wraps
around you
like your grandmother
’s afghan but
warmthlessly, no
cold there
either, the eyelets
she embroidered
staring like
her own dead eyes. 
How will you know? 
The end will
be a taunt, a bolt
that stares
up from
the floor
uselessly
beside the engine. 

 

SUZI QUATRO IN SAN REMO
I can’t get her out of my head.  Like an
            ice pick jabbed over and over
                        into my hippocampus, she’s
burrowed into my consciousness.  Those lips,
            that mullet framing a face already running to fat.
                        Years later latex pants make
sausages of her legs.  She’s
            the girl of my dreams, circa 1974, now
                        in early 1980 singing her biggest hit, her worst song,
duetting on Italian television with a guy whose muttonchops
            are probably more familiar with English
                        than he is.  But
there she is, little girl face, this voice that can
            burnish steel, can melt the paint off a car,
                        siren song of so many coke dreams, hash reveries.
Drummers are the “Q” keys of rock music. 
I would be her drummer, fold her cellulite
in, zip up that latex.

 

The Dead Girls Club 

It’d be nice if ghosts filed in,

like the future kings in MacBeth,

stately, decorous, in order.  But they don’t.

They enter like students, noisily, banging desks, dropping bags,

full of outside life.  And they don’t take their places

either, whether you’ve set them up in assigned places

or all in chairs facing one way but arrange

the room to fit around them, a corner here

to accentuate The Cutter’s curls.  A window there

so The Junkie can stare out when she gets bored.

The Crazy One makes the walls, the furniture, the others ricochet around her, mouth

open for an occasional comment or a shriek.  But that’s the thing.

They never utter a word, or none you hear.  Except for their entrances, ghosts are silent.

Except The Silent One on the floor, now spread eagled, now fetal,

mewling like a hungry kitten.  They’ve come

with the others—The Successful One,

The Trust Fund Punk, The Cold-Handed Sculptor, The Big Mother

(Big Grandmother now!), The Really

Crazy One you never fully see, the Others you don’t have names for—to do what?  Serenade you? 

You’ll never know.  They come, they shuffle around

the room, themselves.  One by one, softly,

one by one they leave you.

Ghosts always eventually leave you.

Flashy queer stuff

 

A new patient this morning, a retired funeral home director, said to me something along the lines of, When you're older you start reminiscing more often. He thought it was funny that, some 20+ years younger than him, I was already doing that. But it's true that much of my time while driving or doing crosswords is spent with the equivalent of 16mm film clacking in the back of my head. 

In 1973, I was a fat, ungainly, probably acned tween, although the term wasn't used then, on the way from middle school to high school. In the next year I'd start acting in school productions, reading pulp novels, and lose my virginity. But at 13 I was just a schlub who, on Friday nights, stayed up late to watch The Midnight Special. 

Most of the artists they played were pretty good, if not terribly innovative. I mean, I was just starting to listen to groups like the Doobie Brothers and Steely Dan and appreciate the comedy of Monty Python. But Mac Davis and Anne Murray were more the stuff I'd see, and they were all right, although I could hear them in regular rotation on local radio. But in November they played the David Bowie 1980 Floor Show. 

I can't say if I knew Bowie was appearing on that show or not. I'd heard "Space Oddity" of course. It had penetrated even the stodgy AM wasteland of rural upstate New York. There had been something to the sound that appealed to me, so it's possible I was paying attention that he was headlining. 

But the first minutes of the show, a videoed version of the two night farewell to Ziggy Stardust Bowie performed at London's Marquee Club that previous October, did not prepare me adequately for the moment as he began the title song "1984" and two of his backup singers stepped forward to rip the gaudy gauzy costume he was wearing from him to show he was actually wearing a spangled bustier with fishnets and garters and high heels. That moment smacked me across the forehead with a force it would take me decades and my first experiences with LSD to identify as pleasure in the unexpected and unexplainable. 

I would go to bed that night having sat on the edge of my dad's padded rocker for an hour and a half hearing sounds and seeing things I couldn't articulate to anyone. On Monday, no one I knew or asked had remained with the show much beyond the first minutes. "You kidding, that flashy queer stuff? What was that, anyway?"

It was flashy queer stuff, no mistaking. And while my response was not equal to the imagined reaction of Christian Bale in Velvet Goldmine, it was a solid, rock hard love that's lasted my life since. Bowie's sexually charged pas de deux with strutting Mick Ronson awakened feelings in me I couldn't articulate and certainly couldn't act on for years. My first Bowie was the Changes One album bought that week at Barker's, the local department store that everyone knew had the better selection, and played deep grooves into the nylon. 

Decades later, teaching the Orwell novel, I tried to introduce it and make its messages relatable to classes by playing cuts from Diamond Dogs for them, trying to explain what seeing the songs acted out was like. But it left them staring at me like I was showing them nude photos of their mothers. I suppose some things, like the life-altering media experience one goes through at that certain age, are  untranslatable. 

Making Judea Great Again

This is the text of a sermon I wrote and read this morning when I led worship for a friend who was on vacation. It is a different topic than I would normally write about, or is aimed differently, because she is minister of a Christian church and follows the lectionary. Today was Christ the King Sunday, so a reading from John 18:33-7 is my reference.

Making Judea Great Again

          A couple decades ago, when we were first married, my wife and I developed the habit of describing anything that was garishly colored—cerulean, aquamarine, taupe, copper, any neon hue—as a prom dress. As in, “That’s not a whatever, that’s a prom dress.”

