School Shootings

Gun violence has become so common, it rarely stays in the news for more than a few days. The ones that shocked me, Columbine and Virginia Tech, were the ones that could not be dismissed as individual anomalies but indicated institutional failure.

Most of us survived high school, and wondered what on earth was going on in Littleton. Some of the initial explanations, since disproved by Dave Cullen and Jeff Kass, were the ones that resonated with graduates who knew first hand the status system that allowed one group to scapegoat another or led people to feel persecuted when they were simply overlooked like the strongly religious.

But, we think, something had to fail for routine nastiness or teenage angst to propel Eric Harris into buying automatic weapons and luring Dylan Klebold into his maelstrom. Society’s verdict that they were psychopaths beyond help simply offers a self-serving label in place of recognizing a cultural or institutional failure.

At Virginia Tech we know a lot more, because the parents and school did not blind themselves to Seung-Hui Cho’s problems as people had done in Colorado. They simply had no idea what to do with someone who had stalked people and been diagnosed with mental problems, but could not be institutionalized or even expelled on probability.

The part that shocked me was the role of the creative writing program. Art is supposed to exist as a means people use to externalize and contain their demons, to explore what they know is inadmissible We know the biographies of too many published writers who drank or drugged themselves to death to still believe art is a cure, but we do still think it is a way to explore our worst feelings without letting them become too destructive.

I’ve never taken a creative writing class, and fall into that group that is skeptical about what possible job market a middling school like Virginia Tech hopes to serve with an entire major in creative writing and just what future they see for their graduates after they have provided themselves with employment.

I’ve taught English composition and realize the necessity of helping students learn to write a decent sentence and become knowledgeable enough about their writing to be able to edit themselves. I always stayed with prosaic, factual assignments because I believe the process is the same for all writing - poetry, novels, or essays - and it’s easier to critique something the writer is not personally involved with than something that has required they reveal their feelings.

Louis Menard’s recent article in the New Yorker suggests the central methodology in many creative writing programs is public, group criticism. He makes classes sound more like the self-accusatory sessions of the communists and evangel prayer meetings, than anything I would tolerate.

Such group sessions might possibly work in the sort of summer sessions and graduate programs where each member has to first prove him or herself to be capable writer to be admitted. Such criteria are not possible in a state undergraduate program. Interviews with his classmates make it sound like Cho was exposed to the voices of the very unthinking, conventional students who were first suspected of persecuting Harris and Klebold.

One instructor, poet Nikki Giovanni, had him removed from her classes because she thought he was "menacing" and wrote a letter for the record to the department chairman, Lucinda Roy, who in turn notified school authorities. Another instructor, Lisa Norris, asked the dean’s office about him and was told he had mental problems.

His male play writing teacher, Edward Falco, was less bothered and simply recognized Cho’s writing wasn’t "good" and that he probably took the courses to find a means of communicating.

Writing requires risk taking. A school that turns homework into an opportunity to enforce conformity by reporting deviance betrays the student. The fact Giovanni and Norris were correct in perceiving danger does not negate the ways their reactions and those of their students contributed to Cho’s growing sense of isolation. They, and everyone involved, should know the dangers of liberating the imagination in a creative writing program and either know how to respond or not offer the courses.

Notes:
My memories of comments at the time by Virginia Tech instructors and students confirmed with Wikipedia.

Cullen, Dave. Columbine, 2009.

Menand, Louis. "Show or Tell: Should Creative Writing Be Taught?," New Yorker 8 June 2009.

Kass, Jeff. Columbine: A True Crime Story, 2009.

Michael Jackson and Creativity

It was bad luck for Gale Storm and Billy Mays to die the weekend everyone’s attention was focused on Michael Jackson. Buried in the June 27 edition of the New York Times was a notice that an important diamond cutter had passed on the 15th.

Margalit Fox’s notice was that rare obituary that not only told you the usual information about Antonio Bianco’s survivors, but also described what made him special in his trade. She first needed to explain how diamond molecules react to being violated, before it was clear why it took several months to cut particularly large stones without permanently marring their internal structure.

I sent the notice to a friend of mine who’s drawn to the mystery of what’s inside externally drab rocks she finds in her neighborhood. Her return comment was "He must have made a lot of money."

She was a great Michael Jackson fan and we had spent part of Saturday talking about him and what his death meant. No one would just say, "he made a lot of money," although there are those who wonder who will inherit and what will be left after the debts are settled.

I used to wonder what people meant by materialism, because I was raised to respect work well done and to acknowledge the greatness of artists and artisans. I’m still shocked when, regardless of what people feel, they can only express their reaction in monetary terms.

It’s that simple equation that truncates artistic creativity. Someone is always afraid of the cost - the dependent family, the record companies, the concert promoters. As soon as large sums appear on bank statements, representatives of capitalism fear the kind of risks that create wealth in the first place.

No one minds if famous performers spend their money on useless possessions or self-destructive substances. After all, each purchase creates wealth for someone, as do any medical consequences. In their uselessness such transactions are materialism at its purest.

However, none of those petty traders of human frailty can step back at the end of a day and take pleasure in a well-cut stone or a new combination. Obituaries don’t yet record what people made, but what they did. Tombstones still have dates, not dollar signs.