Dirty Words

Hannah Montana is teaching your kids to talk dirty!

A mother in Jacksonville, Florida (Why is it always Florida?) is complaining that her three-year-old is learning to curse from her talking Hannah Montana doll. The doll is, as the commentators like to say, "dropping the F-bomb." It aparently sings "We'll have a rockin' good time," But if you really listen hard, maybe hold it just right and turn your head so, it seems to say "a fuckin' good time."

Why does this remind me of another story running over the web these days, one famously sent up by Bill Maher on his HBO show, about the guy who found the face of Jesus on his dog's ass. It may be because the moral of both these stories is the same: people find what they look for. But there's another lesson after this. A while ago I posted about the former student who could only remember me talking about sex in class. Like my former student, like all of us, the people making this lamentable news can only see or hear what they know. What they see and hear is thus a snapshot of what they're thinking about.

But how does all this really work, knowing what you see, seeing what you know? An expression like "the F-Bomb" is a way of saying the word "Fuck" without really having to say it, avowing and disavowing in the same breath the thing you're trying to say. But the expression also smuggles in the speaker's absolute and unequivocal awareness of what it means to make such a denial. It doesn't just give the word a whole new life, it reveals the speaker's own sense of paradox, complexity and, most importantly, of the way our speech never gets things right. Some Jewish students, and some Christians, for that matter, won't spell out the name of God in college essays. They write "G-d," making it into a type of "G-word." This is because these students realize that to bring something into language is to take possession of it, reduce it to something you can own, conceptually and socially.

But there's more, especially concerning dirty words. When you own a word it owns you back. I think we can see this double-paradox in the way we censor ourselves and others. For example, shortly after the now-famous "Dick in a Box" skit on Saturday Night Live, in which the word "dick" was predictably bleeped by the NBC censors, Justin Timberlake went on Jay Leno and read out a list of all the words the censor would have accepted in place of the one they bleeped. These included, "rod," "gat," "fun gun," "shaft," "johnson." Somebody explain to me how any of these words, some of which suggest weaponry and violent penetration, are less offensive than "dick."

I remember when Harrison Ford's "Jack Ryan" movie Patriot Games was first broadcast on network television. There is a moment when Ford's character is watching a terrorist training camp in North Africa through a satellite and finds a woman from the IRA terrorist group he's hunting sunbathing nude in the desert. In the movie, he says "Ah! Tits!" In the broadcast version he says, "Ah! Jugs!" Same question: how is this word less offensive and more presentable? How was the term "Making Whopee," used on the godawful Newlywed Game in the seventies, less stupid and vulgar than "Fucking"?

The answer is, of course, that it isn't. But the convention and all the cliches allow us to make an end-run around the things that bother us most about these words and the things they bring before us when we say them. The expression "the N-word" came into the national consciousness during the O.J. Simpson murder trial, when it was discovered that Mark Furman, the cop who was the chief prosecution witness, had used the word "nigger" several times in an interview on tape. No word produces more conflicting emotions, more shame and abnegation, in the white mainstream than this racial epithet. It was a bit disarming to see such representatives of our national ethics and morals as Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw talking night after night about how Furman had used "the N-word." It was like they were saying the word and unsaying it at the same time.

The Florida 3-year-old is going to learn the word "Fuck" sooner or later. It's better she hear it from Hannah Montana. And I'll bet the students of the Georga teacher fired after what the CNN newscaster called "the B-word" appeared on her "friends only" Facebook page already knew that word before finding it on her web page. What we're really teaching students when we censor these words, in ourselves and in others, when we fire teachers for them, is not that the words are not there or that they are unspeakable. They very much are. We're teaching them that our forbidden words are a threshold or a frontier that shows us the limits of what we're willing to think. Not what we're able, but what we're willing to think.

Professional Ethics III

I'm reading with some concern the stories about Ashley Payne, the English teacher (it's always the English Teacher!) at Appalachee High School in Barrow County, Georgia, who was forced to resign after posting vacation pictures on her FaceBook page. The CNN story says she put up a couple of pictures of herself drinking Guiness (while on a visit to the Guiness brewery in Dublin) and wine (in Paris). I've seen the pix and they're pretty tame. Then the reporter said her site also contained "the B-word."

