Dept. of Shameless Self Promotion

Sometimes a guy's gotta do what a guy's gotta do: toot his own horn. I have a short article on teaching a poem by Campbell McGrath in the new issue of Minnesota English Journal.

Adventures in Translation

From a student paper on Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants":

"The man tells the girl about a drink called Anis del Toro (meaning butt of the bull)."

No wonder I could never stand the taste of anise.

Sick and Awkward

One of the pleasures of teaching teenagers is that you get to keep up on current slang, or at least not fall behind as far as you would on your own as an old fart. This year’s two biggest slang terms are sick and awkward. Sick is an adjective that—not surprisingly—mean its opposite. It’s used almost entirely by guys, especially (at this institution) hockey players, in place of awesome or amazing. For example: That was a sick move! Or That was a totally sick move! Or Did you see the end of last night’s game? It was sick!

Awkward is used primarily by girls, which is fitting since it has more to do with social dynamics.

“I would never do that.”

“Why?”

“It would be so awkward. Can you imagine anything more awkward?”

It also has more complex connotations than sick. In fact, it seems to me, to signify a different and particular kind of social awareness. Sick feels like another version of cool or bad: one syllable terms that essentially mean good or really good. The prominence of the concern about awkwardness seems like something different and new. Obviously when I was a teenager there were awkward situations and moments, but we didn’t identify them in a such a clearly-defined category. Also, awkwardness can be uncomfortable or odd, and given those things it can often be quite funny. In fact, it seems to me to be the operating mode of the most popular comedy out there these days. The humor of The Office is built almost entirely around discomfort—our own and that of the characters—which is true as well of last summer’s hit movie, The Hangover.

I love to see the way people play with language, and make it fresh. I remember when my first son was born, and consciously not wanting to use the word cool around him too much. It seemed that everyone around me was using it for everything that was good or desirable. I felt like it put too much emphasis on what was cool and what wasn’t, and it also made people sound rather unintelligent when that was the only modifier that came out of their mouths. I wanted him to grow up with a greater range of descriptors at his disposal. In time, sick and awkward will either become passé or clichéd, but for now they feel fresh. Of course, as a middle-aged man I don’t actually use these terms. That would be awkward.

A Cormac McCarthy List

A few years ago, I was contemplating teaching Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, but I felt like teenagers would find it boring. I could see them complaining and rolling their eyes almost unanimously. I love McCarthy and The Road, but let’s face it—most of the time not much happens. Page after page, the boy and his dad have variations of the same conversation and the same experiences. A colleague went ahead and taught it—and the kids have loved it! Many of them have raved about it to me.

I thought back on my original approach to teaching it the other day when she told me she had a student complaining that he didn’t understand what was going on in it. If this were an early McCarthy book, I would understand the complaint, but The Road? Every day is more or less the same, and every day the boy is going to ask the same questions, and the dad is going to deal with them in the same way. I’m intentionally making it sound boring or static, because the reasons I love McCarthy have nothing to do with plot. I love the way he uses words and makes sentences. In fact, when I read him, I underline all the words I don’t know and the phrases that blow me out of the water. The words he chooses are lyrical, archaic, earthy, rich. Here’s my list from The Road (with page numbers):

Gryke (11)
Collet (16)
Batboard (17)
Bulldrums (17)
Pipeclayed (18)
Breakfront (21)
Chifforobe (22)
Discalced (24)
Shoddy (as a noun, 28)
Creedless (28)
Feverland (28)
Firedrake (31)
Godspoke (32)
Disclets (38)
Mayapple (39)
Pipissewa (39)
Mastic (48)
Cheroot (56)
Advents (59)
Bracken (61)
Stakebed (61)
Rachitic (63)
Colliculus (64)
Temporal gyrus (64)
Siwash (68)
Truckgarden (68)
Billets (of wood, 70)
Claggy (75)
Skifts (76)
Quoits (76)
Cowled (77)
Catamites (92)
Sedge (94)
Kerfs (98)
Port cochere (105)
Sleavings (106)
Dentil (107)
Haspstaple (109)
Tang (as part of a shovel, 109)
Illucid (116)
Swag (123)
Duff (124)
Chert (129)
Coolingboard (130)
Cakebell (184)
Envacuuming (191)
Slagpools (192)
Lightwires (192)
Loggia (204)
Knurled (209)
Scud (as a noun, 221)
Seacrawl (221)
Isocline (222)
Davits (223)
Turnbuckles (223)
Mae west (uncapitalized, 225)
Gimbaled (230)
Bindle (230)
Pampooties (243)
Salitter (261)
Entabled (261)
Bollards (262)
Gantry (262)
Scarpbolts (271)
Bloomery (271)
Uncalendared (273)
Incinerate (as an adjective, 273)
Ensepulchred (273)
Crozzled (273)
Hagmoss (274)
Counterspectacle (274)
Hydroptic (274)
Wimpled (286)
Torsional (287)

