July 27th, 2010 / 4:20 pm
Behind the Scenes
Blake Butler
Behind the Scenes
1987 David Foster Wallace student evaluation
[Used with permission of Jessamyn West. Thank you to her.]
Tags: david foster wallace, student evaluation
B+
Her insights into fiction were usually quite acute.
jaundiced!
She then went on to go back in time and write a book that was adapted into a film and nominated for an Academy Award!
The crossing out and replacing of “certain.”
Using certain as “a certain kind of” plateau, and then seeing the possibility for misinterpretation.
Rather, he saw the second ‘certain’ looming on the other side of the colon upon re-reading: no one wants that kind of resonance on their report card.
He used the pen only once, when he dated, emended and signed.
That’s a B+? Man, maybe you have to actually be Hemingway or Faulkner or something to get an A.
Hi there — this is my image and it’s got a CC by-nc-sa 2.0 license on it. Would you mind taking the image down or taking the ads off this page?
jaundicedly yrs,
Jessamyn
hi Jessamyn,
sure. it was on flickr, so seemed fair game, but in light of the CC by-nc-sa 2.0 or something i will just make it a link instead.
sorry for the burp.
b
That *is* a pretty impressive photograph.
She said this is *my image*
I feel v inadequate.
Hmm. I’m now completely confused by the Creative Commons license. Though this blog is supported by the occasional ad, is a post on the blog really using this image for “commercial purposes?”
probably not. but i took it down anyway since she asked.
This seems smart, but I wonder how I would feel about it were I the student in question.
B+
Her insights into fiction were usually quite acute.
jaundiced!
She then went on to go back in time and write a book that was adapted into a film and nominated for an Academy Award!
Probably very anxious. “I could be pretty great if only I didn’t suck so much!”
But I always feel anxious.
Very sharp advice in any case.
The crossing out and replacing of “certain.”
Using certain as “a certain kind of” plateau, and then seeing the possibility for misinterpretation.
Rather, he saw the second ‘certain’ looming on the other side of the colon upon re-reading: no one wants that kind of resonance on their report card.
He used the pen only once, when he dated, emended and signed.
That’s a B+? Man, maybe you have to actually be Hemingway or Faulkner or something to get an A.
Hi there — this is my image and it’s got a CC by-nc-sa 2.0 license on it. Would you mind taking the image down or taking the ads off this page?
jaundicedly yrs,
Jessamyn
hi Jessamyn,
sure. it was on flickr, so seemed fair game, but in light of the CC by-nc-sa 2.0 or something i will just make it a link instead.
sorry for the burp.
b
That *is* a pretty impressive photograph.
She said this is *my image*
I feel v inadequate.
We worked it out, it’s cool.
[…] from Jessamyn West on David Foster Wallace as a teacher: her remembrance of him @ librarian.net, including his quote, “Just because it […]
Hmm. I’m now completely confused by the Creative Commons license. Though this blog is supported by the occasional ad, is a post on the blog really using this image for “commercial purposes?”
probably not. but i took it down anyway since she asked.
This seems smart, but I wonder how I would feel about it were I the student in question.
Nothing special here. Typical workshop lingo. Just because he’s dead doesn’t mean every thing he did in life was interesting or worth discussing.
Except it was.
Okay. I’ll give you a cookie then for being easily satisfied.
You’re right. Nothing else he did was interesting or worth discussing.
nobody’s saying it’s infinite jest 2 you ass. maybe people want to take a peek at something because it’s a nice little thing to glance at, nothing more, nothing less.
Probably very anxious. “I could be pretty great if only I didn’t suck so much!”
But I always feel anxious.
Very sharp advice in any case.
I don’t know–the phrasing is slack and padded and lazy (“more than occasionally”; “a certain number of times”) and downright clunky (“deepen her stories into . . . the kind of . . . attitude . . .”). Utterly meaningless qualifying adverbs are all over the place. We are kidding ourselves if we find anything other than the perfunctory in this specimen of his prose. If I were the student, I would feel as if the teacher wasn’t making much of an effort. But I am very sad that the man took his own life. Maybe he was very depressed when he wrote this evaluation. It doesn’t sound as if his heart was in it. Yeah, the more I reread it, the more I think that this stretch of prose might be symptomatic of deep depression.