I wonder what this word is. Bugger? Bitch? Blowjob? A-Bortion? Butt-fucking? Born Again? I'm wondering what words I might write on this or some other page that would get me fired. I wonder what word beginning with "B" her students never heard until she wrote it on FB. (Bukakke?) I invite anyone reading this to help me out here.

Actually, Payne wrote that she was going to "Bitches Bingo" a popular local event "with my bitches." She was called into the School District on the basis of one anonymous email. Maureen Downey believes, after an analysis of the grammar, vocabulary and inside-knowledge in the email, that it was written by another teacher wanting to damage Payne's career. Here's that story:

http://blogs.ajc.com/get-schooled-blog/2009/11/13/barrow-teacher-done-in-by-anonymous-e-mail-with-perfect-punctuation/

But why would it matter to the Barrow County School District what she was doing on her Facebook? If you google "fired teacher facebook" you will be let in on what is becoming a national argument about the importance of monitoring teachers when they're off work. Lot's of people are getting fired from stuff they've put on Facebook, and I have even advised students of mine not to talk about their experiments with sex and drugs online if they're applying for jobs and graduate programs.

But the Georgia woman's problem brings me back to something I've posted about here before, namely, the public private lives of teachers. Five of the Top Ten people fired from Facebook postings listed on this site: http://www.thetechbrief.com/2008/01/16/top-10-lives-businesses-and-reputations-ruined-due-to-facebook/ are associated with institutions of learning, either as teachers, administrators or students. This profession has always carried a particular sort of vulnerability, brought on by what we call "the importance" of teaching and teachers.

Ashley Payne probably makes just over 30-grand a year. And for this she gets up at 5:30 every morning and stands on her feet for seven and a half hours. If she's anything like teachers here in Palm Beach County, Florida, she pays out of her own pocket for many of the materials used in her class. If she's anything like any other teacher anywhere in the country she is answerable to, and never satisfies, students, parents, administrators, associate principles, politicians, pastors, pundits, and now newscasters and the general public. Oh,and she does this to do a job most parents don't want to do: she raises their kids. That's right! I said it right here on LiveJournal: teachers are the new Mexicans! They do the work most American's won't -- they're cheap labor, reinforced with lots of lip service about how the children are our future and how teachers are "our heros"!

But all this is not enough! For her 30k a year, this young woman must also answer for her vacation time in Dublin and Paris. It's not like she put up pictures of herself with her dress over her head, or flipping the bird. It's not like she put up a video of herself painting a canvas with her bare buttocks. Teachers in the DC School district did this, according to an article in The Washington Post called "When Young Teachers Go Wild" (I know, I know!) on April 28, 2008. I can't quite imagine anybody, teacher or not, stupid enough to represent him or herself in public like that. But when teachers do it, we tent our fingers beneath our chins and hem and haw about ideals and role models. In this way Ashley Payne is like a politician who must keep people happy on all sides of the ideological spectrum. The Barrow County School Board knows perfectly well it isn't enforcing any sort of principle here: they canned Ashley Payne to avoid heat from the religious right in their state. They did it to look principled and dignified, at the expense of somebody way down the food chain.

The School District canned this teacher in order to present itself in a certain way. But what we hide in moments like this is much more important. What we hide when we surveil and humiliate our teachers is not just our contempt for them and the job they do; we hide also our sure knowledge that they do a job we won't do because, unlike us, they still believe it can be done. We all know from the numbers that education is failing, and rather than consider the deeper social and ideological causes of this we let our teachers take the fall for it.

Last year one of my nephews told Sue and me a long story about being called in with his father, my brother, to see an English teacher about his performance in high school. In the story, my brother and nephew suffered assorted indignities at the hands of this man: no do-overs, no extra credit, no late papers; in the telling of it they were nudging each other and passing the increasingly gloating narrative back and forth to build to the punchline when my nephew said this to his teacher:

"You're a fucking loser! And the proof of it is that you're only a fucking stupid high-school teacher!"

