Naked and Aimless

I'm teaching a writing class at SPU this term that I'm calling Thinking Out Loud, the course text for which is Alan Jacobs' How to Think. Yesterday, we were discussing the chapter "The Money of Fools," which, among other things, discusses the metaphors we live by. The book has been a success in class, though sometimes I worry that Jacobs writes so lucidly that I'll have little work to do. We're trying to frame take-aways from the book: how will we conduct ourselves differently after having confronted these ideas, and for this week, one of them was simply to mark, to listen for the embedded metaphors around us, and then to interrogate those for possible unintended (yet still powerful) influences. We'll try to notice when a political commentator refers to the peaceful transition of power between two parties serving the smae country as "a battle," featuring "victories," and even "casualties." And then we'll try to think of other ways the same phenomena could be framed, perhaps more helpfully. 

We talked about the Italian phrase for good luck (particularly on tests)--in bocca al lupo-- "Stick it in the wolf's mouth," and then someone brought up the admittedly strange benediction wherein we suggest to our performing friends that they "break a leg." Our class discussion reminded me of a buried metaphor I heard a few years ago and have been thinking about—on and off— since. 

I found myself sitting on the outside deck at Fremont Coffee one summer morning, on what happened to be the summer solstice. I had heard, vaguely, that there was a parade, but saw no evidence thereof until I saw a fully nude man riding a bicycle, standing on the pedals as though looking around for someone. I looked to my fellow customers for verification that we were all indeed observing the same bizarre phenomena. They were non-plussed. Then three girls rode by, looking similarly lost and also in the buff. By that point, we coffee sippers had pieced together that this was some kind of demonstration, likely connected with the solstice, and I thought: four riders; that's about right for the exhibitionist population of a city this size; plus, it's cold out. Then 150 more rode by, variously body painted, pierced, shaved, not, and otherwise just so very there. 

It was funny to me how the critical mass mattered. The one guy I took for a pervert. The three lost girls I felt sorry for. But when the parade route rode right down the street I was sitting on, the whole mood changed almost to elation. People clapped and cheered. They brought their kids to line the streets, carrying them on shoulders like at any other procession of mayor and firetrucks and marching bands. And then the man next to me said the strangest thing; raising his fist, he shouted to the naked bikers, "Go get 'em!" 

Right then, I asked myself some questions. Go get whom? And how? The clothed? Christians? All that was going to take place, objectively speaking, is these people will ride their bikes naked around a few blocks, then go home, shower, and go out to brunch. But this fellow seems to have thought they were warriors of some kind, conducting a raid. I mused and smiled, and, thinking back now on the morning while thinking through Jacobs' book, I think, I think he imagined these riders as a kind of cavalry and that they were, by airing their fannies thus, going to take down "The Patriarchy," whatever they took that to mean. 

I think he thought--and I think they thought--that they were soldiers, giving up their own dignity, rather than their lives, to wage war on Mr. Rogers, or Andy Griffith, or the guys from Mad Men. That somehow, their taking a stand now against the normal worked to undo the very idea of normalcy and thereby of the status quo and somehow thereby against the church, or the married w/ 2.5 kids, or maybe the suburbs. 

I suppose that's the strange thing about bacchanalian rites: they're great fun, but one can never quite see what the objective is. But that's also the strange thing about metaphors: they burrow and sometimes need to be burned backward out, like ticks.

Writing Pet Peeves

In a sense, it isn’t right to call the following errors “pet peeves,” since they are, well, errors. It’s not like they’re idiosyncratic to me; it’s not like they’re pets that I nurture, little annoyances I nurse for the pleasure of hating something. It’s just that these are the writing errors that I’m tired of pointing out. I’d like to move on to getting upset about other mistakes you make, to believe that your sins are unique to you instead of stamped out at some kind of demonic factory.

Since I’m posting them here, I’d like to say make any one of these errors in a paper you turn in for me and you automatically fail. I mean, forewarned is forearmed, right? But I’m not really saying that. I’m just saying knock it off.

I’m tempted to list plagiarism here at the outset because it’s the most disconcerting, but plagiarism isn’t really a pet peeve; it’s a crime. It’s a subcategory of fraud, actually, since it involves a writer trying to gain access to a degree that confers benefits (incl. subsidized loans rates etc.) under false pretenses. Stay as far away as you can.

