* 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. . . . )

* "DE-fense! DE-fense!"

It's fascinating how football as a prototypical American discourse has injected its machismo into the very language: thus the normal iambs of preVENT and deFENSE become the stronger trochees of PREvent DEfense. . . .

* "This Ain't the Summer of Love"

I was a touch too young to remember Woodstock—that "Summer of Love"; what I did remember from that era—a few years later, in high school—was a radio report that heroin was being smuggled into the U.S. . . . in the bodies of dead American soldiers killed in 'Nam. I don't think the phrase "This ain't the Summer of Love" occurred to me then, but all the same, a deadly chill ran up my spine for the first time, of disillusionment regarding the whole human enterprise. And obviously, that glorious (or whatever) "season" has retreated further and further into the ideological distance [Quot. of the Day]:

This ain't the Garden of Eden—
There ain't no angels above—
And things ain't what they used to be—
And this ain't the Summer of Love—
    --The Blue Öyster Cult

Of course, the Rush Limbaughs and Jerry Falwells of the world would play the "Pat Tillman" card on me: "If you only believed, son!" Okay, we can get into the heavy theological argument about how an omnipotent "God" could allow all this murder and mayhem, about notions of privatio bono and all that. But I'm tired—and so I'll be as knee-jerk dismissive as they are: [mild expletive deleted] ME.

* "The Lord's Coming!"

[One of my favorite old jokes—best appreciated, perhaps, by those like me who are recovering-Catholic-but-still-guilty:]

I got some good news and some bad news.

{Okay, let me hear the good news first.}

The Lord's coming!

{Great. And the bad news?}

He's—pissed. . . .

* Playing in the "Worm Dirt"

The new controversy surrounding the death of soldier/former NFL player Pat Tillman in Afghanistan regards his & his family's purported (lack of) "faith." Thus an Army lieutenant colonel has attacked the Tillmans' subsequent vocal concerns about the military's handling of Pat's death as perhaps based on their lack of religious belief, and therefore lack of solace & closure: "Well, if you are an atheist and you don't believe in anything, if you die, what is there to go to? Nothing. You are worm dirt." [—ugh, punctuation & grammar—] In sum, the family can't get over his death, presumably, without the crutch of faith that he is now a good Christian soul in Heaven.

As for myself, I find great solace in the fact that I'll be "worm dirt" some day in the future, mingling my atoms with the rest of the planet & cosmos—first, dirt and "worm food"; then worm; now—robin? (And so, then, with more real wings than those of Christian angels?!) Plus, I'll be free of all this bogus human ideology that must deny its own DIRT-filled existence. Even the Good Gray Poet may have believed something very similar a good century and a half ago (Quot. of the Day):

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles.
    --Walt Whitman

Ditto, Pat Tillman, and requiescat. . . . (Yes, Whitman always claimed to be both the poet of the "body" and the "soul," and his emphasis on the "soul" became greater, the older he got. But by far his best poetry was that of the "body" and of the "earth"—that is, of "worm dirt.")

* That "NATIVE AMERICAN" Angle . . .

[This is from an email of mine (August 2001) to the director of my Ph.D. committee, a light respite from slaving over my dissertation. (Written before I came across Alexie's poem "From the Unauthorized Biography of Me" [2000], which has a section similar in content and tone.)]

YOU KNOW YOUR DISSERTATION HAS A "NATIVE AMERICAN" ANGLE WHEN . . .

1) Most of the cities of publication in your bibliography are Tucson, Lincoln [NE], and other God-forsaken places "out West."

2) Most of the book titles in your bibliography have either "Sky," or "Earth," or both; or "Turtle," or "Bear"—or both. . . . But thank God that 99% of the editors' names are Anglo, so you can spell 'em. (But "Rothenberg, ed." and "Lowenfels, ed." still cause problems—and intermittent bemusement & laughter).

