Literature: Learn it, Live it, Love it? Fuck it.

by Joelle Renstrom

This is the last thing they want to be doing on a Monday night. Most of them work from nine to five, and then they’re here from six to ten.

There’s a high-schooler sitting in the back corner. He’s already been to four classes today and wears his baseball cap pulled down over his eyes in a show of extreme exhaustion. The girl with bleached blonde hair slept until four thirty this afternoon and committed what she’d typically regard as a cardinal sin by wearing sweatpants to class. She wants to be a journalist. A middle-aged man with ten adopted kids sits right up front, looking at me with his eyebrows raised just above the rim of his glasses in seemingly perpetual dubiousness.

As a new part-time English 111 instructor, I drew the short straw.

We have class in the emergency shelter classroom in the basement of Kalamazoo Valley Community College—a tiny hole of a room with no windows and no clock, as though to confirm that class will be a weekly experience in timeless torture.

No matter how old they are or what they do, before the class is halfway over, they glaze over like ham. They’re done. There’s no more learning, no discernible listening, and an impressive amount of zoning.

So what do we do? We read. Out loud.

In the face of their catatonia, I have to pull out all the stops. Each week I hand out my favorite stories and poems and excerpts from my favorite books. The perfect answer to a literary distress call. “This is a poem by Pablo Neruda,” I say as I pass out copies of Ode to My Socks. “He’s an incredible poet. Chilean. He was exiled to a small island off the coast of Italy.” I wait for someone to ask me what Neruda did to get exiled. No one does.

They say they’re all out of energy from having read out loud so much tonight. So I end up reading Ode to My Socks. I give it feeling. I sell those socks. “See,” I say triumphantly. “Poems don’t have to be all deep and complicated and hard to figure out. Sometimes, a poem is about a pair of socks and that’s it.” No one says anything. Shockingly, no one declares undying love for poetry. Or for this one poem. Or for socks.

Sometimes it seems that nothing moves them. But then they surprise me.

When we’re discussing what makes a good opening paragraph, I bring in the prologue to Tom Robbins’ Still Life With Woodpecker, which begins: “If this typewriter can’t do it, then fuck it, it can’t be done.” It’s perfect. If this doesn’t grab them, what will?

I pass out the copies. “I think you’ll like this,” I say. “Tom Robbins is a lot of fun.” Someone reads the page out loud. Silence follows. I look out at them, awaiting evidence of their literary conversions. “’If this typewriter can’t do it,” I pause and look up, “then fuck it, it can’t be done.’” It’s twice as clever.

“I hate it,” says a woman in the front row. She's never uttered a single word in class.

“Why?” I ask.

“The F-word in the first sentence?! I would never keep this book in my house!”

“Neither would I,” the father of ten adds.

“Okay,” I say. Well. “Anyone else?”

A couple of people think it’s funny. Some even say they’d like to read the book sometime. I offer to loan my copy, but they all quickly back down, as though selflessly passing up the last hot appetizer on a plate.

(Image from The Procrastinating Philosopher's flickr stream.)

Comments

[sammy]

Why does it have to be so???........ when a wannabe writer discovers failure in delivering worth to the output of the keyboard, its adolesent mind commands the fingers to find the f-u-c-k keys.

Do us all a favor. Go and find some life experiences that are worth using up some computer RAM. Oh, yea, and maturing a bit would be a plus. Until that happens, you are condemmed to a windowless room.

[Elaine S.]

Looks like sammy could use an Intro to English class himself.

Oh, that dreaded F word, how it haunts me!

[Angela Salamy]

Try teaching ninth graders to read...now that's a good time!

[Eric]

Ummmm.... Sammy? Life experience? Do you know anything at all about this person? No, I didn't think so. Because if you did, you wouldn't be hiding behind a keyboard like a coward tossing useless comments.

I'd also like you to explain to me how life experiences use "computer RAM." Are you a robot? If so, that would be cool. Plus, your childish yammering could be dismissed as the defective programming of an emotionally stunted circus clown.

Condemning someone to a windowless room because of what? I'm not sure where you are coming from. Neither are you, it seems. You have no clear argument, and your aggravation is unfocused and amateurish at best.

The English language is a wonderful thing. You should look into it. I'm told there are over 500 words. One of those is "fuck." If a writer feels that is the best word to use at that moment, it is their choice. Not the last resort of a "wannabe." I believe that baseless, anonymous heckling of someone's work on the internet is the last resort. Not writing an article.

Please, Sammy. Enlighten us with your work. Point us to your award-winning and highly regarded oeuvre so that we may bask in the greatness that is you. No? You can't do that? Then sit the fuck down and learn to write.

Hey! I used the Fuck word!

[James]

Well said Eric.

[no name]

i am crazy in love with this woman but there is no way she knows my name.