The hour badly spent

Friday afternoon, servicey tipster Sean Trolinder let us know the wheres and whens of the English department’s super-secret final soiree this semester (Beach Museum, 6pm). Believe me, I really wanted to bring someone with me but let’s face it, you’re all pretty lame, so I went alone.

Upon arrival, the head of the department took my coat, which felt like a little bit of awkward because I also have a class with her (Not for long! End of semester! To be honest I’ll kind of miss it. I’ve been feeling weirdly nostalgic lately. Let’s not talk about this any more). Upstairs, the thing was in full swing. Everyone was dressed to the nines and I hardly knew anybody. And the people I did know had already gone off into grad-student cliques. And I needed a drink.

I spent a few minutes doing that thing where you circle the periphery of the party, gaping stupidly at the people who know what they’re doing but not quite knowing how to approach them and start talking. Largely because, as I’ve suspected all long, they all look pretty fucking sexy and that shit is distracting. What, are you gonna go up to Naomi Wood and tell her "hot dress!" That’s okay, because she came up to me.

"This might be the last of these parties for a while. The English department budget’s getting drastically cut," she said. Oh noes! Then we made fun of the Collegian. With which I acquired a new teacher-crush.

Some professors performed a short reading of ‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales,’ a short story by Dylan Thomas. It is fascinating to watch certain people read out loud: Naomi, Michael Donnelly, Wendy Matlock, Liz Dodd, Donald Kimball, Alyssa Dawson; they all had this incredible ability to inflect the sentence just so the humor comes out just so at the end of it. Fun fun fun (yes, I am a huge dork).

I finally gave Wendy Matlock a piece of my mind. Specifically, she is brilliant and enthusiastic, which makes class with her amazing. But! The students, so christianey; sometimes class feels like church, and when it gets like that, my eyes glaze over and my mind shuts down, not to return until someone says "may I get freudian for a moment?" I was afraid you’d never ask.

Phil Nel, by the way, is massively cooler than you. Just ask him anything about music. I dare you.

Tim Dayton is also massively cooler than you. He only listens to punk rock made between 1976 and 1984. We know this from talking to the head of the women’s studies program, Angela Hubler, Dayton’s wife, who wasn’t afraid to zing him. "Does he ever let one else speak in class?" No, he doesn’t, but we don’t mind. We never have anything important to add anyway.

Then we went to the Kathouse, where I flirted with a bunch of grad students. Happy Festivus!

Lately, appreciating poetry feels more and more impossible. Some pieces are accessible, but too much of them are all Ezra Poundish, too moderney and inscrutable (maybe I’m just far too lazy to scrute). Wednesday night I went to former Poet Laureate Charles Simic’s reading of his own collected works hardly knowing what to expect, either from him or myself.

Liz Dodd delivered the introductory speech, as she is wont to do. She is actually getting more and more prolix each time she does this, drawing on more interpretations and more metaphors and more more with each speech. The next day’s Collegian article would say that she "opened with an elegant and insightful introduction of Simic, beginning with a brief biography and ending with an exploration of some of the themes within his work." Heh. It simply made me restless; intro is like bling, and the less, the better. Too quotey, I wrote down and showed the Hipster. We ducked behind the people in front of us to laugh, hoping the Eyes of Dodd couldn’t see all the way to our irreverentially muted mirth at the back of Forum Hall.

The Former Poet Laureate began by taking us into his first poem, "Shelley," with a portrait of his own life as it was when he was writing the poem. The portrait did not lack for fine detail, which is to say that as he talked about his life in New York City in the 80s, "a period where nothing much happened to me," he admitted, he began to drift. Nothing much piled on and on, slightly garbled. Perhaps the Former Poet Laureate is nervous in front of crowds? "I was wondering how someone could be the Poet Laureate and have so much trouble speaking English," my companion later remarked. I began to wonder if this was the actual poem (the streaming of consciousness of an Old, which would have actually been amazing). Too New Yorkey, I noted to the Hipster. She agreed. Another bout of stifled laughter.

