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current Monday
Report below!
This week's report by Noah Cicero
About The Professor Crap Network
I went to my first ‘real’ poetry academic literary event last week. It
took place near the campus of Youngstown State University. It was
in a downtown building and sponsored by the local Bourgeoisie in an
attempt to bring art to Youngtown, even though the only people
there were upper middle-class white people who don’t live in
Youngstown. The person to read that night was Diane Thiel, a
professor of creative of writing.
Here is the chorological order of events and an analysis of them.
The reading took place in a stale room that looked like a boardroom.
There was no alcohol, none at all to be found. I don’t even think there
was free pop or chips. Personally I think there should always be at
least one of two things at a poetry reading: alcohol or free chips.
Professor Philip Brady went up to the mike and introduced Diane
Thiel. He said a bunch of words like, “Energy, powerful, spiritual,
dark, emotion, optimistic, inspiring, and beautiful.” It sounded like a
commercial for a family-friendly sitcom. I thought it was contrived for
a moment, but I was like no, there’s a formula one follows when one
introduces a professor that’s supposed to be a poet. Maybe the first
time someone wrote one of those lame introductions it was
contrived. But now it’s a formula no different than the formula a
mechanic follows to change a car’s oil. There was no thought by
professor Brady concerning what she wrote about or how she wrote,
just that, “This is how an introduction should be done.”
Diane Thiel went up to read. She was wearing a black dress, had long
hippy hair, and big black leather boots. But the best part of her ‘poet’
costume was the amount of Native American jewelry she was
wearing. She had on a huge chrome belt that held up nothing and a
huge chrome necklace with that turquoise color that Native
Americans put on their jewelry. The jewelry was that shit sold at
truck stops in Utah and Arizona. It is for sure that she thinks she is
somehow connected to the Native American people through some
spiritual force that resides in trees and rocks.
Diane Thiel started to read and the horror came. It sucked; I have no
idea why she even writes. There was no human behavior at all in her
writing, only descriptions of objects. The only thing I can assume is
that Diane Thiel is terrified of actual human behavior, and that she
views her self and other humans as objects so she can feel safe and
secure. She kept naming locations like towns in Latin America, and if
she ran out of towns, she would speak Spanish, Greek, German, or
words in English so obscure that even if you knew what the word
meant at one time, you probably forgot because no one ever uses
that word.
Her poetry was in strict boring-as-my-asshole meters. The kind of
meters people only know or care about if they have gone through
senior creative writing classes. So even if you were an English major
and especially if you were any non-English major or didn’t go to
college, you would have no idea why she was talking so funny, and
which provoked me to stare out the window.
Her prose was predictable as hell. She basically had a setting, then
wrote all the nouns that would be in the setting, and then gave them
stereotypical verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. I got the feeling she
had nothing to write because she is so vapid. So she just thought of
all the nouns that occupy certain settings, and that’s how she
created her sentences. I diagramed her scenes as I was sitting there.
See diagram below. It is not exact to her story, but you will get the
idea. You can see how boring it must have been from the diagram.
Let’s call it, the diagram of predictable crappy writing.
Diagram of predictable crappy writing:
The worse thing, was that she was in Youngstown, Ohio. A city with
fifteen percent official unemployment and in reality the
unemployment is around forty percent. Everyone in the Youngstown
area is unemployed, poor, most have no health insurance, and if
they do they definitely don’t have full coverage. It is miserable,
segregated, and a hard place to live in. She read those nonsensical
poems and stories inside a bankrupt country with a reactionary
dictator and a piss-poor bourgeoisie asshole as a democratic
candidate. And all she talked about were Latin American towns, her
mailbox, one poem about how it was okay to be mediocre and weak,
and nothing at all to do with the people of Youngstown and their
miserable existences. It wasn’t even funny. What kind of asshole
writes poems and stories that aren’t funny at all? Even Dostoevsky
had his funny moments.
Everyone thought it was great except for my friends and me. It is like
the professors at YSU and several other colleges have these four
presses, Artful Dodge, Ashland, Pig Iron Press, and Etruscan to get
them published. These presses don’t even have a distributor, their
books don’t make it to Borders or Barnes and Nobles. And I looked
through NewPages.com and the other lists of publishers on the web
and I couldn’t even find these presses. The only thing I can assume
is that they keep them secret in case the wrong people will read
their books or submit to them.
Oh, the best way to spot one of their books is the cover, which
always has pictures of a single tree in autumn, storm clouds, or
majestic photos of the Rocky Mountains at sunset.
They all sit around publishing each other’s ultra shit books jerking
each other off and forcing the college kids to buy their books and
read them to graduate. That is absurd behavior.
When the reading was over, I went to the after party at Philip Brady’s
house. His house had all these African artifacts, Irish folk music was
playing, and there was a fire going. While I was there some deranged
human trying to get her way through college asked Diane Thiel some
questions. She asked why she memorized her poems or as they
said, “Learned by heart.” Diane Thiel said it was oral tradition, that’s
how primitive people told stories. And if she was alive then that
would be her function in the tribe. I almost asked her if she was so
conservative and reactionary that she wanted to go back in history
all the way to 26,000 B.C. But she would not have understood the
question.
I’ve been shit on and looked at like a loser for saying that I enjoy
reading e-zines and having my work published in e-zines. They make
it obvious that they think print is better, but give no reason why. I try
to explain that only professors read print journals. Young people and
regular people don’t read print literary journals. E-zines like Retort,
Zygote in my Coffee, Newtopia, Word Riot, and many others are
visited every month by thousands of humans who actually enjoy
reading.
This leads to another aspect of their absurd mentality; their love for
contests. Before the poetry event started Philip Brady named all the
contests he and his friends have won lately. I have no idea why
someone would enter a writing contest and care about winning, I
always thought writers started writing because they wanted to do an
activity that was free from competition and the rights and duties
enforced by institutions. I got the impression from these people that
only certain people had the right to read their work: college
graduates and the petite bourgeoisie.
It is clear that their writing is not transcendent; it is only a cultural
phenomenon. Their writing will die with the last printing of their
books. Their writing is a cultural phenomenon in the way the people
thought the world was flat, the way people thought that kings and
marquis should rule over people’s lives, and it resembles cheap
romance and sci-fi novels more than classic literature. Their books
are not outside the world, they are like cups and chairs and all false
ideas. They will be destroyed and forgotten as the dialectic of history
pushes on. The essence of their writing and existences is that they
are instruments of the bourgeois to maintain the status quo of class-
division, mediocrity, self-deception, and the total negation of reality.
It must be pretty miserable to spend one’s life writing and reading
crap to ensure that one percent of the population remains billionaires
so you can make eighty-thousand a year to buy African artifacts.
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