Contronyms

Last year I wrote about a non-word, aibohphobia, that I thought should be a word. Now I’ve got a much more practical non-term that is deserving of word status. A contronym is a word that is it own opposite. I have also seen these words referred to as antagonyms, auto-antonyms, and Janus words. Wikipedia even traces the use of contronym back to 1962.

I become most vividly aware of these words while teaching the short story, “The Guest” by Albert Camus. Before the kids even read the story, I point out that it was originally written in French, and that the original title is “L’hote,” a word that means not only guest, but also host. It’s a fine opportunity to point out the decisions translators must make, but the contradiction in the title also reflects the paradoxes and reversals of the story. It seems to me a clear case of a writer using ambiguity deliberately to increase the complexity of his story.

Many kids blurt out that it’s stupid to have a word mean its opposite and see it as a shortcoming of the French language, but I point out that we have many words like this in English, words such as

bolt
bound
cleave
clip
enjoin
fast
grade
handicap
trim
weather.

A more complete list can be found at this site.

As a side note, it’s interesting to me how many of these mean to attach or cling in one form and to separate or move in their other form. Perhaps an etymologist could explain why that is.

Slang also takes advantage of contranyms. Bad can mean good as well as something negative, and my students these days are quick to use sick when talking about really impressive things. It also makes me wonder if there is a term for when you use two different words that seem to be opposites for the same purpose. For example, something really appealing can be cool or hot.

Student Neologism

Horridifying! I’m pretty sure it was unintentional, but it’s kind of growing on me. For use when something is extremely horrifyingly awful, as in its original appearance in an in-class essay on The Color Purple: “the horridifying scenes of Celie’s rape.”

A Former Student Writes

"I got into the U of M a week and a half ago, and just tonight I found out that I've been wait-listed at Lewis & Clark, which is better than flat-out rejection. It's kind of like when the girl you have a crush on lets you take her out to a movie as friends, better than nothing I guess."

List Poems

I was introduced to my first list poem, “Silent Poem” by Robert Francis, as a junior in high school, and I fell in love immediately. Here was a poem without verbs, a twelve-line poem, each line comprised only of four compound nouns. It was a poem whose form seemed to match its content perfectly; 48 rustic nouns without a verb or punctuation created a sense of stillness, but the fact that they were all compound words gave it a physicality, a thickness that almost made the images palpable.

While in college, I discovered the poems of Campbell McGrath, another listmaker who was not afraid to leave the verbs out from time to time. His debut collection, Capitalism, included two poems, “What They Ate” and “What They Drank,” about the dietary practices of the American colonists, that were comprised entirely of lists and also rhymed. His second book, American Noise, contained a prose poem, “Sunset, Route 90, Brewster County, Texas,” which in a single 14-line sentence attempted to catalog the light of a particular time and place and ended up as nothing less than a prayer.

I started collecting such poems, photocopying them out of literary magazines and library books, and keeping them in a manilla folder where I could return to them whenever I wanted, and disappear into those small nouny worlds. As a teacher, I showed my students the different ways a list could be a poem (while always making sure they understood that not every list was a poem—far from it, in fact, which is part of the beauty of these things). It seemed a way to make poetry less intimidating, to emphasize the music of language and de-emphasize that adolescent search for the deep hidden meaning of a poem that seems to drive so many teenagers away from poetry.