My brother and nephew chortled and looked expectantly at me and Sue. They wanted us to share the laugh. My nephew has inherited some considerable wealth (not from my family, but from his mother's), and drove to school in a car worth nearly this teacher's yearly salary. I pointed out to my nephew that he was talking to three teachers, Sue, me, and his girlfriend, who taught kindergarten. "Oh, yeah, " he said. But neither his contempt nor sense of his right to it were disguised.

I'll say more about all this soon. I'm teaching a course on the Boca Raton campus of my university next semester and am worried because a lot of the material in it is offensive. I teach literature and some of the literatures our culture produces and even honors are offensive. So, this episode has sent me into a bit of a meditation.

Teachers are the front line of our society's most important losing-battle. We browbeat and criticize them because we know their own optimism -- that idiot belief in somebody's future besides their own -- and their sense of commitment to some vision of a shared cultural space, shames the rest of us. I don't know Ashley Payne. But I'm gonna go deep here and bet that she knows more about her students, has given more to the people of her school district than have the people who terminated her. Her commitment, her very willingness -- and the willingness of teachers everywhere -- to do this job is the source of the contempt expressed by my nephew and by the people who fired her. Because just by showing up for work in the morning she willingly puts herself in all these institutional crosshairs, submitting in advance to personal attacks from every asshole who feels entitled to make one. Even the CNN newscaster led this story with a little sermon about how this teacher was unwise to post pictures of herself at the Guiness brewery. Teachers all submit to this, and to the entropy and cynicism of the whole system, just to stand in front of those rooms full of bored kids and try to make something out of them. We punish teachers because they believe what we say we believe, but don't. They make us liars, and that we cannot bear.

I seem to be creating a story with good guys and bad guys here. But it's more complicated. Like many of the systems in our world, the educational system is failing because it is collapsing under its own weight. There aren't really any personalities on the first line of this confrontation: just institutions, with their own life-forces and needs. But when we let the problem get thrown back onto teachers, everything gets personalized and made into a problem of character. Then, a bit salaciously it seems to me, we go looking for the bad characters who will give us the peace of mind we seek. Teachers fucking students; teachers doing drugs; teachers being inappropriate on Facebook.

For now, I'll say this to the Barrow County School District and the tax payers all over the country who fund the schools: If your teachers are so important that you have to surveil their personal lives, if what they do is so imortant that you have to fire them like you fired this young woman then pay them what they're worth!

I wish my colleague, Ashley Payne, good luck and God-speed in her lawsuit. The CNN story says she's suing to get her job back. I don't know why she would want it, but I'm grateful that she does.

Apocalypse. . . NOT!

Sunday night Sue, Enrique and I went to see 2012. We didn't get to go with Louis because he was at a church dinner. I was excited to see it with Enrique, since its all about a Mayan prophecy that interests him and since his own Mayan genes show up in his Mestizo features.

The movie has had bad reviews, has been bumped off the charts after only a week by those tanned and shirtless Vampires, and, yep, it most totally sucked. We watched it with our mouths agape, our eyes bulging, our fingers digging into the arm rests of the rocking-chair seats, but it sucked. You totally get your 10-bucks' worth with the special effects, but you come away wondering, "What the fuck happened?" In part, this seems to me to be due to the cowardice of the writers and producers, who were unwilling to make a movie with a real apocalyptic ending. By the end, billions have died horribly, but we don't really care because John Cusak has won back his family and they're going off like the family at the end of Mel Gibson's Apocalypto to "make a new life." or, as Gibson's Mayan puts it, "to make a world elsewhere." Yeah, yeah.

