Parts of today's entry are going to be interactive. If you're not alone in the room, read this later when you can be interactive without getting laughed at.
Just warning you.
So today I want to talk about what I want to be when I grow up, and why I want to be that.
(It should be noted that I don't want to grow up in any sort of traditional "adulthood" sense -- but you know what I mean...)
Someday, if and when I grow up, I want to teach English. Maybe to high school kids, maybe to middle school kids, maybe to college kids. I'm not sure yet. I don't CARE much, really, although I don't have the patience to deal with rugrats (i.e., elementary school kids) in a nice, soothing, nurturing way, so that's kind of out the window.
Helena, why do you want to grow up and be an English teacher?
We're getting there... Really...
So, I wanted to read you part of this passage from the book my class is working on reading... (This isn't the interactive part yet... Fear not...)
Okay, so this is a passage from a book called "Stumbling Toward Justice: Stories of Place," by a dude named Lee Hoinacki. Nobody on this entire planet knows how to pronounce Mr. Hoinacki's last name. Just FYI...
"I can only conclude that the institutions that claim to be the guardians and teachers of the West's poetic tradition have failed. Rather than giving people poetry, they have taken it away. I assume that, for literate persons, a daily speaking and hearing of poetry is necessary that there be a certain wholeness in their lives. ... In a well-ordered community, teachers should take care that the young are exposed to or taught good poetry, since, in some way, this experience contributes to virtue. ..." He goes on to talk about how he was listening to the radio in his car, turned on a country station, and marvelled that this was poetry, on simple, mostly un-varied themes -- but poetry nonetheless. He continues: "People listen to these very same themes, day after day. Why? Part of the reason, I am convinced, is that these uncomfortable truths are spoken to them in poetry, the songs voice their most intimate feelings, their common experience, as poetry. I suspect that professional literary critics seldom listen to this music for the pleasure of its poetic quality and, indeed, would probably deny that it is poetry at all. But these littérateurs are integral parts of the very institutions that have failed to inculcate a love of poetry, to foster the daily enjoyment of poetry. A genuine attachment to poetry is prevented by the schools..."
...And so on...
So I wanted to talk about that.
We're not up to the interactive part yet...
Now, the passage I just read you may be about poetry, like verses and Robert Frost and all that shit, and it may be about "the arts," or it may be about language (as Mr. Hoinacki would say, "language qua language," but I hate that "qua" shit... Reminds me of duck-noises...). We're going to pretend, for purposes of this entry about why Helena wants to be an English teacher, that Mr. Hoinacki is talking about language: as in, writing and literature.
Fine.
From the age of 10 until I was about 17, I did not read for pleasure. Okay, scratch that; I read ALMOST nothing for pleasure. I had a set of Stephen King books which I loved, but I never left the house with them, because my mom said they were scary and my teachers said they were shit. I did not read much of anything for homework or classwork, either. I did not like stupidass stories like, "The Gift of the Magi," where you were supposed to read it about forty billion times, and then tell the teacher that, because you read it forty billion times, circling every other word, and looking up the word "magi" in three separate dictionaries, you magically understand IRONY!
For those of you who have not read it, here is the story: a dude and his wife are poor. They want to buy each other presents. The woman cuts off all her hair and sells it to a wig-maker so she can have money to buy the man a pocket-watch chain, or something like that. But the man sells his pocket-watch so he can buy the woman so hair barrettes. Deep, enh? So fucking profound that in tenth grade I just about shit myself.
(That was sarcasm... We learned about sarcasm in 12th grade...)
Anyway, so we were reading a lot of stuff that we were supposed to analyze until it crumbled into little pieces and fell on the floor. We were supposed to analyze irony, and sarcasm, and all those nice literary things, until the story sucked ASS. Until the story sounded as bland and boring as the summary I just gave you above of "The Gift of the Magi."
There was a strong smell of sulfur in most of my English classrooms for many years...
(That was a METAPHOR. Metaphor is when you're comparing some things. Like, for example, hell, and high school English.)
So why the fuck do I want to grow up and be an English teacher if I think "Gift of the Magi" is a piece of crap and I despise Charles Dickens with most of my being, and I couldn't finish "The Great Gatsby" to save my neck?
Two things happened to me before I completely went under...
In eighth grade, my teacher was named Miss Koval. She's named something else now, I think. Miss Koval was small and blonde and young and pretty. She kind of looked ditzy, but I don't think she was, really. She liked me, sort of. Until she started a "girl's group" or something, and I started going to it every Tuesday afternoon and yelping, "GO NAKED" EVERY damned week. Long story, Not really relevant. Anyway...
Miss Koval brought her tape recorder in to class one day. It was some fancy-ass shit, too. A small little cute thing with a CD-player on it and everything. (This was like, 1993 or so, and having a CD player was still pretty cool, at least to me.) She also brought in a bunch of CDs, and some handouts. The handouts were printouts of the lyrics to her favorite songs. We listened to the songs, and read along with the words, and THAT, said Miss Koval, was POETRY!
(The CDs were Natalie Merchant... I've never really liked Natalie Merchant, but until that point, I thought all teachers must listen to boring stuff like NPR and stock reports, like 24 hours a day. It was unimaginable for a teacher to listen to music, much less sorta-popular music...)
