* On Favorite Authors

Teaching the ENGL capstone course for the first time, I'm also getting to teach some favorites I haven't taught in a long time--including William Wordsworth. As enthusiastic as I've been re Lyrical Ballads, however, I still have to interject my rather irreverent attitude/teaching style into my presentation of the Sage of Grasmere. And some students don't know how to handle this. Which led me to a new aphorism, a new "quot.-of-the-day" from yours truly:

If you can't laugh at your favorite authors . . . you haven't read them long enough.

* "Beat Me, Daddy-O"

It beats me how public television can consider itself educational sometimes. So I'm surfing by this "educational" show set in a bookstore—and stop because the bookstore person is talking about the fact that the Beat writers used to frequent the place. When the interviewer asks what "Beat" means, our literary expert explains, "It was called Beat poetry because it had a rhythm to it"!?!? (Yeh, sure; hit that bongo, man.) Jack Kerouac, that beatific hipster, must be rolling in his grave.

* RADIO RANT: Michael Savage on Ecofeminism

Thanks, Mr. Savage—you've given me a better title for my ENGL 945 course. Last night (9/5), you made reference to "wackjob moron feminist treehuggers." What an interesting appellation! Henceforth, then, I think I should call my Native Ecofeminist class "Wackjob Moron Feminist Treehugger Squaws." Okay, maybe squaw isn't a word you'd be brazen enough to utter on the radio, but I assume it's an epithet that swims around comfortably in your consciousness.

* SKOOL DAZE BLUZ

(The following effusion was inspired in part by my awareness that I seemed to be "rushing" out blog posts now, knowing that I wouldn't be able to expend nearly as much effort when school started.)

I imagine that damned near EVERYONE who has grown up in a Western nine-month school system has internalized the same seasonal-emotional clock: the clock that says, with the end of summer, something painful comes. Whether your particular school starts in mid/late August or after Labor Day, it's that same archetypal turn towards the "Fall of Man," both a darkening of the seasons and an imprisonment of the soul: i.e., SCHOOL.

And it also really doesn't matter that much if you're a student or teacher, young or old. ALL know that two-weeks-to-go shudder, that beginning-of-the-end-of-pleasure "I-have-to-do-something-now-before-it's-over!" As a child, I knew it, even though I also knew that, as a poor kid whose only love was books, it wasn't that great a loss. As a young man without a job, though, I especially felt it, perhaps, since watching Jerry Lewis & his marathon without having found a real job YET meant true failure, according to the natural order/timeframe of things. (That is, without a job, I should by all rights be in school now, in some fashion or another, doing something!) As a middle-aged curmudgeon with a teaching job, yes, there's the pressure of syllabi and handouts and trying to concentrate the mind beyond the ephemeralia of blogs & "radio rants"—and yet my classes actually do deal with many of the issues that I'm so po'd about in these blog entries.

But still—yes: the body's, and society's, clock says it's the end of summer, a death, a finale, a funeral for the soul. But like that toothache I blogged about before—it's rather a delicious pain at this point in my life, an acknowledged product of the heavy fruits of consciousness. [Geez, I came off sounding older than I am. I hope.]

* RETARDED

As an advocate of the developmentally disabled, I despise those comedians who must say "RETARDED" over and over, as part of their limited & relatively talentless shtick: e.g., Carlos Mencia. (And hey, Carlos, no Indian with any self-respect would mock his own race like you mock yours.) I've also noticed, in this decade, that the use of the word "retarded" among the general public—and above all, MY STUDENTS—has become even more blatant. I always stop them in class when they use the word: "you mean 'developmentally disabled?'" Obviously, they're trying to redefine a term in a way that I both resent and deny. Ditto "gay," as my students say: "that's so gay." I ask them: "you mean homosexual, and in an obvious negative connotation?" Nope, they have no clue thereof—things are just "gay"—I guess because, like Paris Hilton, they haven't got outside their six-friend, six-video-game, 600-pop-song, 6,000-word-vocabulary "retarded" lives. Excuse me for my language.

* Mormon = Christian? = ?