Maybe they do, angry little gene.
Maybe some of us realize how prevalent it is now to “take a peek” at everything the man did since he’s dead and that’s the fashionable thing to do. I’m sure you’d also like to “take a peek” at one of his frozen turds.
You’re right. This is the first time some small detail from his life that would’ve never been discussed before he died was suddenly worth discussing. Where have I been?!
We worked it out, it’s cool.
i’m not angry, i called you an ass because you are one. use of scare quotes. belittling tone. hiding behind a moniker. see, some of us glance at blogs and boards to find out info, get a chuckle, maybe engage in conversation. we don’t spend 11 hrs trolling on a board or post 75% of the posts on a 200 post thread. i’m chill. i’m going to go to bed, wake up in the morning and do shit. you can talk all the shit you want, won’t vex me none. because i know you’re the spineless type that gets off on little faceless spats. i guess we all have to have hobbies. but at the very least, use your real name.
Anyone else feel this reads like he’s critiquing his own 1987 work?
one of my creative workshop professors gave me a C.
while nothing short of an unexpected pockmark on my transcript, i must admit it was something of a delight watching her take up almost the entire 45 minutes devoted to discussing this one short story of mine, just to savagely criticize every sentence i had written with this strangely alarmist voice. she even kept cutting off the dozen or so other students who kept disagreeing with just about everything she had to say.
for the life of me i can’t remember her name. or even the name of her only published book (published mid-the semester i had with her) that she said had taken 17 years to write and was just over 200 pages long. the book she said had “cost her friendships” in the few days following its publication. i also seem to recall her admitting to us that she had surreptitiously been stealing from someone’s life story for years, and that was where she got the plot of her one book. she recommended the technique as i seem to remember, but really can’t recall.
long story short, i politely wrote the the lit. department about her and she was gone the next semester. apparently i hadn’t been the one to not C eye-to-eye with the way she conducted her class.
Same here. I worked 12 hours today. Didn’t “take a peek” until late at night, the early AM, and this is what I get–some ho-hum teaching eval from 1908 ripped from a personal flickr account without permission. I’m disappointed. Off to bed I guess!
whenever i read one of your posts i envision you as a fancy corporate lawyer who is also a gigantic chicken with a voice that fluctuates between Winston Churchill delivering a long, consternating oratory on masturbation / Colonel Sanders flogging a 9 year old over stolen pie. You might also be Bill O’Reilly or Bea Arthur.
i like this artifact simply because it’s interesting to see dfw engage with student work in his unwavering idiom. props to b for posting, props to jessamyn for sharing, props to dfw for fastidious, incisive evals. ahoy.
I don’t understand the outrage in response to snark. And, Re: MFBombs super-threading… if ten avatars come in to attack, that lengthens the thread… why should MFBomb then be blamed for lengthening the thread? Americans are Puritans w/r/t the sin of dissent. Someone voicing a difference with the Bloc Opinion is a sinner by default. Americans like joiners.
“Nothing special here. Typical workshop lingo. Just because he’s dead doesn’t mean every thing he did in life was interesting or worth discussing.”
That’s not exactly rich with ad hominems. What’s the problem with it? I think the cited artifact (now removed for reasons of “copyright”! Really? Laugh) was interesting for the very reason MFBomb disdains it: it shows DFW executing the intelligence-sapping chore of a job that was obviously harmful to his writing. (Note: having seen a book/books by “Jessamyn West” in my grandmother’s book case when I was a kid, I was initially confused by this post).
Esp. funny to see avant gardish writers attacking MFBomb for being a non-joiner.
he probably had to write a ton of these and loathed every minute of it… bored people write boring things
who knows though
Wow. Proof my persona works, as you’ve described my opposite, though–seriously–I’m a huge Golden Girls fan. Addicted. Betty White is the best. RIP to the rest of the crew. Why would you ever mention BOR and a feminist like Bea Arthur in the same sentence? Come on now!
Meanwhile, Jessamyn is interesting in her own right:
“West was one of about three dozen “credentialed bloggers” at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, the first time that such an event issued press credentials to bloggers. She indicated in a New York Times feature on the group that her goal was making “the librarian voice in politics stronger and louder.” Her first-day quip that the convention was “Burning Man for Democrats, without the nudity or drugs” was widely reported.
