Another Hellfire Cross Country Speech

Longtime readers of the run and lower-tier runners of Grinnell Men’s Cross Country will remember the hellfire sermon I gave at the LaCrosse Invitational last year. Well, I gave another performance this week at the Central College Invitational. Some background: instead of actually running the race as a race, we were just using it as an easy-to-moderate level workout. Also, there had been forecasts of severe thunderstorms all day and we were sure the race would be rained out, but instead there had just been a light drizzle. I’ve got no clue why I chose to write it with line breaks, it’s not a particularly poetic speech.

Look above you, men!

There is a storm a-brewing!

Not a storm of thunder piercing the earth,

 Or of floodwaters drowning the streets,

Or of wind picking up men like blades of grass

And dashing them upon the ground.

No, the storm above us, the storm of this meet,

Is really just a couple of dark clouds

That look like they could do some damage

But only really sprinkle a little bit

And can only be called a storm by a very loose definition.

This is the trial set before us, men!

We must run with patience! And reasonableness! And keep a conservative pace!

If we succeed, we’ll only have reached, like, half our potential,

And have met very low expectations.

But do not rage against the storm, men!

Do not yearn for suffering and sacrifice and hard-won victory!

For, at the end, we will have technically run a race

Without actually doing any work.

And that’s pretty cool too, don’t you think?

The Island

I'm writing this the day before classes start. People on campus make the day a weirdly mournful celebration, hosting barbecues and staging massive Nerf battles while all the time muttering about how scared they are about classes. It seems like having your favorite food at a funeral. I shouldn’t be so hard on them, traditions crop up at times of transition, that’s just the way it works. But, even though I’ve operated on the academic calendar for as long as I can remember, the start of school never seemed like an especially important event for me. Maybe that’s because my year has always started and ended with my family’s one week summer vacation to The Island*.

The Island is up in the boundary waters between Ontario and Minnesota, technically on the Canadian side but so close that my mom swims to the U.S. and back every year. My family has been visiting the area since my dad was a kid. When I first visited it at age six I assumed that it was a sovereign nation and we were its royal family. Really, that might as well be the truth. It's a scrap of rock in the middle of nowhere. No one would mind if we raised an Osler family flag on the dock and formed our own congress, and my cousins would probably go for it.

I have so much trouble describing what it’s like up there that sometimes it feels like I’m one of those early European explorers to the Americas who were so overwhelmed by how alien it all was that they inevitably fell back on biblical allusions and words like “awe” and “wonder” when writing about it. It’s a forest, but with no soil. Even at the center of the island there isn’t more than a few inches of moss and pine needles and maybe a little bit of dirt before you hit the jumble of boulders that make up the bedrock. And somehow pines twist their roots through that and get all of the sustenance they need to grow thirty feet tall. Can you picture that? I don’t think I could, if I hadn’t seen it.

Even the simpler aspects of The Island don’t fit into familiar ideas of what a trip to the wilderness should be like. There’s no WiFi or electricity and we have to maintain our own pump system to get water, but we’re not roughing it; we have a propane stove and enough dedicated cooks that we usually eat better there than we do at home. It seems like an archetypically outdoorsy place, but sometimes I spend almost the whole day in the cabin, reading and hanging out with the family. The routine up there isn’t hard to get used to, but it always feels like a jump to a different dimension when we return to the world of paved roads and lights after sunset. I've never been anywhere like it, and I don't think I ever will. It’s a clean break from the rest of the world.

That’s why it’s my designated place to reset at the end of each year. The same way sleep separates one day from another, a trip to The Island cuts off one year and signals the beginning of the next. And the same way the rest of your life drains away as you get lost in the world of your dreams, at The Island it seems like I’ve had an entire separate life up there, one that’s only lasted a couple weeks so far. With the real world a half-hour boat ride away, it begins to feel like the rocks and trees and cabin and lake are all that has ever existed. The evening eight years ago that I paced on the rocks by the shore for an hour, wondering what my new life in Minnesota would be like might have only happened two months ago, and the trip to our new house never came. 

Every year since I was six I had this fantasy that a war broke out while we were up at The Island and I’d have to live up there full time to avoid the draft. I even wrote a terrible novel around that premise to convince myself it wouldn’t be so great, but not even my own heavy-handed writing could puncture my idealized escape from the world. Right now, with about a hundred pounds of books I’ll have to read for the upcoming semester looming on the shelf above me, a permanent return to The Island doesn’t sound so bad.

It sure would be boring, though. That’s what I think I missed in my novel** and fantasies. I might daydream about all the things I wouldn’t have to do if I went to live up there, but what would I have to do? Find a consistent source of food, avoid bear attacks, and survive the winter, probably.