The "feel good" ending tacked on to this movie got me thinking about how we're imagining the end of humanity and mankind these days. The end of 2012 was actually a rerun of Steven Spielberg's The War of the Worlds, which took a big hit from the critics for shifting the horror of Wells's novel. At the end of the novel the human race is spared, but at terrible expense. In place of this, Spielberg gives us a family drama, so that the alien attack on earth and the human race is threaded through the story of how Tom Cruise has to reunite his alienated kids with their mom. Father and son learn to respect each other. By the end of both movies, we're, like, sad and stuff that most of us have died horribly, but we're still happy because the family has been healed and the American Spirit remains intact.


We have made some cult movies where the human race dies out, like Last Night, with its amazing performance by Sandra Oh, and the cult classic, Miracle Mile, which ends when the hero and his girlfriend and by implication the entire human race sink slowly into the La Brea Tar Pit in LA. But what struck me watching 2012 is that, like so many movies coming out these days -- Armageddon and Deep Impact, for example -- is that the human race not only survives, but it survives with all its technology and values intact. In The Day After Tomorrow, the world is pretty much destroyed, but we get an apology from the arrogant US vice-president who wouldn't listen to the scientist. There is a new ice age, and the US population has fled to Central and South America; but it's okay, because things will go on pretty much as they did before. Like with the Mayan apocalypse, this movie's feel-good punchline comes when -- Guess What! -- the scientist, Dennis Quaid, snow sleds from Washington to New York to reunite with his estranged son, Jake Gyllenhall (who, I'm happy to report, is in the process of consumating his love with girlfriend Emmy Rossum). So why save the family?

Mike Davis has written that the 9/11 events have pretty much shut down the possibility of beliving in American Exceptionalism and the notion that "it can't happen here." Wells also wrote about the bombardment of New York by dirgible, but, Davis claims, after the attacks in New York, it became harder to hang onto the idea of our invulnerability. So, maybe these films that have come out in the wake of 9/11 are a way of restoring the American "feel good": your eyes bulge, you grip the edges of your seat, and the world -- you along with it! -- is destroyed; but its okay because all the values that put you in that seat are alive and well. At the end of 2012 the man who has replaced Cusack in his family is sacrificed to save one of the escape ships trying to survive the new flood. He turned out to be a good guy, a worthy replacement for the estranged dad: but we're glad to see him go. The fat Russian prick has already died trying to get his kids onto the ship, an end that almost redeems him for being such a prick; and his young hottie drowns poetically while the ship struggles to close its doors against the flood. Cusack goes back into the water to fix the problem that is threatening the whole ship, and for just a second we think he also has been sacrificed. When, after a long wait, his head pops up from under the water, the audience I was in let go with a big cheer. Yay!

Faulkner famously declined to accept the end of man. But what would it take now to imagine it? And do these films flinch back from their own premises out of hubris or fear? Faulkner's line is from his Nobel Prize address, from the height of the cold war, a time that had its own apocalyptic obsessions. During these years, which also happened to be my childhood and early teen years, Americans built backyard "fallout shelters," and there was lots of talk about our family being the last survivors of a nuclear war. I remember my parents telling me they didn't want to build a shelter because, they said, "If everybody else is gone, I won't want to be here, either." The fallout shelter panic of the late-fifties and early-sixties is sent up in the comedy Blast from the Past, where Christopher Walken has kept his family underground for 30 years and now must believe that the world has ended. When he finally surfaces in present-day LA, he thinks the people living there are mutant survivors of a nuclear holocaust. Nevile Schute's 1957 novel On the Beach (film version,1959) is perhaps the most forceful of the anti-war sermonettes produced in the cold war, and it gets its power precisely because it ends with human extinction. After the awaited nuclear holocaust, the radioactive cloud is slowly covering the globe from North to South, while people in Australia wait helplessly. An American nuclear sub sets out to Seattle to answer an SOS call, but when they get there the call turns out to be coming from a coke bottle tied to a window shade and tapping out Morse Code on a radio left alive when everybody else is dead.