In 2007, West made a YouTube video of herself installing Ubuntu on two library computers, which attracted thousands of views and free CDs from Canonical. DesktopLinux.com called it a “non-jaded, non-techie look at Ubuntu.” Cory Doctorow, writing on the blog Boing Boing, dubbed her an “internet folk hero”, and brought the video 14,000 views in a day and a half.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessamyn_West_%28librarian%29
Esp. funny to see avant gardish writers attacking MFBomb for being a non-joiner.
———–
Thanks, Steven. I find this particularly ironic, and it’s one reason why I probably won’t spend much more time here. Way too insular and posturing for a true avant garder such as myself.
Opinions: don’t let teachers express them.
Nothing special here. Typical workshop lingo. Just because he’s dead doesn’t mean every thing he did in life was interesting or worth discussing.
Except it was.
Sounds to me like a really nice way of telling a bright college student she writes standard college-age fiction.
As for the qualifiers, have you read his work? They’re the ‘conversational’ part of his winning lyrical + conversational one-two combo. (Or, as Franzen said, he’s the man that elevated ‘sort of’ to an art).
But isn’t a big part of the DFW myth the business about his loving his students and loving teaching? The letter on exhibit reveals a man barely going through the least strenuous of motions.
I’ve read his work. I saw the intelligence, the enormous, searching intelligence. I did not see artistry.
Okay. I’ll give you a cookie then for being easily satisfied.
no outrage, i think MF is kind of precious. i like colonel sanders. i like big chickens. i like the terms “ho-hum” and “frozen turd” when i think about colonel sanders saying them.
and yeah, fuck america, though i seem to recall germany having displayed a special propensity toward conformity a time or two. whoops.
why is teaching “intelligence-sapping”? lots of marvelous teachers are also marvelous writers and maintain that balance well — and enthusiastically.
we like the golden girls. see, we’re all friends.
You’re right. Nothing else he did was interesting or worth discussing.
nobody’s saying it’s infinite jest 2 you ass. maybe people want to take a peek at something because it’s a nice little thing to glance at, nothing more, nothing less.
i’m flattered you find me “precious.” means a lot coming from someone who eschews most forms of punctuation. see, i can do the non-punctuation thing too and pretend i’m ‘experimental’–i can also employ the tao lin single quote tactic to amplify the preciousness if you’d like.
anyway, thanks for your feedback, though i realize i’ve reached my commenting quota and won’t be able to respond to the 10,000 commenters who respond to me within the next 24 hours to call me a troll.
My thought too.
Actually not sure about Hemingway on a curve this steep.
“and yeah, fuck america, though i seem to recall germany having displayed a special propensity toward conformity a time or two. whoops.”
Dood. I’ve been living in Europe for 20 years and I never get tired of hearing that particularly provincial response to that particular social critique. What should scare you is the fact that, roughly 70 years later, Americans are writing the book on dissent-suppression. Germans are *still* conformist cunts but they don’t go around in the clueless haze of the belief that they’re the soul of groovy.
“why is teaching “intelligence-sapping”? lots of marvelous teachers are also marvelous writers and maintain that balance well — and enthusiastically.”-Kristin
“Oh boy, don’t even get me started on teaching… The more time and energy spent on teaching, which is extraordinarily hard to do well, the less time spent on your own work… I find myself saying this year the same thing I said last year, and it’s a little bit horrifying.” -DFW
to everyone else reading along and not commenting amidst whatever exactly this is all about, i recommend intense Jazz Fusion as an accompanying soundtrack. wild and wacky stuff.
Hey, ‘avan garde’ ain’t synonymous w/ contrarian. Bunuel (according to Bunuel) was the most bourgeois gentleman around, yo. And Leni Riefenstahl had mad skillz, and she was an ACTUAL NAZI!
Just sayin’.
1. Leni Riefenstahl = avant garde? Not in this timestream.
2. the dichotomy is avant garde vs conformist, not avant garde vs working class.
1. It’s late. After 3 AM, bougeois = conformist.
And B, the Rief was pretty cutting edge. At least in terms of technique. (And let’s face it, in terms of avant writing, technique’s all you got. Unless you believe, like Cixous or Silliman, that writing random text destroys patriarchy and/or capitalism).
I’m 70% sure I’m white. Right!
