Some even mused that the rallies served as the groundwork for Sparks’s future political career. The true fools of our society deemed Sparks a harmless clown.
A bell sounded as the Faculty University College Campus Engagement Representative, Dr. Peggy Summers, called for us to take our seats and settle into a silence. The president was about to speak. We all moved to the bell like trained animals, conformity our greatest trick. My eyes swept the crowd again for Chambers. I saw Mean Dean Jean Greene, but not her prey. Perhaps she ate him, I joked to myself as her teeth tore viciously into a muffin.
Peggy (darling Peggy, I remember her as an adjunct) introduced the president and he shambled to the microphone. I could not remember a time when Dr. Woodward was not the president; how did we River babies allow a dictatorship to take root in our greatest monument to freedom of thought? It was he—not him alone, mind you—who turned Freedman’s into a wasteland. We deserved the scorn of Sparks and his ilk. I watched Dr. Benjamin Woodward with a sneer as he cleared his throat, a great guttural grunting sounding into the mic. Angry goose pimples raised themselves along my skin. If I were taken to violence (and I might have to be someday soon) I would have parked myself at the top of the library tower with a rifle, staring into the scope, waiting for Woodward to step into the black of my crosshairs.
He was a man who had survived many scandals, many plagiarism accusations, many budget shortfalls. Woodward was weakened, but unashamed. In fact, Wood-wood, as we called him intentionally and as he called himself accidentally through the hilarious magic of poor pronunciation, was incapable of shame. I recall the time the student newspaper caught him slipping the good wood-wood to his secretary despite his wife who wore a church hat and a smile to every convocation, every graduation, every campus function both major and minor—in fact, she was there in the front today wearing a regal light blue crown fronted with lace and baby’s breath. His quote to those students: So? And it took just a week for the newspaper staff to disappear. It was as if those students never existed.
The microphone whined as Wood-wood moved his lips closer to it. Graduation, he said, the bass of his voice rumbling through the auditorium.
For a moment he let the silence hang before continuing: We talk about graduation the way that folk singer talks about revolution. He eased into the mic and hissed: Like whispers.
A contingent in the front began hooting and clapping. They fooled no one; Woodward brought his own claque of people to clap and scream at his every talk.
He continued: We need to shout it. We need to scream it. That’s what we are about at Freedman’s University. Graduation! He bawled it this time and the microphone squealed in pain. He paused before continuing. I know some of you want me to speak about that guy and his rallies, but that’s not what I’m going to talk about today except to say that that’s free speech. I can’t do nothing about that, so I’m going to talk today about things we can control, like—he moved his mouth so that it hovered over the mic—graduation!
That shiny engineering program with all its fancy machines. The writing program. All the nurses now training in our hospital. None of that means anything if we aren’t shipping a steady supply of Freedman’s graduates into the world. Quantity creates quality. We shove enough of them out there and one of them is bound to be great. But we are not making enough of our students walk the plank. We are hung up on old-fashioned notions of excellence, mastery, and reputation. Here we need to define excellence as graduation, and our reputation rests upon the aforementioned graduation. That is our future, my Freedmen.
He paused, taking in the silence. And let me tell you this, he continued. I’m not asking you to sacrifice scholarship, excellence, or intellectual rigor. No. Of course not. All of that must remain. Be excellent is our motto. As a matter of fact, there is not enough scholarship coming out of this part of the world. We want excellent scholarship. And some of you may be saying, But Wood-wood, how do we do that while each moving hundreds of students on to graduation each year? Yes, you do have an average of two hundred and fifty students each per semester (not counting lecture hall classes), but if you divide your day into five-minute excrements, you can see how much time you actually waste and you can practice the art of researching and writing in five-minute bursts. As a matter of fact, this semester’s Norville Orbison Faculty University College Keynote Speaker, Dr. Jarreau Simmons, author of The 5-Minute Scholar, will speak in a few minutes about the art of writing and publishing journal articles in the five minutes between your classes, at red lights, or just before falling asleep. Anytime you got five minutes, you got a journal article, you got a chapter, as far as I’m concerned. String enough of those five minutes together and you got a book. No laziness here at Freedman’s, just excellence. Excellence. And graduation. To that end, I’d like to announce the Faculty University College Brilliancy Operation Initiative.
