Reading Lolita in Laramie and Jupiter

Yesterday Michael Jackson died.  Almost immediately, the 24-hour news networks reminded us about all his problems with young boys.  He is celebrated on the tube as "A Pop Icon," but the thing the networks have been talking about is the recurrent and insistent accusation, one seconded by Jackson himself,  that he slept in the same bed with young children. 

An hour and a half before he died, the news networks were all reporting that the U.S. Supreme Court had decided that school officials in Stafford, Arizona had violated the civil rights of Savanah Redding, a 13-year-old honor student with a 4.0 GPA, who was strip-searched after another student alleged she had given him an over-the-counter Advil tablet.  Clarence Thomas dissented, writing that the decision in favor of Redding and against the school administrators who pulled down her pants would now effectively inform drug-abusing school children where to hide their drugs.  Thomas's suggestion here is that it is more important now than ever before to check the panties of middle-school students.

So!  What's it gonna be?  Is it wicked perverse when an individual pulls down a child's pants, but okay for the representatives of an institution to do it?

I don't think there is an answer here, mostly because the bodies of our children have become a cultural obsession, one that I think reveals something important about us.  Before I left Berkeley to teach at the University of Wyoming I got a very warm and self-conscious email from the English Department Chair, asking me to reconsider assigning Vladimir Nabokov's great novel, Lolita, to my freshman lit class.  The chair didn't want to infringe on my academic freedom, but, she said, I may not be familiar with Wyoming and with the people there. 

Okay.  What the hell.  I was coming into a new situation. Maybe I should teach something less. . . um. . . challenging.  And the Chair was right.  My students at Wyoming were wonderful; and I was especially touched and impressed at the intellectual vigor of many of my students from LDS and deep faith backgrounds.  But there were also those who regularly complained about having to read Dante, Boccaccio, Shakespeare -- all of which they identified as pornography.   They regularly complained I was sexually harrassing them Because I assigned literary works a lot less. . . um . . . challenging than Lolita.    To be fair to these students, I got into big trouble in high-school for reading "The Miller's Tale" out loud at Charlotte Catholic High.  About the time the guy gets the hot poker stuck up his ass Brother Duffy went to the front of the classroom, stopped me, and pulled me out by the ear.  He called my parents, and we spent the rest of the day talking about "Michael's Problem."  Brother Duffy needed to learn the lesson all teachers need to know: never teach something you haven't read yourself.

What is strange about teaching Lolita, however, is that I don't notice any difference teaching this particular novel in Jupiter.  Last year, a freshman wrote, "my response to this book is that of any rational human being: disgust."  Right!  Eighteen years in Palm Beach County Schools, Eighteen years of MTV and the mall, have qualified you to respond to your freshman reading curriculum in the name of any rational human being.  You go!

Okay.  I'm being unfair.  A little.  In some important ways, Lolita is a "trick question" for a college reading list.  Americans, especially young Americans, tend to weave emotional and intellectual issues together.  The primal student response to reading fiction or poetry in a college course -- as opposed to just watching South Park or Vegas -- is to create a division within the work between "good" and "bad" and then to align with the "good" side.  This may sound suspiciously like our politics and foreign policy.

Child sex is one of our cultural hot button issues, one which gives way only to saying No to drugs.  This is why its okay to strip-search a 13-year-old female honors student but not okay to assign Lolita for a college freshman course.  It's not just that our thinking on this issue breaks down: it's that we rush in to make it break down.   We love to make it break down!  We can enjoy the salaciousness of To Catch a Predator, edge a little forward on the couch while some blue-collar loser comes into the house with flowers and chocolates and finds the righteous TV crew instead of the little girl or boy, always without having to consider how we are implicated in it all. (We think we identify with the TV guy and the film crew; but the whole set up makes us identify with the guy who thinks he is going to get some child sex.)  This is a failure, of thinking, of ethics, and in my case of pedagogy, in which we all delight.  Hamlet says Guildenstern and Rozencrantz "made love" to the work of ratting him out.  Our news media and pundits make love to the idea that our most difficult and frightnening cultural issues can be broken down into bite-size bits, and that the right sound bite can bring us down onto the "Not Guilty" side of the very thing with which we're secretly thrilled.

