Why Am I Not Surprised?
 

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/18/us...=fb-share&_r=1

We're guilty of this as well, with our language "content warnings".

Michael,
I have seen this issue from both sides, as a student and as a teacher. As a college student, I was annoyed when, during a slide lecture on baboon behavior, the male professor slipped in a slide of female grad students sunbathing in bikinis. He was used to having a largely male audience and was probably surprised when the female students in the auditorium hissed him. I think he had it coming.

On the other hand, as a professor I am not always sure what will offend students, and I have had my own unpleasant surprises (though none involving hissing). If there is going to be nudity in a film I am showing to the class, I usually tell them in advance. If someone has a real problem with the subject matter of some literature, I have occasionally made that work optional (e.g., Lord Rochester's poetry in a survey of British literature) or provided an alternate assignment. If I know that some students are likely to be outraged by something, but I still think it is important that they consider the issues of it (e.g., The Merchant of Venice, The Taming of the Shrew, Huckleberry Finn), I try to put the work in a context that frames it as an issue to be debated, before they read the work in question.

My goal is not to dismiss the students' reactions, but to show them that there is more than one way to look at the issue. Censorship is the thing to be avoided (though even there, there are some lines that I probably wouldn't cross, and everyone is going to draw the line in a different place). Advance warning about some topics or images at least gives students a chance to alert the professor to minefields of which he or she may be unaware. Can students use these issues to try to get professors into trouble? Of course, and we are seeing more of that these days. I try to think in terms of reasonable accommodations that show respect for students' feelings while still addressing the edgier subjects.

Susan

I'm not sure "guilty" is the word I'd use. Perhaps "respectful" would be a better term?

Best,

Bill

Bill, if the New Yorker, or almost any decent literary magazine I can think of, respects it's readers enough to believe that they can handle whatever adult language may sometimes pop up without being warned; and we pride ourselves on being the best and most advanced workshop on the net, I don't think "respect" is the right word for our dirty word warnings.

Language warnings here strike me as prissy gestures of propitiation, concessions to the tyranny of the easily offended. The “trigger warnings” issue, as Susan illustrates, is a bit more complex.

As a general rule, I’m all in favor of history and literature courses that push students out of their comfort zones. Students should be disturbed by the pervasive atrocities of human history -- war, torture, rape, genocide, oppression of every variety. The fact that history can be so horrifying is a reason for exposing students to it, not a justification for shielding them from it. The promiscuous use of a racist epithet in Huckleberry Finn is offensive to you? Good! There would be something wrong with you if you weren’t offended. But the book is about a white boy learning to transcend and reject the racism he’s grown up with, and nothing embodies that racism more perfectly than the word in question. It would have been profoundly dishonest of Twain not to have peppered his novel with that toxic word. And if you’re smart enough to be in college, you’re smart enough to get that depicting racism accurately is a far cry from endorsing racism.

It’s important to be aware that there are students whose life experiences have made them all too familiar with the worst that human beings can inflict on each other. Professors are doing a good thing when they take the special vulnerabilities of those students into account. But codified “trigger warning” rules are certain to be booby-trapped with unintended consequences. Right-wing trolls know how to turn campus hate-speech codes against black students who say “redneck” or “cracker,” and there’s nothing to prevent comparable abuses by students wailing that some professor triggered their anxieties with, say, explicit gay material or radical feminist rhetoric in a course on modern liberation movements.

It's going to be a bit difficult to read 'Othello', I'm thinking. I played Iago about fifty years ago and he's really not a nice man.

I have no problem with what Susan chooses to do as a teacher, but I would have a problem if that approach were forced upon her by some sort of code. The question isn't whether it's ever appropriate for a teacher to prepare students for what they are about to read by "warning" them about it, but whether it's appropriate to legislate a teacher's lesson plans and academic freedom.

As M. A. Griffiths noted, the surest way to get someone to read your poem is to hang a warning on it. Heh.

Seriously, though, a little common sense and respect go a long way.

Yes, respect includes sensitivity when presenting material that has obvious potential to cause distress; however, respect also includes treating adults like adults, and expecting them to be able to handle adult topics and language...like, um, adults.

Balancing these two types of respect is where the common sense comes in. Or should.

That said, it is rarely, if ever, possible to legislate common sense into people who lack it. Would that it were.

[Cross-posted with Roger. Amen, brother.]

