bullshitismo!

What an amazingly bad class! I understood everything without ningun problema. I said a couple of things ineptly but strangely there was just no room for my whole obsessively prepared "things to say" despite it being a "seminar" which is supposed to mean discussion. Possibly because I could understand better today after a week of desperately trying to think en español, I hated the class with mad passion.

The lecture got worse and worse! There were over 20 "isms" that he put up on the board one by one, like "Ilum1nismo" and "triunfalismo" and the point was that there's all these things, these isms, that G@rcia Marquez (GGM) perfectly exemplifies. And the way you are supposed to read the book is to take the isms, which might be confusing to us because we might not love literature as much as he does, and then try to find places where those isms are being perfecty expressed. Ooooookay. That would suck enough on its own, but it extra sucked because many of his isms were just made up and extra bullshitty, and the other half that I had actually read about were not at all what I have understood them to be and he's completely on crack. For example according to "Kafka1smo", writing is about being mentally ill. Now that we have psychology, we can detect mental illness, but before psychology was invented, we just couldn't. (?!)

Cos1smo is the way that "things" are important. (I had actually prepared an elaborate thing to say about metonymy, utopias, and the house and the way that Ursula is the one who gets all this stuff from Europe, but didn't get to say it. Instead, we got told that "things are specially important" and then moved on to the next ism.

My notes are sprinkled liberally with "?!" and "WTF???!!!"

But the worst was yet to come. We listened to La Zena1da -- a great song! -- and El Profe outlined "tr0picalismo": What do you think of when you think of the tropics? (dead silence, the smell of fear.) "Fruit! Lots of fruit! Everyone eats lots of fruit. That makes their skin healthy because fruit is full of...?..." (dead silence... finally a collective abashed murmur, "agua...?") "AGUA! and las morenas, las negras, they have the most beautiful skin... " (long ode to the beautiful black and coffee colored skin ensues) And they love to eat fruit, and dance - they have natural rhythm, the rhythm of the tropics... and they are poor, but happy, like La Zena1da... street vendors are not weighed down by poverty, they are always happy to see you and to chat, and are dancing with their baskets of fruit on their heads...

We interrupt this bulletin to say once again: WTF WTF WTF!!!!!!!!!

... and they love music! the mangos, the papayas, the music... The birds, there are lots of birds, and the heat - it is a sexual heat, and the women have a sensual beauty, a sexual freedom... it's all about excess... there is of course drink - and I'm not talking about coconut milk - who could think of Puert0 Rico without thinking of... RUM! Or M3xico without tequila? Everything is more intense in the tropics, the colors are more intense, life is more intense, food is spicier, people wear bright colors, and people have a tendency to exaggerate! The exaggeration of reality comes from the heat of the tropics and the natural geography!"

I am NOT MAKING THIS UP. And I was speechless. The class around me was laughing (I'm hoping with mad, freaked out nervousness, not with actual agreement and appreciation.) And no, the guy wasn't joking. Like because he's col0mbian he gets to say this crap and get away with it?

In the car all the way home I composed my speech that I am going to give next class when called upon -- we were told to have something to say about one of the isms. I am going to describe the tropical1smo of the U.S. South and its watermelon-eating beautiful sensual poor but happy people who have natural rhythm, and then I will cross out the word "trop1calismo" and write "racismo" and make everyone in the class repeat the word after me, and then I'll sit down and take the bad grade that will be sure to come my way.

Anyway, now I see two things:

- why everyone I talked to about this class (I gossiped around for a year, remember) said "he was hilarious and he's such a card" or whatever. This is because he's a flaming, uber campy guy who talks about the sexual revolution and drugs all the time. Wow maybe that woudl impress me if I were 13. but no.

- why everyone seemed very worried about what would happen when i took the class. "You can't talk back... he's very old school... He just wants you to say back what he says in the lecture... It's best to keep your head down,..." And their brows would knit and they'd say and in fact are still saying before and after class, "Saying something won't change anything... You just have to endure it..."

Is it true? I feel a tiny twinge of understanding that it might be desirable to not say anything, but I really can't bear it. I was like a cat on a hot griddle today and by next week I will be a tiger. There is NO WAY I can get through this whole semester listening to that sort of thing without saying something and attempting to instigate a small revolution. I'll say something and some people wil think I'm rude or stupid or an asshole but others will perhaps say "I'm so glad you said that." God. I just... why let it pass, anytime? There are enough people in the world who have many, many reasons not to say anything. Why should I... god... it's not like I have some delusion of grandeur that it matters hugely to anyone but it matters to my pride and beliefs not to sit and listen to that sort of thing in silence, ever. I mean maybe if someone had a gun to my head, but not before then and maybe not even then, depending. Because in my imaginary universe it DOES matter not just for my own pride but because of the people who are then glad I said whatever it was, that they might have some future situation where it does matter and they might have the nerve. Etc. I'm sure everyone knows the drill here. But it's why I couldn't major in Sp4nish at U.Taxass because I kept standing up, giving a speech, and walking out. Here I will not walk out, obviously, as I need this specific class to graduate. I have just a twinge of fear, alas. I used to be fearless.

Oh I left out the part where he went suddenly on and on and on about how computers ruin people's brains by making their memories bad, and making them rude and un-chatty and overly businesslike. By the end of his monologue on that subject everyone in the class was looking straight at me and giggling. (as I was the only person with a computer out - I take notes on it since I type 80 wpm or so and my handwriting is shit)

So frankly I realize I'm fucked anyway in that class and I might as well mouth off to my heart's content.

