my worst class

We broke 500 pageviews! How bout that? I think I accounted for at least 200 of them. Since I started this blog, I've had over 500 pageviews, three followers, one friend admit that he's following by email, and three different people have tried to stab me. It's exciting stuff.

Today, The Procrastinator will share one of his pieces of homework because it is quite ridiculous. But first, a word from our sponsors:

Do the Dew!

Think about this: Mountain Dew can save your life! Let’s say you’re being chased by a rapist. If you drink some Mountain Dew, you’ll have the burst of energy to get away from him! (Unless of course, the rapist is doin the dew, in which case, he’ll soon be doin you.)

INTRO:
The class is called "Forms of Writing" and it rotates the subject every semester. It's required for English majors, and this spring it just so happened to be about 'prose poems.' So we had a group of English majors looking to meet a requirement (the majority of them were quite unhappy with "prose poems"). Then there were the other kids, business students and whatnot, who just needed an English/writing class requirement and had unfortunately landed in this hell-hole.

No one was prepared for what followed. The class was obnoxiously bad. We had no knowledge of prose poems, but we were thrown into the deep end and expected to swim. On the 1st day we all had to sign up to lead discussion on one day of class (we would later learn that this was the teacher's way of avoiding ever having to teach). So on every day of class, we would all sit there in a circle - yes, that's right, she made us sit in a circle - and stare at the floor, while one student – the discussion leader - was crucified (the teacher would grade papers for another class while this happened). "Uhhh what'd you guys think of this poem?" the unlucky boy would say in a petrified voice. Dead silence. Dead silence. SO much silence that it was loud, beaming into your ears and drowning you. Pretty soon every student was bringing in a laptop so that they could distract themselves with facebook, Family Feud, naked pictures, or at the very least get some homework done for another class. The teacher would eventually save the discussion leader from his murder-by-silence, and then she would talk until class was over. Sometimes I was impressed by her ability to just talk and talk and talk, look for someone to respond to her, get no response, and keep talking. I did so much zoning-out in that class that I wonder how much of my life was wasted. One kid always came to class ten minutes late (I was jealous). Almost every day there would be people who would leave class, go get some food, sit down, eat the food, and come back to class later. When class ended we would all leave with a collective sigh of relief, pat the discussion leader on the back "Sorry, you had to endure that" and then we would bash the teacher.
"It's hilarious," I said to this kid named Swanky, "how people just have other conversations while she's talking. No one cares."
"Oh yeah," Swanky said. "She gets no respect. This class is terrible. I think I'm gonna start going to it drunk."
One day, amidst all her talking, she said, "take the carpet for example - what are some details about the carpet?"
Suddenly the class was alive. The carpet? We know about the carpet! It's what we've been staring at this entire semester. "Yeah, I think it's ugly."
"The pattern is dreadful."
"These colors make me wanna vomit."
The teacher was suddenly overwhelmed with participation, wondering where the hell it all came from and why it was all so negative.
She eventually started handing out assignments, which was met with outrage. How dare you? But, knowing how little we cared, she attached the clause that we could get an extension on any assignment for any reason as long as it was 12 hours in advance. Not one paper was handed in on time. The thing that was annoying was that the papers would have "lead-in exercises" that were due a week before the paper (but with the extensions, the lead-in would be pushed back to when the paper was due, and the paper would be pushed back to the next week. We were relentless.). For one of the papers, the lead-in exercise was called "critics converse," and you had to take the 2 critics you were using in the paper and write a conversation between them. I hated this exercise because A) it was stupid as shit, B) I generally hate all homework, and C) As a creative writing major, I didn't like the idea of just writing a random dialogue that would be really corny and phony; I wanted to make a story out of it. Add in my general anger with the course, and this is what resulted...
(looking back, I can't believe I handed this in)

Forms of Writing: Prose Poems

Critics Converse

I was walking through the mall the other day looking for my drug dealer because the acid he gave me was not working. I felt totally normal. I hate feeling normal. I was in the mall because my drug dealer works at the Taco Bell in the food court. I waited in line patiently. I was handling this well, I thought. He owed me a lot of money for those duds, but I was going to be calm about it. When I got to the front of the line, I told him, “Hey, Bartholomew, we got a problem. You gave me duds. I paid a lot for that because you said it was real crazy. Real crazy, my ass. They’re shit.”

“Oh, yeah?” he said, combing his blonde afro.