Michael Jackson was the first big pop performer to start hiring real musicians for the stage and studio.  He ended the trend, common in arena concerts in the 1970s, of using rhytym machines and tape loops as back up music.  This is one of the many things I'll remember him for.  And for the cover Miles Davis did of "Human Nature."

Edwidge Danticat and Washington Irving

Some time ago I bumped into a former student who, at 20, was born-again, married some guy from her church and started knocking out children, and, oh yeah, was going around my campus telling people "All Harrawood ever talks about is sex!"  This, like the liking/not liking children thing, seems to be something people say about me.  That this particular young woman was doing it pissed me off because I had known her since she was 12, when I let her paint my toenails for a campus family fair, and when she was 16 and working at a local burger joint, and I helped her beg her parents for a tattoo.
"Hey, are you really telling people the only thing I ever talked about in our class was sex?"
Well!  That's all you ever do talk about."
Like I say: this pisses me off.
"Oh, really," I said.  We were walking together outside my campus's dinning hall.  "What's a thesis?"
"Huh?"
"Come on.  Thesis!  I wrote it on the board.  You had to answer test questions about it and use the word in a sentence?"
"Um. . . "
"What's Irony?"
"Huh?"
"What's Sarcasm?  What's Ideology?  What's Hegemony?  What's Iambic Pentameter?  What's Catharsis?  What are Reversal and Recognition?"

I went on some.  You get the idea.  I reminded this young woman of at least 20 words like this that I had taught her in that course.  But what she came away with was "Harrawood talks about sex!"  I don't know whether she decided this and perhaps also forgot all her vocabulary before or after she started Walking With The Lord.

This episode makes a point for me: in exactly the same way that muscles can only lift the weight they can lift, people can only see the things they can see.  The secret to learning is like the secret to bodybuilding: it is a matter of lifting more weight than you can lift or having a thought that you can't have.  And that means when you teach you have to use what your students know and can see as your starting point.The problem with this young woman is not that she sees all she can but that she sees all she wants to.  No need for heavy lifting.  Since so much of the course was lost on her, besides all the sex talk, I mean, it seems likely that she is the one who was thinking about sex all the time.

But there is something else going on in this failure to see new things.  Right now, it feels like the hardest part of my teaching, and the part I feel I'm failing at most desperately, is getting students to learn new words well enough to use them in their daily lives and written work.  So, this young woman is really only a very militant and obnoxious piece of a much bigger puzzle.

Louis and I went with Sue to Barnes & Noble last night.  Enrique runs the Starbucks there and so it was a sort of family outing.  Louis and I worked on vocabulary so he'll have a strong start in high-school this fall.  I got him one of those vocab workbooks and he's already using words out of it.  He sent me an email last week saying "I'm sorry to be such an adamant boy."  Pretty cool.  He's picking it up fast.

We're reading Edwidge Danticat's book of short stories Krik, Krak, which is absolutely beautiful.  Louis and I read the first page of a story to each other last night and talked about what she was doing in it, about how you read a story, and about how you talk about literature.  I picked this book for selfish reasons: I wanted an excuse to read Danticat and usually don't have time to allow myself real pleasure reading.  Like Danticat, Louis is Haitian, and so she writes about and also I think politicizes experiences that have been everyday life for him.

But Louis isn't like the young woman my former student.  He is on fire to learn more.  Like the bodybuilding stuff I show him in Gold's Gym, Louis devours the words we read and the things that are out there for him to learn.

