Kaf·ka·esque (käf'kə-ěsk') adj.
Of or relating to Franz Kafka or his writings.
Marked by surreal distortion and often a sense of impending danger: "Kafkaesque fantasies of the impassive interrogation, the false trial, the confiscated passport . . . haunt his innocence" (New Yorker).
Lunch again. The original two Guests have swelled to about twenty regulars, those hilarious students who come in during lunch to laugh, flirt, and talk, play cards and guitars, and beg me to intervene in squabbles over anything from relationship disputes to the occasional marker-on-face incident. Sometimes I feel like a sibling, sometimes a mother, and seldom a teacher in these wild half-hours. Mostly, I sit and read the paper, drink tea, and try to relax as well as possible against the colorful, moving background of faces and voices.
Today, I look up from a newspaper article, about a typo vigilante who corrects restaurant menues with chalk and white-out all around the country, when a small word is shoved between my eyes and the paper.
Actually rather a long word, Kafkaesque is printed on a rectangular magnet in 13-point font, and now one of my students is holding it out with concern.
"What's this mean?" he queries.
I smile. I wondered when this would happen. Two days ago, I brought the magnetic poetry set from my old house's refrigerator and put it on the side of the file cabinet next to my desk. Since the magnets were getting no use at my old house, I doubted that we could want them at the new place. So I scooped the whole collection into a plastic bag, then spent twenty minutes on Monday sticking them to the black cabinet while my docile first period worked on chapter questions. I had liked the effect of the white magnets on the black metal, but I anticipated a problem.
You see, this set of magnetic words was the "Genius Edition," given to me by some wry family member years ago in response to my penchant for ridiculously and unneccesarily large words. I tend to use "purchase" instead of "buy," or "indeed" instead of "yes," so they got these words to mock me. And they are long words. Wild words. Words that I don't even always recognize. On Monday, I considered the consequences of having a student ask for a definition that I was unable to give. It would be humbling. But humanizing. They can't really think I'm a genius, anyway. Not after this long.
Fortunately, I do know this word. Hopefully, lunch will end before he finds ersatz or salient.
"Ms. D?" he prods, as I take my time looking up from the typo-bandit article. "KAFF-KAIS-CUE?"
While I know that the normal teacher response is something snide like, "Look it up, why don't you, and learn something?" I'm also vaguely aware that the cruel dictionary expects some knowledge that Kafka is a person, not a Ukranian village or a Russian car or a drink made from vodka.
"OK, so there's this author named Kafka, and he writes crazy books. Like, really crazy. You don't know what's going on crazy. So, if you call something 'KAF-KA-esque,' you're saying it's weird, bizarre, wacked out, out of control..." (I always speak in italics and fragments at lunch. Class is the time for well-planned, rhetorical speech. This is the time for passion.)
"OK, OK, I get it," he nods, deep in comprehension. He disappears behind the overhead screen, while his friends begin handing me more magnets to define. I scrape definitons together from past reading, roots, context, and synonyms, none of which would probably have stood the Webster test.
As the bell rings for lunch, the first student pulls up the overhead screen to reveal the whiteboard behind it.
"Look what I wrote!" he is saying to anyone who will listen as they shuffle off to fifth period. His claims are proud, expansive, and extremely proper. "In my own words, this is what I believe about my teacher. This is how I can best describe her."
His scholarly syntax catches my ear; this is a student who will say "don't" when he shouldn't, and adds infinite "ed"s to actions in the very distant past. I look back at the board to see what he's talking about.
There, written in large, neat letters on the length of my whiteboard, is a simple and perfectly correct sentence.
"Ms. D is Kafkaesque."
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Thursday, April 10, 2008
A View to a Death
Simon is dying again.
In the late afternoon, as I fold my legs up and sit on top of a table at the back of the classroom, I again reach page 152, that horrible page, and young Simon is again stabbed, beaten, and kicked to death by a mob of terrified and demented little boys. This is the fifth time today I have read Chapter 9 of William Golding's Lord of the Flies aloud, and even now it is awful, too awful to breeze by or to read without some measure of solemnity. As the stranded boys form a phalanx of spears, sticks, and clubs, as they dance and chant and descend into a dark and stormy world of instinct and appetite, I force myself to continue crying their vicious chant: Kill the beast! Spill his blood! Cut his throat! Do him in! It's horrible, but I don't stammer or stumble, for the words are catchy, their spondaic insistency pounding on us like waves or the percussive end of a spear. Even in our classroom in Seattle, we are aware somehow of the thunder, the hunger, and the primal terror back there on the beach. With the lights off, only the half-light of a cloudy April day filtering through the windows, our imaginations are dragged into this fiendish scene.
I can't stop us from getting there, to the bottom of the page, when the boys turn on one of their own. When "the circle became a horseshoe" and the mouth of jagged spears devours Simon, the compassionate, gentle boy who had discovered the secret of the island, that they had nothing to fear but the evil of their own dark natures. As Golding takes us through the murder, his subtle prose is lost on some of my students, who are either on the wrong page or are gazing at the clock, which has stalled, as it does every day, on 2:00 PM. But one girl is more astute; as soon as the small figure comes out of the forest to them, she knows what will happen.