I was astounded. I wrote down the lyrics to every song I liked. I taped stuff off the radio and wrote down the lyrics. It was neat to LOOK at the words, AND hear the words. I had a notebook labelled "LYRICS!" which was stuffed with a crazy amount of this... poetry?
Miss Koval rocked. But she still couldn't get me to read Robert Frost. Oh well.
Personally, if I was Robert Frost, and two roads were diverging in a wood or whatever, I would just sit down and dream myself off into what might be down either of them, and sit there until it got dark. "Less-travelled by" is still "travelled-by" to some degree. But how many people just sit down at a fork in the road and chill for awhile?
Anyway...
It was cool to discover "poetry." It was cool to discover that poetry didn't have to be pretentious. AND that it could be intelligent, pretty, and relevant, all at the same time.
But I still didn't read anything for pleasure, except those damned lyrics, and Stephen King novels, which I fervently hid.
Then 1997 happened. I was dating this dude, Erich, and Erich was an asshole who, at 16, thought he belonged in college, even though he felt he was "too learning-disabled" to do any work in high school. Erich thought that made him special, to be learning-disabled. Erich is one reason why I have no tolerance for people who are all like, "gosh, I can't walk down this sidewalk because I have a problem taking notes while I'm reading and I'm on Ritalin for it..." Anyway...
I used to go to Erich's college class with him sometimes. It was an astronomy class, and I actually still have the textbook for it. I used to sit in the back of the class with Erich and write love letters to other people. But one evening, I thought to pick up a copy of the student newspaper, the "Pipe Dream," and read the articles. The top story was the death of Allen Ginsberg.
I didn't know or care who Allen Ginsberg was. I gathered from the title that he was a poet or something, so I figured maybe we'd cover his stuff sometime in 12th grade.....
...But underneath the obituary, there were about thirty lines of Mr. Ginsberg's most famous poem...
It took me the entire three-hour class period to get through that poem. Not even the whole thing; just the first thirty lines...
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
That's the first line.
This is the interactive part. Say that line out loud. Say it forty bazillion times. Add some commas and hyphens and semi-colons (those are the ones with a comma AND a period in it...), and say it again. Now yelp it. Think of the most starved, hysterical, mad, naked people you know, and HOWL it for them.
Robert Frost's dilemma was picking a road, having two options, and having forgotten to stop and ask directions. Allen Ginsberg's dilemma was that he and all his friends were fucked up. Very fucked up. Starving! Hysterical! Naked! Mad! Madness! Destroyed!
I read on:
Angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night
(That's the third line...)
What the fuck is a dynamo, anyway?
Frost's deal was that he should have asked directions. Ginsberg's deal was that he and his friends were looking -- nay, BURNING -- for an ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night. I guess it helps to know what a dynamo is, first... I think he probably did. Before I start teaching English, I'm going to learn what a dynamo is...
Who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz
Word.
Another interactive part... Imagine a cold-water flat. Imagine it floating across the tops of cities. Imagine poverty and tatters. Imagine being high. Stoned out of your mind. At night. Maybe without any electricity. Imagine jazz. Now imagine all that other stuff about naked and starving and madness...
WHEW! Word.
I wish Robert Frost had been more of a ham. I wish he'd been one of these dudes who has to turn hunger into "starving," and not having the rent into "poverty," and shitty old clothes into "tatters." Maybe then I could give him more props for having a crisis about two roads in a wood. They DIVERGED! Is that ALL they did? Where's the fucken passion, you know? Why didn't they CONverge? Why didn't they have crazed, sensual road-sex? I think a fork in the road is very sexy, myself.
My friend Chris has a pin that says, "Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took both of them."
Chris wants to be an English teacher too. Don't ask.
Anyway...
So I started reading again. And reading. And reading. And now if I don't have a book somewhere on my person, I grab a phone book and start looking for literary genius somewhere toward the "T's"...
Because it's beautiful to say things with words. And it's beautiful to be flamboyant with those words. And people should SWIM in words, and duck their heads under in words, and almost drown in words, and then come up gasping for breath and yelping, "wait! I can't drown yet! I haven't written about the cherry pie!" People should take BOTH roads. People should say "fuck it!" to the roads, and go to a bar instead, and listen to the Dave Joyner Trio, and write to their penpals about how much the woods kind of sucks sometimes, especially when you've been sitting at a fork in the road all day bumming around. People should be able to break a heart, heal a fracture, or start a family with a few sentences. People should comb their hair and brush their teeth and take their morning dump using words. Big words. Scary words. Words that smell nasty.
And this is why I want to grow up to be an English teacher.
I promise, I swear on everything sacred, that I will never make anybody read "The Gift of the Magi."
I will bring to people, to young people, what I was never given a chance to have, what I was kept AWAY from, in high school and middle school: an ancient heavenly connection -- not to a dynamo, because I still don't know exactly what a dynamo is, but to WORDS, and LANGUAGE, and WRITING, and WRITERS, and BOOKS, and POEMS, and SENTENCES, and IRONY!
Ah, fuck irony.
I'm going to go look up "dynamo" now.
~Helena*