A Catskill Mountain Journal, Bob Steuding

In 1990, Purple Mountain Press over in Fleishmann's, NY (on the far eastern side of Delaware County), published this book, A Catskill Mountain Journal, by Bob Steuding.

I picked it up the other day in the Main St. Bookstore for 8 dollars, although it was originally published at $14.50. Steuding has written an important book on the poet Gary Snyder, and is himself a poet.

The book is 159 pages. The initial part has essays about Steuding's hiking activities in the Catskills. The first part has journal entries:

"WINTER

In some ways, I think I like the Catskills in the winter best. They seem, in their white, wind-swept desolation, to express the essential wildness and solitariness of these ancient mountains. In winter, there are few birds, and the sky is closer to the land. Lacking leaves, the trees make little sound, only their trunks creaking, like old men in rockers, when the raw winter wind blows. Brooks and streams are frozen and only the faintest gurgling sound can be detected, if one listens with attentive ear. Winter is a time for thought and for meditation. It seems that even we humans wish to hibernate, as do the black bear, snoring in some leaf-lined cave. December, 1978" (p. 25).

"GOLDEN EAGLE

Saw a golden eagle two days ago yesterday on the Ashokan Reservoir. The eagle, very large and black-brown, flew out into the upper basin. It saw a crow crossing the reservoir and scared the daylights out of the crow, just for the fun of it, the crow making an incredible racket, terrified. I laughed, no one else around. June, 1983" (pp. 22-23).

Steuding teaches over in Stone Ridge, NY at Ulster County Community College. He's published several books of local interest about the dams and local towns of the Catskill area, as well as the Snyder book, and poetry books.

The book is slow, and somewhat invested in the Gary Snyder think-local aesthetic. I don't mind that aesthetic, or even the politics that come with it. Steuding's book traces some of the Catskill history: the Indians, the 19th century Romantics, including the famous John Burroughs, who lived about twenty minutes away in Roxbury.

What I think will stick in my mind from this book is this poem:

HUNTER MOUNTAIN

balsam/spruce
mountain top

wind
snow
dwarf cornel wildflowers

(clean mind)


some hiker
left seven
cherry-size tomatoes
at the peak.

(p. 89)

There's no way I'd touch those tomatoes as they might be laced with LSD (Hunter Mountain is close to Woodstock), but I still like the poem.

Hipsters & LL Bean

Obama is the Bob Dylan of our time. Neither one has ever made any sense to me. Both have a kind of song & dance routine that refers vaguely to hope and change but is really in effect about how cool they are and how you are never going to be quite so cool. They are bohemians & people of spirit and you're a fat cat banker or an oily merchant or just a mindless slob but if you support their personification as the apotheosis of cool they will flash their charisma in your direction.

One could say that Bob Dylan actually is a parody of Barack Obama.

Or is Obama a parody of Bob Dylan?

but neither one is joking, they are both quite serious.

I do get tired of hipsters, and prefer solitaries, but hipsters can mobilize the troops. They can get us to think that insulation is sexy, or that pumping up our tires is something to do for the country, or that everybody must get stoned.

I admit that I am a failed hipster. I just want to mobilize diffidence. I can't stand enthusiasm, and the hipsters tend to mobilize people based on enthusiasm.

*


*

This next part has nothing at all to do with the first part.

It's just an observation about quality. I have about 20 colored t-shirts. I like to buy black or deep blue or sometimes faded purple t-shirts, since they are simple to wear, and make it easy for me to become invisible. Most of these keep their shape for about a year or a little longer. But I have one t-shirt that seems to never lose its shape. It feels different, too, as if it's more solid. I decided that maybe it had something to do with the brand, and checked the slip at the back of the neck. Yes, the good one that never loses its shape is from LL Bean. A wealthy friend told me I could have it when I was visiting him at Ocean City. I kept it. I think he gave it away because it's lime green, and is such a hideous color.

What is it about this LL Bean t-shirt? Does it have more threads per inch, or is it better designed than the other t-shirts that are from Gap and Fruit n Loom? There's a qualitative difference between the LL Bean and my other t-shirts. I can sometimes put my finger on the qualitative difference between two poems, or two poets. But I can't quite sort out why the LL Bean is qualitatively superior to the Gap t-shirts, which are in turn qualitatively superior to the Fruit n Loom.