          I was working at a group home for adults with emotional and developmental disabilities back then. One day, one of the residents had the day off from work and I took him shopping. When we parked in the mall parking lot, we were a couple yards from a small car that was colored a lurid lilac color. My passenger, who loved cars, pointed it out to me. “Look at that car!”

          Instinctively I said, “That’s not a car, that’s a prom dress.”

          He looked at me, he looked at the car, looked back at me, looked back at the car. Then he said, in exactly the same slow, deliberate cadence I’m sure had been used more than once on him, “That’s a car.”

          Words mean. They make solid the ephemeral world around us. They can hurt and they can heal. Before I became a full time preacher I was a full time writing teacher so you can perhaps imagine how important getting the right word or choosing the right interpretation of a word can be for me. When I taught technical writing, I had an exercise asking students to imagine I was a knight from the Middle Ages and they had to explain how a car worked to me.

          One of the most important elements of communication, whether written or oral, is to meet the audience where he or she is. To use the language that makes someone’s world real. This means using the terminology or words and phrases that the person you want to communicate with uses to make them mean roughly the same idea you want to get across. In my exercise, this meant using terms like “horse,” “spark,” and “chain,” and avoiding words like “gas”, “combustion”, “engine”, not necessarily because the words were unfamiliar but because their meanings had changed so dramatically from how someone a millennium ago would have understood them.

          The original speaker of what came to us as the Book of John may have used some word or phrase his audience had long since come to understand by virtue of its repetition. But a century later, the writer of John’s gospel, in trying to get across the newness of God’s community without bogging down his readers with questions about what exactly an unfamiliar word means, used words they had heard and understood all their lives. Hence, we get a God who is king, a Jesus who is Lord, and a place below them for the rest of us we comfortably understand.

          “Are you the king of the Jews?” “My kingdom is not from this world.” “So you are a king?” “You say that I am a king.” Why king? The John writer’s Jesus, who’s speaking Aramaic, a now nearly-extinct Semitic language related to Hebrew and Syriac, being supplanted by Arabic eventually in most places a few centuries into the Common Era, uses a word that seems, in nearly everything we understand about his theology, contrary to the freedom he otherwise espouses. If Jesus were to preach this message today, he would use a different terminology. We might get instead a God who is Chief Executive Officer, a Jesus who is our Supervisor. “Thy corporation come, thy will be done.”

To understand this, and why the John writer makes a lot about it, we need to read ahead. In seminary, I was taught two important rules in interpreting selections from the Bible: read the chapters before and after the selection and place yourself in the position of the original hearers of the selection.

          We know the books that comprise the Bible, like all ancient literature, were initially oral recitation for small audiences of believers meeting to hear the Word. These were eventually written down over the course of several hundred years. The oldest scrap of the Gospel of John has been dated to the Second Century Common Era, at least a hundred years after the death of anyone who would actually have laid eyes on the historical Jesus So to make sense of what is said, to hear it fully, we have to place ourselves in the minds of men and women who have heard scraps of the teachings of this peasant killed by an imperial force which was still very much in charge.  

It’s in chapter 19 we are given the ultimate rejection of Jesus by the people he came to Jerusalem to save. Having had Jesus whipped, Pilate presents him to the crowd gathered for Passover, saying “Here is your King!” But the crowd refuses to accept responsibility for Jesus, crying for his execution. Pilate, in John’s account, tries one last time, asking incredulously, “Shall I crucify your King?” Caiaphas and his cohorts answer him, “We have no king but Caesar.”

          The initial listeners of John’s gospel would have heard something very different. At the time of its telling, a common hymn sung during Passover contained the declaration, “We have no king but you [God].” Caiaphas and the high priests’ words make explicit their rejection not only of Jesus but of God. As followers of the Scriptures, intimately familiar with the story known to us as Exodus, the first century listeners would have heard something familiar and frightening.

Caesar is a Latin word, and in Greek is Kaiser, a word we still use. But there is no word for Caesar in Aramaic or in Hebrew, the languages the original hearers might have heard. They would have heard the word malik or king in close relation to Caesar, just as in Exodus they had heard the word Pharaoh. What they hear is a demand to return to the slavery their ancestors had escaped. 

It would be a return to, well, better the devil you know. God may have brought them out of slavery, but the people are electing to return, metaphorically, to Egypt. Knowing full well how badly most of them had it during that period, they wanted to return to that semblance of comfort. Making Judea Great Again, as it were.  

A jaded, servile Pilate famously mocks what Jesus said, that his purpose is to testify to the truth of the new community God will bring about. “What is truth?” Truth is just as malleable today as it was when Pilate said this. We live in an age of “fake news,” of “alternative facts.” We watch a video of a fight and we’re certain we understand who started it and who ended it. But then someone points out that it’s filmed from a perspective ignoring this guy over here, or that the video starts just after the first punch is thrown so we don’t hear what the other guy said. Or it’s been cropped, or speeded up or slowed down, or that the person recording is friends with one of the combatants and shows him in a better light.