Still, I think that having a quick little exile from the real world is a good thing, and I’m glad to have that privilege. At college it always feels like everything is going a mile a minute, and if life continues  at this rate, I’ll be out of school and in a job and deep into middle age before I can catch my breath. So a little arrested development is nice. As long as our family stays the part-time tyrants of the tiny pile of rocks in the boundary waters, I’ll always have that place where it doesn’t make a whole lot of difference whether I’m six or twenty one.

___________________________

* Sorry if the capitalization bugs you, but I’ve always considered The Island a proper noun and typing it all lowercase seems like an insult to the place.

** And it’s a good thing I did, because that would have somehow been an even worse story.

Sporadic Reviews

A friend of mine who's been doing an email blog over the summer has a recurring segment where he offers reviews of various parts of his life. Since I'm running sort of low on publishable archival material for this Monday segment, I figured I'd just steal his idea:

The Execution of All Things (album by Rilo Kiley): By far the best thing I’ve discovered from listening to the radio in the men’s Cross Country locker room. 4/5 stars.

The Radio in the Men’s Cross Country Locker Room (radio): Excepting The Execution of All Things and a few classics, the selection is usually not the best. Then again, it’s sometimes a source of entertaining trivia (who knew Smashmouth was on the soundtrack for The Digimon Movie?) and functions fine as a piece of equipment. 2/5 stars.

Gardner’s Art Through the Ages: A Global History, 15th Edition (textbook by Fred S. Kleiner): I haven’t actually read it yet because my Art History class doesn’t start for a couple of weeks, but that thing sure is heavy and was a real pain to carry back from the bookstore. 0/5 stars.

The Bible (holy text by God): Also difficult to carry back from the bookstore due to its weight. On the other hand, it is The Word of the Lord and the one and only path to eternal salvation, so that kind of evens it out. 5/5 stars.

Pears (fruit): They probably wouldn’t be too impressive under any other circumstance, but it’s slim pickings at the Grinnell Dining Hall until the rest of the students come, so they’ve more or less been getting me through the week. 4/5 stars.

Maze Rats (tabletop RPG): It’s a pretty fun simplification of D&D with much more intuitive combat mechanics. Though a tip for incoming players: if one of your party members is a grave digger who’s way too into the job, another is some kind of pleasure-cultist, and the only distinguishing feature of the third is that he speaks like Tommy Wiseau in The Room, then you’re going to have to put up with a lot of zaniness.

Sleep (basic human function): It’s been kind of hard to come by, given that I’ve spent the past week in a tiny dorm room with no AC where the windows seem to be hermetically sealed to save students from single-story falls. And when it does come, the dreams are really weird. 2/5 stars.

$30 Couch From Goodwill (furniture): Essential for any dorm room. Or it would be, except I think this is the last couch like this in existence, and I’ve got it! Though it has been dubbed a “grandma couch” by several of my friends. 4/5 stars.

Blinking Light on the Ceiling of my Dorm With No Apparent Function (annoyance): Another reason why I’ve been having trouble sleeping. 0/5 stars.

Academia

I’ve been back at Grinnell for the past couple of days, though since classes don’t start for another week I’ve had a lot of time to kill on the depopulated campus. Mostly I’ve spent that time running, playing a variety of niche tabletop RPGs, and catching up on the headier reading I picked up at the New York State Summer Writer’s Institute. Particularly, I just finished Siri Hustavedt’s novel The Blazing World, a book that I bought purely based on its cool cover art and which inspired a random stranger who happened to see the book to tell me, “Oh, you could’ve made a better choice than that.”

For the most part, that stranger was right: The Blazing World is a tough read. It’s an epistolary novel told by more than twenty different narrators, which tells the story of a woman who secretly creates work for three different artists for a variety of abstract and sometimes confusing reasons. But it’s especially difficult for me to read right now because, in a week, I’ll be in the full immersion of academia that is a Grinnell College education. And if there’s anything Hustavedt’s narrators love, it’s academia. And if there’s anything I hate, it’s academia.

Hate might be too powerful a word, actually. After all, I deeply enjoy most of my classes at Grinnell. But still, there’s something about sentences like, “Nevertheless, the successive real environments may pack a punch that is ultimately more subversive than the accommodating relationalism advocated by Bourriaud” that fires up a instinctive anger inside me, the way that seeing an enormous spider might fire up instinctive fear.  

Grinnell doesn’t exactly coddle its freshman when it comes to teaching them how to write for college-level classes, so maybe the rage I feel at academic writing stems from the time I got back my first paper, in which every use of figurative language, every colloquialism, and every contraction was circled in red ink. I mean, seriously, contractions? Try going a day without using contractions in your everyday speech, and you’ll see how painfully unnatural that is.