The novel's finish reminds me of Boccaccio's Introduction to his Decameron, which is an account of the world-ending event brought by the bubonic plague in Florence. Some people get religion, some get drunk, some run around and scream, some fuck each other: the captain of the American sub and his crew scuttle the ship at sea so an American warship won't be left behind. The last shot in the movie is a street in Sidney with newspaper blowing around. Boccaccio's remnant group retreats to a country estate and they begin telling each other stories. This, for a number of reasons, solaces them and restores them to a sense of community and hope.

Walker Percy writes in his book on language The Message in the Bottle, more or less a decade after Faulkner's speech, that "the real question facing us as a nation is not 'What will I do if the bomb goes off,' but 'What will I do if it doesn't.' " Percy goes on to imagine life-eternal in Burbank with Johnny Carson on the tube night after night. Percy is a Catholic and writes this line to remind us how precious our mortality is: that both life and death are the great gifts defining us from birth. Okay, I get that. But why edge up against the idea only to retreat from it?

I've always thought post-apocalypse movies of the Mad Max type, or slash movies set in our suburbs or vacation spots, reflected a death wish in our cultural unconscious. A wish for the materialist American dream to consume itself in a moment that would give it meaning. As the American suburban dream banishes death, sickness, and even age, I think the stalker-in-the-burbs movie longs for something beyond the comforts we enjoy. I tell my students the slash-horror film is the closest our culture comes to medieval literature, where death and life are versions of one another.The intrusion of a knive-wielding killer into the pristine American middle class would thus reflect a wish for something transcendent, something more than night after night with Johnnie or Jay. I get this wish.

But what about these most recent movies, where the world ends but the American family, American ideals, American technology, and American anxieties push to some sort of "beyond"? I wonder what we're wishing for now. In these movies the American family and the way of life it builds is not just pushed through the cataclysm to transcendence: the family, the father-son axis, IS transcendence itself; it is not the thing that survives, it is the meaning of all life on both sides of the catastrophe. Shortly after President Obama introduced himself as "a citizen of the United States and a proud citizen of The World," Newt Gingrich said at some banquet, "Let me be clear: I am NOT a citizen of The World." And why should he be, since as a few pop singers once put it, We Are The World.

The Mayans said the world will end in 2012. They didn't predict the strained survival of the American middle class. Fucking Mayans! After the movie, I told Enrique, "The World didn't even end! Mayans suck!"

Love me, Love my politics!

I've been away, I know. Here is a cross-post from a conversation I had today on my colleague Chris Ely's Facebook. I think the back story sort of tells itself. One of my interlocuters had said about Sarah Palin "There's no there there." And that just pissed me off! Okay, well it didn't, because I got what the guy was saying. But the colloquy was being pushed along by somebody who had hacked into Chris's FB and who seemed to me to be making a rather taunting and goading argument on behalf of conservative Palin politics.

Here is my comment:

I LOVE you guys!

Except for John Sivley! For your vicious and unfounded attack on my hometown! The "no there there" quip is something Gertrude Stein liked to say about my beloved Oakland (Go A's!). And, even though many of the street signs there are in Chinese and Spanish, the people of my fair city are, mostly, Americans who can tell fluff from stuff, and we reject your comparison of our town with. . . you know who.

Obama has talked about a "coarsening" of American political discourse. But it seems to me that it has always been coarse, lowest-common-denominator, emotionally-driven. Right now, Limbaugh and Beck are right now calling a female US senator a whore; but worse was said about Andrew Jackson's wife during his campaign. This is the political world we share. Norman Mailer said the Nixon/Agnew camp made its appeal to people who need to resolve all their problems with simple sentences. I'm not sure their opponents were any different. The trick to any democratic society is creating a language that bespeaks its true concerns.

I'm sure a lot of people support Obama without understanding any of issues. What I do not see in them or in the videos posted here is the anger, righteousness, and call to violence that I've been seeing in Town Hall Meetings and in the video Chris posted.