"No!" she wails as I continue reading. She lays her book cover-down on the desk, folds her arms over her head like Simon. "Not Simon! That's awful! This is awful!"
I can relate. Ever since losing Beth in Little Women, I haven't been above grieving for fictional characters. There is something intimate about reading, about getting to know these characters through their actions and words, especially for someone who has lived as long in imagination as I have. I've brought them along, this time, in learning to love Simon, the child who helps others, whose common sense and bravery set him apart from the savagery of his peers. "He's the best character we've got, you guys," I've told them, wondering how obliquely I can describe a Christ figure without actually mentioning the name.
But I keep reading. I feel callous as I read these horrible words aloud, almost as if I were somehow complicit in this terrible crime, merely by bearing the news of it to my students. I try to find a tone that is solemn enough, respectful enough, for the gravity of this moment. I read the rest of the chapter, my voice and Golding's words eventually carrying Simon out to sea with the tide, among waves glowing with phosphorescence. It's beautiful, a dignified end for this saintly, sacrificed character.
As we pack up, my students express various levels of horror at the state of things, and I wish I could tell them that it got better. The truth, as I recall now, is that Simon's death won't fix things. Killed like so many innocents, perhaps Simon is Golding's cynical memorial to those lost in the two world wars which preceded his publishing of Lord of the Flies. At the end of this book, I think glumly, I'll have told them that people are basically bad. What am I doing to them?
One of the themes we've encountered in the novel has been the loss of innocence that gradually meets all of the boys. I think about Simon's last act, after his disillusioning encounter with the Devil, an act of compassion. I remind the kids that even after innocence is lost, goodness and compassion remain. "He's still Simon," I say. "Even after everything horrible he's seen today, he's still a helper. He's still good. Just not innocent."
Like them, I think now. Yes, if they believe it this book will take some of the luster off of the world, some of the inherent goodness to which perhaps some of them still hold. Today has been a rubbing away of innocence for me, even, as I have five times recited the details of a murder, engraving images into my mind that I may never wholly forget. I remember that literature is often gruesome, that violence is real and the truth of it must be revealed. Even when the truth is dark and dreadful, like today.
On the other side, I know, is the hope that they will grow up, even as they shed the naivete of childhood, into people capable of striving for truth and working compassion, courageously good against the evil they find in the world around them.
In the late afternoon, as I fold my legs up and sit on top of a table at the back of the classroom, I again reach page 152, that horrible page, and young Simon is again stabbed, beaten, and kicked to death by a mob of terrified and demented little boys. This is the fifth time today I have read Chapter 9 of William Golding's Lord of the Flies aloud, and even now it is awful, too awful to breeze by or to read without some measure of solemnity. As the stranded boys form a phalanx of spears, sticks, and clubs, as they dance and chant and descend into a dark and stormy world of instinct and appetite, I force myself to continue crying their vicious chant: Kill the beast! Spill his blood! Cut his throat! Do him in! It's horrible, but I don't stammer or stumble, for the words are catchy, their spondaic insistency pounding on us like waves or the percussive end of a spear. Even in our classroom in Seattle, we are aware somehow of the thunder, the hunger, and the primal terror back there on the beach. With the lights off, only the half-light of a cloudy April day filtering through the windows, our imaginations are dragged into this fiendish scene.
I can't stop us from getting there, to the bottom of the page, when the boys turn on one of their own. When "the circle became a horseshoe" and the mouth of jagged spears devours Simon, the compassionate, gentle boy who had discovered the secret of the island, that they had nothing to fear but the evil of their own dark natures. As Golding takes us through the murder, his subtle prose is lost on some of my students, who are either on the wrong page or are gazing at the clock, which has stalled, as it does every day, on 2:00 PM. But one girl is more astute; as soon as the small figure comes out of the forest to them, she knows what will happen.
"No!" she wails as I continue reading. She lays her book cover-down on the desk, folds her arms over her head like Simon. "Not Simon! That's awful! This is awful!"
I can relate. Ever since losing Beth in Little Women, I haven't been above grieving for fictional characters. There is something intimate about reading, about getting to know these characters through their actions and words, especially for someone who has lived as long in imagination as I have. I've brought them along, this time, in learning to love Simon, the child who helps others, whose common sense and bravery set him apart from the savagery of his peers. "He's the best character we've got, you guys," I've told them, wondering how obliquely I can describe a Christ figure without actually mentioning the name.
But I keep reading. I feel callous as I read these horrible words aloud, almost as if I were somehow complicit in this terrible crime, merely by bearing the news of it to my students. I try to find a tone that is solemn enough, respectful enough, for the gravity of this moment. I read the rest of the chapter, my voice and Golding's words eventually carrying Simon out to sea with the tide, among waves glowing with phosphorescence. It's beautiful, a dignified end for this saintly, sacrificed character.