At length he started to recite "Shelley." The next day’s Collegian article would read, “’Shelley spoke of a mad, blind, dying king,’ he read, his voice rising with import. Then a new tone of conversational story-telling came." Nominally a tribute to the Romantic poet, the piece felt like a ghostly observer gliding through a world of discrete scenes. A hunchbacked shopkeeper. A three-fingered waiter. A man bloodied and half-conscious after a street fight steadies himself upon a lamp post. Every setting is slightly wondrous but vaguely threatening; behind the observer/narrator’s keen eye lies a restless fear of fully apprehending what’s around him.

His subsequent selections grew a bit lighter, often more ironic. "His poetic voice fit his accent," commented Hipster. "My Beloved," a love poem about the impossibility of writing a love poem, was, for this post-happy hour crowd, a bit easier to digest.

“In the fine print of her face/ Her eyes are two loopholes/ No, let me start again/Her eyes are flies in milk/ Her eyes are baby Draculas/ To hell with her eyes/ Let me tell you about her mouth.” Then her breasts. Then her legs. Then the carnal treasure between them, like the precious key to freedom for a jailed convict. It was a perfectly awkward metaphor, so much so that, amid the audience’s reaction, one laugh rose higher and rosier than all the others in Forum hall. "That was a naughty laugh," Simic remarked, his Slavic inflections leaning on naughty just so. That laugh came from Elizabeth Dodd.

He goes on to other poems. By and by I actually begin to like them, although he did offer another babbling introduction to "The Note." Too explainey, I scribble and show the Hipster. She rolls her eyes, exasperated but not acerbic. Of late she has remarked that I seem "happier," that my "eyes look different" these past few weeks, and I’m fairly sure the way she rolls her eyes at my (charmingly?) predictable jokes has something to do with this.

"The Note" turned out to be pretty good; a lighthearted persona poem, terse, but long enough for a story, with a surprise ending and a dead mouse (Ha ha, spoiler alert).

Simic finished up with a poem about a boy on a somewhat failed date. Dodd was the first to stand up. Flowery trousers notwithstanding, she affected the most Creedlike pose possible, holding us all in suspence for a good ten seconds for her cheery announcement.

"There are books! For sale!"

[K-State Collegian]

The Poetess recently gave voice to the existential horror of attending an informal gathering of English professors: "I’m not smart enough."

Well, yes you are, and that’s really no big deal. English professors are just like the rest of us. Nobody comes to a party to be outsmarted. They just want you to listen to them, get their jokes, seek explanations for what you don’t understand, and squeeze their asses when no one else is looking (Professor Dodd will use colourful pants to indicate her receptivity. But do not try this with the Saucy Aussie. I saw her first!).

Your best strategy is to figure out what everybody thinks of everybody else, which you can use for leverage when you ascend to the top of a multinational crime syndicate. This exercise is all about self-effacement. You are not here to show off your resplendent panoply of grace and charm. And if you have enough grace and charm to impress the English professors then I hate you already.

So don’t name-drop, like I did with Princess Glitter Bunny ("Oh of course I know what you’re talking about. Unlike the other undergrads, I’ve read Derrida! Har har har!") That’s just wankerish. Rather, just ask questions. Find an old man, with a bow tie and bushy eyebrows, who is already drunk. He is the best place to start. He is a font of experience, good humor, and as a bonus, he is actually kind of awesome. Ask about what he’s written, what he likes to read — Milton, apparently — where he’s travelled, etc. Let him do the work. He’s just itching to unload some jovial backstabbey nugget about one of his peers. Just wait. I promise it will be funny. You should also probably try to make yourself as drunk as he is.

Do not sit next to Rhymes With Flan. You did not dress well enough for that, and this fact will gnaw at you every second you are there. She is tall, slender, blonde, stylish, and her diction is flawless. If she were your age, she’d be a wholesome sorority frenemy. You, by contrast, mumble and stutter (which is partly why you’re listening and not talking); your sartorial contribution is a wrinkled green docent shirt your ex gave you seven years ago. You wore it today because you really don’t have a windbreaker, but next to Rhymes With Flan, you look like you’re homeless.