Maybe I like it because I like my friend.

LOSING WEIGHT THE LUTHERAN SURREALIST WAY

While I grant that getting a good exercise program under way is essential, and cutting down on sweets is smart, neither one is sufficient.

I have developed a diet plan that eclipses all others. I don't have a name for it yet, but it consists of a single question.

The question is, "Do I really NEED to eat that?"

If the answer is no, then I don't eat it.

The thing is you have to apply this question to absolutely everything you eat. It's hard to implement this diet when you are working, because there are so many other questions that can eclipse the single question.

And if another question eclipses your shiny question, then in comes all kinds of appetite unbidden and unwatched, and suddenly you've gained five pounds without even thinking.

So should I call it the thinking diet? The unemployed person's diet? It really works better when you have nothing to do but think about the question.

Meanwhile, it's ok to drink Diet Pepsi or tea or anything calorie free, but even better is to drink and eat nothing for long stretches. It's like you're a hockey goalie, and the idea is to keep pucks out of your own face. People are always trying to sling things into your face, and your game is to dodge those things. At parties if someone has gone to some fussy extra timetaking procedure to produce some greasy slimeball that they want to wing down your throat, take one or two, say thankyou, and see if you can slip it into the trashcan while other people are busy screeching about how good the food tastes.

Drive by a McDonald's and they will catapult burgers in your face, go to a party, and the host will try to sling macaroons down your hatch. Go down the hallway and someone will try to empty their popcorn bag in your piehole.

But your job is to play goalie, and dodge all these perks.

You can get so good at it that the pounds just roll off. It's possible to lose five or ten pounds in a week, easy.

The problem is that you shouldn't let yourself get weak or dizzy. You need to eat enough food to keep your blood pressure up. I suggest stuffing your fat face in the morning with a huge bowl of oat meal with yogurt on top. Then, try to sneak through lunch and eat a small dinner consisting of a light soup and some bread with margarine on it, and anything like Postum that you can find in a health food store (I'm drinking some garbage called Peso or something and it's very good, not at all like the cardboard drink of Postum that I shall never forget!, and I sure wish Postum would reappear on the market).

At any rate, good luck to all of you on diets. Remember that it's not about how much you can stuff in your face every day. That's the wrong question. The wrong question encourages you to cheat in little places, and dump in a few more peanuts, and also a cookie here and there, thinking, the diet won't notice. The diet might not, but the scale will find you out! The right question is to reverse that question and say to yourself instead, how little can I get by with eating today? It makes it into an active exercise, and it makes you aware that you are a goalie, dodging pucks of food that might otherwise lodge themselves on your love handles. How good a goalie you are will determine whether you are a fat and guilty little busybody at the end of the week, or whether you are a sleek and svelte little fussbudget, attracting envy and admiration even from yourself as you regard a person in the mirror that you barely recognize, with a bare plate over your head that resembles a halo.

MERIT

Merit is very hard to judge.

In sports, there is the notion of points scored that can separate someone like Michael Jordan from someone like Hanno Mottila (Mottila was a Finn who played for a couple of years with the Atlanta Hawks). Mottila was extremely talented, but next to Jordan, he came off as almost crippled.

Or differently abled.

Or otherwise gifted.

Suffice it to say he was making about 6 points a game, and his team was losing almost every game, and he ended up back in Finland. Still, I was a fan of his because he was the only Finn to make it into the NBA and my wife is a beautiful Finn.

Outside of sports, we can look at cars, and their respective merits. The Russian car called the Lada fell apart at the slightest touch. Doors fell off. But it didn't cost much. You could buy a new one for about a thousand dollars back in the 1990s in Finland. Low cost has its merits, and it might trump the fact that the doors would fall off if you hit a pothole in the middle of winter. It was kind of fun to get out and put them back on.

In America, the car I own now (Dodge Caravan) has certain merits. It is easy to repair. They are not as expensive as a Toyota Sienna or a Honda and they're American, so if you buy one, you're helping the people in Detroit remain employed.

