Grad School Report - Spring 2008 (Week 10)
Baseball season has begun. Oh glorious baseball! You give me something to talk about with dudes I would probably have nothing else to talk to about, around work, the guy at the deli, a stranger on the subway… You give women I meet something to pretend to care about when they like me. You are the warm voice in the background of my summer evenings, the rhythm of a lazy Sunday afternoon. You are an outlet for that strange obsessive statistics-driven side of my mind. You give me a place to put the energy that would be wasted on patriotism, religion and regional chauvinism, the energy that is created as a surplus from that friction of my inextricable interweaving with the dominant culture.
Class ends on a spring evening and I get out my little transistor radio and the little earpiece and on goes the game, lowering the volume during commercials, guessing their length with little half-remembered rhymes from songs I once had on tape from my Saturday night recordings of Kiss Master Mixes back in the spring of 1985. On the bus the whine of the engine somehow interferes with the AM signal, and there is whine that cuts across the play-by-play that raises and lowers in pitch with each bus stop and red light when I should be doing some reading for class.
Parzival, maybe… But maybe I have decided I am not going to read it. This is something I have not done while in grad school, and it feels like cheating… It is not my style to simply not read a book for class, to rely on my ability absorb from lecture and class discussion, and my ability to write a good essay on a final exam regardless of having read the text. I did it with some frequency as an undergrad. The ability to get a good grade despite not reading it is not the point to me. I should read it. But for some reason it is not clicking in my brain. You’d think it would. It’s a medieval Arthurian romance. I love all that knight and magic bullshit. I’m a geek. I read J.R.R. Tolkien and George R.R. Martin (what is with the R.R.s?) But this? Ugh. This is a different animal.
In Literature of the Middles Ages class on Monday we discussed the first half of it, and I guess the discussion was reasonably interesting. I even took part in it even though I not gotten past page 60! It is just that I can look at any excerpt and talk about in terms of the context of the larger text as I understand it and based on the context of the class discussion. And I am careful when I speak as to not spout off and say some obviously stupid bullshit… So, whatever… I’ll give it another try this weekend and see how far I get, and if once again, I find myself reading the same sentence twelve times and stunned by the boredom of the detailed descriptions of knightly retinues, or driven to distraction by the author’s asides which I guess are supposed to be funny, but are rather quite tedious - well, then I’ll put it down and give up and try to get ahead on some other reading.
Speaking of reading, in the English 2 class I am TAing had to write an essay on how Doris Lessing’s short story, Our Friend Judith illustrates concepts from Karen Horney’s book and the Becker excerpt from Denial of Death - More of that “false self/real self” bullcrap. It is an interesting story, though. I think I like it. What does it say about me that I found the titular character to be quite reasonable in her behavior and attitudes, though she is the one being literarily diagnosed with neuroses by this class of freshman (and also I guess by the professor). I thought it was a lot more interesting that she is behaves differently in different environments. I don’t see that as individual psychology so much as the contextuality of identity. Those are both the same person… So we need to look at what does change. Anyway, for once the students got to do in-class writing, give it to me to read and comment on and then I gave the first drafts back at the beginning of Wednesday’s class and they rewrote and finished the essay before handing it in again.
I was so happy that one student wrote the sentence, “Judith appears to have different personalities with different people.” I told him I thought he was on to something. I mean, sure I am only happy because it mirrors my own reading of the story, but at least I am encouraging him to go in that direction after he came up with it on his own. He is not parroting something I told him about how to read the story, which is essentially what the rest of the class is doing in regards to what the prof has told them about reading literature through a psychological lens.
The idea of the lens through which to read literature is something I am trying to explain and reinforce in my comments on their papers and in one on one consultation. A lot of them will write something like “the author of the story uses the concepts from Horney,” and I tell them, “Don’t think of it as the author using the concepts. Rather think of the concepts as something you use to interpret the text.” This may seem obvious, but I don’t think anyone has really taken the time to even try to explain that to them before. As the students left class a couple of them stopped to thank me for my comments, “I found them very helpful,” and I just about burst with pride and satisfaction. Maybe they are just flattering, ass-kissing since they know I will be the one grading them, but if so… well, it worked.