[By the way, my jeremiad of a few days ago, to the effect that wind chimes should be illegal, was hyperbole. I did not really mean to endorse the all-too-fashionable idea that there is a legislative solution to every societal problem. Sometimes one has to actually go to the bother of having a conversation with those of a different opinion; explaining one's position in a reasonable, respectful, and (one hopes) persuasive manner; and asking if a mutually acceptable solution can be worked out together.]

When I was teaching undergraduates, they seemed far ahead of me on sex, drugs, tattoos, weird corners of the Internet and many other subjects. They probably should have warned me that I didn't understand my own assigned material.

I think there are times when it is appropriate for me to tell students in advance that some of my course materials may be disturbing or offensive. (They often appreciate being warned, and I don't care as long as they end up reading and thinking about the course material. Hope springs eternal.) I don't think it's ever appropriate for the university to require me to issue such warnings--and then punish me if I fail to warn to their satisfaction.

If I learned anything from teaching, it was no one size fits all. Once an African American student, after a lecture on some genetic diseases, demanded I issue a retraction of a statement I made concerning an intestinal disease being more prevalent in Blacks and Asians than Caucasians because this made him feel inferior. I asked him if he would question his future female patients about their menses or breast lumps, or males about their prostate health (propensities for abnormalities are, of course, related to their genetic makeup). The next lecture I made a point about the necessity for the physician to treat every patient as unique and to be sensitive to some who will be ashamed of their disease, whether due to external conditions, lifestyle, or their DNA. They deserve a scramble to find the key to educate them about ways to deal with their physical and emotional dis-ease.

To me, the teachable point for sensitive students is, their discomfort may be the expected outcome of violence, hate, and unfairness in their lives and, if possible, for them to somehow educate others about the result of these things and explore ways for them and their community to decrease such destructive effects.

‘Tis a gift to heal, ‘tis a gift to be healed
wkg

double posted

I read this article with real horror. The idea of applying a prophylactic to art and literature is truly repugnant. Of course, it is happening in the high and confused quarters of academia. The self-appointed stewards of culture.

What do these students expect to experience in college? It's really the dark side of "political correctness" reaching something like its extreme victory. I don't know about you guys, but I still hear Frank Zappa vs Tipper Gore in the back of my head. He was crazy and he wouldn't stop talking, but he was absolutely right.

We are GUILTY of exactly the same kind of mindless mind coddling, group think, and phony manners with our "language warnings" here. Anyone with the ability to log onto a poetry critique board must already know that life comes with language. All kinds. This push for warning triggers is a really dark impulse, very closely aligned to the Internet echo chambers in which people only want to communicate with those who tell them what they want to hear, meanwhile vilifying anyone who steps outside the lines--the false accusations and crowd-sourced bullying of group think are on the flip side of this "warning trigger" coin.

The look on that student's face (the photo in the article)--the smug certainty and fixed eyes of the true believer--terrifies me.

Whitewashing language and attitudes of previous centuries
 

If this is what they're discussing in English departments, I shudder to think what they're teaching in History.

-o-

Reply to "Why Am I Not Surprised?"
 

I'm concerned about how far this is going to go, assuming it goes anywhere. Will it get to the point of not assigning works essential for any developing writer? Beyond that, would we see a return to Bowdlerizing?

Of course Zappa was right! He would have made a great President, and I'd have voted for him.

I started out with a big bag of wind, but when I broke it down, I realized I had good objections for all of my points.

Here's my immediate problem: what film was this? There's art, and then there's garbage. I realize it's subjective, but still:

I can sympathize, and DO, very much so, with everything Rick wrote.

Then again, I can sympathize with a young woman who's been raped having to sit through offensive garbage, or even a good film with a scene depicting rape. I suppose if I were her I may have simply walked out and given my reason, without trying to increase the already silly over-nurturing and molly-coddling that's going on.

Then again, I haven't been raped.

I've been trying to write a poem to justify the thread title "Fuck You, You Fucking Fuck (Language Warning)."
(A mod can delete that... it's not original anyway.) And, funny, the first time I saw the movie Lenny
(about Lenny Bruce), it was on a network, so it was censored. I got a kick out of that.

And what Rick said.

And of course, the list of what might offend someone is pretty much endless. Who decides where to draw the line? The students? Which students? Etc.

Yep, that's kind of the crux of it.

My view is that there are two options: you put it all out there and allow certain people to be offended by what offends them, OR you start to redact and censor things piecemeal, trying to cast a broad net over what affects a much smaller percentage. But whenever a new offended voice pops up, a new net must be employed, until all that's left is literature that consists of conjunctions and prepositions. I rather prefer the former option.