“I took them, and they didn’t do shit. Are you listening to me, fuck-o?”

“Fuck-o? ” he said. “Aren’t you an English major? Use some real words.”

“Here’s a real word – I want my money back!”

“That was multiple words.”

I pounded the counter.

“Don’t do that,” he said.

I pounded harder.

“Hey! Don’t do that!”

I continued.

Then he turned around, grabbed the sour cream gun, and shot it all over my face. Thank you, Bartholomew. Stay calm, I said to myself. “I’m cleaning this off, and then we’re finishing this discussion,” I said, walking to the bathroom.

“They’re not duds,” he said.

When I got to the bathroom, I looked in the mirror. I looked like Santa Claus. Someone else walked in the door.

“Hey,” he said. “You look like Santa Claus.”

“Yeah,” I said. “You look like Michel Delville.”

“That’s because I am him. By the way, the paper you wrote on me was shit.”

“You can’t be Delville. He doesn’t live around here. Does he?”

“And Santa doesn’t exist. But you are him.” He pointed at the mirror.

I looked back at the mirror. I was Santa Claus – red suit, white beard, big belly. I took a paper towel and rubbed it on my face. It really was a beard now. Not sour cream.

“Holy shit, the acid’s working,” I said.

“You know what isn’t working?” he replied. “Your ability to understand prose poems. I brought this book along.” He showed me Great American Prose Poems by David Lehman.

“This is so crazy,” I said. “Why am I hallucinating you?”

“Probably so I can set you straight, and you can stop failing all your classes,” Delville said. “Look, break it down like this: narrative prose poems and language-oriented prose poems. It gets a little easier.”

“That’s a good point,” I said, stroking my beard, which I was growing quite fond of. “I like the narrative ones better because they’re easier to understand. I like to write stories, so I like to read them too.”

“No one asked you what you like, kid.”

I found this quite rude, but before I could reply, a toilet flushed. Out of the stall came another man. “And it’s not like you’re good at writing stories,” this man said.

“Who are you?” I said, bitterly.

“I’m Steven Monte,” he said. Then he gestured to his stall. “And that dump was almost as bad as your last story. What was it called again?”

“This Milk Tastes Milky,” I said.

They both laughed at me.

I tried to justify myself. “It was about a dairy farmer with down syndrome.”

“Jesus,” Delville said. “What were you thinking?”

“I don’t know,” I said sheepishly. I tried to change the subject. “Look, can you just help me out with the prose poems?”

“Like I said, try to break them down into the two main categories,” Delville said. “There’s the narrative and the language-oriented.”

“How am I supposed to understand the language-oriented ones?” I said.

“Maybe you’re not supposed to,” he said. “Perhaps they seek to question nothing less than language’s capacity to make sense.”

“But,” Monte said, “breaking them down into merely two categories may not be sufficient.” He paged through his own copy of Great American Prose Poems. “I happened to be reading this while I was dropping that doozy. Ah, here, “Justice.” This poem is language-oriented for the first page and then becomes narrative.”

“So,” Delville said. “There’s some overlapping.”

“Why are they so hard to understand?” I whined.

“Often a single work, because of its influence on later works, functions as a defining paradigm for a genre. A lack of such a paradigm in prose poetry may help account for its ambiguous generic status.” He sighed.

“But how do I examine them?” I said.

Monte patted me on the shoulder. “They are very hard to pin down, aren’t they? Remember, Santa, it’s necessary to approach the prose poems from several critical directions at once.” And then he left.

Delville and I were left alone.

“Awkward silence, huh?” I said.

“Did you notice that Monte didn’t wash his hands?” he said.

I laughed.

Then he turned into a monkey and jumped on the sink.

The door opened and Bartholomew entered. “Hey,” he said. “Sorry about the sour cream.”

“It’s okay. Now I’m Santa Claus.”

“Interesting,” he said. “You want a ride home?”

“Only if we bring the monkey.”

He put his arm around my shoulders. “Of course we can,” he said. “Of course we can.” And then we walked out with the monkey following us.

WORK CITED

1. Delville, Michel. An Exaltation of Forms. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. 262, 265. Print.

2. Monte, Steven. Invisible Fences. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000. 37. Print.

3. Lehman, David. Great American Prose Poems. New York: Scribner Poetry, 2003. 67. Print.

Comments are still open to anyone, so feel free to grade the assignment, or to beg for more stories about Reginald, or to simply shout obscenities anonymously - that's always fun too.