Referring to anyone by his or her first name who is not your roommate

Students do it all the time, especially to women. Here’s the rule: when talking about historical personages you get to write a first name once: the first time you write it. Every time after, it’s just the last name. So, “Dickinson says,” not “Emily says.”

Misusing the conditional tense

This one is so ubiquitous and so new that I think it must be the fault of some sarcastic movie I didn’t see. I can just imagine some character sneering in response to a parent who asks “what’s this” something like “that would be a tattoo” meaning of course, “that is a tattoo.” Anyway, it leaked into the language. About five years ago, students started writing “would be” instead of “is.” I get papers that say things like “John Keats would be the best Romantic poet,” and I think to myself, "Would be” if what? If Shelley hadn’t lived? Before that, no one ever misused the conditional, which, as the name implies, suggests conditions. Don’t say “would” unless you’re prepared to answer them.

Dropped Quotes

Every sentence you write has to have your words in it; you don't get to pop a quote into a paper, let us awe at its majesty and then watch you stand back and say things about it. You don't spoon spaghetti into someone's open palm, do you? Same here. Get a plate and serve up the quote like a good host.

Citation Errors

These bother me only because they’re so easy to get right. The differences between MLA APA and Chicago citation styles can be daunting, sure, but no one is asking you to memorize them. You should write academic papers with a style guide right in front of you. The other thing that’s weird about them is that people usually do extra work to make the error. MLA requires, for example, just the page number after a citation, as in “Whitman writes ‘Oh me’ (43),” yet I frequently get (Page 43), which is 4 extra keystrokes, or (P. 43) or (Pg. 43) or some other fantastic variation.

So,

It may seem to you that these don’t matter much, and perhaps once they didn’t, but in a digitized academy, command-inputs and metadata matter more than ever. Put a } instead of a] in a line of code and the program will not work. It may only mean that the little jumping man in a video game glitches for a second, but then again, it may mean that someone’s heart medicine isn't dispensed into the IV bag. Be careful in small things. Learning to take care is one of the things you’re here to master after all, and if it isn’t, it should be.

Other things come up all the time: grammar perversions, punctuation whimsy, topic sentences exhibiting irresponsible leadership, but those things I take in stride. Not so the above. The proverbial stride, the whole gait and carriage is hobbled hereby and, like any wounded animal, I start snarling.

Romantics Class Recap: Faust 3

In class this week, we finished our reading of Faust, and buttressed our discussion thereof with a summary of sublime discourse from Longinus and Burke. The students selected passages in Faust that typified the sublime as Goethe renders it, noting especially:

• its ability to obliterate the sense of self
• to enlarge same
• to create fearful-pleasure (which led to an interesting discussion of roller coasters and horror movies. viz. is it because we trust amusement park safety mechanisms that we find such threats to our well-being pleasurable?)
• its sexual analogue, a correlation Mephistopheles makes (rather) explicit through coded stage directions

These led us to discuss the concurrent shift in painting, from the proud neoclassical heroism of Jaques-Louis David to the haunting, anti-humanist, perspectival work of JMW Turner and how the Romantic movement lives in the tension between those views, a pull best illustrated by that quintessential piece by Caspar David Friedrich: “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog” (1818) wherein the figure both rises above the chaos of the world–an image of the enlightenment artist–and is daunted, dwarfed by it, in an image of the Romantic one.

Finally, we discussed Faust as an aesthetic treatise. Before it is metaphysical, or merely entertaining, the play– as can be seen from the opening argument about what type of play it should be– interrogates both the place and power of art. We thought about how the materials of the world resist manipulation into form. From Michelangelo’s carrerra marble to the creation of lapis lazuli to the intrusion of “normal life” that wrecks the drive of so many aspiring artists, art-making is daunting business (on which subject the book Art and Fear is best). Somehow, this took us into recent work on evolutionary aesthetics and “the survival of the beautiful.”

All of these themes came to a head in Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” which I recited (from my own translation). The poem blends all the elements of the sublime–the blindness, silence, mindlessness it engenders along with the arousal and fear and implications for self-understanding. And of course, it’s also a triumph of German (even of world) literature and a good deal of fun.