I suppose a diary is no good if you beat yourself up for not writing in it, but last fall is a great blank in terms of reading anything other than student papers and the things that I was teaching. My war themed English 111 class featured books that I had read before: Toni Morrison's "Beloved" (the freshman common text for that year); "Heart of Darkness;" "Regeneration" and "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close." I read the latter two in the summer after our Italy trip, and was too busy thinking about how to teach them and making notes to write about them here. "Heart of Darkness" bored them, "Beloved" bewildered and appalled them. "Regeneration" seemed to appeal especially to the men in my class, with it's clear-eyed and unsentimental depictions of masculine friendships and the pressure of "manly" expectations. "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" for all the critics' grumblings about the book being gimmicky and overly precious was adored almost with exception. My students loved being able to read a novel that was so wholly contemporary, multimedia, and that dealt with tragedies that they could understand and had gone through themselves.
"The Tin Drum" on the other hand, went over like a lead balloon. They hated its episodic structure, were repulsed especially by Oskar's sexual proclivities and his irreverence. Instead of seeing the book as a celebration of the idiosyncrasies of human life triumphing over forces that sought to homogenize and crush the spirit of a country--a continent--my students saw it as a sick revelry in the bizarre dark side of life. Part of the reason I have not been so good at recording my book log activity is because I have been trying to pull a poem together about the experience of teaching Grass, about all of my apologetics and justifications about why it is necessary to not look away from the mistakes that glare out from human history. The poem is not done, perhaps it will never be, but it captures something about the futility I felt trying to harness the attention of young people who didn't want to see these things in the world.
After class, the seminarians complain
Here’s what breaks them:
Oskar, age sixteen,
spitting into the mound of fizz powder
in Maria’s cupped hand to make it
sizzle and itch, to lap
the sugared bubbles from her skin.
The men of God object.
To now they’ve tolerated
the worst kinds of violence,
vulgarities raw on the page,
an arc of war that spreads
across the centuries like a mold.
It’s an old argument:
they don’t want to dwell
on the ways the world has gone wrong
and most of all,
the perversity of the sensual,
the images flashbulb-blinding.
Would God
deny them that,
the sparkle of carbonation
and sweetness across their tongues,
the shock of the body’s knowledge?
They want permission to close the book.
In sin and shame, I grant it.
