Although we’ll all be in the same room, our communication will happen exclusively through chat rooms and listservs, or over social media. Distraction and split attention will be mandatory. So will aimless drifting and intuitive surfing. The students will be encouraged to get lost on the Web, disappearing for three hours in a Situationist-inspired dérive, drowsily emerging from the digital haze only when class is over. We will enter a collective dreamspace, an experience out of which the students will be expected to render works of literature....
Nothing is off limits: if it is on the Internet, it is fair play. Students watching three hours of porn can use it as the basis for compelling erotica; they can troll nefarious right-wing sites, scraping hate-filled language for spy thrillers; they can render celebrity Twitter feeds into epic Dadaist poetry; they can recast Facebook feeds as novellas; or they can simply hand in their browser history at the end of a session and present it as a memoir....
November 13, 2014
"Come January, fifteen University of Pennsylvania creative-writing students and I will sit silently in a room with nothing more than our devices and a Wi-Fi connection..."
"... for three hours a week, in a course called 'Wasting Time on the Internet,'" writes Kenneth Goldsmith.
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54 comments:
I've found the best places for hate-filled rhetoric has been the leftwing sites. They're orgasmic.
Great training for their future careers.
The soft bigotry of low expectations isn't just for the underprivileged. Somewhere along the way, these kids are going to wonder just what it was that fucked up their lives. But they probably won't be able to figure it out.
Mummy and Dad will be so proud.
Easily worth $5,000 to take that course.
Will they be permitted to "troll nefarious left-wing sites"?
Nah. There's no such thing. Jerk.
Why require them to be in the same room?
Why three hours?
Well, all you have to do is go to any contemporary undergrad lecture class anyway to replicate this "Situationist-inspired dérive."
It sounds like all of the constraints of the traditional classroom, all of the lack of focus of the internet.
They could read Richard Poirier on Robert Frost.
Just don't tweet at the Prof looking for a lesson plan.
I spent all this money on a college education, am deep in debt, and I can't even get a good job!
Mommy!
they can troll nefarious right-wing sites,
so we get to what this is all about after all.
I think I might try and go full Dada: Shit in my chair, call it Susan, recite a page of the phone book...
Collect a pile of ears atop a centrally located table...march out of the classroom at full attention...but softly repeating:
"No one will ever know the real Napoleon"
the first thing i thought of when i read this was "why don't they just do this after class or on weekends and save the tuition?"
yeah, i still have some naive moments.
they can troll nefarious right-wing sites, scraping hate-filled language
Apparently this guy is not the token republican in the university faculty.
I never really focused on how big a threat the internet is to creative writing programs. Here are millions of people writing. Subjecting their work to open comments and criticism. You can claim expertise, but can you show that it actually helps your students? How many writers workshops can stand to see their work compared to a good blog.
Whom would you hire if you needed some creative writing done (I know that's a silly premise, but let's go with it): Someone from this class, or, say, Betamax3000?
Sounds to me like a Montessori Kindergarten with a bunch of 5 year olds using their ipads.
I just skimmed the article. I didn't see whether or not they would be permitted to masturbate, which is a very common internet-empowered activity. If so, will the students be permitted to watch each other?
They could make a movie about it.
Cost of attendance only $64,200 a year. So there, parents.
How do I get to charge people $165 an hour to surf the web?
Why three hours?
Because, if you are going to do nothing, you need time to ease into it. Otherwise, severe muscle strain, or worse, could result.
they can troll nefarious right-wing sites, scraping hate-filled language for spy thrillers;
Notorious right-wing sites such as Prof. Althouse, She-Wolf of the SS.
Being an English Professor is the closest thing to stealing money for living.
You can basically teach anything and say anything - as long as its in English and not conservative.
Almost every listing of the English Courses at every University is "Onion" material, except its real life.
Althouse needs a "You can't make this shit up" tag.
garage mahal 101?
they can troll nefarious right-wing sites
I think you're safe. There's nothing nefarious about the professor's blog.
A college class to learn how to waste time on the internet. Put it all in Mandarin and then you at least learn another language.
Did you know that on the internet there is one word for 'snow' but three-hundred for 'masturbate'? Eskimos need to use Google more.
"Come January" follows "Cannot Ejaculate December."
I know, I know: I am not as good as Betamax3000. That doesn't mean that I still can't be loved.
Life imitates Dilbert. http://dilbert.com/dyn/str_strip/000000000/00000000/0000000/000000/20000/1000/000/21053/21053.strip.gif
U-Penn tuition and fees are over 47K a year.
I suspect that anyone willing to pay for this course is actually being groomed for voluntary human sacrifice as a heart or liver donor. You have to find the REALLY gullible ones, and this is a brilliant way to do it.
This is the sort of thing you can do at home for just about nothing.
It's frightening that they can find fifteen students this stupid. I am not sure, but I imagine that most persons watching three hours of porn would wish to get a little more actively involved, and thus the classroom environment is not a benefit.
I suppose in a few years they'll be able to use their creative writing skills in the next Occupy tent camp, demanding that their student loans be cancelled. I won't be sympathetic.
Curious George said...
garage mahal 101?
ok, that honestly made me laugh out loud
That's an interesting article, and the guy has an interesting point. I don't doubt that he's seen so many Miss America style I Think The World Should Be A Nicer Place platitude casseroles that he's ready to tear his hair out in misery and rage. Where the fuck are your souls, you miserable mice? Say something that's really you. That seems to be where he's driving. (We can't blame him for not teaching them thermodynamics, English grammar or the history of farming because that's not his job -- he isn't a professor in those departments. We could ask him to shoot himself or quit his job for being a social parasite, I guess, but he isn't doing anyone harm so that seems excessively Lutheran.)