Eventually, something underminerey like this will happen:

The Hour Badly Spent:  Do you mind if I smoke?
Rhymes With Flan:       Oh. Please, don’t. Ew [shudders].
The Hour Badly Spent:  Oh, okay.
Rhymes With Flan:       Yech.

You’ll see the Perverted Shakespeare Professor. In class, he’s so upbeat, almost cheerleaderey; this evening, long after class, he might seem somehow jaded and weary. We suspect the production of ‘Tis Pitty Shee’s A Whore must have been stressful, what with all the preparations being made during those weeks after spring break where everybody goes through a ceaseless gauntlet of exams and term papers and projects. That is why the cast only met for their first full rehearsal a day before curtain time.

I don’t know shit about Jacobean drama. Or any type of drama, for that matter. But I’ll talk about it anyway. The performance — Saturday night, wish you were there! — was fun and celebratory, and slightly campy; just like the Professor conducts his classes, except with slightly more incest. My favorite actor was the Roman soldier: his uniform was a polo shirt with some pinned-on medals.

You might hear about studentfucking. Kind of interesting, but it’s really to be expected, and it’s only juicy if you actually know either of the parties involved, which you don’t, because you don’t know anybody, which is why you’re drinking with English professors on Thursday night and the following Friday afternoon. So put the hearsay out of your mind, because (A) you don’t want to get anyone fired, and (B) you’re not an earnest do-goodey cockblocker. Also: don’t shout out "studentfucker!" in the middle of a lecture (Sorry about that! It was noisy! How was I supposed to know the dean would hear me?).

You might also hear of dumb stuff the students have said — about ethnic minorities and such. It won’t be so bad. All the real wingnuts either go into engineering or polisci. Don’t worry about who, exactly, said what; there’s a good chance you’ll find out soon enough who this person is, based on your ability to stereotype better than she can (a gender neutral pronoun would be really nice right about now!). She will get a column in the Collegian. She will bring guns to class. She will run for student government. She will meet a soldier who will love her for her "values," and they will marry young and have lots of little douchebags, who will attend K-State.

You, however, will not find love. You will find rum, which is just a different kind of love.

Speaking of which, in time, the Most Annoying English-Major Couple will make an appearance. They really are cute together. They will sit next to each other, of course; bemusedly chatting about their plans for the future. They will lightly stroke each others’ arms, but not excessively; they will smile at each others’ literary puns, but not excessively; and one of them will drink. Excessively. And that is the real secret to shmoozing with people who have more intelligence, class, and wit than you.

Yesterday Anthony Doerr visited K-State and read a short story from his latest book, The Shell Collector. That reading was the best K-State’s had this year. Afterward, the English department got together at Rock-A Belly’s. I was midway through my second G&T when the Saucy Aussie made some idle comment that ended with "vagina." I remember precisely what she sad: "Crikey! Kangaroo Kylie Minogue sheila dingo boomerang bushwhacked VAGINA!" The table went silent for a second, and Saucy Aussie seemed embarrassed, probably because she thought she had crossed some comfort line.

Well, that’s not why we were quiet. The word "vagina" is actually a great source of comfort. Hearing it is like having a cool breeze roll across you on a summer day. No; we went silent because each of us had hoped to be the first to say "vagina" that evening, and when she beat us to the (kitty) punch, no one was ready with another clever vaginal follow-up. Personally, her awesomeness made me feel like a slow-witted prude.

I lamely tried to break the silence. "Thanks! I’ve been waiting for someone to say ‘vagina’ all day," I ejaculated. But ‘vagina’ doesn’t roll off my tongue as nicely as it does from hers. OR DOES IT?

After dinner, Rhymes With Visa drove a few of us - Imad, Tony Doerr, Saucy Aussie - to the top of the hill that overlooks the city. We had to get out and hike a little ways to reach the summit, from which we had a beautiful view of Best Buy. Then Rhymes With Visa drove us back to town. Not til much later did I realize how pathetically funny the whole scene actually was: we were basically all guided up to the top of Makeout friggin’ Mountain, and yet it never occurred to anybody to cop a feel. Lame.

Vagina! There; our reputations are safe.