I don’t know–the phrasing is slack and padded and lazy (“more than occasionally”; “a certain number of times”) and downright clunky (“deepen her stories into . . . the kind of . . . attitude . . .”). Utterly meaningless qualifying adverbs are all over the place. We are kidding ourselves if we find anything other than the perfunctory in this specimen of his prose. If I were the student, I would feel as if the teacher wasn’t making much of an effort. But I am very sad that the man took his own life. Maybe he was very depressed when he wrote this evaluation. It doesn’t sound as if his heart was in it. Yeah, the more I reread it, the more I think that this stretch of prose might be symptomatic of deep depression.
Maybe they do, angry little gene.
Maybe some of us realize how prevalent it is now to “take a peek” at everything the man did since he’s dead and that’s the fashionable thing to do. I’m sure you’d also like to “take a peek” at one of his frozen turds.
Murnau is laughing in his box. But he’s also a tad irritated. He thinks Rief = Nolan but he’s just a jealous.
“long story short, i politely wrote the the lit. department about her and she was gone the next semester.”
But doesn’t that sort of indicate the cage DFW was locked in as a teacher? Too much brutal honesty and you get sacked. Too much unfiltered praise and it looks like you’re coasting. Result: the zestless eval we are all now discussing… DFW reads like a racehorse being used as a mule.
I’m not saying that the teacher who got sacked in *your* case, Zus, was right or even a capable teacher; I’m saying the power of the student/client to sack the teacher might be sort of antithetical to the greater goal of teaching the student/clients to write (and weeding out the students with no talent).
(“sort ofs” used as an homage)
You’re right. This is the first time some small detail from his life that would’ve never been discussed before he died was suddenly worth discussing. Where have I been?!
i’m not angry, i called you an ass because you are one. use of scare quotes. belittling tone. hiding behind a moniker. see, some of us glance at blogs and boards to find out info, get a chuckle, maybe engage in conversation. we don’t spend 11 hrs trolling on a board or post 75% of the posts on a 200 post thread. i’m chill. i’m going to go to bed, wake up in the morning and do shit. you can talk all the shit you want, won’t vex me none. because i know you’re the spineless type that gets off on little faceless spats. i guess we all have to have hobbies. but at the very least, use your real name.
Anyone else feel this reads like he’s critiquing his own 1987 work?
Same here. I worked 12 hours today. Didn’t “take a peek” until late at night, the early AM, and this is what I get–some ho-hum teaching eval from 1908 ripped from a personal flickr account without permission. I’m disappointed. Off to bed I guess!
i love brutal honesty, i really do. i just also happen to loath (and in some cases actively seek to snuff out) unjustified and tactless criticism. i struggled a bit composing my above original comment because i didn’t want to sound like i was complaining, since if there’s anything that one professor did teach me, it was to learn what to do with bad criticism. the more she would sort of open up class with tales related to her failed (sorry, had to say it) writing career, the more it became obvious where all of her negativity was coming from. i recall her talking for something like 15 minutes straight about how “great and famous” harold bloom is, and her conjecturing as to what being “as famous as he is” might be like.
helluva thing, really. putting up someone mid-life crisis to teach impressionable undergraduates about the joys and virtues of crafting fiction. i can say that i learned a lot from the class, C or no C (btw i should add: my letter about her was mostly: ‘i got a C, which isn’t the end of my world, but here’s why that doesn’t make any sense to me’; i should also add: i wrote to her first and got a one sentence reply), but i wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of the others in that class walked away from their experience just that bit more sympathetic to their parents’ suggestions to ‘take business classes.’ maybe that’s why she had been put there, like you said, to weed out student-sans-talents.
while currently not a teacher myself, i’ve taught writing in the past and whewf, it’s not exactly easy. my mantra was always: write to be read. as in: imagine what your words would look like to a set of eyes not in your head (didn’t phrase it that way, somehow that phrasing seems… gross). and then i’d try to tie that back into some sort of pop-philosophical notion of “perceptual empathy” and then would just keep stressing, stressing, stressing the role of a reader in a text, in every paragraph, in every sentence, in the shape of a work-at-large, etc.
but that’s just me. i felt guilty handing out anything less than a B, and wasted a couple classes trying to talk sense into the too-cool-for-scholarship students who seemed to take pleasure in being determined to fail. i also used to preach that “anyone can write if you’re first willing to admit that you can’t,” so maybe i was the real chump in those situations.