And that inauthenticity towards language tends to translate over to an inauthenticity towards life. It seems like the most respected academic writing is the kind that replaces any real feeling that the reader can connect with or evidence they can understand with esoteric quotes and impenetrable logic. It’s more than just that the writing is difficult to understand, it’s that it seems to intentionally remove itself from any kind of understanding aside from a lofty, pretentious understanding that you can only get after you’ve been stuck in a library cubicle for so long that physical sensations and memories begin to fade away. Sometimes it seems like academics make their writing impossible to understand without a PhD in order to keep PhD programs afloat. And if the vast majority of the population will never have the education, much less the desire, to read something, then what makes it so important in the first place?

Of course, everything I’ve written so far stinks of hypocrisy. My writing definitely comes off as pretentious from time to time (and opening this post by talking about a book on the nature of art probably didn’t help that). And I do really like college. After I get over the gag-reflex to the prose, I usually even enjoy the academic writing I read. And I especially like class discussions, because by pooling our knowledge we can usually find some way to pull all the academic nonsense down to earth and explain it using real language, contractions and all. Despite how inauthentic academics seem to strive to make their work, most of it does have important implications on people’s everyday lives. Under all the pretension and philosophy and obscure quotes, The Blazing World is essentially about how ingrained sexism is, not just in the world of art but in the simplest interactions and deepest relationships. And maybe I came to understand that better for all the work that went into piecing it together.

So now I’ve come to the point in the post where I have to make a stand. Either I can go back to my stance that academia has something broken at its core, or I can say it’s all my fault and I just need to work harder. But, in the fine academic tradition of worming out of hard questions, I’m going to say it’s neither. There’s something rewarding about struggling through a dense article, but I can’t help but wonder why it has to be so distant when the ideas are really so intuitive and applicable to real life once you talk them out. I think the best way to communicate and understand the ideas that academics grasp at is through literature (by which I mean real literature, not that literary theory crap). Whether it’s simple writing or purple prose, it always has enough distance between the language and the deeper idea that by connecting the two forces you to engage with it. But, unlike academic writing, the ideas are told through stories that feel real when you read them (at least, if they’re done well), giving you an authentic target for empathy to hold on to as you journey through the story. It lets you engage with deep ideas, the way the best academic writing can, but through something that feels halfway real.

So here’s my current life plan, which I figure I’ll be regurgitating enough over the next few days that it might help to get it straight now: I’m going to get through two more years of academia at Grinnell. I’m going to graduate with an English degree. And I’m going to teach English to high schoolers, so I can engage with all these fascinating ideas without getting knee-deep in phony ivory-tower blather. And, damnit, I’ll use all the contractions I want! 

Milk the Religion Out of his Brain

Doing this on a dare. Don't ask.

The Horny Hornet Incident or: How I was Almost Persecuted for my Journalism

Starting in middle school I wrote an underground satirical newspaper called The Southern View. I kept it up sporadically into high school, while also writing for the school's legitimate student newspaper. One week I was short two articles, so I just submitted some pieces from The Southern View as humor articles (which didn't make a whole lot of sense, since the school newspaper didn't have a humor section at the time). Somehow, the editors actually approved it, but both articles got deleted as soon as our principal found out about it. At first the principal assumed I was some kind of cyber-vandal who had hacked the school's webpage and even tried to get me suspended. To this day I've never been clear on which article offended him. Sure, odds are it was the use of the word "horny" in a school newspaper, but I've always secretly hoped that he resented my on-the-nose message about our school's push for new technology. Anyway, here they are:

Student Council Begin to Question Merits of "Horny Hornet Dance"

After calling a press release to deal with the fallout from the homecoming game disaster, Edina High School’s Student Council has claimed their invention and encouragement of "The Horny Hornet Dance" was, “Probably not our brightest idea, exactly.”

Meekly defending their decision to create a highly sexualized school-specific song-and-dance routine, teach it to the entire student body during the pep fest, and encourage them to perform it at the homecoming game whenever the home team scored a touchdown, Stud. Co. President Michael O'Neil said, “I wish I could say we didn’t see this coming, but honestly, we knew going into this that there was a 60-65% chance that everyone would be horribly offended. But that’s the risk we at Stud. Co. are willing to take.

"At least everyone had a good time," O'Neil said, a statement which he quickly revised, "I mean, obviously not everyone did, since so many people are protesting and all that. But some people did, I think. The guy in the hornet suit sure was into it."

Edina Public Schools Continues Descent Into Tech-Driven Dystopia

Expert opinions released this week from the Minnesota Center for Apocolypse Research confirmed that Edina is continuing its long, painful decline to a twisted dystopian civilization ruled by technology.

