Student Hijinks & Highlights

Since today was the last class of the semester and the last class I'll be teaching in the foreseeable future, I thought I'd share a couple of highlights, some a little ridiculous, some sentimental (I can fight the tendency, but I can't destroy it). The following are from 6 semesters of teaching. Should I make it back into the Endangered Intellectual Preserve, I'm sure my stories will rapidly accumulate.

*Fridays are an opportunity for announcements, usually along the lines of: "There's a poetry reading at such location and time," or "Come check out my band." One Friday ran another course. A guy announced cheerfully, "Now not to sound like a pimp, but my girlfriend is studying to be a physical therapist and she gives great backrubs, so if anyone was interested, her rates are reasonable and she's taking new clients." Mental note: try to begin more sentences with "Not to sound like a pimp."

*One student raised eyebrows week after week as he read poems in a fanciful British accent, something in between Winston Churchill and Eric Idle. He ordinarily spoke in a flat Midwestern accent. I tried to broach the subject diplomatically: "I've noticed you read rather dramatically."
He misunderstood: "Why, thank you. I've been in drama for three years now." I tried again: "I guess I'm curious about the English accent. Did you spend time abroad growing up?" The truth came out: "No, no, but I did spend a lot of time watching Monty Python and other British comedy. I just love that stuff." Seeing as this was a guy who took pleasure in pronouncing the word "po-hem", I let it drop.

*One student chatted with me at class's end several times, nothing too unusual. Until one day she walked with me all the way to another building, where she suggested we see a movie people in class had recommended. "Oh, I'd enjoy that," I said, "so long as it was a class kind of thing, you know, not too small a group." She said, "Well I thought maybe it could just be you and me."
Bold. I said, "That would be fun, but let's keep things on a professional level, since I'm your teacher and all..." "Don't worry," she said, "It's not like anybody would tell." At which point I break into nervous laughter. I haven't stopped yet.

Tigers & the World's Finest Citrus

Roger Wimpleflat* is a variation on the earlier theory, concerning houspets, since Roger's fetish creature is the Bengal Tiger. Roger, a sweet, mild mannered young man has plastered his walls with posters of tigers, some being white, but mostly of the pumpkin coloration. Roger looks a lot like a blond Tom Cruise, but he ruins it by wearing shirts with a single wolf howling at the enormous full moon, or a humpback whale cresting, all depicted in that soft-lens look that suggests internally gooeyness. Roger is also essentially asexual.

Except in his private conception of himself: the lone tiger. Stalking the forest floor, I slink where few others dare to tread. Critters scamper wildly at my approach, because I am absolutely lethal, baby. And for all my muscle and razor-sharp claws & teeth, I've still got class. I'm sleek. I'm no lunky lion, no siree. I can frickin climb trees. So watch out.

In Thailand, a Buddhist monastery has been rescuing Bengal Tigers who've been kept inhumanely as pets. A similar refuge exists just outside of Bloomington. An important difference: at the Thai monastery, everyone believes in reincarnation, whereas here, the only believers stand out from the crowd like Dikembe Mutombo at a Klan rally. Here belief in reincarnation promotes a wind-tossed unkempt hair look and flimsy dresses that look as though they are equally well-suited to use as a dorm wall decoration.

But in Thailand, the Buddhists wear orange, likely the most brilliant color scheme of any religion. And no hair. This aesthetic is based on the world's finest citrus, the orange. But while the reporters interviewed the head monk, he explained that caring for thie tigers is no different than caring for people, since their souls and ours may take any shape and form before reaching that rock band from Seattle. The truly marvelous moment came as they discussed his relationship with the tigers, some of whom were identified as divas, loners, bullies, and so forth.

Reporter: And can you read their body language to understand how they feel?
Head Monk: Yes, and I also read their thoughts.
Reporter: You know what they are thinking in their minds?
Head Monk: Yes, and they read my thoughts also.

Which leaves me to wonder, what if he's right? What if the tigers have been reaching out to us for all this time and we've turned a deaf ear? Or worse yet, what if their only contact in America is Roger Wimpleflat*? What has he been telling the tigers about me? I can only hope they've learned not to put too much faith in the thoughts of somebody who wears shirts featuring wolves and whales.

