Have You Heard That M.F.A.s Suck, Part 3,145

Daniel's excerpted a much longer William Gass interview for the good stuff! As one could apparently predict? I didn't read the whole thing. But I did read this part, which isn't in the excerpt...

BLVR: You’ve mentioned being taught by M. H. Abrams and Wittgenstein, and I know there are writers now who recall their own class time with you. What were your primary goals as a teacher? And as the years continued, what did you learn about the practice of teaching?

WG: Well, I was very limited. I was basically a classroom lecturer. And I wasn’t terribly good at seminars or with tutorials. I certainly didn’t feel as comfortable, and that may be because, as Stein said of Pound, I’m a village explainer.

Maybe I'm just a stupid, self-absorbed, illiterate M.F.A. holder, but I could see how his teaching approach might predispose a workshop environment to be pretty miserable. (I'd probably hold the Henry James kid down so that Gass could hit him, though.)

Funny coincidence: Not long ago, I sent away for my transcripts since I hadn't seen them in a while.  (At my alma mater, there is such little emphasis on grades that you don't get them at the end of a semester -- you get evaluations from your teachers, instead. If you want to see your letter grade, you have to ask at the registrar's office.)

So, I skimmed through it to find the worst grade of my entire academic career.  The Craft of Poetry. Graduate level seminar. That's right. To this day, I still can't deal with iambic pentameter. It's easier for me to explain selective seratonin reuptake inhibitors, or do a geometry proof. Or clean my house.

It's always bothered me that in academia, writers are often perceived as lit majors who decided to get their freak on. OF COURSE, writers should read. OF COURSE, they should read novels, short stories and poetry.

But imagine that literature is a car. Imagine there are brands. (It would definitely make NASCAR more interesting for me, but back to the analogy.) Let's say that the twentieth century is Chevrolet.

Now, imagine all of the people who are linked to Chevrolets. Some of them are enthusiasts -- they belong to fan clubs, know the history of the brand, eagerly await new releases, take their beloved Chevies to cruise nights, flock to car shows.

That's not all there is to Chevy people, though. There are also the people who design the cars. There are the people who fix the cars, and maintain them. The ones who customize them.

Often, these two groups coincide. The guy with the Camaro really does know how to take his engine apart and put it back together. The repair guy down the street really can name every single model put out in 1973.

But I have real difficulty with the idea that while enthusiasts might not know anything about engineering, ALL Chevrolet mechanics should know every model put out in every single year, or that they should always approach a new car by sitting in the driver's seat rather than opening the hood. And that's what I think happens a lot of the time.

No one gives literature majors hell if they don't write creatively, right?

The best part of it all, though? Assuming I didn't know Gass hated my guts, I think I might have liked being in a class with the format he describes in the interview. I did an independent study in grad school where I developed a literature class for beginning writers, and I'd love the chance to teach it someday -- find all of its weak points and holes.

Edited to add some more background on why I'm obnoxious about this whole thing:

I had the same advisor for undergraduate and most of graduate school, and we had the same argument  every single semester, when it came time to register -- he wanted me to take a literature class along with my writing workshop, and I didn't.

It's worth noting that I only took three classes at a time, and there was a lot of independent study in each class. It's also worth noting that my writing workshops ALWAYS had non-workshop reading, both in class and independently. It didn't help that I had friends who took writing workshops and literature classes, and just really seemed to hate it.

"I want to pay attention to what I read this way, not that way," I'd tell him, and after a few minutes he'd sigh and sign off on my registration form. I took lots of history courses. I took religion, political science, film. I even took criminalistics.

I started grad school at American, where you have to take literature seminars -- no excuses. So I took a 500 level course on 20th century European literature. It was fine -- I didn't dissolve into a puddle, and I had no problem keeping up -- in fact, I did a presentation on James Joyce that was probably way more than anyone ever wanted to know. But when I went back to Bronxville the following year? My non-required class was a sociology course on American immigration. That was a fun fight.