Comments

[Iris]

No, no - please wait. Couldn't you distance yourself for a little longer if you really need the grades from this class? Perhaps you could do all the arguing and stomping out near the end of the year when you have a pile of decent back work and it would be hard for him to mark you down.Or have an affair with him and re-arrange his brain playfully while he is handcuffed to the bedpost.

[Jo]

I think iris is right, particularly on the last point. Handcuffs tend to change the context just enough, and if that doesn't work, then the gentle application of thumbscrews might.

Tropica1ismo, my ass! Good lord.

[Barak]

I'm not sure if my experience was relevant but I will share it with you. I was taking a drama as literature class at MIT from a guy I will call Timopolous Timopolous, because he had the same first and last greek name. He invariably spouted bullshit, which I would call him on to varying degrees, because I didn't need the class and I didn't care less about my grade. He insisted that because 'Godot' is pronounced GOD-oh in French, it's obvious the Godot was a stand in for God. Now, I wouldn't argue that Godot was a stand in for God, but I'm pretty fluent in French and I'm certain the 'Godot' is pronounced guh-DOUGH, just like we do in English. Minor stuff compared to your racist guy, but we fought about facts obliquely related to the plays all semester. The high point was when he called me a 'dick-head'. He gave me a B+.

[squid]

But...Barak...God in French is Dieu...as in Mon Fucking Dieu, what horrible crappitiness from both of those professors.

It is always such a shock to come up against professors with entrenched, closed minds in what are supposed to be the halls of enlightenment. I know it's rampant but it keeps surprising me.

The people who said that "saying something won't change anything"...what was it that was said? And what were the specific results?

If Iris and Jo's ideas don't work, I'm all for your Racismo approach.

On the bright, shiny side, I'm glad you didn't have any trouble following along.

[Prentiss Riddle]

Ooh, I love the "ismismo"! Did he arrange them in a taxonomy? Was there a "mosquismo", defined as writing in which characters appear from a distance like flies?

Your racism performance is an excellent idea. I do recommend you rehearse it and get the timing down to where you can finish before he calls security.

To introduce just the teeniest bit of contrarian devil's advocacy: since I'm hanging out with Brazilians these days I'm getting a bit of insight into how silly our gringo attempts to be gender-neutral, colorblind and generally PC (god how I hate that term!) look to them. It doesn't mean that I'm ready to embrace my inner racist and/or sexist, but it does mean that I'm a little less likely to get on my high horse and assume that my version of racial and gender justice is the unvarnished truth. Of course my attempts to be open-minded on this point may just be a sad case of cultural relativism being hoisted by its own petard.

Which doesn't mean I don't like the racismo idea! I think you should also whack the prof over the head with all the McOndo references you can.

Okay, a way to perhaps glean a lesson about literature from this farce: to what extent do you think he is reflecting Colombian attitudes which may actually be present in GGM's writing, even though from an enlightened 21st-c. anti-racist feminist norteamericano perspective they're bullshit? Justify your answer.

[Jo]

And use examples!

Prentiss, I love that taxonomy. Yay you. And for the good use of the word "petard" you deserve a medal.

Still, even if tropilcalismo guy has the pedigree of being closer to the source through the accident of his birth country, the fact remains that he is teaching a class HERE, in this context, to our Badger, and that his comments have raving lunatic-style racist implications that she must address if she is to keep her integrity as a human being.

[badgerbag]

I talked a bunch in a previoius class about the racism of GGM and also rtemember giving a presentation long ago with clips from some Un1vision soap opera that had 3 storylines. One storyline was about a super reserved, upper class, very white couple who were always sitting on their mahogany furniture and sipping sherry out of crystal in a genteel manner while looking at each other melodramatically. The middle class couple was a bit indio-looking and was like the ultimate blue-collar stereotype of hardworking, very concerned with making their house neat and appearing respectable and upwardly mobile. Then there was the black couple who even in their own kitchen would have conversations about the smallest thing while laughing and dancing -- it was actually revoltingly Step-n-fetchit-esque, complete with scarf tied around head and carefree carpe-diem attitude. The thing I wrote on GGM I'd have to dig up from somewhere but basically I was blasting the scenes with Nigr0manta the prostitute who has sex like earthworms and other creatures low on the evolutionary scale and who is associated with dirt and a sort of raw animality. I think I was talking about her and the character of M1nty in this one novel I hated, hated, hated by Charl3s Johnson as m1nty also gets to be the black woman who is a whore and she dies by falling apart - by actually disintegrating into a sort of putrescent bag of flesh, so she starts out sexy and earthy and a whore, and becomes completely inhuman by her death. No one else in class agreed with me that these things were problems -- I think they had difficulty hearing my take on it without assuming that I was trying to enforce my politics on literature as a censor and to say that "one couldn't write a black whore character" but that was NOT what I was saying at all. Also, they all _liked_ the characters of N1gromanta and M1nty and thought them beautiful, interesting, and expressive of... of something... of love and sexuality. IMHO this actually shows the ways that the members of the class get to feel comfortable having sexuality exoticized off into part of "blackness" or "tropicalness" or "primitiveness" and points up their own racism. It is dangerous to start saying that other people are unconscious of their own racism, but I said it anyway.

[badgerbag]

The point being that novelists do metonymy on purpose. I make the same sorts of points (not like they're orginal with me or anything...) about objectification in love poetry especially the anatomic dissection poems where lips, eyes, teeth are separately praised. And then I go off and write love poems. Oops.