March 31st, 2011 / 4:24 pm
Snippets
Snippets
Blake Butler—
At Montevidayo, an interesting post from a student who was picked up by campus police after they discovered what he’d written for an assignment in which he was asked to imitate Johannes Göransson.
One of my students was interrogated by the campus police for making a visual representation (crayon and pen on posterboard) of the structure of Tobias Wolff’s “Bullet in the Brain.”
I’m super-disturbed by this student’s account. Orwell’s thought police are upon us, increasingly.
holy shit
holy shit
Hey, look there’s a doll in here with a penis.
I’ve always wondered about this when talking about sedition.
If you are writing a first person narrative that talks about a desire to kill the current president, using the current president’s name and everything, could that get you arrested?
I’ve always wondered about this when talking about sedition.
If you are writing a first person narrative that talks about a desire to kill the current president, using the current president’s name and everything, could that get you arrested?
Nicholson Baker got pretty close to flirting with it, and nobody came for him.
Ben Metcalf wrote an article a few years back in Harper’s about whether he was allowed to say he wanted to hunt down George Bush and kill him with his bare hands. He makes ther statement regularly throughout the article, but only as a hypothetical phrase, and I’m pretty sure he’s still alive.
Maybe they were the “bad poetry” police.
Aww. But yeah, kind of.
i’m super-disturbed that this student wanted to use spray paint to dye his hair green…
something similar to this happened to me when i was at ball state. i started a metal band with friends where all the lyrics were comically violent and over the top mysoginistic, murder, satan, blah blah blah. i just wanted to take offensiveness as far as i could to see if it could still be funny. the album was recorded with friends over a single weekend. on sunday night i posted the album on my ball state website. then a friend posted a link to the album on a ball state livejournal community. monday or tuesday, the virginia tech shootings happened. someone listened to the album and got freaked the fuck out i guess. i was called in to the disciplinary office. i forgot the official name for of the office or the guy’s job title. doesn’t matter. in the meeting i actually had to explain the band to this guy and then post an apology/explanation on the livejournal community to avoid suspension. even after the apology ball state took away my webspace privileges.
motherfuckers. it was not the luck of the irish.
I dunno. Is this problematic? They found out it was a poem and they let him go.
Why did they read him his rights like an episode of Law & Order if they were only bringing him in for questioning?
gotta fight the man
that was a good weekend.
i like the idea of the police reading montevidayo
This whole thing just sounds fake.
I want to hear this record.
I’m sure everything you wrote when you were 19 was impeccable
I like the “the super-freaky super-nunchuck from outer-space.”
Something similar happened to me in high school, concerning a “disturbing” mini comic book I’d drawn and written about an evil priest abusing kids at an orphanage, and one of the kids then getting revenge.
Understandable that the authorities want to make sure students aren’t planning on doing anything violent, but it sucks to be young and put in a position where you have to defend your art or creative writing or whatever as simply being that, and not some evil master plan to kill people with a doll’s penis. I’m glad this student was able to see the humor in the situation.
Gonna go practice my super-freaky super-nunchuck moves now.
“This is a Poem, Not an Act of Terrorism” (2011)
compare to:
“Poetry must be a violent assault…We want to glorify war — the only cure for the world…” (Futurist Manifesto, 1909)
Oh the difference one hundred years can make.
here is where you will find the album in question:
http://prayerhelmet.blogspot.com/2010/09/new-old-metal-album.html
here is the first album we made, which is probably funnier:
http://prayerhelmet.blogspot.com/2010/09/blogger.html
if this story is true, said thought police would be whichever random citizen found the poem and reported it to police.
if it was me who wrote it, i’m not sure whether i’d be happy my words had that much an impact on someone, or that it had been so resolutely misinterpreted.
tho i tend to concur with the ‘bad poetry police’ notion stated below.
