Loose Cans

Faulker/America and the US is over, and I'm rather a bit worried that that was the easy one. The only trouble came with Faulkner, when I spent the first twenty minutes of the exam staring at the questions, trying to decide which one to do. That cost me big, too--I got fucked on time, and had to scrawl at the bottom of my half-finished Roth essay, "TIME. RUBBISH!" Of course, half-finished is a relative term; none of these suckers were properly finished. Look, these questions aren't like math problems. They're valid questions that deserve more than forty-five minutes of hyperactive disgorging of any and all relevant details. I hate exams. Like, really hate exams. I know this is a novel sentiment, but holy shit, do I hate exams. They're counterproductive. For English majors bent on writing especially. For me especially. At least Horace Mann had the good sense not to give them except for grammar and the casual AP. I mean, the ability to synthesize data quickly is important for anyone, not least of all for us, but only when the data is at your disposal. Remove the ability to be intertextual (that is, make a closed-book, hour-long test) and you effectively vitiate all the techniques of synthesis we've spent all this time working on. I must quote. I cannot and will not compartmentalize knowledge; I study this subject as a way of ordering the world around me; to deprive me of external material, of the material of that world, is to neuter my intellect entirely. So I memorized Macbeth's "sound and fury" speech. I study in order to cultivate a stable of references. The Sound and the Fury essay I began with an ancedote about Beethoven: he was performing a new sonata for a small drawing-room crowd. When he finished and the applause had quieted, a lady asked, "it's very beautiful, Mr. Beethoven, but what does it mean?" So he played it again. (Other such handy anecdotes are the one about the modern dancer who was asked the same question, and replied, "if I could have said it in words, why do you think I should have gone to all the trouble of dancing it?" and the one about Melville, who when asked what Moby Dick was about, said "it's about a whale)

I take very serious every opportunity I get to write (unless we're talking a blog I was far too distracted to undertake). I cannot willfully write generically or simplistically. I can't do it crudely, at least not consciously. Also, the obvious is out. I couldn't just sum up Whitman's aesthetic of the self in Song of Myself, oh no. I had to write about why that aesthetic, which makes him a great prophet, makes him a failure as a poet (it does). It means too much to me to just piss all over. That's why exams are so infuriating. They actually require us to be negligent of nuance, complexity--of our entire subject. I'd rather write elegantly, with a tight, unified essay structure and a strong, original thesis, one that I can really get into, than flood the page with idle language. Especially when I write by hand. On a computer, a lot of lines are fairly meaningless throwaways. By hand, because so much effort goes into it, I write with extreme deliberation. And slowly. Very slowly. I write in fear of the fact that I can't backtrack, slip in a paragraph. You can't edit, and that alone makes exam-writing a joke. The argument there is that it tests your raw ability, but that's horseshit. This is writing, not science. Everyone has his or her own method. Test me on a computer, I'll show you a completely different result. That fact alone invalidates the exercise in my mind. Essays--and I know I've made no end of a geshrei about them--for all their flaws, are a good and accurate method of evaluation, so long as some attention is paid to the method and intent of their writing. Exams, for us, are patently absurd. What kind of idiotic exercise, purporting to test your powers of expression, actually prevents you from finishing your sentence--prevents you from expressing your thought? The fact that I'm going to take a hit as a result of my inability to finish my Roth essay (which was going very well, had quickly taken solid and sharp shape in my head), is enough to show that these tests more test your ability to take tests than your aptitude for the subject itself.

Of course, that's an old trope. We all complained about this on the SAT's. I object now because these are so much more serious, and there's so much less margin for error. This is not multiple choice. This is not right and wrong. This is also not something you can retake next month (not that I think I did badly on this one, not at all--I was quite happy with both my Whitman and my Faulkner essays, short as they were at 2.5 pages each, and the half of Roth I'd cranked out. Throwing toilets and glitter all at once). What this is is the judgement on the entire past year of your life, the only one. This is what determines your grade, as the essays count for little. And I think it's just insensate. If we must submit to these ordeals, then they should, at the very least, give us some time to write. I'd sooner have a 12-hour marathon session, like the New York architecture exams, than these three-question, three-hour brain farts. Rubbish.

Sadie and I are seeing Lady Windermere's Fan at the Gate tonight. I think that should set things to right.

Two showers, a shave, and a clapping of shoes out the window later, I am still sand-mottled, rousting grains from my pores, where they lodged themselves snugly over the course of this weekend's Cork Beach Ultimate Hat Tournament. From Friday evening to Sunday night, I neither changed my clothes, nor showered, nor shaved, nor brushed my teeth, nor even moved my bowels (hey, you're camping on a beach--there's nowhere to go. Furthermore, on the way home, when we finally made a pit stop for some food, I trotted into the adjacent pub and into the bathroom, whereupon I dropped my trousers, sat down, exhaled triumphantly, finally looked around for the toilet paper and nearly cried when I saw there was none). On the other hand, we won. Our team might have been somewhat stacked (though I maintain that any team where I have to handle can't be that good), but the flow was superb (even against the reduced stall count of eight, we never let it above four), and in our last two games, the semifinal and final, the aggregate score was 21-2 (each game saw us run up a score of 10-0, then concede the last, or penultimate point). Just really good Ultimate. Sand's a killer, though. My toes are warped and sore from pushing through it all weekend. Took a hit in the final--I got tangled with the guy I was marking, and his knee smashed into my calf muscle. So that was all for me. Can't walk right today either.

We slept in tents on the beach, a little village of tarp and twine, lashed all night by the wind and rain. The first day saw one isolated cloudburst right before we began, and then sunny skies all day long. Cracking, wild wind, though, meaning that all the upwind points were crucial (we allowed virtually none). That night, we barbequed and lit the bonfire. Desultory marshmallows, with neither Graham crackers nor Hershey's chocolate, but beer and skits, at least. The wind had died, and the Flashlight (disc with LED lights, for night play) flew true. The next day was less amenable. Two rainsqualls sent everyone scurrying back over the dunes into the tents, and the wind had switched direction. Rain was sporadic through the day, complicating play, but not too much. We're used to it here. Low releases. No push passes, ever. They end up going backwards. Broke camp Sunday afternoon. I was in a car with three others, and claimed shotgun on the grounds of injury (might have torn a ligament, or just bruised the muscle, not sure yet), but in a crowded hatchback--all the cars here are hatchbacks--even shotgun doesn't provide that much legroom. Also you can't go to sleep. Drove through the Irish countryside one last time, under bright, leaping rainbows.

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Upon returning home at 11pm, limping and half-dead, I showered, scrubbing violently, shaved, dressed (I'd been wearing the same swim trunks under the same jeans, plus the same shirt and same socks, since Friday) and headed out to Spirit, Dublin's biggest and, doubtless, loudest nightclub. Antonio's final leaving party. Left at 3am, ears ringing harmonically, in whining treble and drowsy bass. Still hearing a bright clear whine right now. I'm just wrecked. Sadie's first exam was this morning. I need a haircut. I need to go grocery shopping. I need to get a big envelope from Chicago; Harvard's rejection came via email over the weekend. I am not upset (I am not of the 75 out of a thousand--at least, not on paper), only freaked out. The possibility that I might get shut out at Chicago just became very, very real. That needs to not happen. That's why this post is so terse and tense. I'm a little distracted.