Wood-wood’s sycophants began woo-hooing and cheering, waving their arms in approval. You haven’t even heard the plan yet, he said. The paid sycophants laughed.
You all have journal articles, submit them to our committee for scrutiny, he continued. Best article from any discipline gets a thousand dollars. Second place is a copy of Dr. Simmons’s text. Third, well, there is no third. Everyone gets a critique, though. Get to writing, my Faculty University College Brilliancy Operation Initiative Scholars! The cheering section now stood and screamed madly, whistling and slapping their hands together with great force and vigor. Bring out the brilliance, that’s our motto! Thank you to Peggy, er, Dr. Summers, for suggesting this program and for naming it. She names everything around here. And I want to thank Dr. Simmons—we used to call him Soapy back in undergrad, that’s my line, brother—for taking time away from the classes he teaches at Stanford . . . Oh, what’s that, brother, you don’t teach in the spring? Got a 1/0 teaching load, you say? That’s not a teaching load, that’s a score! Well, we’d like to thank him for taking time away from his, uh, duties to talk to us about achieving our excellence. I love you all. Here’s to a wonderful semester. Graduation!
As Wood-wood stepped from in front of the microphone I felt such a despondency, such a despair, I could scarcely stand. I looked around at all my peers and they were feeling it too, reeling, flopping about as if their limbs had turned to pasta. Dr. Simmons spoke after Woodward and he only compounded things—all his talk of researching and writing in the gutters of your life—I felt as if I had sunk into the floor and was now groping to climb up from a bottomless pit of starry blue darkness. I remembered why I stopped attending these things despite the easy access to food and drink. It was designed to break our spirits, make us dependent on Freedman’s, make us see Woodward as the great father. I looked around, and so many had fallen for the conditioning as I once had. The fact that Chambers wasn’t here was a sign that he was beginning to free himself. As a matter of fact, back so many years ago when I first woke, the most important thing I did was skip the Faculty University College. What wonders that one act did for my newly unshackled mind.
I trudged back to the morgue, ready to sleep a dead sleep on the floor like my father’s corpse. Before lying down and closing my hazy, sandy eyes, I opened my AOL, moving with rote robotic motions. My computer shouted at me that I had mail, and I did. In between the spam and Idra’s nonsense sat a message from Chambers imploring me to read a thing he called beautiful and special. And indeed I read it and found it, his latest syllabus, so glorious that I read it over and over, I read it aloud to hear the sound of the words, tasting them and rolling them in my mouth. I read it in different voices, first shouting and then whispering. I stayed up all night as one does with a lover, and as I read, my eyes poured salty ancient rivers and I saw myself as a speck in the waters swimming about in all that beauty.
FREEDMAN’S UNIVERSITY
College of Arts and Sciences
Department of English and Cultural Studies
English 101: Special Topics: Loneliness
Spring 2018
Instructor:
Dr. Reginald S. Chambers, Ph.D.
Email: [email protected]
Alternate Email: [email protected]
Extension: x3725
Office Location: Alfred McCoy Hall 0242
Office Hours: MWF: 9 a.m.–11 a.m.; 2 p.m.–5 p.m.
I. COURSE PREREQUISITES:
Students must pass the University-approved placement test, a bit of a ridiculous measure. Tell me, what does a test have to do with the beating of the human heart?
More importantly, students should bring to the course an open mind and, above all else, a questioning but thorough and intellectually rigorous spirit. And then, couple that spirit with a near-radical honesty—intellectual and otherwise.