*name changed to protect the innocent

My Janitorial Dreams

It occured to me today that people can be herded as easily as goats, if not easier, since goats do not follow written instruction. Case in point: when I forgot to grab pickle wedges at the grocery store the other day, I had to turn around and fight against shopping cart traffic like a salmon swimming upstream because the store is arranged to maintain a steady flow through as many aisles as possible. Angered, I lashed out at the giant corporate grocery by abandoning my cart blocking the path in front of the lobster tank then taped a sign that read "SALE!" to the side of my cart, filled with just about everything but pickles. A mob formed quickly, further blocking traffic to the hotdogs and dairy section and resulting in such abysmal sales of lobsters that the fishing off the coast of Maine has temporarily come to a halt. Or so I'm told.

Which is why, if I am ever promoted from grad student to janitor, I will employ similar tactics to perform my duties with efficiency and ease. For example, I fully intend to clean no more than two toilets a day, no matter if there are three or four per bathroom. Each morning I will simply close and lock the doors of all but one of the stalls, and voila - problem solved. Anyone who has to go badly enough to check the doors will find to his embarassment that each is occupied. Maybe since women lack the convenience of urinals, I will allow them two stalls on Fridays.

This may result in performance issues for the commodes in question, so I should remember to rotate weekly the unlocked stall in an attempt to balance wear and tear. I should take this opportunity to remind readers not to try this outside the professional environment - Mother nearly had my hide when I told her to either just be patient or to bathe in the kitchen sink. But we must face these trials by fire, we janitors. And to think, only eight years ago I was mop-boy at the bottom of the tube slide at McDonald's. A story for another day.

Literary Threats of Death and Seduction

I am only aware of a single threat made in earnest against my life. It was penned in my junior year of college, a year I will forever remember as my clumsy entrance to adulthood. I had just figured out what I wanted to do with my life, and believing I had the means for such a life at my disposal, I became a fairly outspoken and arrogant advocate of my own lifestyle.

"Became" may not be quite the right word, since I had been considered (by certain judgmental friends) arrogant for many years prior to this transformation. Let's say that my arrogance was heightened, and perhaps it was heightened to potentially self-endangering levels. But please bear in mind that to pursue the writer's life is to embrace arrogance. The two are inseparable as honey and bee-stings.

Oblivious to such artistic necessities, one of my peers in a fiction writing class - let's call her Margot - suppressed her growing feelings of rage for the majority of the semester. Her rage was manifold, including distaste for our hep-cat instructor, the many ineptly conveyed and cliche-driven stories, and the pseudo-intellectualizing of workshop. (The following is representative: "I really admire the use of music for mood in Bill's story because Eliott Smith is the man. I mean, he is the man.") Margot pinned these and other countless exasperations hoping, I assume, that under intense pressure her rancor would eventually yield a perfect diamond of artistic dimensions.

This was only evident following her submission to the workshop of a story whose plot was straightforward enough: a frustrated student kills each and every one of her creative writing classmates. Sadly, many were slaughtered in summary; I was one of the fortunate whose name would at least live on in literature. On the other hand, while the other named victims at least met their ends swiftly, the character named "Topher Michaels", whom I read as my doppelganger, suffers much longer. The narrator of the story, a highly unattractive person in every regard, first tempts poor Topher into visiting her dorm room. His libidinally-driven vulnerability leads to his demise; she carves him up with an axe, as I recall. Not even Professor Ratman is spared. By the plot's end, only Margot herself is in attendance. The story ends with a lyric passage on the beauty of silence.

Theory: One "Meow" Does Not a Menace Make?

This is the first installation in what will be a continuing series on my many theories. To make order from the chaos which surrounds us, Men of Reason and Valor must assemble raw data into manageable tools for living in the world. The following is a tool of essential importance.

It was first observed in Disney's One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961) that often pets resemble their owners in appearance. Explanations for this phenomenon vary: people may choose a pet that resembles them, owners may gradually acquire characteristics of their pet, or perhaps phenotypical incompatibility (lack of resemblance) results in death of either the pet or owner.

I contend that in addition to physical resemblance, pet owners bear a psychological resemblance to their pets as well. Consider the case of the boyfriend of one of my ex-girlfriends, who keeps two turtles in an aquarium. Let's call him Chet. Physically we may describe the turtle as short, built for power and not speed, and able to travel at a moderate pace on land or water. We may say the same of its owner, Chet. However, the turtle's primary psychological characteristic is its tendency to retreat inward, to seal itself safely out of the reach of predators behind its steely shell. Hence it should come as no surprise that Chet employs a similar tactic. He isn't one to lash out with claws. Instead, Chet is in the habit of withdrawing completely, poking his head out only once he is fairly sure potential threats have gone off along their way.