‘a racehorse being used as a mule’ <— i really like this analogy, though to be honest, anyone worth a damn needs experiences like these to be able to be taken seriously down the road. i'm not a giant fan of DFW (frankly, i think his fiction [while well crafted] was consistently wrong-headed in its thematic execution… though i do loves me summa his nonfiction) but the one line he has his name on that i've always loved was (and i paraphrase from a spotty memory… you know what? fuck it. google! get over here!):
"Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed."
whenever i read one of your posts i envision you as a fancy corporate lawyer who is also a gigantic chicken with a voice that fluctuates between Winston Churchill delivering a long, consternating oratory on masturbation / Colonel Sanders flogging a 9 year old over stolen pie. You might also be Bill O’Reilly or Bea Arthur.
i like this artifact simply because it’s interesting to see dfw engage with student work in his unwavering idiom. props to b for posting, props to jessamyn for sharing, props to dfw for fastidious, incisive evals. ahoy.
Zus: again: want to make clear I wasn’t claiming that your cranky teacher was a martyr by default…
And: I think the tricky part has always got to be: *which* reader? The dumbest reader? The smartest reader? The smart reader who doesn’t have much time to read? The smart reader who’s been reading for 40 years and is bored with the standard approach, sees every “twist” telegraphed a mile off and looks right through the narrative to see the stultifying normative presets informing the text? Or the smart reader who’s been reading seriously for only a few years and hasn’t shaken off the imprint of the educational institution that guided her/his early choices?
Also: the teaching of creative writing is now deformed by the expectation that all transactions between buyers and a professional vendor should yield standard results in a given field. But if you’re selling sports equipment and a delusional quadriplegic rolls in saying he wants more “bang for his buck”, you might have to risk a breach of decorum (and a lawsuit) and steer him elsewhere. The diff being it takes a millisecond to make that call (in the preceding example) whereas it may take as long as a week to make the same call in a creative writing class. The fact that students are now signing up for these things with a possible career in mind only adds pressure to the mix.
Teaching is worse for some writers than others; for some writers, teaching is as bad as moving to Hollywood. DFW hung himself over bad chemicals, but if he hadn’t, the teaching would have fucked him up anyway. Nabokov (for all his fond reminiscences of Cornell) owed Lolita (and the windfall she brought him) for the work of his that came after her. And he was teaching in the days when you could both eff a student and “F” his/her writing without getting in that much trouble.
I don’t understand the outrage in response to snark. And, Re: MFBombs super-threading… if ten avatars come in to attack, that lengthens the thread… why should MFBomb then be blamed for lengthening the thread? Americans are Puritans w/r/t the sin of dissent. Someone voicing a difference with the Bloc Opinion is a sinner by default. Americans like joiners.
“Nothing special here. Typical workshop lingo. Just because he’s dead doesn’t mean every thing he did in life was interesting or worth discussing.”
That’s not exactly rich with ad hominems. What’s the problem with it? I think the cited artifact (now removed for reasons of “copyright”! Really? Laugh) was interesting for the very reason MFBomb disdains it: it shows DFW executing the intelligence-sapping chore of a job that was obviously harmful to his writing. (Note: having seen a book/books by “Jessamyn West” in my grandmother’s book case when I was a kid, I was initially confused by this post).
Esp. funny to see avant gardish writers attacking MFBomb for being a non-joiner.
he probably had to write a ton of these and loathed every minute of it… bored people write boring things
who knows though
Wow. Proof my persona works, as you’ve described my opposite, though–seriously–I’m a huge Golden Girls fan. Addicted. Betty White is the best. RIP to the rest of the crew. Why would you ever mention BOR and a feminist like Bea Arthur in the same sentence? Come on now!
Meanwhile, Jessamyn is interesting in her own right:
“West was one of about three dozen “credentialed bloggers” at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, the first time that such an event issued press credentials to bloggers. She indicated in a New York Times feature on the group that her goal was making “the librarian voice in politics stronger and louder.” Her first-day quip that the convention was “Burning Man for Democrats, without the nudity or drugs” was widely reported.