You can look in Consumer Reports April Edition and see the merits of a given set of cars.

When you get to an empirical thing -- an ice scraper, for instance, you want it to be able to scrape the ice off your windshield and yet not scratch the actual glass. You want it to be strong enough not to break. You don't want it to be so ugly that you can't stand having it between the front seats, where such things usually sit through the winter season.

When it comes to morality, this becomes harder to assess. Because morality isn't what is seen, it's what isn't seen. All of us until two months ago thought that Tiger Woods was a moral being. Then suddenly he was morally crazy on most scorecards: lying to his wife, paying for hookers, sacking up with at least a dozen women concurrently and telling them all he loved them truly.

With Allen Ginsberg, many of us had the sense that he was a moral person. But toward the end of his life it became increasingly apparent that he was a member of NAMBLA, and in his last book are two poems that solidify that notion.

Morality is not so much what you do when you can be seen, it's what you do when you don't think anybody is looking.

But even so, we can't judge Ginsberg's entire life on the basis of his being a member of NAMBLA. He had other sides to his life. Let's try to see all of it. We don't even know if he hurt small children, or what his commitment to NAMBLA really meant. Plus, he wrote some wonderful poems, and was fairly nice to Gregory Corso, among other things.

Judgment of others' morality is easy to do if you're willing to bear false witness. We bear false witness when we focus on one thing about another person, and say it's the entirety. You can say that so and so is a monstrous racist because they think that Obama is a socialist. You can say that someone hates all people of disability because they haven't been convinced by the aesthetic merits of Larry Eigner's poems. You can argue that because someone doesn't like Sarah Palin, they hate all women.

These gambits are tried all the time, and I find them somewhat appalling, and yet probably no worse than any other kind of "thought," that comes trotting along in the guise of truth while actually pushing any kind of convenient lie that makes the money spin -- whether it's global warming, or whatever you want Sarah Palin to be in terms of your politics -- whether it's Peg Bundy or a mental imbecile or a moral genius (it's possible to bear false witness by taking too good a view of someone in order to convince others, too, isn't it? Is it possible for instance to put Larry Eigner next to Shakespeare and claim they are equivalent in terms of their accomplishment?).

Total depravity is often seen not only in the judged, but in the judger, and even (and especially) when the judgement is a positive one.

More serious, and perhaps hopeless in terms of the ability to judge its merit, is aesthetic reception. The drawings of Pierre Klossowski, for instance, are probably not as subtle or as fluid as the drawings of his brother Balthus. But because Klossowski was also a philosopher who focused on the ways in which the virtuous hide their vices behind a wall of self-righteousness (the face behind the face), I find him rather Lutheran in the way he ferreted out sin. And this capacity helps me to see his merit (see drawing above).

Others might just think -- well, others draw BETTER, or others are not as pornographic.

Aesthetic merit is probably more impossible to decide than moral merit, and the two are easily confused.

The moralistic recovery system in which black, Asian, Hispanic and other writers are rapidly being recuperated depends for its success on the notion that these writers were not taken seriously in their own day. Zora Neale Hurston, however, was taken seriously, but she disappeared after a morals charge eclipsed her career when she was tried for molesting a small boy. The charge was dropped, but the threat to her reputation lingered, and she ended up in an unmarked grave. It may also be that the vogue for the Harlem Renaissance petered out during the Depression (I haven't looked hard into the nature of her particular eclipse).

An eclipse can easily happen, just as a person can attain prominence for spurious reasons.

Some want to dispense altogether with any universal notions of merit that might underwrite a meritocracy, and decide simply on politics.

In the 1950s, McCarthyism eclipsed many writers in Hollywood. And, in the Soviet Union, to be thought to be non-communist, meant a death sentence in almost every case. Even keeping a private diary, or telling a joke (Ivan Denisovitch's crime), could mean you were -- in basketball parlance -- benched for years.

But those writers who managed to publish in spite of this terror -- Solzhenitsyn -- for instance, were vaulted to the very front lines of prominence -- again irrespective of the aesthetic merits of their work (I find his work to be a bit too long and uniformly grim and I can't get through it any more than I can get through the insanely long and humorless books of Marcel Proust). Solzhenitsyn got a lot of play on the American side during the Cold War, but I doubt if anybody reads the guy for fun.