Or we listen to a speech and we hear, quite clearly, the speaker make a racist comment. We are certain of what we’ve heard. But when the Pilates who work for Caesar go on TV or the Internet, saying, “That’s not what he said, or it’s not what he meant, or he was clearly joking. You are the real racist for having thought you heard him say something racist,” what are we to believe? When we’re told our eyes or our ears or our intellect is suspect, that our news sources and our schools and history books, the organizations whose intent are to collect what was said and done and tell others, are purveyors of “fake news”, then we have to admit Pilate’s mockery is justified. If Jesus’ intent is to testify to the truth, and the truth is subject to alternative facts, where does the truth lie? Does the truth lie? Scholars have discovered a Gospel of Judas. Will we someday unearth a Gospel of Pilate? 

This is a problem inherent to continuing to use, thousands of years after the event, words that were at the time an approximation of what the writer meant. Pharaohs built monuments to themselves, Caesars named conquered cities and nations after themselves, kings and princes kill people on a whim and declare themselves innocent. They aggrandize themselves, not God.

What’s needed is a different way of looking at the words we bring the world around us to life. Instead of the kingdom of God, perhaps what is to come is the community of beloveds, a phrase popularized by Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. The beloved community, however, I tell you already exists. Like the John Gospel’s kingdom of god, it is not a place but an agreement between people to care for one another, to help one another, feed one another, keep one another warm and safe. The beloved community is one of radical inclusivity, where someone looks out not for himself but for everyone, knowing that in their humanity they are all him. “My kingdom is of another place,” Jesus says, locating it not in the world of then or now but to come. It requires a lot of work, and 2 millennia after Jesus, we have barely begun.

But examples of the work of the beloved community are all around us. Last month Milwaukee bus driver Natalie Barnes was on her regular route when a stranger came up to her, told her his house had been condemned, and that he was homeless and asked if he could ride the bus all night to stay warm. She did so, and when she stopped for dinner, she bought him some hot food too. When her shift was over, she bought him clothes and supplies, then dropped him off at a homeless shelter where a friend works.

Will there be a happy ending? Well, I hope so. Barnes says she speaks to him every couple days to let him know someone cares. He was a stranger in need asking for a kindness and rewarded with more than he could have hope for. As that prolific speaker, Anonymous, has it, if you have been blessed by God, build a longer table, not a taller fence.

We Have a Kid

I think a month and a half break from publishing is long enough. During that time, much has happened. Trump's first hundred days have come and gone, numerous scandals relating to said 100 days and earlier have been discovered or uncovered, members of a family were murdered during an argument between a woman and her "bully[ing,] ticking time bomb" of a husband who nonetheless had access to a gun, people were killed by van and knife in London, and a lot of people naturally were killed between May 1 and May 31 around the world in various terrorist attacks. And during this period, we finally took in a foster son.

It was a long process, begun last year. Since, over the years, we have housed up many of my homeless and traveling friends, my wife said, "I think I'm getting the hang of this. Maybe we can have a kid come live with us." We'd talked for years, mostly in the theoretical language we appreciate, of having a teen come to live with us, but now we decided we had crossed the Rubicon between theory and practice and were ready to give ourselves in place of lectures or a little charity. So we began what was, in retrospect, not so bad a process but at the time seemed a huge burden to carry, essentially explaining the way we'd decided to live our lives in such a way that people for whom anything much outside the lines was a line too far (and they begrudged us that, oh yes, they did, keeping us on tenterhooks down to the wire as to whether they would even accept us or not) to be satisfied that we would not assault or eat any teenage children they threw our way. We knew, from the beginning, we would prefer teens as that age is very hard to place, but is the age group with which we were most comfortable.

The Tall Kid is a good kid, 6'4" of opportunity and issues. Like any of us are. Without getting into his history, I will say he's in foster care for the first time, having been placed with different members of his family and being rejected in each case. He behaves well around home, and while there are missteps, they aren't major ones (well, except using my wife's still-working credit card information on her former phone he uses to order sneakers, but we caught that fast and dealt quickly with it. One of the major elements I insist on is that, once a situation has been corrected, that's the last he hears about it, unless he does it again); it's been different at school. There, he's an authority-confronting, teacher-defying frequent user of their In-School Suspension Room, and the day before the end of school his principal called to tell me he had worn out his welcome there and was now suspended for the rest of the school year (which meant, of course, a day and a half).

We are hoping he makes the changes he wants to over the summer before starting high school. We suspect many of the problems at school are attributible to his past behavior and the fact, as someone new to the foster system, and as a Tall Black Kid, he's a focus of attention. At least high school offers  a place for new behaviors. I'm not so naive to assue he suddenly straightens up and flies right. I remember my own teens too well. But I am hoping the new place makes him want to be a different, better person.

I'm reading a book that's 20 years out of date, but is nonetheless one I'm learning a lot from: A Tribe Apart: A Journey into the Heart of American Adolescence, by Patricia Hersch. If nothing else, it gives me an insight into the way his parents might have grown up and why they treated him in the ways they did. Color me hopeful.

A reason we ended up with Trump?

I've lately been reading a book about adolescence, A Tribe Apart by Patricia Hersch, which is, I'll be the first to admit, rather dated in its information, having been published in 1998. But precisely because of that I'm left to wonder if the following information, presented about the early teens of the mid-90s, who are parents now, is a good descriptor for what has led to Trump's election.

In 1992, a USA Weekend survey of over 236,000 young people revealed that 25 to 40 percent of teens see nothing wrong with cheating on exams, stealing from employers, or keeping money that isn't theirs. A 1989 Girl Scouts survey of 5,000 kids found 65 percent would cheat on an important test. A survey by the Josephine Institute of Ethics in 1992 similarly revealed that 75 percent of high school students admit to cheating...The biggest reason, according to 65 percent of the students, was that it was more important to get good grades than to be honest..."People are under lots of pressure. The attitude is that everybody does it, people don't look upon cheating as bad, none of your friends look at you as bad because you cheated." Everybody knows it is the wrong thing to do, "but I am not convinced that it is unfair when you are in a class you are never going to need again in your whole life but...the difference between a C and an A will make a difference in what college you get into.

