Pirates You Don't Know, and Other Adventures in the Examined Life: Collected Essays

Hardheads

92 Hardheads “What are you working on?” Crazy Larry said, when I told him about the trees. “Aren’t you supposed to be writing about . . . whatever it is you do? You must be a great disappointment to your editor.” He’d called as I was humping to campus with thirty pounds of overdue books and composing in my head: maples are soft, sweet trees that take instruction easily—they’re the first to drop everything when cool weather comes in.Oaks are hardheads.Even when forced to take autumn’s meaning, they clutch their dead leaves like sheets of foolscap and rustle them until winter’s end. “Maybe it’s a poem,” I said, breathless from the march to class. “About resistance. That’s why we choose oak for the hardest jobs: whiskey casks, gallows, ships of conquest.” “What are you—building an armada in your backyard?” he said suspiciously .“You don’t know how to tell a story. Most people don’t. In Chicago, they have this black-box theory of theater, all that pc hooey about conflicts and relationships and blah blah blah. Listen, I was at a staged reading last night, and two actresses were making out. I was in the second row and could see their jaw muscles working. Now that’s drama.They ought to build a whole night of theater around that.” r At the mailboxes in the English Department, Rory demanded to know if I’d seen some tv show.“I guess I missed it,”I said, absentmindedly flipping hardheads 93 through junk. I offered my apology: “We only get about eight channels. Sometimes we watch pbs.” “I’m not like you,”he snapped.“What’s so great about pbs? I’m not judgmental ; an episode of American Idol is the same to me as Dickens’s Vanity Fair. Call me the Postmodern Cowboy.” My creative-writing students often said they were postmodern too. One wrote the relativist sentiment that popsicles and crucifixions were equal; I said it depended on which you were offered. They didn’t talk about social construction of the self; that wasn’t compatible with the teen ego.They did vaguely admire ideas of their own powerlessness and the impossibility of practical ethics, which made for pretty sweet Thursday nights. My back, relieved of the pack, tightened up in anticipation of Oronte’s Traveling Snake Oil and Talking-cure Emporium. It had been a hard sell all semester. I’d asked them a week earlier to consider a Maupassant short story through the lens of an essay on dramaturgy by John Barth.Half didn’t bother, and I’d given them another chance. They were sitting around the square of tables, looking straight ahead, when I came in. I asked if they were ready to discuss the readings now but saw instantly by their faces that they were still unprepared.Resistance is what the educational psychologists call it, and it serves a good purpose: it protects the self, like a shell. Their writing so far had been rants, set pieces, dreams, drug trips—anything but short stories, and it wasn’t a beginners’class. “A story is just a bunch of stuff that happens,” one said. They got angry with me because I suggested a bit of drama with the rant, and an ear for prose. I recalled poet Robert Graves’s examiner at Oxford: “You seem to be under the impression, Mr. Graves, that one poem is better than another.” “Our teacher last semester was nice,”somebody said.“He let us have class outside.” We began workshop.The student story was about some kind of monster (I think) with invisible (?) spikes in its head, who (somewhere) tortures and murders (various unseen) people because he sucks minds (or something). It was written to titillate—the crushing of windpipes the only clear image—a kind of pornography of violence favored by young male students who (I would guess) have never encountered real violence but love the idea of it. 94 hardheads “I just wanted to be weird,” the author said. “You succeeded,” a young woman said quietly. I’m paid to make suggestions, so I said: “There’s a sister mentioned on page two. Why not use that relationship?” “You just hate science fiction,” another male student said. My syllabus did say we wouldn’t be discussing straight-up genre fiction that brought nothing new to the party...