If blacks, women, and other ethnicities and genders can say we were eclipsed, and have it matter, so that whole departments of study are formed around their works, then it creates a motivation to gain a back door to brilliance. Disabled writers along the lines of Larry Eigner are now forming into blocks, with disabled critics demanding a reading with an unparalleled virulence. (I inquired into Eigner's aesthetic power about a year ago on Ron Silliman's blog, and the enmity at the time was only via the amateurs -- now the professionals are weighing in!).

I'm still not convinced that the minimalists of the seventies were very important writers. One of my commenters -- Curtis Faville -- has recently published the Complete Works of Eigner -- and I hesitate to judge -- but from what I've read of Eigner's -- I don't want to read this book. Eigner is great on occasion -- and he's got some of the power of say, Robert Creeley (also disabled because he had only one eye to work with but whose work I also find difficult to read) -- I have never seen the merit of either writer as being on a scale with a poet like Marianne Moore. I don't see a giant scaffolding of ideas, for instance, or a deep taproot. I see hilarity, and exquisite beauty, but in a very minor mode. Other poets who worked in the seventies in this school -- Richard Brautigan (I love his short fiction, but don't feel that his poems amount to much), or Tom Clark, or Anselm Hollo, or Larry Fagin, or Joel Oppenheimer, just don't have the ambition of someone like Marianne Moore or -- going back -- to even a poet like Henry J.-M. Levet. And in at least some ways, they were all disabled. Brautigan suffered from very serious depression of the kind that led to his suicide. Anselm Hollo was writing in a second language. Larry Fagin wasn't all that gifted. Oppenheimer was lazy, and preferred to drink. Of these, however, I think Eigner (from what I've read) is the most ambitious upon occasion, and the most interesting, and perhaps had the soundest mind, in spite of suffering from Cerebral Palsy. But I often wonder to what extent any of these writers wanted to be GREAT. Maybe they just wanted to be minor. Or great, in the way a candy bar tastes great (to quote the comic book artist Lynda Barry).

That, in fact, may be part of their charm. They may have the relationship to great writers that Lucky Charms have to a 5-star French restaurant, and perhaps it is wrong to judge them from the perspective of the Michelin guide.

At least for me, it's hard to know how to take it seriously unless I take it seriously.

On the other hand, a poet like Charles Olson had a very ambitious mind -- but again, I find him to be missing any deep engagement with religion, so the work seems slight, and without any serious framework (I think a writer can only write well within a deep religious tradition -- a writer who leaves such a tradition and goes off on their own is not writing to millions of others -- but is merely autonomous -- and crippled or disabled by their not working within a vast group). It would be like praying alone as opposed to belonging in a congregation, or singing a song to oneself, as opposed to singing a song for others, and really trying to communicate something.

If religion is a person's driving concern -- the most important thing in a life -- the highwater mark of one's existence, and the only thing that finally truly matters -- writers who don't engage with that subject lose merit (I find it hard to take Ezra Pound or ee cummings seriously for similar reasons). They might have other merits, but not the chief one that I am looking for.

For yet other critics -- it may be that engagement with race, or gender, or disability issues -- are the most important aspect of a writer. That, to them, is their religion -- their point of highest value.

And for some readers -- it may be that irreligious artifacts help them with their irreligious existence (Mencken appeals to some for precisely this reason).

All these ways of reading have their merits.

As a Lutheran reader, I'm often looking for religious thought, but I also want humor because I think that without that you don't have much of a persepctive. And yet feel that I must speak across an enormous chasm to the irreligious, or to those whose sense of religion is so different from my own.

At least so far it is still a democracy. It is still a sense of virtue I think to reach across the chasm to try to find the merits of a person -- and to not forget that in spite of everything else -- Tiger Woods had a mean 5-wood, and incredible putts that would roll incredibly over a green before dropping into the cup. And at least he didn't kill anybody, and there were no children involved. These days, that's huge.

Even Hitler had his merits as a watercolorist -- however minor his art might have been.