I haven’t taught that poetry unit for a few years now, and had given my pursuit of such poems a break, hadn’t even thought about them for a while, and then today, in middle age, while waiting for my kids to arrive to open their Christmas presents, I stumbled on this wonderful, brief poem by Lola Haskins, four spare and beautiful lines on beauty and aging.

From a Dream Early in my Teaching Career

A student raises his hand, then asks me, "Are you a real teacher or just a bum who knows a lot about English?"

Observation / Pet Peeve

Language is a constantly evolving thing, so I tend not to get too caught up by changes in it. In fact, often I revel in them, and think that people who get their noses bent out of shape by minute changes are rigidly old school (a term itself that has risen in prominence lately). As a result, I know I run the risk of sounding like an old fuddy duddy in bringing this up, but I have noticed my students using cliché as an adjective with increasing frequency, both in speech and in their papers, and it grates on me. Until this morning, I thought it was a trend that was perhaps confined to adolescence, but in the recent profile of Philip Seymour Hoffman (a peer of mine, at least chronologically) in the New York Times Magazine, the amazing character actor, commented, “It’s a cliché thing to say . . .” and I cringed.

When and how did this happen? When did the d get dropped from the adjective form of clichéd? Why is the noun form now used adjectivally? Is there any going back? Should I just mourn the soon-to-be archaic form that I grew up with and move on?

New Link

Here's a little secret I was let in on today: PostSecret. Actually, I guess it's not that big a secret since more than a million visitors have already been to the site, and there have been four books that have resulted from submissions, but it was new to me. I learned about it at the first session of an English teacher's conference I am attending, and it seems an amazing thing at first perusal: people's confessions in the form of home-made postcards. The frisson between text and image in these very brief messages is powerful. Now that I know how popular this site is I can't help but wonder whether people are crafting some amazing lies rather than real confessions. Nonetheless, I'm intrigued and moved. I know I will be checking in weekly to see what is new there.

Overheard in the Hall

"It's so weird when you see teachers joking with each other," said one teenager to another.

"Yeah," her friend replied, "it's like watching a dog walk on its hind legs."

Good Advice

"Fail. Fail Again. Fail Better."

—Samuel Beckett

Antigone in Her Tomb

Zeus,
Your will, finally, is unknowable. I am
exhausted, exasperated. Look
where my most willful
vows have landed me. Father, mother, and a brother already
underground, exiled for eternity from our native
Thebes . . . I claim no kin in that city. My
so-called sister mourns alone,
respected by a fool and other frauds, a
quorum of spineless idiots
posing as law-abiding citizens. The
offense reeks—a blind man can see that.
No one deserves such a sentence, least of all
my deceived, much-wronged brother—
left to rot on the desert plain. Generations will
know I would not accept that un-
just decree. I am not sorry, though I admit
I may have misjudged the jury of the gods.
Here I will end my otherwise unending agony,
groomless, convicted, and unconvinced.
From now on, on the surface of this most grotesque
earth, my name will echo, a doer of
deeds, one who believes, who acts, while
Creon—cruel, unjust—will be forever
banished from the rolls of the noble.
Always, always, always,
Antigone

—Dallas Crow

"Antigone in Her Tomb" originally appeared in the Winter 2004 issue of Arion.

Teaching the Villanelle

Every year I make my students attempt a villanelle.
They complain, whine, contemplate spontaneous combustion.
An aspiring Dante consigns me to my own private ring in Hell.

They tell each other the guidelines are impossible,
swear to me the assignment requires unattainable perfection.
I urge them not to think of the villanelle’s

form as a constraint, but as a container—a vase, a well—
into which words are poured. They laugh sourly at my suggestion,
convinced of conspiracy: one more teacher’s maliciously-designed Hell.

I demur, though not demurely, tell them filling the form well
is one art, playing with it an equally valid option.
As evidence I offer Carruth’s extended villanelle

and Klappert’s “Ellie Mae.” For a few the stanzas start to gel.
To their surprise they find a friend in repetition.
The assignment becomes a puzzle rather than a sentence in Hell.