In 2007, West made a YouTube video of herself installing Ubuntu on two library computers, which attracted thousands of views and free CDs from Canonical. DesktopLinux.com called it a “non-jaded, non-techie look at Ubuntu.” Cory Doctorow, writing on the blog Boing Boing, dubbed her an “internet folk hero”, and brought the video 14,000 views in a day and a half.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessamyn_West_%28librarian%29
Esp. funny to see avant gardish writers attacking MFBomb for being a non-joiner.
———–
Thanks, Steven. I find this particularly ironic, and it’s one reason why I probably won’t spend much more time here. Way too insular and posturing for a true avant garder such as myself.
Opinions: don’t let teachers express them.
Sounds to me like a really nice way of telling a bright college student she writes standard college-age fiction.
As for the qualifiers, have you read his work? They’re the ‘conversational’ part of his winning lyrical + conversational one-two combo. (Or, as Franzen said, he’s the man that elevated ‘sort of’ to an art).
But isn’t a big part of the DFW myth the business about his loving his students and loving teaching? The letter on exhibit reveals a man barely going through the least strenuous of motions.
I’ve read his work. I saw the intelligence, the enormous, searching intelligence. I did not see artistry.
no outrage, i think MF is kind of precious. i like colonel sanders. i like big chickens. i like the terms “ho-hum” and “frozen turd” when i think about colonel sanders saying them.
and yeah, fuck america, though i seem to recall germany having displayed a special propensity toward conformity a time or two. whoops.
why is teaching “intelligence-sapping”? lots of marvelous teachers are also marvelous writers and maintain that balance well — and enthusiastically.
we like the golden girls. see, we’re all friends.
i’m flattered you find me “precious.” means a lot coming from someone who eschews most forms of punctuation. see, i can do the non-punctuation thing too and pretend i’m ‘experimental’–i can also employ the tao lin single quote tactic to amplify the preciousness if you’d like.
anyway, thanks for your feedback, though i realize i’ve reached my commenting quota and won’t be able to respond to the 10,000 commenters who respond to me within the next 24 hours to call me a troll.
My thought too.
Actually not sure about Hemingway on a curve this steep.
“and yeah, fuck america, though i seem to recall germany having displayed a special propensity toward conformity a time or two. whoops.”
Dood. I’ve been living in Europe for 20 years and I never get tired of hearing that particularly provincial response to that particular social critique. What should scare you is the fact that, roughly 70 years later, Americans are writing the book on dissent-suppression. Germans are *still* conformist cunts but they don’t go around in the clueless haze of the belief that they’re the soul of groovy.
“why is teaching “intelligence-sapping”? lots of marvelous teachers are also marvelous writers and maintain that balance well — and enthusiastically.”-Kristin
“Oh boy, don’t even get me started on teaching… The more time and energy spent on teaching, which is extraordinarily hard to do well, the less time spent on your own work… I find myself saying this year the same thing I said last year, and it’s a little bit horrifying.” -DFW
Hey, ‘avan garde’ ain’t synonymous w/ contrarian. Bunuel (according to Bunuel) was the most bourgeois gentleman around, yo. And Leni Riefenstahl had mad skillz, and she was an ACTUAL NAZI!
Just sayin’.
1. Leni Riefenstahl = avant garde? Not in this timestream.
2. the dichotomy is avant garde vs conformist, not avant garde vs working class.
1. It’s late. After 3 AM, bougeois = conformist.
And B, the Rief was pretty cutting edge. At least in terms of technique. (And let’s face it, in terms of avant writing, technique’s all you got. Unless you believe, like Cixous or Silliman, that writing random text destroys patriarchy and/or capitalism).
I’m 70% sure I’m white. Right!
Murnau is laughing in his box. But he’s also a tad irritated. He thinks Rief = Nolan but he’s just a jealous.
“long story short, i politely wrote the the lit. department about her and she was gone the next semester.”
But doesn’t that sort of indicate the cage DFW was locked in as a teacher? Too much brutal honesty and you get sacked. Too much unfiltered praise and it looks like you’re coasting. Result: the zestless eval we are all now discussing… DFW reads like a racehorse being used as a mule.
I’m not saying that the teacher who got sacked in *your* case, Zus, was right or even a capable teacher; I’m saying the power of the student/client to sack the teacher might be sort of antithetical to the greater goal of teaching the student/clients to write (and weeding out the students with no talent).