So now I have another stack of papers to grade. I am thinking that for my turn at assigning a story and teaching I might blow their minds and give them the “Tralala” chapter to read from Hubert Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn. Let’s see what they make of her psychology.
Tuesday was A Brief History of the Lyric. We are working our way towards the Romantics, but only got as far as Blake this last time, but we spent more time with Blake than we have spent with basically anyone else, and for that I was happy, because William Blake is one of my all-time favorites. I think any regular reader of these reports might guess that I like carnality in my poetry, and I think the friction of the marriage of opposites qualifies. Of course we read “The Tyger” which I just love for reasons I cannot explain, but when it asks “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” I can just feel the question swell in my chest and make me fit to burst with wonder at creation - or rather, it finds words for my wonder, for the echo I feel I am, humans are, an echo of that single point of origin that makes all of creation too mixed up for the categories we invent for it. That’s capital ‘L’ lamb… But I also love London:
I wander through each charter'd street,
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow,
A mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every man,
In every infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear:
How the chimney-sweeper's cry
Every blackening church appalls,
And the hapless soldier's sigh
Runs in blood down palace-walls.
But most, through midnight streets I hear
How the youthful harlot's curse
Blasts the new-born infant's tear,
And blights with plagues the marriage hearse.
Maybe it is my disdain for authority, maybe it is my inward rejection of the culture I am steeped in and will forever be of… But I can’t help but feel sympathy for those voices that howl out, the voice that blasts and curses… It’s for that reason that I love Henry Miller, but before I get to ole Hank, let me finish up with this class.We got our mid-term essays back. ‘A’… So fine, but I was more annoyed that he seemed to not understand what I meant about the change in meter in different lines Donne’s “The Sun Rising,” but mostly annoyed at myself for not explaining it clearer by actually pointing out the difference in detail rather than just alluding to it and assuming he’d know what I meant. Well, that and also the fact that despite having done two drafts and having proofread it three times I still managed to write, two feet of six syllables each, instead of six feet of two syllables each when describing iambic hexameter.
So, Henry Miller. We read Tropic of Capricorn for Lopalia LoBats class (for those just joining our program, ‘Lopalia LoBats’ is short for “Language of Place and Location in American Literature of Brooklyn and the South,” but as that is a fucking mouthful and a pain in the ass to type out every time… You get it.) and like I said, I love it. The reaction to it by the rest of the class was mixed, well - actually most of the class - that is four of us liked it enough to try to engage with it, but one woman in the class really didn’t like it - though she gave it the ole college try to keep an open mind. It wasn’t as if she was offended by its crudity, but rather she found it kind if trite and cliché and narcissistic and over-long. I will grant her the narcissism and length, but I think anything trite or cliché about it is a result of the nearly 70 years since this was first published. There was also confusion as to when it was written/published because it was banned in the United States until 1962, but was printed in Europe in 1939, so its nihilism is not a result of World War II, often considered the source of all later half 20th century nihilism, what with showing what we humans are really capable of (I’m looking at you Holocaust. I’m looking at you Hiroshima and Nagasaki), though as I mentioned in class, before World War II, World War I had been the worst thing the world could imagine. It was called “the war to end all wars” for a reason, but all it really proves is however horrible we might be, we can always be… And I think we always will be… worse.
The professor was puzzled by the text as well…Puzzled in a good way… In that way where you want to read more and read more closely and try to get at… Well, get at something… But what if there is nothing to get? Tropic of Capricorn is scattered and messy. There is no arc to it. It is a long rant of the now. I called it “a howl of novel,” and I think that is what I love about it. When I first read it when I was 19 or 20 and it broke open my sense of what it meant to write. It gave me permission to stick my finger down my throat and let me vomit up the venom I felt like I had been swallowing for so long. It gave me permission to stick my finger in the eye of anyone who tried to explain anything, or to grant any virtue an existence.