When the discussion about language on the Sphere came up some years ago, we had an appalling number of posts from now-seemingly-reformed members who did not use profanity creatively, but simply as gross insults. And though I am not above using the F-word and others when it seems appropriate, I remember that it was a real pain to get though certain threads where argument was replaced by insulting barrages of exceptionally gross prose.

There were member complaints--I was a mod then--and they were not from squeamish little old ladies. The Spheriod image of a serious, quality workshop was being dragged down by a constant overuse of mainly sexual explicatives, most based on parts of female anatomy, as the ultimate insult.

One didn't have to be a dyed-in-the-wool feminist or sensitive pastor to be embarrassed that one's poems appeared on what sometimes seemed to be the city cesspool rather than a site where some of the finest contemporary formalist poets posted work and opinions.

Added to that embarrassment were the overriding rules of the Internet. Alex can explain that better than I can but it has to do with a 13-year age limit or labelling the site as adult, or the internet being a public forum, or some such.

If members who shall be nameless had exercised more self-restraint for the good of the community, the cautionary message might never have become part of the by-laws.

That said, there is a difference I think, between a public site where children surf as soon as they can read, and an educational institution where the students are aged, say, 18 and upward.

Young adults seeking an education should not be partitioned from the real world. This silly idea seems to come from helicopter parenting, which posits that the child should never be subjected to the hurtful, the unexpected or whatever deviates from the parental ideas of good or holy.

The earth is not flat. Evolution is a fact and so is climate change. Same sex marriage can be as good as or as bad as man-woman marriage. That Huck Finn used the N-word is a reminder of how things used to be (or still are?) and it shouldn't be swept under the mat.

The Crusaders did the then-equivalent of Twin Towers for two centuries and there was nothing holy about it either. Atheism is a belief system as much as any religion is and shop girls in Victorian England became prostitutes in much the same way as the young women from the former East Bloc or Thailand are caught in sex trafficking today.

I see this idea of warning labels in education (and I am not alone) as a first step to censorship and away from critical thinking.

One would hope that education raises the intellectual level of the student, that he or she is more perceptive and critical after a completed college education than before.

Edward Said is one of my heroes.

http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/papers/lightman.html

One hopes that the main purpose of education is to foster an intellectual climate. Unless the poor child is enrolled in the "Flat Earth Liberty and Rapture University of the Blessed Saints of the Last Days" or a Koran school somewhere in the desert or fill-in-the-blanks.

There is way too much fundamentalism in the world as it is. Do not put horse blinders on the rest of the educational system.

If you haven't already read Said's writings on the role of the intellectual, now is the time to start.

http://cicac.tru.ca/readings/edward_said.pdf

What's not clear to me is whether students who suspect that the content of a given book might offend or upset them are given the option of not reading it. I'm assuming they are not being given that option. If I'm right, then I suppose a "warning" wouldn't be the worst thing in the world, but it also seems to be rather pointless since the student will presumably still be offended or upset upon reading the book, even with advance warning. If a student is so sensitive that a warning is needed to mentally prepare for the anticipated experience of reading something that is potentially upsetting, the student can always make it his or her own practice to Google all reading material in advance to learn what may lie ahead. Forcing the teacher to be the one to characterize the book in advance, and to say things about the book that could influence the way the book is read, seems unnecessary and intrusive on the teacher-student relationship.

It also strikes me that giving these warnings is to treat students in a way that is more patronizing than movie or television ratings. On TV, many shows begin with the warning "Viewer discretion advised," but rarely do these warnings go into the sort of detail that "trigger" warnings apparently contemplate. And on TV, it's appropriate because the audience does not consist of people who have signed up for a course in which they have agreed to submit to a teacher's curriculum. There may even be parents who are watching with young children. In a college course, everyone is an adult and everyone has agreed to be guided by the professor's judgment when it comes to required reading and viewing.

I am very much against the language warnings used on this site. There is no logic behind them. And I hate with utmost muster political correctness.

Meredith Raimondo and Bailey Loverin don't understand literature or art. They don't understand cathartic reading. They don't understand that a book without triggers would be a book without words.

Discontent Warning
 

Discontent Warning : this thread contains aerobatics by Allen Tice that may upend sensitive people on topics including the eardrums of Roman deities; the Third Paeon ('opalescent')*; Research and Development of a hyperreal badger, and whether pigs have wind.

* Above all it is necessary to conceal the care expended upon it so that our rhythms may seem to possess a spontaneous flow, not to have been the result of elaborate search or compulsion. -- Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, 9.5.147.

