Thursday, April 19, 2007

* RADIO RANT: Crazy English Majors

A new generation of students afraid to write anything but . . . haikus about trees?!Given that the VA Tech murderer was an English major who had previously "distinguished" himself with some highly suspect creative writing, I can imagine—indeed fear—a paranoid "tightening" of policies and procedures in higher education, particular in English/creative writing venues—and a new generation of students afraid to write anything but . . . haikus about trees?! I have read many student writings that walked a border between "sanity" (a problematic term itself) and sociopathy; for some, I recommended counseling (and fancied that, as someone with a background in psychology, too, I talked more than one out of suicide); with others, I trusted my gut instinct that a certain healthy ego strength still ruled the day, and I was generally reassured by these students' subsequent successes. But my main point here is that there is a fine line between the William Blakes and (young) Allen Ginsbergs of the world and the Unabomber. Indeed, I would suspect that these two classes of—uh—eccentrics are practically indistinguishable to the lay public (damned near all of us) until the inevitably retrospective "I told you he'd go off some day." And my concern here, again, is only that positive creative "eccentricity" doesn't become an object of censorship and self-censorship.

Michael Savage was little help in this regard last night [4/18/07], tossing out words like "insane" and "psycho" as if they were current scientific/psychiatric terms. "Mentally ill," the cable-news talking-shrinks' term, I can better stomach, but that catch-all phrase encompasses everything from minor neurotic obsessions to psychoses such as paranoid schizophrenia. In no way does "mental illness" necessarily = "psycho" or "insane." (I'm reminded of a student response from an old Intro to Lit class: "Coleridge must of [sic] been psychotic when he wrote 'Kubla Khan'"!)

However, and characteristically, Savage immediately contradicts his original diagnosis in leaping at one caller's speculations that the killer seemed actually quite "focused" and SANE, and indeed, behaved like a terrorist operative. . . . AH, Savage leads the caller on: Al Qaeda terrorism! YES! Savage then grasps at Cho's use of the name "Ishmael" as some "iconic" reference to Islam. I would more humbly (and more obviously) offer the hypothesis that he was an English major, after all, and was more likely to have learned the mythos of this wanderer/outcast from Herman Melville and other references to the Biblical name in Western literature than from the Koran and/or "Islamo-fascist" propaganda. Once again: every theory is "a species of involuntary and unconscious autobiography" (Nietzsche). And Michael Savage seems less able to get beyond that human-all-too-human limitation than most.

2 comments:

Artichoke Heart said...

And I have to say that it concerns me . . . I'm worried that now there will be a sense that CW teachers should somehow be monitoring their students' creative work to check for mental hygiene, and I think this is repugnant.

Tom Gannon said...

My concern exactly; and to expand on my reference above, I think it was the vaunted scholar & critic Lionel Trilling, at Columbia, who thought his student, Allen Ginsberg, was such a loose screw that Trilling wrote a short story about him, about an introverted and asocial figure more fit to have literature wriiten _about_ him rather than someone who could write _literature_ himself.

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