Paradoxically, there is an ethic of cheating. This is how most students explain it...: It is easy and it is not always straight-out cheating. It is the little sneaky stuff like asking somebody from the period before what is on the test, or being absent so you know what is on it the next day. "Real cheating is having the answers in front of you while you are taking the test, looking at someone's paper."

The truth, and everybody knows it, is that to get into college an A or B is always better than something lower, and students' lives are so full of pressure and activity, especially for the smartest and most ambitious, that something has to give. "Even though we are told it will hurt us in the long run, that is a bunch of baloney...Maybe you are hurting other people and that may be unfair, but you are not hurting yourself. Why not take the easy way out if you can go home and be with friends for three hours or work in a subject that really matters to you...[?]" The bottom line is that "grades are more important because they get you someplace--getting good grades, not being ethical." 

This may be the crux of the matter. In the Girl Scouts of America survey, it was found that by a huge margin the youth problems of the headlines--peer pressure, drugs, alcohol, sex, gangs--were not the "crisis issues" for kids. Their concerns were "the social expectations of the adult world which all have to do with pressure..." In times when society lacks clear ethical guidelines, when parents neither spend the time to educate about time-honored values...and personal responsibility nor necessarily model consistent value`s in their own lives, kids are responding to the one message they hear loud and strong from the adult world: Succeed. Do well. Do whatever you need to do... 

Kids have grown up with a regular diet of people like Leona Helmsley, who ripped off the government; Mayor Marion Barry, who was reelected after being in prison for cocaine possession; Michael Milken and his junk bonds; Ivan Boesky and insider trading; Pete Rose and gambling. The list seems endless: Watergate, Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill, Lorena and John Bobbitt, Whitewater. Stories of killings for sneakers, parents who abandon their children, drive-by shootings. The students see inconsistent punishments or no consequences at all... 

Somehow people keep on expecting kids to have a certain belief system or a commitment to certain kinds of values that are not evidenced with any regularity in their environment. Values do not spring fully formed out of nowhere. And cheating, among all the things people are doing that are not right, turns out to be fairly benign.

 Get ahead any way you need to. Cheating isn't the worst thing you can do, and you have to do it because everyone else is and it's the only reasonable response to everything they expect of you. If you aren't caught, you won't be punished, and if you are caught, well, people will understand. There's a sliding scale of unethical behavior and you can always justify it by contrasting it with what someone else does or could do. Act like we tell you, not how we act. Most importantly, other people do a whole lot worse, and they're the real reason things are bad.

Is there a better description for what history will come to call Trumpism?

258 candles-days 122-125

I've been wracking my brain trying to think of what I can say that will mean anything to anyone about the current dismal, distressing state of politics in this country. And I've come to realize this: There isn't anything I can say. But there is something I can do.

My solution, based on the Chinese proverb that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, is to provide daily candles in the form of links to other people's solutions, simple or complex responses to problems that they see. But as a single candle will hardly provide enough illumination to blot out the darkness that is the pettiness and meanness that characterizes this election cycle, I will light 258 candles, one each day between now and election day. In this way, I will do my part to remind each of us we are better than the baseness of the bases.


Today: I've often advocated for the inclusion of former prisoners in most businesses. It helps both their self-esteem and their fight against reoffending. Despite the misperception that might be suggested by its terminology, felon-friendly employment is a worthy cause that we need more and more.

258 candles-days 113-119

I've been wracking my brain trying to think of what I can say that will mean anything to anyone about the current dismal, distressing state of politics in this country. And I've come to realize this: There isn't anything I can say. But there is something I can do.

My solution, based on the Chinese proverb that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, is to provide daily candles in the form of links to other people's solutions, simple or complex responses to problems that they see. But as a single candle will hardly provide enough illumination to blot out the darkness that is the pettiness and meanness that characterizes this election cycle, I will light 258 candles, one each day between now and election day. In this way, I will do my part to remind each of us we are better than the baseness of the bases.

Today: As KRS-One and Boogie Down Productions used to say, "You Must Learn."

258 candles-day 98

I've been wracking my brain trying to think of what I can say that will mean anything to anyone about the current dismal, distressing state of politics in this country. And I've come to realize this: There isn't anything I can say. But there is something I can do.

My solution, based on the Chinese proverb that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, is to provide daily candles in the form of links to other people's solutions, simple or complex responses to problems that they see. But as a single candle will hardly provide enough illumination to blot out the darkness that is the pettiness and meanness that characterizes this election cycle, I will light 258 candles, one each day between now and election day. In this way, I will do my part to remind each of us we are better than the baseness of the bases.

Today: What would happen if we taught meditation as part of American education?

25768 candles-day 76

I've been wracking my brain trying to think of what I can say that will mean anything to anyone about the current dismal, distressing state of politics in this country. And I've come to realize this: There isn't anything I can say. But there is something I can do.

My solution, based on the Chinese proverb that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, is to provide daily candles in the form of links to other people's solutions, simple or complex responses to problems that they see. But as a single candle will hardly provide enough illumination to blot out the darkness that is the pettiness and meanness that characterizes this election cycle, I will light 258 candles, one each day between now and election day. In this way, I will do my part to remind each of us we are better than the baseness of the bases.