Wall Street Journal article on William Bowen's commencement address yesterday at Haverford College, at which he scolded the students who had pressured the first-choice graduation speaker to pull out.

Time's account of the reaction from the student who had organized the protest against the original speaker.

Full text of Bowen's commencement speech here.

(Of course, such situations are always far more complicated than they appear in the press, but it's undeniable that there's been a real epidemic of university students pressuring graduation speakers to bow out this year.)

What Rick & Orwn said.

Nemo

I beg to differ. But it's a nuanced difference, so I would appreciate it if guys with Mommy issues would hold off on calling me a schoolmarm, an emasculating feminist, a controlling female, etc., etc., without reading what I'm actually saying, as happened in a previous thread that I have no desire to resurrect.

Consider, if you will, the following two scenarios:

Scenario #1: To communicate my abhorrence of something, I employ a Holocaust or slavery or lynching metaphor--i.e., I casually invoke a form of victimization that people of my ethnicity were rarely on the receiving end of. My audience informs me that my use of this metaphor is offensive. I whine and complain that this is cramping my style.

Scenario #2: To communicate my abhorrence of something, I employ a sexual violence and humiliation metaphor--i.e., I casually invoke a form of victimization that people of my sex and sexual orientation are rarely on the receiving end of. My audience informs me that my use of this metaphor is offensive. I whine and complain that this is cramping my style.

Why do so many male Sphereans who find Scenario #1 unflattering seem to think that Scenario #2 is entirely praiseworthy?

Yes, there's a magnitude difference, but both scenarios show trivialization of suffering that does not harm you, plus an arrogantly adolescent attitude that "I can say whatever I want to, and you can't stop me, so who cares if you don't like it?" Trust me, this combination is not attractive.

It seems to me that poets--wordsmiths, if you will--should be able to express themselves effectively without overusing certain words, be it "shards" or "limn" or the eff-bomb. Although I don't think any word should be removed from the toolbox--sometimes a charged word is exactly what's needed--I reserve the right to tire of words that aren't used judiciously, whether in poetry or prose. And I get so sick of encountering certain demeaning swearwords everywhere else that it would be nice if, at Eratosphere, this low-register diction were reserved for, say, helping to develop and nuance a character in a poem--or to communicate that a poem persona has really lost emotional control, like the first-person narrator of a recent sonnet of mine posted here (with a language warning).

I would hope that people expressing differences of opinion here will be able to maintain emotional control while doing so.

If Samuel Clemens were alive today and was a member of the Sphere, would he:

1. revolt
2. agree that not all language is henceforth usable
3. take his lumps for being a racist bigot (he clearly wasn't)
4. wait for the "lynch" mob
5. be a captain on a fishing boat in Alaska (where every word is in play)
along with men&women who possess very sharp knives and gaffes
6. be content to read in underground venues

7. suddenly become enlightened...

Mark Twain wasn't writing any kind of poetry; he wrote narrative fiction.
I think he might thoughtfully loose some wind.

I am a native Missourian, Allen. I assure you that Clemens wrote poetry. He was not a prolific writer of such. He wrote many books on travel which sold in the thousands. Maybe you are talking of someone else. It would be easy to look it up.

Fiction and travel books will generally have an immediate representational voice. If I seemed hasty (I am often hasty), I would be happy to read Twain's poetry at least once, and maybe more times. Abraham Lincoln also wrote poetry.

Probably his best:

Ode to Stephen Dowling Bots, Dec'd.

By Mark Twain


And did young Stephen sicken,

And did young Stephen die?

And did the sad hearts thicken,

And did the mourners cry?


No; such was not the fate of

Young Stephen Dowling Bots;

Though sad hearts round him thickened,

'Twas not from sickness' shots.


No whooping-cough did rack his frame,

Nor measles drear, with spots;

Not these impaired the sacred name

Of Stephen Dowling Bots.


Despised love struck not with woe

That head of curly knots,

Nor stomach troubles laid him low,

Young Stephen Dowling Bots.


O no. Then list with tearful eye,

Whilst I his fate do tell.

His soul did from this cold world fly,

By falling down a well.


They got him out and emptied him;

Alas it was too late;

His spirit was gone for to sport aloft

In the realms of the good and great.

Didn't Twain write a pornographic book, of which he said something like: "if there's a single decent word it was an accident"?

Does anyone know where to find this potential literary gem?

Well said.