This makes me wonder about what teaching purports to teach, and why.  Sue's first teaching job was at The Survivor's School, in Boynton Beach, and most of her students had been in trouble with the law, in juvenile detention, or kicked out of every other high-school in the county.  Once, in a conference with a problem student, an Associate Principle told the student and his mother, "Look.  Nobody really cares about learning Washington Irving.  We all know it has nothing to do with your daily life.  But you gotta do this to stay outta trouble."

This is probably right.  The student and AP were both African American, and I am very familiar with all the arguments about the all-white canon and the attitudes it inculcates..  But, hey!  Its Washington Irving!  You know, guys?  Icabod Crane?  Headless Horseman?  Johnny Depp and Christopher Walken?  Isn't there another appeal the AP could have made?  Like, this will make you BETTER.  Reading and writing, any reading and writing, has the potential to open up access to cultural and economic streams that have been closed to you.

I read Jack London's "To Light a Fire" in redneck tract housing in Charlotte, North Carolina in a 100-degree-plus summer in the early 1960s.  It scared the shit out of me!  That's why I'm reading Danticat now and arguing that others read as widely as they can.  So we all won't just keep seeing what we know over and over.

I hope Jesus does the trick for my former student.  But it would be nice if she could find the names for all the things she looks at.

No, really! I hate your fucking kid!

From time to time I hear somebody say these words about me: "Michael acts like he hates kids. . . he says he hates kids.  But he's just kidding!  He reeeeeeeeeeeaally LOVES kids!"

These words are frequently said in my presence, but they are generally spoken to some little snotbag clawing at the knees of my pants and drooling all over my shoes.  He reeeeeeeeeaaally LOVES kids.  He just acts like he doesn't.

So, perhaps its time to clarify.  I hate your fucking kid.  I hate it!  Your kid is little, nasty, crawling with germs; your kid is pissing on my leg and climbing all over me.  Your kid is narcissistic and demanding (which is MY JOB! ).  Your kid is a black hole in any social situation; your kid is an attention whore, your kid tyrannizes my attention and our conversation, your kid thinks it is the absolute center of the universe.  (My Job!  My Job!  My Job!).  If I'm being nice to your kid it is out of a sense of courtesy and decency that you are not showing me by letting the little fuck kick my shins. 

Okay.  I can see we're edging delicately up to a revelation.  I don't really hate kids.  They're Holy Innocents here.

I hate You!  Wanna know who I really hate?  I hate Mommies!  I hate all the Mommies and Daddies who think everybody is supposed to adore their spawn as much as they do.  I hate the whole fucking cult of parenthood that refuses to train, discipline, socialize, or even talk to their kids in the name of some New Age idiot idea that everything that every kid does is Good.

Up until only about 150 years ago we made our children work.  We fucked them and brutalized them, just like we get fucked and brutalized.  We used to marry them when they were 10 or 12 years old.  The notion that childhood is essentially ludic, without constraints or restrictions or violence or aggression or, for that matter, sexuality, is a modern myth that has survived the big upheavals of post-modernist thought mostly because of a bourgeois commitment to "the family" and to the hetero paradigms that drive it.  Only in this culture could you find newscasters lamenting the idea that Tiger Woods didn't get to have "a normal childhood" because his father worked him so hard to learn golf.  He's Tiger Woods!  Who wouldn't take that deal?  Do you think your kid can make a choice like that?  Do you think you could?  It is no coincidence that ideologies of childhood and child rearing are in tatters, and that our children are glued to TVs and Playstations, while our country argues that marriage should be between a man and a woman.

I hate people who use their kids as an excuse to gain 40 pounds, load up on Cheetos and Oreos,  and to give up on their own lives because, like, Now You Have Responsibilities. (In the film Internal Affairs Richard Gere plays a crooked cop named Chris Peck.  Peck takes bribes, he has three wives, he fucks his partner's wife and then murders his partner.  And when he finally gets shot at the end, while trying to rape and murder the wife of the younger cop played by Andy Garcia, he says with his dying breath, "Its easy for You!  You don't have any kids yet.  When you have kids everything changes.  You have responsibilities.  I love my kids!")   I hate walking into a "home" and having to step over all the shit on the floor because you're so busy affirming your kid you can't clean up after him.  I hate watching you beam at me while your jackass kid throws food at me and tries to pull of my clothes.  