      

Drawing from the proliferation of smartphones, success of the eLearning2 initiative, and new surveys on the amount of screen time for the average Edina citizen, MCAR Researcher Bree Jacobs has gone on record saying that we’re, “One or two months, tops, away from a total societal transformation into a Ray Bradbury-level dystopia where real life becomes a passing inconvenience and our lives are dominated purely by internet connections.”

      

According to the newest reports, Edina is leading the world in the inevitable transformation into a technotopia that, were it presented as a piece of fiction to critics in the 1950s, would be called “disturbing,” “far fetched,” and “a stark warning for what our society may be headed towards are we not careful in our consumption of new gizmos and widgets.”

       

“Just ten years ago, Edina of today could easily have been presented as a novel or film about how we need to be careful not to trade our individuality, tradition, and right to privacy for mobile phones and social networking,” said Jacobs. “Heck,  science fiction writer Astrid Soup’s critically acclaimed 1972 short story ‘Braindead Education’ about a school in which books and teachers have been replaced by computers and electronic games is virtually indistinguishable from the EHS of today.”

________________________________

* The Edina High School mascot is a hornet. This was meant to be a take-down of the racy dancing the homecoming court did during pep fests, though really I didn't have a problem with it. I just thought the phrase "Horny Hornet" was funny.

Children's Horror

Here’s a paradox for you: Think about all the pains we take to avoid exposing kids to anything frightening. We don’t fight or swear around them, we censor references to sex or death. My parents even made midnight runs to Petsmart to replace seven generations of fish that were poisoned by Waco tap water so I wouldn’t have to say goodbye to the living decorations I hadn’t cared enough about to even name. With all that in mind, think about the most terrified you’ve ever been. Unless you’ve experienced some real horror in adulthood, odds are it was sometime when you were a kid. As constantly stressed out as I’ve been since fifth grade, nothing has ever topped the nighttime hallucinations I had when I was in Kindergarten, when the posters on my wall were windows to worlds of monsters and horrors slithered through the dark mass of toys on my floor.

Or maybe it’s not a paradox at all. Maybe we try so hard to avoid exposing kids to real-life horror because we know that their minds work differently and we don’t want to give them any more ammunition to terrify themselves over. As scared as I was as a kid, I’ve missed that kind of fantastical horror as I’ve grown up and forgotten how exactly it worked. There was a kind of awe to it that you can’t recapture with day-to-day stress or real life violence. That might be part of the reason why my one of my most recent guilty pleasures is the genre of children’s horror. 

By children’s horror, I don’t necessarily mean spooky stories for kids, since a lot of those use halloween imagery without ever really drilling into deeper anxieties. The best example I can think of is the Toy Story movies. Toys coming to life isn’t in itself a horrifying concept (at least, not the way Pixar does it), but it hits on fears of growing up, becoming obsolete, and not being able to move. Those feelings that scared a lot of kids (me, for example). Or think about the waiting place from Dr. Seuss’s Oh, the Places You’ll Go! I’ve read Dante and Christian mystics imagine purgatory, but I don’t think I’ve ever felt the same fear of a life of resigned anticipation than that one page in a kid’s book.

Most of the children’s horror I’ve seen lately has been TV, movies, and video games: Coraline, Over the Garden Wall, Gravity Falls, Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask and the like. Even in less literary forms, I’m impressed at how the writers evoke horror without falling back on more mature things that haunt us. It really illustrates how universal so many of these fears are, that you can communicate them with a PG-rating and assurance that everything will turn out okay in the end and still haunt the viewer to their core.

Maybe these universal fears are at the core of what makes children’s horror so effective, and why so many adult horror stories fall back on the symbols of childhood (think Stephen King’s It or The Babadook). For kids or adults, it’s hard to confront guilt or mistrust or the fear of losing a loved one head on. It’s exhausting, so much so that it’s usually easier to ignore it and let the anxiety seep in to the rest of our lives. Rather than being vehicles for pure horror, then, these monsters actually make dealing with these issues easier. I think a lot of people underestimate what kids are capable of understanding and think that their fears are just signs of immaturity and stupidity. But even if the monsters are in your head, the fears are real. I wasn’t scared that the night terrors would hurt me, I was scared that they would eat my brother, sleeping a few feet away from me, and I wouldn’t be able to do anything about it. That anxiety sticks with me to this day.

Maybe the reason why I’ve been so into children’s horror these days is because my time at home for the summer is dwindling. I’m heading back to Grinnell in two days, and I won’t be back home until Thanksgiving. Getting whisked away to some world of magic and danger is a common trope in children’s horror. Maybe venturing to Narnia isn’t the most accurate representation of what my next semester will be like, but sometimes we need little lies to make the world easier.