Hollywood Versifier: Barbaric YAAAAAAAAWP!

I knew this day would come eventually. I dreaded it, I put it out of my mind, but here it is. Nothing for it but to play the man, keep my head held high and face the consequences.


I have a Dead Poets Society tattoo. 

What? What's that you say? You didn't realize there is an official logo for the inspirational 1987 film featuring Robin Williams and an all-star cast of up-and-coming teen movie heartthrobs?

This is because you have a life and responsibilities and normal interests that don't require you to view DVDs in slow-motion to take screen captures of still frames. Heck, try a Google Image search for it - no dice. That's how hardcore this is: the INTERNET doesn't even know about it.

In a few frames of the film, when the boys open up the book of poetry their teacher Mr. Keating gave them from his school days, there's an inscription and sketch on the frontispiece.

That is how utterly devoted to that film I am.

I watched the film for the first time when I was seven or eight years old. I probably couldn't understand half of what the movie was talking about. And it changed my frakking life. Stupid Peter Weir, I hate you and your stupid face!

This is what education is all about, right? It's inspiring and dramatic and unexpected, no marking up papers or writing lesson plans or grade-grubbing here. Just get the shy kid in front of the class, embarrass him sufficiently and pray that in your provocation he comes up with something half-way decent enough to keep you from being sued for causing mental anguish.


It's all about truth, man, truth that hits you like this! That's right, exclamation points! More of them! To prove how TRUE this s&%t is! 

O Me! O Life!

Walt Whitman

O ME! O life!... of the questions of these recurring;
Of the endless trains of the faithless—of cities fill’d with the foolish;
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light—of the objects mean—of the struggle ever renew’d;
Of the poor results of all—of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me;       
Of the empty and useless years of the rest—with the rest me intertwined;
The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?
Answer.

That you are here—that life exists, and identity;
That the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse.




I'll admit, the histrionics are mostly my trying to cover up the mortification at how important this stuff is to me. There aren't many movies that you can say changed your life. But in very real, very sad ways I seem to have patterned my life choices after this saccharine tear-jerker: the tattoo wasn't my only dumb DPS-inspired mistake. 


I got an undergraduate degree in English. After the department chair gave a tour de force lecture on Walker Percy's Lost in the Cosmos I saluted by standing on my desk. I started the local chapter of the aforementioned society: on Friday nights we'd go to a deserted playground, maybe have an upperclassman buy us a bottle of cheap wine and read a bunch of silly verses by ourselves or long-dead white dudes. And get this, you ready? Just like Neil, Robert Sean Leonard's impossibly earnest thespian, I played Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream. 


And the most horrific part of all is that I'm not ashamed. 


Gauche and hokey as it all sounds, it's been a pretty good obsession to fan the flames of. It's given me some pretty awesome friends and a passion for books to a point that's not good for me. Not to mention this blog...


So of course I want to become a teacher. It's all freshly polished apples and ovations at keynote addresses and "Stand and Deliver." Or it could be more like this.






Man, I love when Harold Bloom gets a good shellacking. English isn't unique, either:  there's a ton of these little YouTube movies out there about Political Science, Film, Business, Music. There's even counter-counter-films all about how awesome getting a Ph.D. is. 


I think pouring cold water on somebody's dreams is kind of like "the kick" in Inception. It's unpleasant, but you need it to get you anywhere. Plus it's a good way to figure out whether things around you are real or a fantasy. 


It's not all entirely unpleasant, either. You've got humor, for sure: "Bart, don't make fun of grad students! They just made a terrible life choice."







And you've got grisly, gory tales of weird death and madness! Here's one ripped straight from a less-remembered scene of the movie.

The Ballad Of William Bloat

Raymond Calvert

 In a mean abode on the Shankill Road

 Lived a man named William Bloat;

 And he had a wife, the curse of his life,

 Who always got his goat.

 'Til one day at dawn, with her nightdress on

 He slit her pretty throat.

 With a razor gash he settled her hash

 Oh never was crime so quick

 But the steady drip on the pillowslip

 Of her lifeblood made him sick.

 And the pool of gore on the bedroom floor

 Grew clotted and cold and thick.

 Now he was right glad he had done as he had

 As his wife lay there so still

 But a sudden awe of the mighty law

 Filled his heart with an icy chill.

 So to finish the fun so well begun

 He resolved himself to kill.

 He took the sheet from his wife's cold feet

 And twisted it into a rope

 And he hanged himself from the pantry shelf,

 'Twas an easy end, let's hope.

 In the face of death with his latest breath

 He said "to hell with the Pope."

 Now the strangest turn in this whole concern

 Is only just beginning.

 He went to Hell, but his wife got well

 And is still alive and sinning.

 For the razor blade was Dublin made

 But the sheet was Belfast linen.

Mmm-mm good: blood-soaked horror in iambic pentameter, things only lit geeks could love.


And isn't that what it's all about, having some fun times and deep conversations with nerds just like you as we slowly crawl towards our end?


The tradition goes that you have to intone this Thoreau quote at the start of the meeting: “I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately, I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to put to rout all that was not life and not when I had come to die discover that I had not lived.”


Adults of sound mind don't talk like this, and for good reason. It's infantile, hopelessly naive and on the nose. In fact, even the most high-minded study of literature is kind of an infantile hobby, concerned with telling and reinterpreting stories that never happened or puzzling over why somebody made those weird sounds they did.


But you have to distract Baby with something so he doesn't put his finger in the electrical socket. Reading and writing are as good a distraction as any and better than most. Oscar Wilde said, "To have ruined oneself over poetry is an honor." My only regret is that I have but one life to ruin for poetry.


Day... SEIZED!