I know people who can raise decent kids.  Tarja Pollari has a magic 5-year-old named Maija, who is perfectly capable of sitting in a restaurant with a group of adults and behaving like a smaller version of one of them.  Laura Barrett's kids, Maddy and Samantha are great.  Well, no they're not; they're little Death Machines.  But they are perfectly socialized and behaved and Laura has never pawned them off on me or made me sit through any abuse from them.

You want me not to hate your kid, try this: talk to it; treat it like a human being that lives by the same rules as the rest of us.  Teach your kid manners.   Teach your kid words.  Teach your kid the joy of shutting the fuck up so it can join in the human conversation.  Because if you don't, that little shit will end up sitting in my classroom in only ten or fifteen years, blinking stupidly with its mouth open and with no idea what is coming next.  Then, I'll have to do your job.

So, do your job.  Or, do like me and use condoms.

Pump it up! Part II

When people come to me and ask what then need to do to change their bodies I tell them this: You will have to lose all your friends.

This isn't strictly true, of course.  But more times than not things work out that way for those who really want to have a say how their physical plant looks and operates.  The first thing that happens to people who start working out is they get depressed.  This is because your life, your body, whether you love it or hate it, is Yours.  Dasein is Mine!, writes Heidegger.  And even if your body is too fat or too skinny and causes you anguish, that anguish belongs to you as you do it, and you'll miss it when it starts to go.

The next thing that happens is that your friends step back from you, or, in the worst cases, begin busting on you.  Everybody inside the gym has a story about this.  You are part of a social group that operates around you being the fat girl, or the skinny guy.  The group has habits, often the very ones you're now abandoning.  You can't just do that without taking some shit.

-- A couple of years ago a brilliant (and quite beautiful) female student with a nasty eating disorder asked me to help her lose some body fat.  She would come into the gym with me and some other students, and without fail, after the workout, all her friends in the dorms would have pizza and soda waiting for her when she got back.  They were heavily invested in the routines on which the friendship was based and began to resent her for wanting to diet and work out.  She ate the pizza and kept the friends.

-- A snowbird I met in Gold's gym lost 80 or 90 pounds after his first heart attack.  He was having terrible fights at home because his wife resented that he didn't want to eat ice cream and pop corn in front  of the tube any more, and finally began to fear that with the fat off he would start wanting to fuck more attractive women.  (Well!  Hyy--yeah!)  He ditched the wife. Or she ditched him.

-- My beloved friend and long time workout partner, Chula, lost 138 pounds after her marriage broke up.  Her girl friends got pissed because she no longer wanted to spend a "girls' night" over nachos and cheap white wine, talking about how "there are no good men left."  This was when she was 50, and she is now a total hottie who can date anybody she wants.  But those friends are gone along with the nachos and cheap wine.

The list goes on.  One of my colleagues got way up in my face when I stopped drinking.  "What?  You won't drink with me?  What?  Are you too cool to drink with me now?"  After my body began to change all this turned into, "Oh, yeah.  He works out.  He has issues."   Or, "he's afraid of getting old,"  or, "he's trying to be the cool professor."  As if I did it all for them!

The things people say in these cases are all pretty much the same: "you're narcissistic," "you're fine the way you are!,"  "learn to live a little!"   Once, three weeks out from a show, somebody who works at my school followed me around a faculty party with a slice of chocolate cake on a paper plate, trying to get me to eat it.  "Come on!  What can it hurt?" she said.  She pushed a plastic fork at my mouth and I think was genuinely pissed off when I wouldn't eat it.  In her more satiric moments Sue likes to say, "What's life without a donut?"  You also get the self-help-philosophical responses: "you have complexes," "nobody lives forever."  And my personal favorite: "Look at me: I eat whatever I want and I look fine."