One student wakes more slowly to the task, Monday’s 8:30 bell
ringing as he prints out his formal explosion,
cursing not the darkness but his father in his villanelle—
a curse disguised as a blessing for his adolescent Hell.

—Dallas Crow

"Teaching the Villanelle" originally appeared in the Fall 2003 issue of Minnesota English Journal.

Aibohphobia

A few years ago, a student introduced me to this word—or perhaps, since I can’t find a traditional print dictionary that includes it, pseudoword (which is itself not actually an official, real word either, though perhaps it should be as well)—and I fell in love with it immediately. It means the fear of palindromes, and it is a term that is pleasing to me for its aesthetic logic. The urban dictionary lists it, as does wikipedia, and I’m all for everyone using it whenever possible, so that it becomes a legitimately recognized word. Of course, the opportunity to bring up the fear of palindromes doesn’t necessarily pop up all that often in conversation or in print, but it’s worth working on. If triskaidekaphobia can be a real word—and it is (the fear or superstition regarding the number 13)—why not aibohphobia?

Oops!

Last night I went to a coffee shop between 6 and 7 o’clock to grade my last batch of papers for the year. In trying to decide what to order (I rarely go to coffee shops or drink coffee, and after a hot, sunny day I was contemplating my first iced cup of the year, but a storm was coming in, the sky had darkened severely, and there was clearly something to be said for a warm mug, not to mention the question of sizes, choice of blends, etc.) I forgot to make mine a decaf. At 2 am I was dancing up a storm in my living room.

A Teaching Exercise for Ernest Hemingway’s “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”

I run my short story unit as a discussion class where we collaboratively come up with a close critical reading of the story at hand, which seems to be an effective, largely enjoyable approach. Nonetheless, the students really get a boost of energy when there is a bit of variation in the read-discuss pattern. For example, with Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “Gimpel the Fool,” I divide the class in half, and hold a debate on whether Gimpel is a fool or not. There is plenty of evidence for both sides, and without exception the kids have gotten behind their positions, searching through the texts for passages to support their claims, and often continuing the discussion off and on throughout the semester.

With Ernest Hemingway’s “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” I have had success dividing students into small groups (say threes), and having them come up with slogans for each of the three main characters, Francis, his wife, and Wilson, the hunting guide. In coming up with a catchy motto for each character the students have to understand their behavior and motivation, their fears and goals. I have been quite impressed with the identifying phrases the students (10th graders) have come up with, and the way they have explained them. It’s also for them a lengthy story with a narrative chronology that is somewhat hard to follow, and this exercise gives them clear entrée to the characters and their inner lives, which then allows us to look at the narrative with a fair understanding of the story already under our belts, rather than starting out by tripping over the order of the events.

Here is a sampling:

Francis
Flip-Flop Francis
The first kill is always the hardest
A boy to a man
Too little, too late
In like a lamb, out like a lion
Man up
The brave coward

Wilson
Red face, black heart
Wilson: friend or foe?
Bravery gets results
What can killing do for you?
The great white hunter
Hunt, kill, sleep with someone's wife
Wilson: standing his ground no matter what.

Margaret Macomber
Beauty begets betrayal
Kiss and kill
Murder is (not) my middle name
Easy and sleazy
I shot my husband but I did not shoot the buffalo
(I’m) in it for the money
Money > Love

For English Teachers Only: Poems to Teach Alongside Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five

• “Dulce et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen
• “why must itself up every of a park” by E.E. Cummings
• “next of course to god america i” by E.E. Cummings
• “i sing of Olaf glad and big” by E.E. Cummings
• “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” by Randall Jarrell
• “On Being Asked to Write a Poem Against the Vietnam War” by Hayden Carruth
• “Plague Victims Catapulted over Walls into Besieged City” by Thomas Lux

• "At the Un-National Monument Along the Canadian Border" by William Stafford

Nom de Guerre

Today in class, a student raised his hand to ask a question. When I called on him, he inadvertently addressed me as "Mr. Homework."