Today: Dancing out the hammers in your head. 

teach naked!

Most writers have accepted, not without questions, but with few alternatives, the basic format of the fiction workshop, and the collective standards that are apt to prevail there, emphasizing, in the case of fiction, the short story...The writing seminar itself has developed a specific, venerated, and almost inviolable format...A work will be read by the class, and perhaps a few passages read aloud by its writer, who is then forced to be quiet while others talk about it. Experienced participants will begin by saying something nice about the writing, something they liked, something that works. This is positive and also has the virtue of softening the next phase, the criticism. Fellow seminarians will try to confine their remarks to technique and not judgment of the writer's character or ability--nothing to suggest "you must be a horrible person to have written such a disgusting piece..." If you have to criticize, instead say, "the clumsiness of that passage may distract from you interesting theme of universal brotherly love," or something else genial.

--From "They'll Make You a Writer!: [A Review of] The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing by Mark McGurl" by Diane Johnson in the November 7, 2013, issue of New York Review of Books

As a recipient of what, elsewhere in her essay, Johnson calls "the ubiquitous and valued MFA," and a member of many workshops, I can vouch for the veracity of the description above. And as someone who's taught a couple undergraduate creative writing courses myself--which were, above all else, a lot of fun--I can also admit to the supposition of the first sentence: I tried to break the format in my first class but found it nearly impossible to do so. So like the proverbial American lit professor who includes the execrable Sister Carrie in his syllabus because it was part of his studies, I taught exactly the way I was taught, and in some instances in much the same way.

But this isn't to dis the teaching of creative writing in contemporary American schools or the subject of studying creative techniques because, the truth is, I had a lot of fun taking workshops. I loved the arguing, the overlapping elements of narrative and plot and authorial intent (my own favorite, and true, explanation for why it doesn't matter what the author intended: "I won't have you to explain this to me when I'm reading it alone."), the all-night drives to other towns to take part in joint readings, the drinking and bullshit sessions with visiting writers. The acting as if writing really mattered. And it was also true what I told my students: if focusing on writing interested them, then by all means go study it because they would have a focus and concentration and comment on their art that they will never have otherwise in their lives.

And while it's true that, as McGurl points out, the holy triumvirate of finding your voice, writing what you know, and showing rather than telling, tends to produce cookie-cutter small-magazine voices talking about their own special hyphenate problems (in my experience, we often slapped down genre writing in class because "no one," meaning "no one in this class," "reads it," denying the prime real estate devoted in any sized bookstore to the sales of exactly that kind of writing about what no one, whether classified as science fiction, mystery, fantasy, action or romance, has ever experienced), Johnson touches on a truth here when she quotes Elif Batuman in The London Review of Books: "We have to stop being ashamed that 'literary writing is inherently elitist and impractical. It doesn't directly cure disease, combat injustice, or make enough money, usually, to support philanthropic aims,' except in the case of Dave Eggars. But we can still proudly practice it."

This, by the way, remains my favorite workshop-related piece in any media:

the internet as god

[Pragmatism] implied a doctrine...which [Charles] Pierce was concerned to refute.  This was nominalism--the belief that since concepts are generalizations about things that, taken individually, are singular and unreproducible, they do not refer to anything real.  Nominalism is the doctrine that reality is just one unique thing after another, and that general truths about those things are simply conventions of language, simply names.  Pierce balked at this conclusion...We think in generalizations:  that is what inferences are--general truths drawn from the observation of particular events.  Therefore, [Pierce concluded] there must be things in the universe to which our generalizations correspond.

The nominalist's mistake, Pierce argued, is the definition of belief as individual belief.  Of course the beliefs of individuals are flawed; no individual mind is capable of an accurate and objective knowledge of reality.  But the aggregate beliefs of many individual minds is another matter...

Nominalism, [Pierce] believed, was a philosophy in aid of selfishness.  This was not simply because nominalism denies knowledge its social character; it was because by acknowledging the reality only of individuals, nominalism denies the social altogether...

[The] conviction at the bottom of all of Pierce's thought...was that knowledge cannot depend on the inferences of single individuals.  For individuals die:  "the number of probable inferences, which a man draws in his whole life, is a finite one, and he cannot be absolutely certain that the mean result will accord with the probabilities at all"...Reasoning "inexorably requires that our interests shall not be limited.  They must not stop at our own fate, but must embrace the whole community...He who would not sacrifice his own soul to save the whole world, is, as it seems to me, illogical in all his inferences, collectively.  Logic is rooted in the social principle."

 --from The Metaphysical Club:  A Story of Ideas in America by Louis Menand

If it's true that all learning is social--and it is in the sense that "to learn" means to acquire or gain some new knowledge or skill; if we mean something else we need a different word--then learning is something we can only do in culture, in society.  Learning has to be taught, and it makes no difference if we're talking about a human teacher, an accidental teacher, or a physical natural event as the vehicle of what's taught.

I'm reminded of one of my favorite geek ideas, that once everyone on the planet becomes connected to the internet or some web, then the web itself becomes god.  As at least one blogger has suggested, this posits an optimistic rather than dystopian future:  that the divine is what we have to look forward to (as a communal rather than individual end) rather than a golden past with a Fall.

teach naked

 

I've no clue where this quote came from--I've done a cursory background search and, aside from this quote, there seems no information on Alexandra K. Trenfor otherwise--but that doesn't diminish from the truth of what she, or someone who attributes it to her, said. 