That he killed upwards of 30 million people and disrupted all of Europe for ten years and more probably does outweigh those remarkable watercolors in terms of assessing his overall merit. But let's never say that he was all bad. He could give a speech, for instance. Many of us are afraid to stand up and give a speech. Not Hitler! He could give a speech to millions and not suffer an instant of bashfulness!

In assessing merit, let's try to see the whole of a person, and not just one thing about them that we want to wring their neck for, and for which we want to make them into an example. That, at least, is my New Year's Resolution. Now let's see how well I stick with it.

Jesus was able to do that with the thief next to him on the cross, and forgave him. It's an amazing thing to be able to forgive. But, then, he was God. I'm just a mortal. I struggle with forgiveness, and I am not a universalist. Should I be?

I think just as only some books should get into the canon, only some people should get into heaven. And merit has to be part of that discussion.

Canons within Canons

An article in the most recent Lutheran Forum (Winter 2009) by Micah D. Kiel (Assistant Professor of Theology at St. Ambrose U. in Davenport, Iowa) claims that,

"Ostensibly, his [Luther's] canon was shaped by what promoted Christ. But more practically, that which promotes Christ is that which promotes the proper distinction between law and gospel, because where one does not properly distinguish faith and works, even 'Christ is not rightly known.' For this reason, Luther judges some books of the New Testament as better than others. John's Gospel, Paul's Epistles, and the first Epistle of Peter 'are the true kernel and marrow of all the books"; they are 'foremost.' This leads to the denigration of some other New Testament books, most famously James as an 'epistle of straw.' (p. 30).

The two quotes from Luther are from his "Preface to the New Testament," in the Reformation Reader, pp. 108-109. This particular article from Micah D. Kiel that quotes these lines, is called "Why Luther Liked Tobit."

It seems to me that everyone cuts and splices when reading, finding some parts more to their liking, more to their taste, than other parts of the Bible.

If the above represents an accurate reading of Luther's canon within the canon, then what would be Calvin's mini-canon?

It seems to me that the Calvinist Puritans emphasized a much tighter correlation between law and Gospel, ousting anyone who didn't fit their tight notions of virtue. Simultaneously, they had the notion that everyone was completely fallen. How could you be both things simultaneously? I wish we had a Calvinist on board to explain this discrepancy.

How could you have a deterministic God, and yet still hold anyone responsible for not towing the line? Calvinism no doubt has some logic in it, but it's not a logic I've been able to master.

Luther's logic is as plain as day, even though it also has some shortcomings. 1st Peter emphasizes obedience to any and every earthly authority, from the Pope to Caesar, and seems to have been one of the reasons why Lutherans under Hitler were somewhat loathe to assassinate the tyrant.

Every logical framework facilitates some actions, and denies others.

Micah D. Kiel argues in his article that Luther's acceptance of the Apocryphal piece called Tobit allows for a rethinking of the Apocrypha in general. He concludes:

"The complete exclusion of the Apocrypha sets too rigid a boundary around the canon, a boundary not firmly set in Protestant and Roman Cathlic circles until well into the sixteenth century. I am not arguing that Protestants accept these texts as canonical, but Luther's attitude toward Tobit could provide a model of respect in Protestant circles for the Apocrypha's historic place in the Christian tradition"
(31).

Argument over canons and the underlying values that such canon-making implicitly contains is always value-based. Luther's attempt to clarify the two kingdoms and the notion of a kingdom of law and a kingdom of Gospel helped him to focus on those texts which most clearly provide for such a basis and to shunt to one side those texts which muddied the clarity of the two. I don't know much about Calvinism but would he not have chosen texts that caused the two kingdoms to more thoroughly merge?

The surrealist canon with its emphasis on the Marquis de Sade, Sigmund Freud, Charles Baudelaire, Charles Fourier, and others, placed a heavy emphasis on sexual desire, especially that in which the male's desire could receive an almost total affirmation even to the extent of the obliteration of the female (as with Sade).

Some of the surrealists (Soupault) however, completely denied Sade, and were perhaps even unfamiliar with his work. For Soupault, friendship between lovers is the basis of any love affair. Without that, there is no love at all. It seems to me that for that reason, he does not even appear to have read Sade (perhaps however he mentions Sade somewhere -- but in the sixty odd books of Soupault's that I've read -- I see no mention of Sade).