As we pack up, my students express various levels of horror at the state of things, and I wish I could tell them that it got better. The truth, as I recall now, is that Simon's death won't fix things. Killed like so many innocents, perhaps Simon is Golding's cynical memorial to those lost in the two world wars which preceded his publishing of Lord of the Flies. At the end of this book, I think glumly, I'll have told them that people are basically bad. What am I doing to them?
One of the themes we've encountered in the novel has been the loss of innocence that gradually meets all of the boys. I think about Simon's last act, after his disillusioning encounter with the Devil, an act of compassion. I remind the kids that even after innocence is lost, goodness and compassion remain. "He's still Simon," I say. "Even after everything horrible he's seen today, he's still a helper. He's still good. Just not innocent."
Like them, I think now. Yes, if they believe it this book will take some of the luster off of the world, some of the inherent goodness to which perhaps some of them still hold. Today has been a rubbing away of innocence for me, even, as I have five times recited the details of a murder, engraving images into my mind that I may never wholly forget. I remember that literature is often gruesome, that violence is real and the truth of it must be revealed. Even when the truth is dark and dreadful, like today.
On the other side, I know, is the hope that they will grow up, even as they shed the naivete of childhood, into people capable of striving for truth and working compassion, courageously good against the evil they find in the world around them.
Monday, April 7, 2008
its the internet. get over it
The sentence is buried in about a zillion comments to the latest post on the clever blog Stuff White People Like, a recent stop on my lunchtime reading on the Internet, when the Seattle Times, delivered daily, seems just too earnest.
The comments had veered away from the topic at hand--socialized medicine--and into a bizarre world of name-calling and personal attacks that strike me as truly ridiculous, even embarrassing. It's all so awful, but I don't tear myself away, as I probably should have. I wonder, as I read, how old are the posters, especially since I believe only a narrow demographic of age, education and geographic and ethnic background would find this blog funny enough--but not too offensive--to read. The comments spiral into juvenile assaults, until at last someone tells a string of personal anecdotes vaguely relating back to medicine (something about tanning). The stories, though mercifully more on topic, are all written in a manner free from the boundaries of spelling, punctuation, and usage, and I scan them mildly. I've seen worse, after all.
The next comment, however, is from an irate and less hardened Standard English defender, coolly criticizing the previous poster's lack of skill. This merits the above response: "its the internet. get over it"
That's all. And though the technique is not noticeably different than any of the other posts or than much of the writing that I read daily, it made me think. Is this true? Has the Internet become a zone of international language anarchy? Am I so backwards to still read these comments as if they were written by junior high kids who don't know any better? Or are these comments written by tech-savvy graduate students, accountants, and business owners who simply can't be bothered to write whole words anymore?
I recently had the kids write essays about whether or not spelling matters in contemporary communication. I reminded them of spellcheck and advertizing's cavalier ways with words. I made them consider what areas really required proper spelling these days. I asked, "If I were a first grade teacher, should I even bother to teach spelling to the next generation." 90% said I should, which impressed me. Apparently, my urban, mostly poor students can find the holes in this technological web, along with the reputation gained by shoddy spelling. But still, as I read thousands of "ur"s instead of "you are" (or even "you're"!), and hundreds of students who answer questions with "IDK" ("I don't know") and call it good, I wonder if laziness, not innovation, is winning over our kids.
The comments had veered away from the topic at hand--socialized medicine--and into a bizarre world of name-calling and personal attacks that strike me as truly ridiculous, even embarrassing. It's all so awful, but I don't tear myself away, as I probably should have. I wonder, as I read, how old are the posters, especially since I believe only a narrow demographic of age, education and geographic and ethnic background would find this blog funny enough--but not too offensive--to read. The comments spiral into juvenile assaults, until at last someone tells a string of personal anecdotes vaguely relating back to medicine (something about tanning). The stories, though mercifully more on topic, are all written in a manner free from the boundaries of spelling, punctuation, and usage, and I scan them mildly. I've seen worse, after all.
The next comment, however, is from an irate and less hardened Standard English defender, coolly criticizing the previous poster's lack of skill. This merits the above response: "its the internet. get over it"
That's all. And though the technique is not noticeably different than any of the other posts or than much of the writing that I read daily, it made me think. Is this true? Has the Internet become a zone of international language anarchy? Am I so backwards to still read these comments as if they were written by junior high kids who don't know any better? Or are these comments written by tech-savvy graduate students, accountants, and business owners who simply can't be bothered to write whole words anymore?
I recently had the kids write essays about whether or not spelling matters in contemporary communication. I reminded them of spellcheck and advertizing's cavalier ways with words. I made them consider what areas really required proper spelling these days. I asked, "If I were a first grade teacher, should I even bother to teach spelling to the next generation." 90% said I should, which impressed me. Apparently, my urban, mostly poor students can find the holes in this technological web, along with the reputation gained by shoddy spelling. But still, as I read thousands of "ur"s instead of "you are" (or even "you're"!), and hundreds of students who answer questions with "IDK" ("I don't know") and call it good, I wonder if laziness, not innovation, is winning over our kids.
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