 

Similarly, I'm rereading Parker Palmer's Healing the Heart of Democracy, and came across the following wisdom:  "No educational task is more important than helping students reflect on realities larger than their own egos."  This was always, although I never articulated it the way Palmer has, the impetus behind my teaching and I hope that came through to most of my students.  I'm learning to translate this now to everyday life; that's harder and less often rewarded, I've found, but no less rewarding.

teach naked!

on occasion, when I especially miss teaching, I swipe an issue of "the chronicle review," the midsection of the larger chronicle of higher education--my rationale is that it's unlikely most visiters to my local libraries are going to read the chronicle anyway, and it might as well go to use--and spend a few days reading it.  last week I brought home a copy with the short essay "against reading lists" by lennard j. davis.

it's a provocative idea, dropping required readings from syllabi (except for some introductory material) and allowing students to determine, through conversation and suggestion and their own outside reading, where to go next.  say, in a 20th century american lit class opening with some early influential stuff--"song of myself," say, or the red badge of courage--and allow them to determine what and who to read next, maybe choosing from a prepared list of options.

davis recognizes the massive change that ebooks and online availability makes for reading. 

on the internet, one link leads to another.  you look up turner, say, on wikipedia.  that site leads you to the national gallery of art, which in turn leads you to romanticism, which in turn takes you to delacroix, and thus to reubens, who isn't a romantic but whose use of flesh, light, and color influenced that movement.  that little stroll was unpredictable, but a fruitful exercise in intellectual curiosity.  in the past, we've operated with a very different model, conditioned not by the internet and the intellectual meandering it allows but by a kind of linear thinking reflected by the consecutiveness that we find on the printed page.  the fixed reading list is the icon of that linearity.

at first, I wasn't certain he understood what some of the realworld costs of that flexibility meant.  for instance, he suggests that in "the new world of e-books, online publications, and next-day book deliveries, we are freed from the dull hand of tradition," apparently oblivious to the fact that for most students not enrolled at a more expensive school like chicago, where he teaches, such sudden cash expenditures are not easy to negotiate (or for working students to plan reading time around).  he does , however, next present a more affordable and workable alternative, suggesting an e-reader (or an option to spring for paperback copies for the more linear among them) for his students onto which they could download preselected texts.  he says he somehow selected his list so that the 2 groups "would end up spending the same amount of money..." 

that format allowed many impromptu changes in the reading list.  it also allowed us to look at a poem or a short story right at the moment in class when it occured to me to refer to that work.  another benefit was that visual material, not included in the course packet or reading list, could be called up at the mention of a specific reference.

this is doable now, of course, using classbased technology, and I've made much use of that in my more recent practice, putting sites and film clips and readings on the overhead computer screens available in most college classes.  but he makes an excellent point near the conclusion of his essay that what we are looking at is not only new in terms of technology in the class but in the way learning is distributed.

we are now presented with a more 3-dimensional model that reaches through time and space in unpredictable and valuable ways.  the philosophers gilles deleuze and felix guattari called that kind of knowledge "rhizomatic," after a type of plant.  a rhizome, such as a potato, reproduces by sending out underground shoots that form another plant, which in turn does the same thing, producing a network of roots.  deleuze and guattari contrast that to the "arboreal" model, in which a single set of roots produces a single tree, with all its branches connected to one trunk.  deleuze and guattari see the arboreal model as the older model of knowing, hierarchical and organized, such as strict taxonomes of organisms.  they see the rhizomatic as a newer, more effective scheme for organizing knowledge.

 

teach naked: punk edition

I was reminded recently of this midterm I used while teaching at mcnally-smith college of music in the hub.  I'd made some reference to a seminal punk band--the boomtown rats--and not a single member of that class of overlyhip, overlyhyped snottynosed brats even pretended to know the group.  so I created this midtern in order to get their priorities corrected.  feel free to try it yourself or use it to bring a class' appreciation of history to the fore. 

MIDTERM

Johnny Thunders died for your sins!  So you have a better knowledge and, perhaps, appreciation for the aesthetics of punk, you’re going to learn to write an album review.  You will choose one of the albums listed below, listen to it at least three times all the way through, and review it for a Punk Planet-like publication.  Reviewing doesn’t mean you say you like it or not—no one cares if you like it.  What you must do is put yourself in the frame of mind of someone who is the target audience for the album, the average punk consumer, and locate elements in the songs that would appeal to him or would turn him off.  The usual requirements are still the same—500 words, two double-spaced typed pages, no spelling or grammatical errors.  The change is that I’m going to read it exactly like an editor, which means I’ll read it with an eye toward whether I’m going to print it or not.  The grade I give it is the percent chance it would have of getting published.  (Unlike an actual editor, from whom you’d only hear “yes” or “no,” I’ll make corrections and suggestions and write comments on it.)  Wikipedia has an excellent article on punk and its definition at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punk_rock, so it would be a good idea to start there. 

