Fucked day

A very difficult day as a whole.

I read Talk Talk to the class. I tried to explain that I was really uncertain about how it could be revised. I was told to shut up, cut the preamble, etc. The atmosphere in that classroom was one of the reasons why I wrote the essay. I then told the teacher that I didn’t want to read it. After a long rant by the teacher about not writing anything you wouldn’t want to read in public, I relented and read it. The resulting discussion really did little more than raise my blood pressure. I’m so fucking tired of being told to shut up these days. People ask what you think, but they really don’t want to know. Keep it brief. Small sentences. Don’t be too complicated now.

I don’t have any choice but to write what I feel. I believe that the teacher thinks that I’m a flaming egotist; when I said I said I didn’t know how to revise it, she interpreted that as meaning I thought the essay was perfect. Fuck that. It’s just another piece of trash. I write lots of trash. I’m not all that attached to it; it just seemed like something I needed to write at the time. After I read it, the teacher tried to imply that I’m a victim of child-abuse. Fuck that. My father is a great guy. I just used a small aspect of our relationship, rhetorically, to make a point about what happened to me later in life. It’s nobody’s fault. It just is. Don’t cry for me, you sanctimonious . . .

The main suggestion that came out of the discussion was that I should remove, or minimize, one of the piece’s many themes. Uh, it’s fairly intricately constructed, that’s far easier to say than do. Mr. Wordsworth, could you cut that bit with your sister at the end of Tintern Abbey, it just doesn’t fit the entire theme of the piece . . . again, I find myself faced with the idea of trying to write down to people. Complicated writing can’t be good.

Just finished book three of Paradise Lost. Yoder offered his usually brilliant synopsis of God’s lines in the poem: “God only says two things in Paradise Lost: ‘I knew that’ and ‘It’s not my fault’” I feel that way most of the time when students in the rhetoric department comment on my work. It’s not my fault that my references are sometimes a little obscure; it’s a generational thing I guess. Mechanically, most people don’t tell me much that I don’t know. But the worst part is when teachers think they are doing me a favor by suggesting that I write down in order to reduce the complexity of the pieces. Sorry if I’m complicated. Deal with it. I’ve got lots of complicated stories knocking around in my head, especially the last few days. Trying to simplify them down to the level of class work (I can’t believe this is happening in grad school) is no easy task; simplification often means that misreading is inevitable.

Readers here, I don’t have to “dumb down” for. Thank you, all you silent folks. It’s okay if you don’t get it all; I don’t myself. I just write the stuff. I want to write richer stuff; rich stuff is sometimes hard to digest. It’s a really big picture, but it’s getting clearer. One project at a time. It isn’t an ego thing; people are complicated. I’m just another guy, not god. I don’t “know it all” like god. But I do know how to write; I wish people would at least give me a little credit for that. I want to write better; learning how to talk seems like a lost cause at this stage of the game.

Shut up, Jeff