Mostly, people who go regularly to the gym and who follow training diets aren't thinking about "how they look."  They like feeling the blood come into the muscle, they like being hard and having their clothes fit.  In exactly the same way a person with a Ph.D. trains the mind, gym rats like to train their bodies, to take control of and to form the living tissue that gets out of bed with them every morning. 

In fact, I have trouble understanding why you would train your mind, go to all the bother of getting a Ph.D., and then let your belly hang out over your pants.  After having her second a kid and then gaining 40 pounds a learned colleague of mine said, "I've reproduced twice.  Do I really need to have an attractive body too?"  Well. . . no.  But the fact that you can ask that question means you're already thinking about it and you're already feeling bad about yourself.  Will this change by declaring, even in "smart" language, that only unlearned and egotistical people have lean bodies? 

People have reasons for taking cooking classes, going to wine tastings, collecting stamps, electric trains, baseball cards.  The people who work out are usually thinking about how good it feels to have a very specific, learned, focused, and intensive relation to certain body habits most of us take for granted. 

The idea that anybody works out for YOU is just stupid.  Oh. . . and narcissistic!

I"ll come back to this again.

Pump it up!

Well!  Papi is hitting 265 on the flatbench.  I'm posting this because I'm particularly proud of it, and because it has been such a fucking long haul to come back from my motorcycle wreck and shingles.    The tear in my rotator cuff is still hurting me pretty bad, as is the herniation in my neck.  But all this makes the heavy bench even sweeter for me!  Right now I have more body fat on me than I've had in ten years and I'm way uncomfortable with it.  But the calories are helping me close in on 200 pounds and I'm bigger and harder than I've ever been. 

I think.

Lately, Sue and I have been working out with Louis, who graduated from middle school this week, and who is a totally natural jock.  He is just 14 and he puts on muscle by just looking hard at the weight stacks.   He doesn't behave like a kid in the gym: he's respectfull of others, and, most importantly, he respects the iron and the workout.   Everybody at Gold's has pretty much adopted him.

Recently MSNBC aired a special called Hooked: Female Muscle.  I watched it to see if my friend and trainer Debi Laszewski (La-chef-ski), who just took second place at The Arnold Classic, and who is one of the greatest female bodybuilders on the scene right now, would be featured.  Of course she was not.  Instead, it was the usual bullshit about how fucked up you have to be to pursue this sport.  Women with facial hair and Adam's Apples.  Women on juice turning themselves into men.  Pretty predictable stuff.  The voiceover kept coming back to the title words, "They're hooked!  They need to lift weights!"  They brought on that asshole Harvard psychologist who wrote The Adonis Complex to talk about how only psychos can be obsessed enough with their bodies to do the workout and diets done by body builders.

 All of this is pretty common and unimaginative.  I think one reason why it irritates me so much is that as a teacher I have noticed that people who don't work out and who don't diet are not one jot less obsessed with their bodies as those who do.   Students and colleagues have been coming to see me since I started to compete to tell me how they hate themselves and how uncomfortable they feel in their bodies.  They're too fat; they're too skinny.  Then they have four slices of pizza and a can of diet coke for breakfast.  This is self-undermining and seems pretty clearly to me to be part of the same pathology that drives "The Adonis Complex."  I don't think body builders, fitness or figure competitors, are any more "hooked" on body image than civilians; they just handle the urges differently.  Not necessarily better -- just differently. 

There is a Harley T-shirt that says "If I have to explain it, you wouldn't understand."  I guess the gym is the same.  What strikes me as odd, however, is the need of people outside the sport to bust on it as hard as they do.

So, without trying to explain, lemme say this again from age 59: 265 on the flat-bench!