Henry Miller complicates and contradicts himself and I like that. He fills his text with crude, filthy, sometimes violent, over the top sex that balloons into the absurd until both the violation of social convention and the convention itself are cast into the light of the ridiculous. He uses racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, elitist language and yet his libido is a democratizing force, leveling the hierarchies of his environment with his cock. It is a bi-polar novel, and those long rambling triumphant passages that bubble like verbal diarrhea sure do contradict his low opinion of humanity and civilization (which he makes sure to always include himself in). It can be hard to read despite (or perhaps because of) its earnestness. As much as I like it, sometimes even I was just wading through trying to get to the next nugget of stuff worth reading.
I guess the reason why I relate to it so much is because that fundamental rejection it espouses and fails at accomplishing is something I feel as well, and that is easy to feel misunderstood about when trying to explain/express it to other people. It is too easy to marginalize those opinions out there on the fringe as immature and unrealistic, as destructive and unproductive - as a state of arrested development that keeps you in a kind of eternal state of unfocused teenaged rebellion - but I think there is a big difference between rejecting the veracity of rules and laws and customs that govern our society and understanding what is needed to survive within that system of rules and laws and customs (that is, unless you are willing to totally retreat from the world of men to some mountainside cave). When I say things to people like, I see no virtue in the concept of ‘hard work’ or that my one of my goals in life is to eliminate all my ambition, I get strange looks. I am crazy. I am lazy (well, I am) or a liar (“But you work a full-time job, you go to grad school, you are really invested in your creative hobbies!”) - but there is a difference between choosing to do those things, or doing them because I am product of the culture of “hard work”, and understanding that they have no intrinsic value. It reminds me of the discussion I had with scribblestrum a few years ago about begging. There is nothing wrong with begging, just like there is nothing wrong with refusing to give something to a beggar. I prefer begging to people who try to scam some change or a few bucks off of you with a sob story or mathematical shenanigans - though I guess I shouldn’t judge that either - they are just trying to work with the cultural norms that value some kind of loss or distress over just some unwillingness or inability to work.
Fuck work.
I am reminded of Miller’s reminiscence of the local veterinarian in Williamsburg when he had to put down a horse, which was done right out on the street:
The smell of a dead horse, which is almost unbearable, is still a thousand times better than the smell of burning chemicals. And the sight of a dead horse with a bullet hole in the temple, his head lying in a pool of blood and his asshole bursting with the last spasmic evacuation, is still a better sight than that of a group of men in blue aprons coming out of the arched doorway of the tin factory with a hand truck loaded with bales of fresh-made tin (132).
Before class I met up with Diane to discuss thesis stuff and our final papers from our Literature of Brooklyn class from last semester which we had exchanged, but mostly we digressed and talked about a lot of other stuff like our educational history and work and teaching and gender/sexuality and how much we love our professor and applying to doctorate programs. But we did get to discuss the papers a bit, and it will be an on-going discussion, I’m sure. I’m going to be writing my thesis a semester before she will, so as I told her, I will be happy to blaze the trail and pass on any ideas and sources I come across as I do my research and writing. I felt a little bad because she was fairly effusive about how she was impressed with my paper, but I had some criticisms of hers. Mostly that I thought the introduction that talked very generally about maps and mental maps was too long, creating too much of a prologue before the actual text was tackled, and that it felt incomplete, as if she had barely explained her argument when it came to its conclusions. I was trying to be constructive, so I hope she took it okay (which I think she did) and I made sure to let her know that I thought reading the text for those individualized mental maps and the way they define their physical environment undermines the ability to have secure knowledge of a text’s setting, and thus pretty fucking brilliant.
Tonight is an off-day for the Mets, so no baseball… which means, I guess, that I will be able to do some straight reading rather than reading between each half of an inning, but before that I need to go visit mi abuela as she is back in the hospital with some kind of lung infection, and after that a quick trip to Waldbaum’s for groceries. Tomorrow night is roybatty's birthday party over at Lucky 13, which will be my first time in a bar since I got up on the wagon in August of last year (and no, I do not plan to drink), but it is also the premiere of the fourth season of BSG, so I will be going out after I watch that. I am also considering heading out to the Jerze on Saturday to visit the Teasdales and their lovely toddler Mackenzie and see how swollen Terri has gotten with the son they have due in June. I do love me some babies.