I quite liked the idea of his other course, where the students were required to plagiarize and defend it -- must have been very interesting, like those "historical" simulations we used to do ages ago where we recreate the Continental Congress and some of us are supposed to urge loyalty to the Crown and to hell with the Revolution.
Anyway, it reminds me of that middle passage in Pirsig's 70s icon (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) in which Phaedrus describes his struggle with teaching quality in writing to his Bozeman students, and he finds himself baffled by the ineffability of the object. So he turns it on its head, insists they already know quality, and to start with their own voices, then shape them up a bit, rather than try to ape someone else's admired voice. That seems something of this guy's intention here. One trusts he isn't headed for a psychotic break, but it's got to be an occupational hazard if you're into creative writing.
Still, the major flaw, I think, in his approach is that he's trying it out on teenagers. I mean, a 19-year-old simply doesn't have enough individuality in his personality, usually, for much in the way of potent creative juices to spring forth if you tap on a fissure right (barring some wunderkind discovery-in-waiting). At that age, people are still mostly a collage of snippets of their parents, school peers, teachers, media figures, and id urges. They lack experience and the marination of time that turns all that kibble into the individual spirit -- like 300 million years of heat and pressure turn assorted bracken and scaly trunks into petroleum. I'm sure most of them will fake it well enough, but it still seems a little wasted.
If he wanted to strike some deep-buried spring of originality and see it burst forth, he ought to try this with 35-year-olds, or even 55-year-olds, people who have worked and lived and experienced for a long time, long enough to have a unique and complex voice that has been buried under many sedimentary layers of convention and adaption ("this is how people of my sex, age, station speak" as well as "I don't have time to voice original thoughts, I've got bills to pay, customers to please, children to socialize").
But of course, those people would never take his class. They're more likely to write cross remarks about what a fucking waste of time and money the class is, for kids who should instead be learning to solve differential equations and write Java, get on with life, you dopes.
Penn used to be a great university. Really! It was, once upon a time.
Future generations will look back in confusion at this generation's willingness to assume massive, non-dischargeable debt in order to take part in experiences like this one.
This guy is drawing a professor's salary and this is his one course for the semester.
File under the category: "Mailing it in".
Freeman Hunt nails it -- as usual.
I imagine Benjamin Button reading of Althouse with one student starting from the 2004 beginning and reading forward and another starting from 2014 and reading back. They would meet in the middle, in August 2009. But how would the story of the two blog readers end?
I expected the link to take me to the Onion.
I have to admit I wish this course was offered when I was in college. Instead, I was required to take English Masterpieces, reading and doing essays on Paradise Regained (far worse than "Lost"). I have never fully recovered from all those red marks and red writing on my papers. I am almost scared to write a blog post for fear it will be parsed and destroyed.
I think I will go back to college with Brian Bosworth.
Will he be taking attendance?
Everybody knows the best hate is all on the left-wing sites. It is just that nobody will admit it.
What a waste of tuition money.
I'm applying for a life experience degree.
"You been tellin' me you're a genius
Since you were seventeen
In all the time I've known you
I still don't know what you mean
The weekend at the college
Didn't turn out like you planned
The things that pass for knowledge
I can't understand."
- Steely Dan
If crap like this is what's passing for college these days, I'm going to recommend my grandkids go to trade school. For the tuition of that one class, a young person could go to school and get a welding certificate. Good welders can make over $60K a year. Machinists can make even more. A diesel mechanic can practically write his own paycheck. Liberal Arts college graduates? Not so much.
Would some form of this be acceptable in, say, a law school?
Fifteen students. Probably fifteen on the basketball team. Coincidence?
"“Uncreative Writing,” where students are forced to plagiarize, appropriate, and steal texts that they haven’t written and claim them as their own. For a final assignment, I require them to buy a paper from a paper mill, put their name on it, and defend it as their own—surely the most forbidden act in academia."
Ooooh, so transgressive!
Perhaps next year he'll host a class in taking a dump in public, or some other inappropriate, transgressive behavior.
It's not so easy to be transgressive anymore, all the easy stuff has already been done. Somehow plagiarizing a plagiary just isn't as transgressive as the original transgression, is it?
Can one be originally unoriginal?
And what is the cost of this instant a?
I guess its better than chemistry and crap like that.
A heresy: I think the class sounds interesting and I might've taken it.
Concerns about tuition/funding can be a bit overblown. Most schools max out their per-hour tuition at 13 or so credit hours; that is, once you've signed up for 17 credit hours worth of useful classes, adding a 3-hr 'fun' class doesn't cost you anything. My transcript is dotted with fun classes; I took at least one per year, and often one per semester. It was a bit of a hobby.
(Now, I know you are going to say: you could've taken another 3 credit hours of useful classes! Not really. 3 credit hours of creative writing or whatever takes 4 hours per week. 3 hours of upper-division natural science takes 15 hours per week.)
Henry, sign up with my University and I'll give you ONE-ON-ONE tutoring in wasting time and you WILL not only get a degree, but a PhD! Then we can all call you Doctor.
It will cost only $20,000, which is MUCH cheaper than the University of Pennsylvania. And you can study at home!
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