3) Most of these same books also have a "watermark" graphic of an eagle silhouette or an eagle feather. (But you kinda like it 'cuz your book's about "Birds & Ind'uns," anyway. . . .)

4) You had to reject half your potential sources because they were written for New Age bookstores by a white person with an adopted Indian name (usually with "Sky," "Earth," "Turtle," "Bear," or "Eagle [Feather]" in it somewhere). This person is also into astrology and crystals.

5) You can't find one good thing written about Native Americans before 1970—and not one bad thing since. (Who said A.I.M. was a failure?!)

6) You email Dennis Banks & Russell Means for interviews, but they're both busy doing voice-overs for Disney movies.

7) You take your daughter "home" to the Badlands & the Black Hills [in western South Dakota, home of the Lakota], and end up spendin' $500 on tourist traps & trinkets. The trinkets at Wall Drug all say "Made by Real Indians"; and all fall apart as soon as you get 'em to the car. ("Oh, I see, Emma, honey: the small print says, 'Made by Real Indians in Cherokee, North Carolina[!?].'")

8) Your dissertation's completion date is now sometime ten years hence since you've once again come to appreciate the notion of "Indian Time."

* Turkey Vultures (cartoon)

My [much reduced in size] photo of Turkey Vultures at Canyon Lake, Rapid City, SD. (Cartoon "balloon" added w/ Comic Life 1.3.) . . .

My wife keeps telling me what ugly birds Turkey Vultures are. "The eye of the beholder," etc., and an anthropocentric projection of human valuations regarding baldness, and wrinkles, et al. Having watched this species all my life—in flight, and yes, even scavenging on the ground—I find these birds to be one of the most "beautiful" in the world. (The birds in the photo are performing the morning ritual of drying their wings out, under a sun that will also create the thermals upon which they will eventually take flight.)

Oh, of course the cartoon blurbs per se involve a satire on that warped ideal of female beauty perpetrated by the pop media. ("Don't hate me because I'm beautiful" is the fairly famous line uttered by a brunette "vixen" in a long-running shampoo commercial [late 1980's?].)

* RADIO RANT: Symptoms of Society

There is an unconscious Zeitgeist working among the young, a general intuition that not only is Western Civilization no longer "quite right," but the planet itself is in dire straits.Last night [4/23/07] Michael Savage brought up a news story about a fellow who lopped off his own penis in a London public venue—which Savage perceived as a literal manifestation of a larger "truth," that is, support for his own frequent harangue against contemporary Britain as emasculated, as a pathetic after-lingering of a once great (because macho-aggressive) Empire. Well, from a postcolonial point of view, I'd consider this a good thing!? But I have to admit that Savage does perform, at times, some intriguing figurative thinking of this sort.

But what does he see, then, in Columbine and VA Tech? What do these events "say" about us Americans? Cho's ethnicity aside (though Savage can never let that be), Savage's answer has been predictable: these slaughters are symptomatic, of course, of an over-liberal/indulgent society going to hell in a handcart, bereft of any solid religious and moral grounding. (But again, I even consider this current relativistic "plight" to be a good thing, by and large, at least in contrast to a monocultural theocracy.) And yet I'd still read the school-shootings phenomenon only slightly differently, in a more "ecological" fashion, if you will. (Think lemmings.) I believe that there is an unconscious Zeitgeist working among the young, a general intuition that not only is Western Civilization no longer "quite right," but the planet itself is in dire straits. What future, then? Ergo a pandemic turn to depressant drugs, suicide, school shootings—violence directed both inward and outward, towards a "thinning out" of a "botched" species? This despair may even be exemplified in our retreatist last-gasp immersion in the virtual realities of the web and video games. . . . Hmmm: at last, my reading may be even more pessimistic than Savage's.

