To be fair, my creative writing students were much better on Wednesday than they were on Monday. I’d still complain that most of them haven’t really tried to apply the principles & ideas & techniques we’ve looked at in example texts & that we’ve discussed in workshop to their own writing. A few have begun to do that, perhaps — something that comes out much more in conferences than in workshop sessions. For a few of these better students I may have gotten them to point where they can imagine a relationship to a reader. I think that’s part of the “aesthetic distance” I was talking about in the previous post. (Writers who say they “write only for themselves” are either beginners or pros who have so internalized the basic needs of a reader that they have forgotten them.) The failure to internalize the habits (Bordieu) of literary writing is not a matter of intelligence or even talent with my students; rather, I suspect it is a belief about the imagination. Or about “creativity” as it is usually conceptualized in current culture. According to this view, imagination needs no limits or techniques, but only expression.
Monthly Archives: November 2007
Wit
I know there is a large literature on wit, but while writing the previous post it struck me that we use the term to name two essential things: 1) Basic smarts, the ability to have your wits about you; 2) the ability to use language against itself in order to stand against conventional wisdom. So wit deflates pomposity, but if that is all it does it is mere wit; to be really effective, wit needs to be deployed with love, or at least sympathy. I was listening to Fountains of Wayne while writing the last post; now I’m listening to one of their grandfathers, Mose Alison. The sympathy in a Mose Alison tune doesn’t come from the lyric — “You mind is on vacation and your mouth is working overtime” — but from the sweetness of the delivery, which tempers & transforms the acid of the words. And it is the very ability to have a distinct delivery in language — a point of view, a way of seeing the world — that enables wit by creating aesthetic distance.
Bright Future in Sales, Yeah Yeah
I’ve been teaching a long time, but I have seldom had a class as dispiriting as my current Introduction to Creative Writing. It is the end of the semester & they are still unable to eliminate or transform clichés in their own work or identify them in the work of others. They are for the most part unable to describe the tone of a poem or story or to conceptualize & express the basic situations & speakers of poems & stories either professional or by their classmates. But the very worst is that they snicker at passion. They are sarcastic without the least sense of irony. I came home tonight & put the Welcome Interstate Managers CD by Fountains of Wayne on the stereo & cranked the fucker up:
Sleeping on a planter in the Port Authority
Waiting for my bus to come.
Seven scotch and sodas at the office party
And now I don’t know where I’m from.I think I had a black wallet
In my back pocket
With a bus ticket
And a picture of my baby inside
And if I make it home alive
I’m gonna get my shit together
Cause I can’t live like this forever –
You know I’ve come too far
And I don’t want to fail.
I got a new computer
And a bright future in sales
Yeah, yeah.
Welcome to your world, seniors. Another Fountains of Wayne song begins, “Working all day for a mean little man / With a clip-on tie and a rub-on tan . . .” What makes these songs art, ironically, is that (in addition to their verbal wit) they express sympathy for the cubicle rats whose lives they chronicle. Sympathy & wit, the values of verbal art.
Update: So, naturally, I post one snarky thing about my students that I could have posted anonymously elsewhere & the Chronicle of Higher Ed picks it up for its academic blogs column.
Second Update: Here is the comment some creep posting as “Dave” left at the Chronicle: ” ‘Passion’ has become an advertising cliché. In academic circles, it has become a hyperbolic way of talking about ‘something you are really interested in.’ To be teacher of the year, you have to be ‘passionate’ about your subject. Inspirational speakers (who try to inspire without saying anything) tell us to ‘pursue our passion.’ I heard an NPR non-ad about some company that ius [sic] ‘passionate’ about accounting and another that says ‘X is not just our business—it’s our passion.’ I have added ‘passion’ to my meeting bingo list (along with ‘top of mind’ and ‘connect the dots’). Passion is due for a Saturday Night Live sendup. No wonder students snicker.”
Don’t you love that phrase, “in academic circles”? The anti-intellectual contempt just drips off each syllable like some nasty viscous spirit-killing pus. Dave must be an associate vice president for finance is all I can figure. Something has surely killed his soul. Perhaps he thinks that the emotional life has no appropriate place in a creative writing course. I wasn’t actually talking about my passion, but about my students’ passivity in the face of poems & stories by Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams, Sherman Alexi, T.C. Boyle, etc. “Dave” fails to understand the way that art can stand emotion up in formal structures so that it reveals us to ourselves. Makes sense of the world. Stand in opposition to cliché. Most likely, he is just one of the increasing number of the walking dead.