We often proclaim the universal value of a text, when in fact what we mean is that a given text has a private meaning for us, and helps to orient us as to what we believe to be valuable.

How it is that certain texts are passed down, considered authoritative, and valuable for study, is not often clearly studied.

We still do not have a definitive Lutheran Surrealist canon.

The Mystery of Richard Milazzo in Evergreen Review #120

I was going through the online edition of the Evergreen Review, and was astonished that I knew all the contributors. Willie Smith is an old friend from Seattle who I've known for decades. Mike Topp is an old friend (though I've only met him once or thrice). Jim Feast is a friend. Our commenter Ed Baker has a poem in this issue. Valery Oisteanu is a Romanian poet friend who lives near St. Marks Place in NYC. Virtually the only poet I didn't know is someone named Richard Milazzo. I opened his poems, and read them with interest:

http://www.evergreenreview.com/120/richard-milazzo.html

To my surprise the poems reminded me intensively of the poet Henry J.-M. Levet, who died in 1906. Levet only published a dozen poems in his lifetime before he died of consumption in his early thirties. I translated all his poems for Jacket Magazine, where they appeared online about seven years ago:

http://jacketmagazine.com/18/levet.html

Levet's poem "Algeria" in which he discusses the hotels of the capital city, and also the opening poems in the triptych that includes Outwards and Homewards and British India seem to have influenced Milazzo's poem.

I sent the poems to Ron Silliman and to John Tranter (editor of Jacket) and asked if they saw a connection between Levet's poems and Milazzo's. Silliman said no. Tranter said yes. There is not only the exoticism of the foreign, but the slightly amusing viewpoint which comments objectively on itself, while naming the whereabouts of the narrator, and his geographic as well as historical situation, while writing quick takes on cities and places. It's a style that is so particular to Levet, and yet opens out into a very specific world view, too, that influenced major poets in France such as Cendrars, Apollinaire, and many others.

I sent the comparison to Valery Oisteanu who said he was confused. I also sent them to Barney Rosset, editor of Evergreen Review. Rosset was quite polite (he's a titan and I'm a tyro and he didn't owe me a response), but said he didn't see the connection.

Does anybody else see it?

I grant that the content is quite different. Levet is a romantic and is tender and nostalgic and delicate. Milazzo's narrator is a whore hound who stands in line to do some woman on Yaowarat Road in Chinatown at a brothel called The Green Lantern in what I think is Bangkok? (was Milazzo an American veteran of the Vietnam War, or is he appropriating another's experience, or just what?). Milazzo's narrator is a sex tourist in Bangkok.

The poems reference hotels, and depict the exotic perfumes of the east in a manner recalling Levet. Is he consciously borrowing, or not? I checked the contributor's page in Evergreen Review, but there is no note on Milazzo. I had hoped that there he would have mentioned his debt to Levet. Levet himself was in Vietnam, but none of his extant poems are set there. I wondered if Levet had in some way borrowed Milazzo and used him to voice some poems he hadn't written. If so, the content is markedly different. Levet's in love with women who are promised to others.

Milazzo on the other hand visits whores (and falls in love with one without knowing her name). Levet always gives us the names of the women he got to know (or invented) in his lovely delicate poems, and he never slept with any of them.

There are lots of tantalizing similarities between Milazzo and Levet. The differences are scintillating, too.

But who is Milazzo? Barney Rosset wrote to tell me that Milazzo has published many volumes and is also an editor of books. I ordered a few to get a better look. There is also a Wikipedia page on Milazzo's work. He's British, but I think he lives in NYC. There is a Wikipedia page on Levet, too, which lists my translations. Did Milazzo consult them before composing his own poems? I wish I had an email address to ask him myself. I don't have this.

Can anyone else see the similarities? Read "Algeria" by Levet and then read Milazzo's first poem, called "Saigon."

Silliman suggested that such a style is "in the air." He mentioned Cendrars. The poets of surrealism wrote similar poems, but they knew about Levet. Levet's poetry certainly ought to exercise a larger influence. Perhaps he did influence Milazzo. Or maybe Milazzo arrived at this style in some other way. Whatever happened, I can't help but wonder. Have I lost my mind?

