Links
Archives
Sunday, April 18, 2004
|
S-M U
"Anal intercourse is still so taboo that chicks don't even talk about it among themselves," writes San Francisco poet Jan Richman in a piece of writing composed of the glib vacuities typical of "language poetry." Her themes include mass murderers, sexual humiliation, late night talk shows, and sundry acts of rebellion against ye olde bourgeois culture. "I was stealing a hanes T-shirt from an already opened package at the chinatown Thrift's, silently thanking the real thief for leaving me the clean white moral high ground, I was watching a late-night sally jesse on humiliation: why we love it, I was treating myself to another itchy helping of yes-boy love-slave, I was speaking a language I've never heard before, chasing the bouncing ball of sentence structure into a brave new world, I was wobbling on the cliff edge of her mouth between my legs when I saw your face beaming big as tokyo..." Big as tokyo? Whatever. Richman's a professor, or was until recently a professor, at San Francisco's Academy of Art University, which was itself until recently a college ("This promotion of colleges to universities is consistent with the long-honored American custom of raising a thing by adding to the number of syllables used to describe it," Paul Fussell writes in Class). Richman's been fired and free speech advocates are all het up about it. These very expensive arts playgrounds in very expensive cities are a sort of exotic flower which our wealthy country can afford. Some on their creative writing faculties believe it's their mission to confront their students with taboos (anal intercourse, sadomasochism, murder, mutilation) because their students come to them all repressed and unable to write the ugly disturbing buried truth about violent America, etc. So these creative writing professors take these eighteen year old kids all innocent and all - unless you count the forty hours a week of violent movies and video games some of them have been watching and playing with since they were ten - and they have them read, you know, American Psycho and that shit so they can get desublimated and out from under their repressive parents and the June Cleaver life they've been leading. Truth be told, though, rather than a confrontation between a liberated aesthete (creative writing professor) and a repressed bourgeois (student), this sort of classroom interaction is a marriage made in heaven -- an already sadistically oriented American kid links up with a 'sixties type who thinks Bertolucci's Dreamers is high art, and who assigns novels, poems, and plays that have precisely the same content as the video games he's been playing but are gussied up as high culture and taken seriously by adults. This is a dream come true for the kid - a glossy legitimation of his darkest drives. His story about slicing a girl's nipple gets an A. A dark Lawrentian energy flows through this untamed narrative, writes his totally blown away teacher... Even Richman got scared, though, at the depth of subversion that expressed itself in one student's story last semester, and like a fool she showed it to her superior who got all scared too. Yet why was Richman scared? The student was imitating a writing model (David Foster Wallace) his teacher had assigned in class. Sure, the student story upped the atrocity ante a tad, but they don't call America the culture of inflation for nothing. You need to go bigger if you're going to get noticed. Anyway, yeah, merde/ventilateur all over again. Universities have a tendency to overreact, as UD notes in its post (3 April) on the play Spinning Into Butter. Cops were called in to tease out whether Subject was a homicidal maniac or just a florid stylist. They settled on sadist and the school expelled him just to be safe, whereupon his pissed parents correctly pointed out that "their son had been encouraged to write about violence after reading a short story assigned in Richman's Narrative Storytelling class." The March 25 San Francisco Chronicle interviewed her about the story she'd given her students to read. "Richman assigned the story, she said last week, as an example of 'an unsympathetic narrator, a guy who is sadistic and sexist.' But the story was not part of the class's authorized textbook, and fellow instructors say administration officials were angry that Richman had not offered the information sooner." Nothing wrong in my book with diverging from a set syllabus, but the way Richman tells it, you'd swear she assigned a trendy S and M tale to eighteen-year-olds expecting them to tut-tut over the bad sexist people in it. "We're going to write The Death of Ivan Ilych now, teacher, and show people how their cruelty to each other is putting their salvation at risk." Nor was Richman the only instructor laying some pretty heavy shit on students at Academy of Art University. "Apprehension over the content of the student's story grew when the university learned that the author also had brought a violent animation clip to film class after an instructor had screened excerpts of "Seven," the stylish 1995 serial-killer feature that was widely noted for its visual innovation." Seven? This student must have been in seventh heaven at Academy of Art University. He had, one administrator notes, "been interested in this stuff since he was a young child, and his parents were aware of some of his interests in this." Yes, and they found the ideal university for him too, and I'll bet they'll sue to get him readmitted. |