It would comfort me to imagine the Birthers, Deathers and Palin herself going the way of the Black Panthers. And in fact if they do it may be because they relied on a sort of gun-toting machismo rather than a serious political language. Thirty-five years ago I had a talk very similar to the one we're having here with Eldridge Cleaver, one of the party founders. He was in hiding in Paris and the Rothschild family had a birthday party for him. (Yes, those Rothschilds) I was hired to play the accordion. I told him I thought that when you twist language away from itself into slogans, like he had done in his book Soul on Ice, it will always come back and punish you. Cleaver's writings for years referred to the US as "Babylon," but after several years in Algeria and then Paris, he was calling it "back home." He ended his exile and his life completely compromised and lost, and I think the Panthers would have lived longer if they could have un-coarsened their political discourse a little bit.

The thing about cliches -- and the people in the video Chris posted were swimming in them, making the most important judgments of their lives based on them -- is that they don't feel like cliches to the people using them.

Professional Ethics II

Sue took this picture yesterday at our place while Louis was setting up the Netbook we all gave him for his fifteenth birthday.  I've reproduced it a bit large here so you can all enjoy the shit-eating grin on SweetLou's face.  (He wanted a skateboard.)  I don't have anywhere near the dough to buy one of these and so Sue and Enrique helped me buy it.  They also did most of the search, since they know a lot about computers and I know practically nothing.  We have become a truly odd family: me, my young latin hottie wife, my father-in-law who is my best friend and  five years younger than me, and the Haitian son we've all adopted.  I have posted here about the looks we get in the mall.   Louis has been calling himself my son.  I wish I could deserve that.  I bust on my friends in here about their kids, but really, they're all doing something I can't.  Fortunately for me, Louis is doing all the hard part himself.

The choice of a high-tech writing machine over a skateboard reflects my continued blind believe in the power of words and writing.  Louis is a smart kid, and, like I say, he's really taking care of his life all by himself.  My interest here is that he has started at Sun Coast High School, which means he has a real shot at college and the sort of professional life many of my students take for granted and most of the people in Lou's world don't even believe in.  I think -- I passionately believe -- that as Louis learns to master the skill sets involved in writing (he needs to learn to type, to spell; he needs to imagine a grander vocabulary) the opportunities and hopes of the mainstream will open up to him.  More importantly, the world we share will become his world as our words become words that he can manipulate with some comfort and elegance.  I guess the short way of saying this is that I love Louis and I love the world and that I want them to live in some sort of harmony.

Sue is learning to be a Speech Therapist and is coming home almost daily with amazing stories about the world-sharing power of word skills.   She makes me remember that Aristotle says imitation is the greatest pleasure we know.   Just now, I've been watching on the tube the scene in Apollo 13 where Tom Hanks explains to his young son that the space flight will be safe, that "they" have fixed all the problems on the space ship.  It caused me to remember how deeply satisfying it was to imitate my father when I was only four or five years old.  Most of my memories of my parents and family are dark and brooding, and so this was a bit of a shock this morning.  "Be sure you're right, and then go ahead!" my father would say to me (he got that from the actor Fess Parker, who played Davey Crockett on the Walt Disney series in the 50s); and I can still remember my solemn repetition of those words, and even trying to live by them in a back yard kid sort of way.  I learned to talk as a child by wanting to sound like my father.

And I learned to talk like an academic by wanting to talk like the great scholars I heard and read.  I think I repeat the same stories to my students over and over again because this sort of repetition is a mantra that lets me share the world with everybody else.  This morning also, I got an email from my oldest friend, Al Shoaf, notifying me about a new web site he is building.  I can remember listening to Al talk about literature for hours while I was still in the circus in France.  When I started school at age 35 I remember being giddy with the idea that someday I would be able to talk like Al.  (I still can't.  Who can?  But I also can't begin to tell you all the things I stole from him!  In my EZ Rules for Writing on this site my infamous phrase "Never say anything with one word when you can say it with Nine!" is something Al was saying back in the late sixties.)    This is the wonderful and terrible lesson words have to teach.  George Carlin used to do a bit about being told just to say it "in your own words": "I've just been using all the same words as everybody else," Carlin said.  We learn to be ourselves by first trying to be somebody else.

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.