OOGA-BOOGA AND THE WRITING LIFE-Barbara Jean Tannert

Currently still convalescing from the intensive twelve year MFA program from which I graduated in the early 1990’s, and therefore still too delicate to write fiction of my own, I’ve dedicated my life to helping undergraduates tell their own stories. Well, I suppose I should say ’story’ as there’s really only one: It’s the tale of ‘No Name Depresso who lives Nowhere and has Nothing to Say.’ Occasionally, ‘No Name’ is called ‘Sarah’ or “Magda’ and has either an eating or multiple personality disorder. No Name, Sarah, and Magda are always sad and sometimes angry, but never hungry or happy. And it just so happens that all three girls, as well as all their multiple personalities, want to be writers. The young men have stories too, and it isn’t fair to pretend they don’t. These range from “My character who is not me got drunk and peed in a trash can” to “He watched with parched lips as the figure in blue lowered its musket.” Both genders contribute narratives about cyborgs, vampires, and Jesus, sometimes combining them into a kind of wacky postmodern Mod Squad.

For the most part, though, I enjoy the young writers and the cozy hostility of the ‘workshop’ environment in which we sit in a circle and eviscerate the silent author. My role is that of moderator, like James Lipton on “Inside the Actor’s Studio,” and I like to think that I share something of his startling (terrifying) composure. Even during the minor uprising against the quiet lisping young woman who’d written a fifty-page account of a Mormon missionary named Finnegan O’Malley entitled ‘The Sign of the Albatross,” I maintained my usual intense preternatural calm.

“Yes. It is somewhat improbable that Finnegan’s mission would have taken him to Moline, Illinois, but it’s also not implausible that this particular Moline might exist in some parallel universe, yes?”

I “share” my position as enabler of creativity with a colleague, which means that after years of being paid 98 cents a week to urge affable hung-over fraternity brothers to think of themselves as a ‘community of writers’ we were brought up out of the basement, relieved of Freshman Composition and the Bartlebyish title of ‘adjunct lecturer.’ To keep costs down, we were however reconfigured as “one person,” which meant that Monica, bright, sharp, and professional down to her stylish black boots, had overnight grown a comparatively idiotic Siamese twin. My other half casually took over the college literary magazine, which obediently turned over and won two national awards, writes and publishes screeds of her delightful poetry, and allows students (more than one at a time) to come to her lovely house where she provides them with food and love and support and her charming attorney husband with bail and DWI counsel. I still won’t let students come anywhere near my house because I don’t want them spilling red wine on the carpet.

Aside from sharing a position, I also share an office, this with my husband, who got me the damn job in the first place. He is rumored to be brilliant, despite his remarking to me the other day at breakfast that, when you think about it, human beings were never really meant to walk upright. Since it’s not enough for him to be brilliant on his own, he arranges for other brilliant people to come give literary readings.

The problem is that I never seem to want to attend any such gatherings. Our historic campus has a lovely, formal room in which to honor its visiting poets and writers and thinkers. It’s called The Oak Room and it has a crimson carpet and a glass chandelier, nineteenth century windows, and leather couches upon which the students recline slack-jawed with literary feeling. We the faculty sit trapped on folding chairs in the middle of the room balancing cups of fermented apple juice on our knees and gazing with eager idiocy at the speaker, in one memorable instance a Pulitzer prize winning poet who insinuated (in Latin and from beneath frosted swags of hair) that we were all a bunch of morons. In my darkest moments, while I’m sipping my fizzy apple nectar and nibbling on a silence shattering Japanese rice cracker, watching my students undulate on the couches and my colleagues emit rays of psychic intellectual kinship with the drone at the podium, I have to fight the impulse to confess my own doltish incomprehension, to shout, with feeling, “OOGA-BOOGA! OOGA-BOOGA!”

I am also somewhat limited as a professor of literature insofar as I can only teach one novel. Indeed, no matter what the course, or what is on the syllabus, I inevitably bring the discussion around to Dracula. “Suppose,” I say in hushed tones to a startled group of freshman, “Emily Dickinson was to have entertained Dracula in her bedroom in Amherst. The Count may have flown at her window, a great black New England moth, and thwumped the glass with his wings. ‘It’s Nature, Baby. Let me in!’” Then I’ll try desperately to get back to “I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died.” It’s the domestic side of Dracula that I personally find so adorable, despite the hairy palms. “And yet, he’s still scary as Hell,” I’ll re-inform my confused students, having digressed mightily from Heart of Darkness. “Why just last night I was afraid to get up and go to the bathroom because I thought Dracula was hiding behind the shower curtain!”

They think I’m joking.