The very thought of pessimism, by the way, always makes me think of Schopenhauer—who would put all this yap about British & American "character" in its proper perspective (Quot. of the Day):

National character is only another name for the particular form which the littleness, perversity and baseness of mankind take in every country.
    --Schopenhauer

* The Buck Stops . . . Uh, the Bush Balks Here

. . . in forgetting that he is a politician himself. George Bush this morning: "I believe strongly that politicians in Washington shouldn't be telling generals how to do their job." Geez, I hope someone is tellin' 'em; that is why they call you "Commander-in-Chief," isn't it? And if it weren't for certain "politicians in Washington," MacArthur would have invaded China; and more recently, the military bureaucracy would have been much more successful in throwing a blanket over such "pecadillos" as Abu Ghraib. . . .

* Nietzsche Be Damned

Quots. of the Day:

What does not destroy me makes me stronger.
    --Nietzsche

What does not destroy me leaves me incredibly weak, hurt, bitter, and debilitated.
    --TCG

* A Cynic's Significant Other

Quot. of the Day:

A spouse is someone you are really nasty to so that you can be halfway nice to the rest of the world. . . .
       --TCG [from a November 1996 journal entry]

Maybe I'm a social eunuch, but I do love my significant bother—er, other!

* "I Can't Imagine--"

This is a bête noire that has bugged me for years: the statement, "I can't imagine [blah-blah-blah]."{1} Huh? You just did—that is, IMAGINE it—didn't yu'?! (Go ahead and try this at home.)

{1} Example: "I can't IMAGINE the Minnesota Twins winning the World Series." (I had more graphic/creative examples, but given the current discursive climate .  . . .)

* Of Birthdays & House Cleaning

I didn't even remember that it was my birthday until I got an e-card from daughter Emma in Colorado. Before that, by "chance," I'd been performing the bi-annual chore of cleaning this filthy apartment (I omit the grisly details)—and I'm still cleaning. (There are two main downsides to a long-distance marriage: having to scrub a whole life-space by yourself is one of them.) But then I thought, how à propos, how almost cliché in the analogy—this supposed renouveau of my birth-year, and this cleansing "rebirth" of my wretched abode. (Well, it'll be "reborn" for a week or two, anyway.)

* 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.

* RADIO RANT: VA Tech/Savaged Again

Last night [4/17/07], Michael Savage—or, as I think I'll start calling him, Sergeant Slaughter—was excoriating the memorial convocation at Virginia Tech, especially the performance of a certain Nikki Giovanni. It turns out that Dr. Savage, self-proclaimed man of letters, didn't even know who Giovanni was, until one of his callers told him. (Indeed, this male college student helpfully informed him that "we had to read her" in one of those "feminist/womanist" courses!) Now aware that she might be a writer of some reputation, Savage still went on to call her a "clownish creature," an "idiot so-called poet," and "an intellectual dwarf." But Savage never did understand that her "speech," as he called it, was actually a poem. And what most dismayed him (and his ditto-head callers) was Giovanni's audacity to apparently speak of the plight of elephants as somehow on par with human life. (This in spite of the fact that Savage, in other moods, calls himself an "animal lover.")

As for "intellectual dwarfs," it seems that Savage, like some of the commentators on cable news, hasn't been on a university campus since his own salad days, when the campus was apparently the size of a bullhorn-manageable youth camp or a one-building high school with an intercom system. Thus our good Doctor also calls the President of Virginia Tech a "felonious moron" who should be behind bars for not alerting the entire student body sooner. How? Via "loudspeakers," or the like, Savage smugly assures his listeners.

Several of Savage's diatribes regarding the VA Tech massacre last night revealed a similar ignorance of facts that had been circulating on the news all day—facts that his callers often better knew than he (e.g., Savage's assumption that Cho would have had to drive to the post office). But the facts were hardly the point here: at bottom, the incident provided him fodder for yet another knee-jerk attack on a woman of color, and against the "liberal" academia that so deeply wronged him years ago (as he ceaselessly reminds his listeners) for being the superior white male that he is.