What is Freshman Composition?

Freshman composition is a mandatory course at almost all of our 6000+ colleges and universities. Exactly what the course should entail has been under fire. What do you think should be accomplished in freshman composition? Do you remember such a course, and whether it achieved anything for you?

I've taught it or some version of it for close to twenty years. My agenda is to

1. get students writing, and to show them that they can enjoy writing.

2. get them to write a research paper that addresses a significant question, and shows them how to assemble such a paper.

I generally ask for three major papers.

The first paper is about a disappointment, and tells the story of a death in the family that didn't need to happen, the loss of a pet, the loss of a friendship, the loss of a job, the loss of an opportunity on the basketball team, your arrest for selling drugs, the death of a friend from drugs, a friend of yours who cheated with your girlfriend, etc. So you write up the movie (beginning, middle, end) and you also make an argument of some kind as to what the reader should do with the story that's been presented that will either make them do things differently in the future, or else think differently about similar situations in the future.

The second paper is an examination of a beautiful experience. This could be a date that went well, a job interview that went well, a game performance that went well. Again, there is the movie, and there is also the argument part. In general in this paper I ask students to think about law, too. So in this paper, you might think about a law that will protect something beautiful -- whether it is marriage, or a state park, or the ability to French kiss in high school. You either argue for a new law, or against an existing law, and you use beauty or ugliness as the underlying rationale for your argument.

The third paper is the examination of a Gregory Corso poem. This is a standard research paper.

Each paper has two drafts. The second draft should be at least 5 pages long, and no more than seven.

I honestly don't know what the other 120,000+ composition classes are doing. If there are 6000 colleges and every college has on average 20 sections of Freshman Composition (about 2,400,000 students taking freshman comp every semester?), then should there be certain standards?

Some teachers do a lot more with grammar. Some do more with classical terms for logical goofups from ad hominem to post hoc.

I do touch upon these issues. But I am quite interested in aesthetics. I wish I could find a textbook that wasn't so focused on ethical concerns. I can't find one. Most of the textbooks try to get students to fall into line with the PC mandates.

Profession 2009 just came out (the annual journal of the Modern Language Association of America), and the first third of it are arguments for and against political indoctrination in composition classes. Stanley Fish in his book Save The World On Your Own Time (Oxford 2008) kicked off the inquest. Fish argues that there should be no political indoctrination in composition or literature courses.

Fish believes that the teaching of composition has to do with teaching sentence-making, and analysing the relative power of various kinds of rhetoric. In a seminar he offered in the Catskills a few years ago he said that George Bush, on a purely rhetorical level, was much more powerful than John Kerry, who used double-negatives and trailed off into thickets of abstraction that muddled his points. Bush was clear and cut to the quick. Fish was nevertheless for Kerry, because he liked Kerry's politics better, even if he thought he was a doofus on a sentence by sentence basis.

The standard idea is that professors should teach HOW to think, rather than WHAT to think. This distinction makes an implicit argument that many of our academics are teaching WHAT to think at the expense of HOW.

But can you be taught how to think?

Patricia Bizzell who teaches at the College of the Holy Cross says, "an ideological tyrant I am not. I hope I am a humble writing teacher who is helping her students write better, analyze various American rhetorics of persuasion, and reflect -- as Plato, Cicero, and Quintilian have warned every rhetorician to do -- on the moral, ethical, and political commitments entailed in wielding the power of words" (98).

Judith Butler writes of Fish's position, "We are in agreement that it won't do to impose a political point of view on students in the classroom or to require a political point of view for participation in the classroom" (93), but are we to not reflect at all about morality or politics in the classroom? "Maybe he wants to say that there is morality, but it is outside the texts in question; or maybe he wants to say that there is no morality, only a discourse about morality" (93).

Butler (Professor at UC-Berkeley) sums up her own position in saying that, teaching composition courses "doesn't mean we tell anyone what to think, only that we teach a resistance to dogmatism in order to make room for thinking" (93).

She thinks that Fish's model is one of "prohibiting thinking in the course of combating the specter of political censoriousness" (92).

