Bright Future in Sales, Yeah Yeah
Posted on November 26, 2007
Filed Under Personal, Teaching |
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.
Comments
4 Responses to “Bright Future in Sales, Yeah Yeah”
What’s their reason for being in the class? Sounds like a blog post for “Rate Your Students.”
Yeah, I thought of sending it to RYS. I’ve had things there before. But I wanted to own this experience in public. The students are mostly filling a Humanities requirement, so perhaps I shouldn’t expect much, but I always think students in this class will be, at the least, self-motivated.
Well, don’t feel outed; it didn’t come off as snarky. I can identify with that somewhat empathetic pain. Fountains of Wayne seem an appropriate antidote; why not give them a bit of it as exemplary material. Maybe if they parse a couple of the numbers, they’ll begin to see the greater possibilities of complexity. or not
The wonders of the blogosphere. Don’t worry, though; the post didn’t seem snarky to me. I’ll be interested in your students’ responses if you share this with them–and I think you should consider doing so.
Two thumbs up here for Fountains of Wayne, too. “Sick Day” is another glorious song of sympathy, irony, and wit. I just read a great quotation on irony and the need to avoid it until one has real sophistication of thought–but now I can’t remember where. Ah, for a Memex!