A new poll out today (regarding Romney's candidacy) says that a good third of Americans don't believe that Mormons are Christian; another third do; and another third don't know/aren't sure. This correlates well with my own experience with college undergraduates, who—Christian or not—have little notion of the history of (even Western) religion. Thus I often get comments from well-meaning Protestants that not only are Mormons a wacko non-Christian sect-of-a-nut-job, but so are—Catholics! (And never mind any knowledge of the history of Protestantism.) Maybe I'm thankful that I don't get so many student essays quoting the Bible as their only source anymore—but maybe not: this new generation of Christian irrationalists seems to have acquired its entire ideology from parents and conservative media—and they have little idea of the actual tenets of whatever sect they adhere to, short of "I'm anti-abortion," "I hate faggots/queers," and "I'm 'agin' all that evolution-monkey talk." (Recall that, at the recent Republican presidential-candidate debate, when asked who DIDN'T believe in evolution, three of the ten old-white-males actually raised their shaky, Bible-toting hands.)

Likewise, my students also have written me, on occasion, that the Lakota Sun Dance is an inhumane cruelty of a ritual—usually the same students who claim that The Passion of the Christ is one dang fine edifying movie. . . . (I remember that at least one Christian web site was selling commemorative "spikes"—to be worn around the neck—during this movie's heyday; I also recall that I didn't buy one, however tempted. [Wait, my wife did buy me a cheap "facsimile" thereof for my birthday or Christmas—it was "so kewl."])

* Student Sentences

A few all-time hilarious sentences from my students' writing:

* [from a student's Intro to Lit journal entry (Fall 1992):] "This is a short poem with alot of unknown meaning."
(An extreme version of Freshman English students' great propensity to assume that all [good?] poetry has a "deep" or "hidden" meaning. . . . )

* [from a student's Rhetoric paper (November 1999):] "One morning they woke up to find out one of them was missing."
(Talk about your postmodern deconstruction of identity—my head is still spinning. . . . )

* 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.

* Monotheism as Madness

The Judeo-Christian-Islamic complex has been the bane of the planet for an eon.In the ceaseless dialogue regarding diversity in higher education—and mainstream culture, for that matter—one issue is inevitably ignored: the fact that our mainstream intellectual discourse is still unconsciously directed by monotheism, or monism, or whatever monolithic -ism that best fits the context. For instance, monocultural intolerance might be seen as issuing primarily from monotheism—as a "one true god" serves as jealous centrism for an array of intolerances. And this is not just another Christianity-bashing escapade on my part: all this applies equally to Islamic fundamentalism; indeed, it is the Judeo-Christian-Islamic complex in toto that has been the bane of the planet for an eon.

Here I am reminded of the opposite ideal, of Native American cultures' (more usual) religious pluralism/acceptance: to be able to place that statuette of the Virgin Mary right next to the Corn Goddess kachina on one's shelf of household gods—without any cognitive dissonance; and to be unable to conceive that one's own culture-based & placed-based "religion" is also therefore the best one for that other culture/tribe on the other side of the mountain. . . . It is this truly "diverse"/multicultural attitude that I try to foster in my students.

Quots. of the Day:

"God is a thought that makes crooked all that is straight . . . ."
    --Friedrich Nietzsche

"Children of God feed upon children of earth."
    --John Trudell

"There is not enough religion in the world to destroy the world's religions."
    --Friedrich Nietzsche

* A Postcolonial Parable

In my Native American literature courses, two or three students every semester tell me/"us Indians" to "get over it. I didn't do anything to you people!"

And so I wrote the following PARABLE for them:

My dad raped a woman. And when he was done, he took this great diamond from her dresser drawer, a diamond beautiful beyond imagination. When my dad died, I used that diamond to make my fortune on Main Street, and on Wall Street. But later, the sons and daughters of that raped woman came to me and said that they wanted the diamond back. "Go to Hell," I said. "I'm not the one who raped your mother or stole your diamond. Take your claims elsewhere!" Proclaiming all this with a mighty huff of triumph, I walked blithely away to enjoy all the more my profits and my privilege.