In all the great paranoiac dystopian novels (and in the totalitarian regimes that were in some ways their analogues), the state conditioned the individuals to report on one another in just these ways. And of course that’s not always a bad thing — I am comforted when I’m on the NYC Subway and see the “If You See Something, Say Something” signs. But: C’mon. It was a bad undergraduate creative writing exercise of the sort teachers see every day. And the guy who made it was working in the computer lab on St. Patrick’s Day in a leprechaun suit. That’s not a very threatening scenario, except to the extent that post-Columbine and post-Virginia Tech we’ve raised the level of alarm to a degree that when a fellow student overreacts by seeing Columbine and Virginia Tech in a guy in a leprechaun suit who is working on a bad undergraduate creative writing assignment in a computer lab, and when the police further overreact, severely, by taking the student into custody and interrogating him harshly instead of simply approaching him decently and raising the question: What is this, exactly?
I teach two sections of introductory creative writing every semester. They are full of hackneyed but sincere poems and stories about murders, forensics investigations, zombies, werewolves, revenge fantasies, and even the occasional school shooting. Their foremost quality is their ineptness, and who would expect more from someone who has never tried to do something as difficult as writing a poem or story is? The proper response, I’d think, is to have a conversation, and the thrust of the conversation in most cases is a conversation about how to take the material that interests the would-be writer enough to write it and turn it more fully in the direction of the extraordinary thing the writer had in her head when she tried it the first time.
Sometimes I wonder if we don’t fuel the craziness by ensuring every imbalanced person in the country that if they act out, we will give them a lot of attention, some of it very public. That’s incentive for a certain kind of person, and incentive isn’t what you want to offer. Turning down the heat seems like a good first step. This whole exchange was rooted in the kind of fearful overreaction that is making our society in general more suspicious, more fearful of whatever we deem to be other, and more likely to bring the good instruments of law and justice and peacekeeping down upon the heads of people who haven’t done anything wrong, and all of it too quickly. I’m glad this kid ran into some reasonable police officers, and not the other kind we now see with semi-regularity on YouTube.
And this is the most encouraging part of the story, I think: After the policemen overreacted (it’s possible that their response was dictated by policy, which raises a larger issue), they did let him go after he vetted his story, and they didn’t hit him or act in any other unlawful manner.
It doesn’t seem like it would be fake when you consider that (1) The student’s professor was involved enough in the situation to involve Johannes Goransson, (2) Goransson did homework enough to make sure it was true before putting it up on the Montevidayo blog, and (3) Goransson, who is a respected professor at Notre Dame, has always been a reliable source of information in the past.
i’d be rather tickled talking to officers in a situation like this. i’d especially want them to make sure they get back to the person who filed the complaint to explain what had happened.
i’d be rather tickled talking to officers in a situation like this. i’d especially want them to make sure they get back to the person who filed the complaint to explain what had happened.
Maybe so, but I’m guessing you’re not a scared and inexperienced kid in a leprechaun costume.
from my understanding, you’re free to say and prints things like this, it just requires a couple neighborly visits from the secret service.
anyone see the mockmentary ‘death of a president’? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0853096/
How times have changed. Thirty five years ago the Reveille ran this picture of me over some students found journal contemplating the big dive off the high rise dorm. No one came looking for me.
http://toulousestreet.wordpress.com/2009/09/30/pure-despair-for-the-savor-of-it/
That’s all true. I just wanted to be on record that I thought it sounded fake to me just in case it is.
A bunch of little weasels in my creative writing class must have reported some of my writings because–no fucking joke–a couple of FBI—yes, FBI, for christ’s sake– agents showed up at my door asking if I had weapons of any kind and whether or not I intended on “hurting” anyone. It was fucking surreal. They came in a black car and everything. You can’t make this shit up. My best friend was a college professor and she showed me the list of “warning signs” that teacher’s should report. Not many friends, interested in disturbing subject matter, quiet and reserved, etc, etc. Basically everyone who’s not a jock or cheerleader.
what’d you write about?
The usual stuff I was fascinated with then. Sexualized murder, etc.