Albums

• Bad Brains, Bad Brains
• Bad Religion, The Empire Strikes First
• Blondie, Blondie
• Butthole Surfers, Locust Abortion Technician
• Buzzcocks, Flat Pack Philosophy
• The Clash, Combat Rock
• Dead Kennedys, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables
• The Devotchkas, Live Fast, Die Young
• Elvis Costello and the Attractions, This Year’s Model
• Flogging Molly, Within a Mile of Home
• Gang of Four, Solid Gold
• The Mekons, Fear and Whiskey
• The Muffs, Blonder and Blonder
• Le Tigre, Le Tigre
• The New York Dolls, The New York Dolls
• Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, The Best of…
• Patti Smith, Horses
• Pere Ubu, The Art of Walking
• The Pixies, Doolittle
• The Plasmatics, Coup d’Etat
• The Ramones, Rocket to Russia
• Richard Hell and the Voidoids, Blank Generation
• Sex Pistols, Never Mind the Bollocks—Here’s the Sex Pistols!
• Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Best of…
• Sleater-Kinney, The Woods
• The Slits, Cut
• Talking Heads, Talking Heads:  77
• Velvet Underground, The Velvet Underground
• X, Under the Big Black Sun
• Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Fever to Tell

teach naked

The destruction of the [Mongol] invasions, when so much had been lost, led to an intensification of the conservatism that always characterized agrarian society.  When resources were limited, it was impossible to encourage inventiveness and originality in the way that we do today in the modern West, where we expect to know more that our parents' generation and that our children will experience still greater advance.  No society before our own could afford the constant retraining of personnel and replacement of the infrastructure that innovation on this scale demands.  Consequently, in all pre-modern societies, including that of agrarian Europe, education was designed to preserve what had already been achieved and to put a brake on the ingenuity and curiosity of the individual, which could undermine the stability of a community that had no means of integrating or exploiting fresh insights.  In the madrasahs, for example, pupils learned old texts and commentaries by heart, and the teaching consisted of a word-by-word explication of a standard textbook.  Public disputation between scholars took for granted that one of the debaters was right and the other wrong.  There was no idea, in the question-and-answer style of study, of allowing the clash of opposing positions to build a new synthesis. 

--from Islam:  A Short History by Karen Armstrong (my emphasis)

In the Spirit of the Mosquito

I’d forgotten how much I miss the scent of incense and just-lit matches. I was immersed in it at the Clouds in Water Zen Center in St. Paul. I visited there yesterday with several other members of my Zen Buddhism class, co-groupers from a social fieldwork project.

The place was incredible and in the warehouse district. The ceilings were huge, 25, 30-feet tall. They’ve had problems with pigeons occasionally flying in through open or partly-open windows, leading to their placing extra, narrower screens on the windows. The ceiling is held up by old-growth timber; the building was one of the Great Northern Railroad’s many local warehouses, and the Center’s Zazen room was the vault for the building. There are several motion-sensor cameras above each door coming in from the outside—a sensible precaution in an area with many bars and restaurants—but aside from several altars in different rooms and a few paintings in the meeting room, the walls are blank of adornment.

Much of this was told us by Tom, a member who was our practice instructor for the morning. Tom had grown up Catholic but was attracted to Zen Buddhism as a spiritual discipline that was “in service to humanity and not to a god.” He had joined the Center after “30 years of reading and dreaming” and had been a member for 10 years. Initially dismissive of the lessons he learned under the Church, but in the years since meditating and practice, he has become more convinced there are strong correlations between what he’d grown up with and his current practices. He said he was “too much of a smartass” back then to retain much, but now claims “if only someone had taught me then about anything,” he would have been more likely to combine them. He calls the two practices, in their separate ways, “talking with God.”

The Zazen was wonderful, relaunching the memories I have of time spent on my knees, and I was happy to discover that the stance I was most comfortable with was also a legitimate one, called the Burmese sitting position. This was a tremendous improvement over the sitting I was required to do as a younger and more pliable participant in sesshin back in the late 80s, settled on my knees resting on my heels for hours. (I saw only one person sitting this way, and he seemed comfortable in it.) Had this stance been offered me, I might have remained a Buddhist.

The Buddhism the Center espouses is Mahayana or Greater Vehicle Buddhism, which prioritizes the enlightenment of all beings over the enlightenment of the individual. The chant they conducted after the dharma talk was, in fact, the Bodhisattva’s vow:

May our intention equally penetrate every being and place with the true merit of Buddha’s way. Beings are numberless, I vow to free them. Delusions are inexhaustible, I vow to end them. Dharma gates are boundless, I vow to enter them. The Buddha Way is unsurpassable, I vow to realize it.

We sat for a little more than a half hour with a few minutes break at the halfway point. I was surprised how easily it all came back to me: the peacefulness, the attuned hearing, the sense of something interior being let out, my attention to the play of sunlight moving slowly across the floor. I focused on a window just in front of me, remembering to have soft eyes (it helped to push my glasses off my face), and counting my breaths. I did not experience Satori but I did feel very good.

This is the chant we did after sitting and before the Dharma talk. Tom had told us it was the chant they did weekly.

The unsurpassed, profound, and wondrous dharma is rarely met with, even in a hundred, thousand, million kalpas. Now we can see and hear it, accept and maintain it. May we unfold the meaning of the Tathagata’s truth.

I noted during our stretching break and at other times that some people, mostly men, were very conscious of imagined eyes on them. Their own eyes darted to and fro. I noticed this because I recognized my own tendency to do this. I also noted that the Buddha whose presence dominated the Zazen room was very feminine-looking, and might even have been a female Buddha. If this is so, I liked it.