The work you may be thinking of is titled 1601, published anonymously by Mark Twain in 1880. It’s a short risqué piece set in Elizabethan England and takes the form of a conversation between Queen Elizabeth, Ben Jonson, Walter Raleigh, Francis Bacon, and William Shakespeare. It’s vulgar and bawdy, and Twain does a fine comic job of imitating Elizabethan speech.

Richard

If there should be a warning slapped on anything, it should be on college itself -- drunken violence; racism, misogyny, and homophobia; professors hitting on and dating students, etc., etc. It's ridiculous to have warnings on literature, good or bad. Students should know what they're getting into when they enter college -- something mind-opening. And most of them have already encountered "offensive" stuff by the time they're at least ten.

There's a difference between "offensive" material and teachers who are insensitive themselves. I had a teacher in college who showed "shocking" films such as Pink Flamingos as part of his course. Nicest guy in the world. No one said a word then -- early 80s. Much later, students complained. Another super-nice teacher showed a film of cattle being sent to be slaughtered, as part of his film history class. I didn't want to watch it (and will try to never see it again), but slaughterhouses are a part of life. Warnings are being put in the wrong places.

To me, this is about the turning of students into consumers. We must have complete customer satisfaction. We must make them "happy." When I taught college English, I used to complain about student evaluations, which were part of the end of every course. Eleven questions on a questionnaire. Some of them were ridiculous questions, and students -- some of whom hadn't shown up for class half the time -- usually answered them in a few minutes, if even that. And that questionnaire counted toward whether you kept your job or not. There are legitimate student concerns and complaints, of course, but we've drifted toward seeing education as a business where "the customer is always right."

The "Ode to Stephen Dowling Bots, Dec'd." is resonant with humane compassion and the insight that what goes down may come up to touch the empyrean. Somehow its simplicity conceals a great breadth of frontier piety.

The question is not the F-word or similar words themselves so much, as how and where they are used. It seems safe to suggest that they are usually a sign of mental poverty in criticism, at least. Beyond that, I use my sense of humor and espcially my sense of smell.

Must attend to other business now.

Allen: You're joking, right?

Twain's ode from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a parody of the lugubrious popular poetry of the time. It's a clever send up of poor verse.

And Twain's comic genius concerning poetry burns especially bright in the novel when the King and the Duke perform Shakespeare. Twain cobbles together a number of Shakespeare's most famous lines and has the Duke recite them as "Hamlet's soliloquy." The way Twain pieces and patches together those lines to create the Duke's fractured Shakespeare is masterful and hilarious.

Richard

I sit corrected.

Stephen Dowling Bots seems to be a parody of Julia Ann Moore, Sweet Singer of Michigan, of whom Twain said something to the effect that 'no other writer had ever given him more pleasure.' Miss Moore stands alone in the company of William Topaz McGonagall and the tyrophilic James McIntyre, hence not so alone after all.

Here is one of Miss Moore's classic productions. I particularly admire the way she reserves the critical information about Libbie's relative height for the penultimate stanza, not to mention the resounding final rhyme:

LITTLE LIBBIE

One more little spirit to Heaven has flown,
To dwell in that mansion above,
Where dear little angels, together roam,
In God's everlasting love.

One little flower has withered and died,
A bud near ready to bloom,
Its life on earth is marked with pride;
Oh, sad it should die so soon.

Sweet little Libbie, that precious flower
Was a pride in her parents' home,
They miss their little girl every hour,
Those friends that are left to mourn.

Her sweet silvery voice no more is heard
In the home where she once roamed;
Her place is vacant around the hearth,
Where her friends are mourning lone.

They are mourning the loss of a little girl,
With black eyes and auburn hair,
She was a treasure to them in this world,
This beautiful child so fair.

One morning in April, a short time ago,
Libbie was active and gay;
Her Saviour called her, she had to go,
E're the close of that pleasant day.

While eating dinner, this dear little child
Was choked on a piece of beef.
Doctors came, tried their skill awhile,
But none could give relief.

She was ten years of age, I am told,
And in school stood very high.
Her little form now the earth enfolds,
In her embrace it must ever lie.

Her friends and schoolmates will not forget
Little Libbie that is no more;
She is waiting on the shining step,
To welcome home friends once more.

Overall, I think it is better to deal with such things through appropriate discussion ahead of time and afterward, rather than using some mechanical warning printed at the beginning of a work.

But I don't think a warning is that big a deal, nor that it is likely to become a common practice. Those that don't care about it, will easily enough ignore it. There may be some that do care, though, and when they find the warning, may consider if they wish to avoid that part of the work or the work altogether.