We need not look far for our second case: housecats. Housecats are everywhere, thanks to their apartment-appropriate size and breeding capabilities. Felines, to whom all decent men and women are allergic, have but one endearing quality: they induce kinesthetic sympathy by their stretching and arching behaviors. This is replicated in some so-called "cuddly" cat owners, though not universally. (The aberrations may relate to their cats as complementary partners and not as embodiments of the self. Theory forthcoming.) More importantly, cats are widely acknowledged to be impetuous, moody, selfish, hateful, self-destructive, narcissistic, given to sexual deviance, atheistic, controlling, promoting runny noses and itchy eyes, territorial, overly dependent, cruel towards infants, overly independent, smelly, murderous, and morally decadent. As for their owners, I need offer no further explanation.

We may think of this psychological resemblance as part of a tradition of humanity's identification with animals. Witches had their familiars. The Egyptians, for all their supposed sophistication, saw cats as emblematic of their nobility. And American Indians honored personal characteristics through the totem. It may be that each of us has a totem animal, whether or not we have one in our care. The jittery opera singer across the hall may want to consider taking in a Macaw. The beefy unkempt man at the bar may provide apt companionship for a wolverine. And the pony-tailed blonde playing frisbee at the park has golden retriever written all over her.

Only one question remains: what can be made of the author's ownership and care for tropical fish? Only time will tell.

Holding Sylvia

About a week ago I had the rare privilege of holding and looking over some of Sylvia Plath's papers at the Lilly Library. I was there with a class, and we had read and discussed Ariel in its original and restored editions. We'd talked about the artist and the artist's life, how the two commingle profitably or miserably. And we'd talked about reading into and beyond the myth of Plath - I for one had so many hang-ups about Plath's notoriety that it was hard to read her. But ultimately, I find her work exemplary, expecially in terms of transforming the merely confessional, through drafts, to the archetypal.

But the most memorable moment came for me looking over one of her scrapbooks. She had written excessively dramatic captions for her photos: "Sue paying homage to Apollo upon a sun-dappled cairn in Devon", "My dearest Jill, striking an Aphrodite pose at the piano", etc. The archivist remarked that this degree of performativity seemed vain. "It's as though she was writing for people who would consider this worth reading once she was famous," she said.

I couldn't help but recognize myself in Plath's self-aggrandizement. Blurring the distinctions of real life and performance, I seek to enlarge my life. Maybe it's not so much that the dramatics are meant to titillate future readers as they are meant to titillate myself. And I defend the choice thus: seeking to invest my life with artifice, I personalize it according to my own aesthetic. And I may find elements of beauty where a plainer view would find none.

Forgiven: a lecturette

Pope John Paul II's death this weekend has led to some reflection on my part. While raised and educated Catholic, I differ on some theological points. Perhaps they are significant, perhaps a situation where one should just suck up and deal with it. Regardless, I have decided that one of my most important priorities must be forgiveness.

In Catholicism, forgiveness is ritualized, administered by a priest who embodies God's forgiveness of our sins. But even in the absence of ritual, forgiveness is a liberating practice. A Terre Haute Holocaust survivor, Eva Kor, has raised eyebrows with her declaration of forgiveness for the Nazis, particularly Dr. Joseph Mengele, who experimented cruelly upon her and countless others. Kor runs a Holocaust museum called CANDLES. http://te.verweg.com/pipermail/msn-list/2005-March/000865.html

I am reminded of the Doonesbury cartoon I read as a boy, featuring Ronnie Reagan speaking in one panel to American Jews: "Never Forget." and in the next to Germans: "Forgive and Forget." But all jokes aside, can we reconcile the notion of forgiveness with one of remembering the cruelties of the past? For Eva Kor, this act of forgiveness was necessary for her life to move forward, to put an end to past torments.

Similarly, the idea of African-Americans forgiving the whites who enforced Jim Crow, a lynching society, and centuries of oppression is tough to swallow. But swallow it we must, who will liberate our spirits and reach our fullest potential. I don't doubt that anger can be directed usefully. The man with fire in his belly can really burn his enemies, but at what cost to himself? The fire in his belly must feed on his insides.

Just to be clear, I am in favor of affirmative action, equitable public schooling, and other steps our nation must take to redress historical and contemporary oppression against minorities. However, we may view this as an issue of accountability and not one of revenge. Revenge comes out of a rancorous heart, and cannot free the heart of rancor as can forgiveness.

But forgiveness is not easy ... until it becomes a practice. So I will try to work on that today in the hopes that it is freeing. (This isn't easy for me, for all my high talk.) Hmm. I think I can now forgive the senior in my freshman science class who made fun of my too-short pants. That felt all right. Maybe this is something to build on.