wasnât going to make much headway on Untitled Novel , the catchy name assigned to it in the last contract. God, for years I waited for classes to end because I was hot to write during the summer break. Now I volunteer for extra classes because I am broken.
No, I didnât set out just to fill the time. I must have had some notion that it would be revivifying, taking onthese evening Adult Enrichment classes for grown-ups. I was thinking back to the old days, in the thirties, when I taught the night classes in the basement at the pattern cuttersâ union, up in the Garment District. Jews and Italians who dragged in after ten or twelve hours of piecework, and at the end of those grim days coming to me! Starving for a little culture, puzzling their way through a few lines of the simplest poetry I could find, Sandburg or Blake.
Maybe once or twice every class--every single night!--I would see comprehension steal across one of those tired faces. And a sort of rapture, the primal experience of poetry that my undergraduates today will never know, all the rapture beaten out of them in high school Advanced Placement courses. I can picture, after thirty years, one sharp-faced yid, youngish but already bent over from his work. Scowling down at his text and then looking up, startled, electrified, as he read those words of Blake, the paradox at the heart of all revolutionary fervor: One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression .
Thatâs what I was hoping for, moments like that. But itâs different now. I sound even to myself like a crotchety old man, but it is different. The students now arenât tailors crawling out of the sweatshops and trying to catch a glimpse of the empyrean. They are advertising copywriters and tax accountants and spinsters who work the cosmetic floor at Bonwit Teller, and they want to be enriched , as the catalogue promised.
The other night we were supposed to talk about Kafkaâs Trial . I tried to be interesting, get them to draw parallels to HUAC and Hoover and â¦
Not a breeze from the open classroom windows, just the summer traffic noise with its undertones of chafing incipient violence, over our heads a vagrant moth beating against the fluorescent light. The students just stared at me, when I called on Mr. Glover by name he shrugged and, embarrassed, unscrewed his ballpoint pen, screwed it, unscrewed it. Of course he was the last guy I should have called on, it justhappened his was the only name I had bothered to learn. Which had nothing to do with the cleft chin or the earnest bow tie or the intricate flexions of his massive forearms as he twisted, twisted the little pen.
I turned to his neighbor, the girl with the pencil skirt so tight she couldnât cross her legs. âMiss ⦠uh.â She was flustered--she had been focusing on Mr. Glover, not Mr. Kafka--but managed to stammer out what I suppose I had been asking for, simple pieties about unjust accusations and the apparatus of the state crushing individual conscience. Everyone in the room dutifully nodded. They hadnât come to the School for Liberal Studies without being good little liberals.
I felt like a charlatan. I had only meant to get someone to say something, so I wouldnât have to keep listening to myself, yammering away like some loony on the IND. But I had betrayed Kafka and myself and these yearning kids, too. I didnât want to be interesting, I wanted to tell the truth.
âYes, very good,â I said. Miss Uh preened a little, the way my female students always do after praise, trying to hold in place an expression of modest, somber attentive-ness. The effect undercut, alas, by her unhappy choice of periwinkle eyeliner and false eyelashes as big as hairbrushes. She didnât look thoughtful, she looked as though sheâd been scared by a rat. Which would not be, at the SLS, unprecedented.
âVery good,â I repeated. âExcept I think ⦠just possibly â¦â I have
No, I didnât set out just to fill the time. I must have had some notion that it would be revivifying, taking onthese evening Adult Enrichment classes for grown-ups. I was thinking back to the old days, in the thirties, when I taught the night classes in the basement at the pattern cuttersâ union, up in the Garment District. Jews and Italians who dragged in after ten or twelve hours of piecework, and at the end of those grim days coming to me! Starving for a little culture, puzzling their way through a few lines of the simplest poetry I could find, Sandburg or Blake.
Maybe once or twice every class--every single night!--I would see comprehension steal across one of those tired faces. And a sort of rapture, the primal experience of poetry that my undergraduates today will never know, all the rapture beaten out of them in high school Advanced Placement courses. I can picture, after thirty years, one sharp-faced yid, youngish but already bent over from his work. Scowling down at his text and then looking up, startled, electrified, as he read those words of Blake, the paradox at the heart of all revolutionary fervor: One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression .
Thatâs what I was hoping for, moments like that. But itâs different now. I sound even to myself like a crotchety old man, but it is different. The students now arenât tailors crawling out of the sweatshops and trying to catch a glimpse of the empyrean. They are advertising copywriters and tax accountants and spinsters who work the cosmetic floor at Bonwit Teller, and they want to be enriched , as the catalogue promised.
The other night we were supposed to talk about Kafkaâs Trial . I tried to be interesting, get them to draw parallels to HUAC and Hoover and â¦
Not a breeze from the open classroom windows, just the summer traffic noise with its undertones of chafing incipient violence, over our heads a vagrant moth beating against the fluorescent light. The students just stared at me, when I called on Mr. Glover by name he shrugged and, embarrassed, unscrewed his ballpoint pen, screwed it, unscrewed it. Of course he was the last guy I should have called on, it justhappened his was the only name I had bothered to learn. Which had nothing to do with the cleft chin or the earnest bow tie or the intricate flexions of his massive forearms as he twisted, twisted the little pen.
I turned to his neighbor, the girl with the pencil skirt so tight she couldnât cross her legs. âMiss ⦠uh.â She was flustered--she had been focusing on Mr. Glover, not Mr. Kafka--but managed to stammer out what I suppose I had been asking for, simple pieties about unjust accusations and the apparatus of the state crushing individual conscience. Everyone in the room dutifully nodded. They hadnât come to the School for Liberal Studies without being good little liberals.
I felt like a charlatan. I had only meant to get someone to say something, so I wouldnât have to keep listening to myself, yammering away like some loony on the IND. But I had betrayed Kafka and myself and these yearning kids, too. I didnât want to be interesting, I wanted to tell the truth.
âYes, very good,â I said. Miss Uh preened a little, the way my female students always do after praise, trying to hold in place an expression of modest, somber attentive-ness. The effect undercut, alas, by her unhappy choice of periwinkle eyeliner and false eyelashes as big as hairbrushes. She didnât look thoughtful, she looked as though sheâd been scared by a rat. Which would not be, at the SLS, unprecedented.
âVery good,â I repeated. âExcept I think ⦠just possibly â¦â I have