Jihadis from Morocco
There is a remarkable essay by Andrea Elliott in the NY Times Magazine about a group of boys who grew up in Tetouan Morocco & became jihadis in Spain & Iraq. Though it was many years ago, I traveled through Tetouan & then further south in Morocco. Perhaps that is why I found the accounts in Elliott’s essay to resonant. I’ve seen those streets, though they would have been populated by these boys’ fathers & grandfathers a quarter century ago when I was there. (The final section of my first book, Customs (1987), contains poems about Morocco.) Still, the same social problems existed then as now: an authoritarian state, a static society, a pervasive rule-bound religious practice, lack of decent job opportunities even for the educated . . . The theme that runs through Elliott’s essay is Why this place? Why these boys? & more broadly, What makes one young person shift over into jihadi violence while his brother or cousin does not? A lot of people have suggested answers, but it seems to me that each of the young men described in the article had a particularly strong need for meaning in their lives. They were driven toward some version of authenticity in ways their peers were not.The way such a drive expresses itself is highly variable. Some restless boys have always gone for soldiers while others became poets or doctors. When you add a fundamentalist religious system, you make it easier for some boys to abandon their capacities for imagination & critical intelligence in favor of the arid intricacies of textual exegesis. “It is shameful to be an artist,” one of the boy’s father told him. I was told the same thing, essentially, by my own (Christian) father & it wouldn’t have taken too many steps in a particular direction for me to have wound up committing political violence in the early 1970s instead of becoming a teacher & writer. One charismatic imam / professor, one financial setback, one disappointment . . . Some boys will always “go for soldiers,” in the broad sense of that term, & some small number of those will commit atrocities. Because it is in our interests in the secular West to reduce that number, we ought to become more interested in providing economic & imaginative hope for young people around the world. And I include members of the US military: listen to any group of enlisted men & women in the US & compare their social attitudes (bred of cultural isolation & indoctrination) with those of young men on the concrete soccer pitch in Tetouan — you will find equally offensive prejudices in both groups. It’s pretty clear this would be more cost effective than an endless “war on terror,” which cripples our own abilities to think straight while at the same time engendering increased violence & hatred in those who set themselves against us. Just pragmatically, I mean. There is another set of moral arguments that might be made.
Thanksgiving at Melissa’s
Carole & I usually go to Ottawa to one of our favorite restaurants on Thanksgiving. Yes, there is a bit of irony, which we cultivate, surrounding leaving the US to celebrate a US holiday. I have no family I’d much want to associate with in any case & Carole’s family members live on the West coast, a long trip for an extended weekend. Most of our academic pals go hang out with their families, so we have made a virtue of our disconnectedness by having a nice meal out. The sweet potato frites at the Black Dog Cafe are out of this world — & sweet potatoes are traditional on the day! But this year Carole’s colleague Melissa invited us & a couple of other rootless souls over to her house for a traditional Thanksgiving feast. It worked out nicely since we had freezing rain, then snow overnight, which would have made a trip to Ottawa difficult if not impossible. Well, traditional except for the vegetarian spring rolls I made as an appetizer. Carole made a co-appetizer of smoked trout sour cream dip with crackers. Mark brought the wine, Dorothy brought a chocolate mouse & a cranberry-orange sauce for the Turkey, which was perfectly cooked by Melissa, who also baked limpa bread. Alexa made mashed sweet potatoes & little cheesecakes for a second desert. Perfect meal, lovely. After dinner we played cards — a game I was unfamiliar with, but which Melissa, daughter of an Anglican priest, grew up playing. When she was little, she said, they had to call it Oh, Heck! even though everyone knew its real name was Oh, Hell! or Shit-on-Your-Neighbor. (We played a two-deck version, otherwise the same as the game described in the link.) I didn’t play very well, so in revenge I’ll have to have Melissa over to play Hearts. I’m not actually a great Hearts player, but at least I know the strategies. For a bunch of loose ends, we made a fine meal & had a good time.