The poet Roland Hudson believed that his words could rearrange and derange the consciousness of the reader. I want to work with students who are willing to worship at the altar of great writers like Hudson, and who would like to be rearranged and deranged in order to rearrange and derange others. I believe in the power of words to achieve this derangement. Indeed, it could be said that I have been deranged by words.
By taking this class you are telling me that you believe in Word Power completely the way a fundamentalist Christian believes in the divinity of Jesus. If at any time you no longer believe in Word Power, then you must immediately drop the class. Of course, there may be dark nights—and even semesters—of the soul, I myself have them, but the only way around that is by writing and thinking through the darkness. If you stay in this class, this is the basic assumption you accept. Everything else can and must be questioned.
II. COURSE DESCRIPTION:
First, this is a writing-intensive course. If that is a problem for you there are plenty of other professors in this department who will award you an A grade for making power ballads, Play-Doh sculptures, YouTube videos, and the like as your primary coursework. That is fine; it is not what we are doing here. You will write a major essay relating to our theme while utilizing various modes of rhetorical development. In addition, journals and reading responses will be assigned throughout the course of the semester.
Our theme this semester is LONELINESS, which means we will discuss this concept (idea? feeling?) as the basic and most elemental problem of humanity. According to a September 5, 2016, article in the New York Times, “As a predictor of early death, loneliness eclipses obesity” (Hafner, see required texts). The most antisocial among us are still social creatures. Isolate a newborn and, even when provided with the proper nutrition, he or she dies. When an adult is isolated, he or she can become warped, unhinged, disassociated from reality. What is the outcome when you have a society of the warped? We all use each other to keep our fragile minds tethered. Still, we often seek solitude to recharge us, make us more creative, to become in touch with our truest thoughts. Things we will examine may include: the difference between solitude and loneliness; depression and loneliness; the difference between depression and unhappiness; the unbearable sadness of a Monday morning; anything else your brilliant minds can conjure, but most importantly, we will discuss how to make the hurting stop.
We are all adults. The subject matter, at times, may call on us to explore mature themes, such as sexuality and violence. Therefore, you—or I—may deem it necessary to deploy the full range of our language, including profanity, within reason. I fully encourage this. This class is a free and safe space.
III. REQUIRED TEXTS:
Baldwin, James. Notes of a Native Son. Boston: Beacon Press, 1984. Print.
Fitzgerald, Helena. “The Fierce Triumph of Loneliness.” Catapult. Catapult, 18 May 2016. Web. 24 May 2016.
Hafner, Katie. “Researchers Confront an Epidemic of Loneliness.” New York Times, September 5, 2016. Web. 22 September 2016.
Hudson, Roland. The Firewater of Love: Poems. Cross River: Peckerman House, 2010. Print.
Thoreau, Henry D. Walden; or, Life in the Woods. London: J. M. Dent, 1908. Print.
A dictionary
A thesaurus
A notebook to fill with the impressions of your human heart.
IV. STUDENT (AND PROFESSOR) OUTCOMES:
Upon completion of English 101, students will demonstrate:
1. Look, I’m required to reproduce an endless list of things here, including improvement in critical reading skills, critical thinking skills, an awareness of grammar conventions, blah, blah, blah . . . and I hope you do get all that and more from this course, but the one thing I expect you (and me) to gain from our semester together is an understanding of how to eradicate the ache of common loneliness.