The Dharma talk itself, I fear, was dull to me. Not much was said that struck me as original (aside from the comment that provides the title for this post or the African proverb preceding it) and several times I thought to myself, “This would be a good place to end.” I found myself experiencing not only monkey-mind but monkey-body—rocking, stretching, moving beyond necessity to find a comfortable position.

I took down several takeaways from the Dharma talk:

• “Where do I start in my new life?”
• “There’s an African proverb that says, ‘If you think you’re too small to make a difference, you haven’t spent a night trapped with a mosquito.’”
• “The Eightfold Path operates as a prescription against suffering.”
• “Why do I feel the need to speak?”
• “I see the power of speech and how actions emerge from that.”
• “Even a small action, how like a ripple it moves out.”
• “Being aware right now, of all judgment, with deliberation.”
• “What I want to escape isn’t my life. What I want to escape is my struggle.”
• “In one minute we are told there are 60 seconds, and within each second there are 60 or 62 moments. So we have a lot of time to notice thing. We should not miss our life. Right now is the only time we have.”
• “It’s exhilarating to fight this losing battle with reality.”
• “The mind is an untrained elephant.”
• “Everything is alive and whole and complete [including us] as it is.”
• The Eightfold Path (also called Indra’s Net) is holographic—every piece reflects the whole.

teach naked

Nelson [Humboldt] spent the summer after graduation back [home], painting houses and fantasizing hopefully about the next few years of his life. Gallaher had painted an idyllic picture of his own grad school days, living in a Quonset hut in East Lansing, Michigan, writing his master's thesis on a card table at one end of the room while his wife and kids watched Your Show of Shows at the other. As a going-away present, he had given Nelson a handsome slip-covered edition of Aristotle. This would give him a head start on his literary theory seminar, Gallagher said, and Nelson spent the summer reading it cover to cover, his hands smelling of turpentine.

But on his first day as a graduate student, at the very first meeting of Introduction to Literary Theory, his instructor--a gaunt and entirely hairless man in severe wire rims, a jacket of herringbone tweed, and a white roll-neck sweater--lifted a paperback edition of Aristotle with two fingers and set it on fire with a silvery Zippo. He dropped it in a wastebasket without a word and watched it burn, and when Nelson got up and opened a window to let out the smoke, he spun with a sharp, jerking motion and barked at Nelson to sit down.

"Don't touch that, you!" the professor said, in a vaguely Gallic accent; and then, to everyone, "I want you all to smell that. I want it to penetrate to the back of your nostrils. By the end of the term I want that smell to come to you even in your sleep, to be as familiar to you as the stink of your own pale, oozing bodies."

This struck Nelson as a little extreme on a September morning in Indiana.

"For some of you," the professor went on, "I will be an intellectual terroriste, striking brutally"--and here he lunged at a young woman in the front row, who cringed and clutched her notebook to her bosom--"ruthlessly and without warning at the foundation of every you hold dear. But for those of you with the rigor and the intellectual humility to submit to my will, I will be your guerilla chieftain, teaching you, disciplining you, driving you with a terrible love to do things you did not think possible. Some of you will not survive." He fixed Nelson with a fearsome glare, his merciless eyes huge behind his lenses. "But some of you I will lead out of the hills and down into the burning metropole."

He lifted the wastebasket. Aristotle was still smoldering.

"This is just the first step," he said. "We will have to destroy literary theory in order to save it."

Thus Nelson discovered that no one was doing close reading anymore. The professor called himself Jean-Claude Evangeline. Even his colleagues were uncertain of his provenance, although they hadn't examined his vita any further than the College de France, which was good enough for them. His one published volume, Les Mortifications, a book as dense and impenetrable as the man himself, was dedicated equally mysteriously to "Ma belle guerriere!" His English was flawlessly idiomatic, but was he French? Flemish? Quebecois? Those of his colleagues who envied his cultural cachet and his hypnotic hold over graduate students mimicked his accent behind his back and compared him to Pepe LePew.

...Nelson himself felt as though he had passed through the looking glass. An innocent and self-evident remark in Evangeline's class about Conrad's jumbled chronologies raised snorts of derision from his classmates. A severe young woman from the Indian subcontinent addressed Nelson without looking at him, telling him painfully, in a posh imperial accent, that Conrad's racisim was the starting point for any discussion of his work.

"Read Edward Said," she added, in a curt postcolonial sotto voce.

Evangeline himself cut Nelson not un millimetre of slack. In his first paper, Nelson manfully tackled Nietzsche, the earliest theorist Professor Evangeline was willing to sanction, and the professor handed the paper back with a failing grade and only one comment; on the first page he'd circled the word "literature" in blood-red felt tip and written in the margin: "When I see this word, I reach for my revolver."

Thus, Nelson's first lesson in graduate school was to keep his mouth shut.

--from The Lecturer's Tale by James Hynes

this is from an interesting comic horror novel I've started reading about an academic whose reattached finger begins to assert his will on everyone around him, a sort of postmodernest revision of faustus or of what faustus would have liked to accomplish. hynes also wrote the collection publish and perish back in the 90s, and I really enjoyed those stories. as with many young literary men--or in this case, middleaged literary men--this story may have autobiographical detail, particularly the above, but I reproduce it not because it reflects my own grad experience--far from it--but because I heard similar stories from many classmates and remember the bloodshot and baggy-lidded eyes of other students, so that I often wondered at my own abilities to avoid such enforced workaholism. for me, grad school and then teaching was mostly fun, and the few times it became insufferable were distinctly because of my own tendencies for procrastinating (which of course I am loathe to give up).