Is thinking necessarily thinking about political and ethical issues? Is this sometimes used as a pretext to bully freshmen into taking our own political and ethical stands? Gerald Graff (president of the Modern Language Association) writes,

"Patricia Bizzell argues that this specter of the bullying radical teacher is a straw man invented by Fish and others. I disagree. The writers of the many recent manifestoes on behalf of liberatory education make no bones about their belief that radicalizing students is a legitimate goal of teaching. At the least, I think Fish is right that politically engaged teaching has led to unprofessional and unethical classroom behavior" (9).

If we ram our ethics down the throats of freshmen, is that in itself unethical?

Moreover, is it efficacious (does it work?). You'd think it wouldn't work, and yet, many now come out of college "radicalized" by their four years of brainwashing and peer pressure to an extent that a vigorous opposition movement has been mounted, steered by David Horowitz among others, and has become the subject of intensive conservative editorializing in newspaper, and television format, and increasingly also in book forms. Serious institutions such as Fire.org are formed around the issue of protecting freedom of speech and thought for students. And yet the bullying continues unabated.

What are the answers?

One might be a conscious decision to try to hire people of various political persuasions as composition instructors. At present, almost everyone in Humanities departments is on the left. Out of 500 professors at Duke University, only 3 identified themselves as Republicans in a report published by John Leo at one of the big weeklies. Trying to find a self-identified Republican on most campuses is not as hard as finding a self-proclaimed scholar of classical languages in revolutionary Kampuchea but the exercise is reminiscent.

So, how would you encourage Pol Pot and his hordes to politically diversify? How would you go about enforcing title IX that disallows discrimination in hiring on the basis of religion and political creed, in order to let in a few more conservatives, even if it doesn't in any way yet match the numbers of conservatives and religious people who are not now welcome on most campuses?

Or should the goal of composition simply be something else?

I never took a composition class. I took a simple test at East Stroudsburg University back in the day (1974) that showed I could write full sentences, and skipped right over composition and got into literature courses. At Evergreen State College likewise I never took a composition course. At Naropa Institute I never took a composition course. I emerged full-blown from the sea like Diana on the half-shell, and simply started writing papers. I could always do this. It was like breathing.

I don't know why this happened to me, and not to others.

Is there something to be taught in composition classes? Is it just a place to practice writing, and get some feedback, before moving on to doing it in classes and for what remains of the print medium?

I never learned anything from any of my professors in classes. They seemed to be speaking to other people. For me, college was four years to talk to myself. The professors were more or less irrelevant. Graduate school was a different story. There, I actually did learn, but probably never in the classroom, and only because I befriended many of the professors. I learned from hanging out with professors and asking the odd questions that actually mattered to me, the kind of thing you can't ask in a class, but can ask over a coffee table, or over dinner, or while walking around a lake. The Socratic method of discussion is the only method in which learning actually takes place. It's wrestling with other individuals and seeking the truth together that counts. I usually learn best by wrestling with my own conscience, even though I am often pinned.

I never learned anything in a classroom except how the leftists try to take them over and prevent any kind of genuine discussion.

I think I also did learn in writing my papers. But I never learned anything from the feedback I got. It was almost entirely useless. It was the writing of the papers that mattered. I think people can only think on a one-to-one basis when they are friends and actually care about each other, and know each other well. Or maybe that's just me?

I hope my own students are having a different experience but how would I know? All learning is individual. Is that true for you, too? A single remark made as I left a class with a friend was often twelve times as much illumination as anything actually in the class. Talking with a teacher one on one, as I sometimes got to do with Corso, Burroughs, and Ginsberg -- taught me everything I learned. I don't think I ever learned anything in any of their classes.

Why not? I think it's because classes force professors and students alike to adopt social poses as opposed to saying that they actually think. What a person actually thinks is embarrassing, and odd, and would get you fired. People are individuals and can only think as individuals. Education is mass-produced and doesn't teach anybody anything. At best it fits an individual about as well as do our mass-produced pants and shirts and coats. We are an ungainly bunch who think that we can teach other people to think. People can only teach themselves to think. Not that anybody else will actually listen. We are in an autistic world of self-important goof-ups. And it's important that we play ball.