Nonetheless, my reputation as a teacher has taken a wrong turn. The rumor that I’m “crazy” is something I’ve only recently discovered myself on RateMyProfessors.com. But if I were really “crazy” would I sit up there on the desk, swinging my feet, sipping my decaf latte, telling my bright-eyed freshman that “the word on the street is that I’m a lunatic, but you’ve got to be nuts to read The Awakening! Heh, heh, heh!” A few laugh back, nervously. (English is funny!) The rest copy the lunatic speech down in their notebooks verbatim and repeat it robotically at their Intervarsity Christian Fellowship meetings. Secretly, I’ve stopped reading contemporary fiction, fiction written by adults (in general), poetry of any kind, especially non-rhyming, critical essays, the New York Times, and all the classics (except Pride and Prejudice). That leaves me with Heloise’s Household Hints and Harry Potter, which I find is all I really need in life. I’m afraid I’ll be found out though. Already, my professionalism is, I am certain, being called into question by gimlet-eyed youngsters who come to class in their underwear.

They have cause. I remember one soft, autumn morning, a Tuesday, Tuesdays being reserved for scholarly research, along with Thursdays and Fridays, when I stood barefoot in the vegetable garden drinking coffee and feeling the breeze ripple gently under my nightgown. I had just begun to consider the possibility of planting ornamental cabbages when there sounded, from inside the house, an agitated ringing. With a dawning sense of urgency, precipitated by the memory of the twenty-seven student conferences I’d scheduled for my Introduction to Literature class, I rushed hobblety hoi across the lawn, dodging hickory nuts and angry squirrels, and burst into the kitchen.

“Hello,” I gasped.

“Hello,” I answered myself suavely, “I’m not home right now but if you leave your name, number . . .”

An accusing voice cut across my own: “Professor? This is Courtney K? I’m waiting outside your office? I had a 9:15 conference?”

“Courtney! I’m so sorry! I don’t know what day it is!”

“. . .I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.” (Liberty Bell theme from Monty Python blares, ends with simulacra of flatulence). A moment of silence followed. Then, “I’ve got it,” in a low sinister tone.

“Pardon?”

“My essay on the Sun Also Rises?”

“Well done,” I said heartily. “Maybe we could just discuss it over the phone.” It has often occurred to me that this might not be a bad way to conduct literary business. Students could wait outside my office door and I could speak to them from my kitchen over some sort of speakerphone contraption. “Read me your thesis.”

“My what?”

“Your opening paragraph.”

“Modernism is a time of great upheaval and war and the taking down of all kinds of architecture and even changes in literature. Including Ernest Hemingway. When Jake tells Beth he loves her in the dark in Paris he is secretly mourning his lost impotence.”

“Never mind,” I told her, merrily. “Why don’t you just slip your essay under my door and I’ll write it myself as usual.”

“Look, you’d better get over here,” she announced grimly, “Everybody’s waiting for you.”

They were. I had to step over a mass of student bodies lying like wounded soldiers in the little hallway. A weak cry went up as I arrived and they rattled their essays at me, shaking them like empty cups. “Ah! The great unwashed! The teeming hordes of humanity,” I cried to them gaily. Then, head down and heedless to their protests, I hurdled my way into the office (I believe I had changed out of my nightgown but please don’t press me on this point) and locked myself inside. Bozo, a life sized inflated replica of the famous clown (my fifteenth wedding anniversary gift to my husband), stood by my desk, and I was thankful that someone was in charge. And yet, I’m not sure that he can keep covering for me.

Take last week, for example, (it was yesterday really, which is why I’m sitting here in the dark quiet of my basement curled up against the water heater) when a nice red headed young man in my advanced fiction writing class finally managed to catch me off guard. I had asked him to read aloud from his work in progress and he kindly obliged, narrating, in a thin, pleasant voice, the story of American dentist who takes his teenage son to Amsterdam as a graduation present. I was nodding along, lazily contemplating the way late afternoon sunlight illuminated the beer colored highlights in his hair and imagining a story in which a blue figure with a musket fires indiscriminately upon a group of depressed young women while an albatross with a crucifix around its neck wheels lazily overheard, when I suddenly and inexplicably began listening. “Hold it,” I said. “What was that about a nude dancer on a revolving table?”

It would seem that father and son, after smoking some hashish at a little bar on a cobbled street, venture out to see a sex show, whereupon the two of them, dizzy from observing the spinning, gyrating dancers, look at each other, roll their eyes, and throw up.

“They both have weak stomachs,” explained the young man earnestly. “It’s what finally brings them together.”

For many reasons, none of which I care to explain, I felt unable to respond with anything but a hideous giggle. The students, most of them solid, stolid, good girls and boys from the Midwest attempted to cover for me.

“Illness as metaphor?” suggested an ambiguously gendered individual in a ski cap and dark glasses.

“Or perhaps,” announced a rectangular-headed young man, presumably but not definitively a football player, “they’re vomiting up their own evil natures.” He catches my eye. “Like in Dracula.”

“But what I’d like to know,” I said, looking around brightly, “is if the two of them threw up in unison, you know, like synchronized swimmers?”

The students watched me politely for many minutes, these sad mute children of the corn, before, with hysterical gestures I finally managed to wave them away.

This sudsy update was written on Friday, October 23rd, 2009 at 1:20 am and is filed under How to Write Stories About Writers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.