(“sort ofs” used as an homage)
ZZZZUSYA’S DISCUSSION WITH STEVEN BELOW IS WORTH 1.5 OF THESE POSTS AT LEAST, BUT LOOK WHAT IT CAME FROM.
My impression of this letter: “She writes the same cynical/snarky narcissistic look-at-me BS that 99% of people her age writes, but she is a good person who participates and tries hard and I want to make her sound good to you Mr. Administrative Doof.”
I’m not familiar w/ this kind of student eval (what does the dept. do with them?), but I imagine he wrote a lot like this. Seems as if he was torn between the urge to give an honest critique and the need to not fuck up the student’s “career prospects” by speaking negatively of them or add the lone UNIMAGINABLE C to their transcripts.
I had a similar reading, hence my initial response. Didn’t realize it would cause a shitstorm or whinefeast. I’ve spent the last 10 years as a student or teacher in workshops, and there’s nothing unfamiliar here, or surprising, even though it’s written by DFW.
Other than Steven’s analysis, what else is there to do with this thing, other than put it up on Ebay?
Zus: again: want to make clear I wasn’t claiming that your cranky teacher was a martyr by default…
And: I think the tricky part has always got to be: *which* reader? The dumbest reader? The smartest reader? The smart reader who doesn’t have much time to read? The smart reader who’s been reading for 40 years and is bored with the standard approach, sees every “twist” telegraphed a mile off and looks right through the narrative to see the stultifying normative presets informing the text? Or the smart reader who’s been reading seriously for only a few years and hasn’t shaken off the imprint of the educational institution that guided her/his early choices?
Also: the teaching of creative writing is now deformed by the expectation that all transactions between buyers and a professional vendor should yield standard results in a given field. But if you’re selling sports equipment and a delusional quadriplegic rolls in saying he wants more “bang for his buck”, you might have to risk a breach of decorum (and a lawsuit) and steer him elsewhere. The diff being it takes a millisecond to make that call (in the preceding example) whereas it may take as long as a week to make the same call in a creative writing class. The fact that students are now signing up for these things with a possible career in mind only adds pressure to the mix.
Teaching is worse for some writers than others; for some writers, teaching is as bad as moving to Hollywood. DFW hung himself over bad chemicals, but if he hadn’t, the teaching would have fucked him up anyway. Nabokov (for all his fond reminiscences of Cornell) owed Lolita (and the windfall she brought him) for the work of his that came after her. And he was teaching in the days when you could both eff a student and “F” his/her writing without getting in that much trouble.
Bett is your favorite on that show, over Estelle? GTFO
Erm… maybe write a memoir based on it…?
ZZZZUSYA’S DISCUSSION WITH STEVEN BELOW IS WORTH 1.5 OF THESE POSTS AT LEAST, BUT LOOK WHAT IT CAME FROM.
“he probably had to write a ton of these and loathed every minute of it… bored people write boring things”
Interestingly, he didn’t write many of these, at the time. This was his first teaching assignment out of college. And he only wrote evaluations for Hampshire students because our transcripts had evaluations and not grades. So there were three of us from Hampshire in the class; I’m not sure if the other people got evaluations or not. I know I asked for one. And yeah I think he was basically saying “Hey one trick pony, you could maybe do some stuff if you fleshed out your writing a little” I would drop by during office hours and talk to him and this is pretty in line with what he had said to me before.
I was getting more into linguistics anyhow so I moved on writing-wise. I think he loved teaching generally — that was my impression from being in his class and talking to other students of his — but that all the interpersonal stuff, the connecting stuff, was a bit difficult for him. Who knows, it’s all history now.
My impression of this letter: “She writes the same cynical/snarky narcissistic look-at-me BS that 99% of people her age writes, but she is a good person who participates and tries hard and I want to make her sound good to you Mr. Administrative Doof.”
I’m not familiar w/ this kind of student eval (what does the dept. do with them?), but I imagine he wrote a lot like this. Seems as if he was torn between the urge to give an honest critique and the need to not fuck up the student’s “career prospects” by speaking negatively of them or add the lone UNIMAGINABLE C to their transcripts.