V. GRADING/EVALUATION PROCEDURES:
Grades do little but pervert the educational process, and if I could do away with them I would, but I’m no fool. I understand that most of you have been damaged by your prior learning experiences and the only thing you respect is the lash of the teacher-as-policeman providing arbitrary numbers for everything you do. If I didn’t have the power to ascend you to heaven (pass you) or banish you to hell (fail you), then most of you would not read or engage with the texts. It’s sad, really, because you are not here to receive some dull, barely useful numerical evaluation and then move on to becoming some cog in a barely middle-wage, middle-class job. You are here to learn how to think. Society doesn’t want you to think. It’s better for the powers-that-be if you remain ignorant. Better to manipulate you and use you for their own agendas. Thinking is a rebellious act. Please remember that and remember this: When you were born and you came out of your mother’s womb you were covered in blood and slimy afterbirth. In short, you were completely disgusting. Time passed and you made a habit of shitting and pissing yourself and then you learned to clean yourself (poorly at first), but still you made a habit of publicly digging in your nose. Many of us never shake this habit. Presumably you’ve stopped most of your disgusting habits, at least outwardly, but maybe you don’t shower daily or maybe you don’t properly clean yourself after masturbation. Maybe you leave the restroom without washing your hands. (I’m sure at least some of you carry on with this revolting, sickness-passing habit,) Perhaps you cheat on tests or on your lovers or you plagiarize. There are levels to disgusting. In essence, then, the goal of maturation, of education, is to, over time, make yourself less disgusting.
I won’t list a bunch of meaningless percentages here. You tell me what you think your assignments are worth.
VI. ACADEMIC INTEGRITY:
It’s our secrets that make us the most lonely and this I’m about to tell you is not something I’ve ever admitted to anyone. When I was an undergraduate there was this girl. I wanted to possess every inch of her, but she was a wild stallion, and I, a poor jockey. She was among the first to allow me inside of her and I cried from joy when we finished. That’s not the thing that brings me the shame, this is it: she was ravenous, needing to make love two or three times a session several nights a week. This was fairly new to me and, yes, I imagined myself a conqueror of the female form. Who told me I was this type of warrior? There had never been any basis in reality for this self-image. A couple instances of breast sucking followed by intercourse in high school. An incident of awkward oral sex in the first weeks of college. I simply couldn’t keep up with my first real girlfriend and the worst of it was that most times I finished quickly, far too quickly to ever satisfy her. It became too much. So much. I hunched over crying softly in her dorm room one night after we were done. (I say, we, but I was the only one who finished.) I looked over and she had turned to her side, a beam of bluish white light lying across her black skin. She rested her hand between her legs and I could tell she was finishing herself off. I grew enraged as if I had caught her with another. We began to scream back and forth.
Well, what do you expect me to do? she cried.
Really? I replied, while I’m lying right next to you?
She looked away, and a feeling of foolishness passed over me. It was all so absurd. I didn’t know it, but I was screaming into a vo
id at myself, at my own loneliness.
It’s okay, she whispered. We can work on the sex. Don’t turn this into something bigger than it has to be.
When the tears ended, we held hands, naked, staring into the dark at the ceiling. Really, it was quite beautiful. I did not plan to spend the night this way. A quick fuck and then finish the paper I had due in Comm. Law. My love put her hand on my dick as the dawn neared and I bawled out in terror. I had work due. I was going to fail because of her. No, she said, shaking my flaccid dick. You’ll fail because of this thing.
It stiffened in her hand and I replied: This is not a joke! I’ll lose my scholarship. She turned from me. I watched the ridges of her spine press themselves against her skin. She stood and rummaged through the mess of papers scattered on her desk. Here, she said. I got an A on this last semester. Spend an hour re-typing it.
My love’s A somehow became a D in my professor’s eyes. I lost my scholarship. And soon I found out my girlfriend was cheating on me with a fine arts student. A horrible singer who never wears a shirt and always sounds like he just smoked thirty cigarettes. I hear him on the radio sometimes, so do you. He has gotten no better. And sometimes I pass the Fine Arts Building and I’m haunted by the memory of them huddled together, not committing a sexual act, not even touching, but standing in a pose too intimate for casual friendship. How could I have been so blind as to watch them, but not truly see them? We yelled at one another in the privacy of her dorm room. I prepared to accept this transgression and move on together, but she shrugged and broke it off abruptly. Her world didn’t require me. I spent the rest of my time as a student at this university tormented and mostly alone, finding company—and a kind of friendship—only with Christine, only with strangers in the library tower. I ACCEPT NO FORMS OF PLAGIARISM OR ACADEMIC DISHONESTY.
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