I had a similar reading, hence my initial response. Didn’t realize it would cause a shitstorm or whinefeast. I’ve spent the last 10 years as a student or teacher in workshops, and there’s nothing unfamiliar here, or surprising, even though it’s written by DFW.
Other than Steven’s analysis, what else is there to do with this thing, other than put it up on Ebay?
Bett is your favorite on that show, over Estelle? GTFO
Erm… maybe write a memoir based on it…?
“he probably had to write a ton of these and loathed every minute of it… bored people write boring things”
Interestingly, he didn’t write many of these, at the time. This was his first teaching assignment out of college. And he only wrote evaluations for Hampshire students because our transcripts had evaluations and not grades. So there were three of us from Hampshire in the class; I’m not sure if the other people got evaluations or not. I know I asked for one. And yeah I think he was basically saying “Hey one trick pony, you could maybe do some stuff if you fleshed out your writing a little” I would drop by during office hours and talk to him and this is pretty in line with what he had said to me before.
I was getting more into linguistics anyhow so I moved on writing-wise. I think he loved teaching generally — that was my impression from being in his class and talking to other students of his — but that all the interpersonal stuff, the connecting stuff, was a bit difficult for him. Who knows, it’s all history now.
Thank you, I enjoy being right. Off you go now.
maybe i haven’t been doing this long enough to start aiming right a reader sub-groups. i tend to just tell myself to write for people who are literate.
and i don’t really get the quadriplegic analogy. i still believe anyone can write, though i guess it would be harder if you didn’t have hands, or there were fluids where most of your brain should be, that sort of thing, but maybe that’s me being pollyannaish.
No, I’m still here and will decide to leave when I want to. I apologize for not masturbating over this pedestrian document. However, I’m glad you enjoy “being right,” toeing the party line, kissing ass, and not having an original thought or bone in your 95 pound body.
What an infant.
It’s interesting because it’s a document written by an amazing writer.
Thank you, I enjoy being right. Off you go now.
No, I’m still here and will decide to leave when I want to. I apologize for not masturbating over this pedestrian document. However, I’m glad you enjoy “being right,” toeing the party line, kissing ass, and not having an original thought or bone in your 95 pound body.
What an infant.
It’s interesting because it’s a document written by an amazing writer.
i’m never really sure where i’m coming from…
wait, ‘what’?
[…] A student evaluation written in 1987 by David Foster Wallace was published. “She articulated herself very well: other students learned from her.” […]
“i still believe anyone can write…”
But, Zus, why do you believe this? Where’s the evidence? Have you really seen so much material out there that was worth the time? Why the reflex-egalitarianism when it comes to writing? Most humans can walk and hop and run, too, but I never hear anyone claiming that “everyone can be a Dancer”…or a painter, or an actor, or a sculptor, or a singer or batik the most splendid hippie garments for the Renaissance Fair. Everyone probably has a talent they can call their own, yeah, but that talent is not always *writing*… to think so would imply that Writing is the easiest of the Arts to master. Um, but it’s not! Batik is easier, for a start…
“there were fluids where most of your brain should be”
Can Jellyheads write? I don’t remember.
YES, ZZZZIPP HAD THE SAME REACTION AFTER HE HIT “SUBMIT”
“i still believe anyone can write…”
But, Zus, why do you believe this? Where’s the evidence? Have you really seen so much material out there that was worth the time? Why the reflex-egalitarianism when it comes to writing? Most humans can walk and hop and run, too, but I never hear anyone claiming that “everyone can be a Dancer”…or a painter, or an actor, or a sculptor, or a singer or batik the most splendid hippie garments for the Renaissance Fair. Everyone probably has a talent they can call their own, yeah, but that talent is not always *writing*… to think so would imply that Writing is the easiest of the Arts to master. Um, but it’s not! Batik is easier, for a start…
“there were fluids where most of your brain should be”
Can Jellyheads write? I don’t remember.
YES, ZZZZIPP HAD THE SAME REACTION AFTER HE HIT “SUBMIT”
@S.A.
i could be completely didactic and claim that by saying ‘anyone can write’ i’m actually implying that a lot of people aren’t actually very good at it… in the same vein that i can dance, just not very well.
still, i just believe if you’re willing to admit to all your faults at a particular skill you want to get better at it, it tends help you improve, and if it’s an artform we’re talking about, it at least helps you get more of what you were after in the first place.