Screen Time, Take 12: My Old School
I had a system for writing papers in college: 1 page = 1 hour. It takes a half hour or twenty minutes per page to spew out all your thoughts, and 30-40 minutes to edit. “Editing” meant proofreading it once. No need to go overboard with those secondary drafts. These were undergrad college papers, not high criticism I was hoping to have reviewed by the Pulitzer committee.
My English Lit III professor was one of the many Humanities and Literature department faculty members who drew me away from my original major at Bard College: Film. I wanted, more than anything else, to impress this woman. I was interviewed by the Bard Free Press and was quoted insisting that I would marry the professor one day. In retrospect, her seeing that in print might have tipped her off to the fact that my ideas weren’t always grounded in reality.
I felt a tingling on my cheeks as she passed back our 8-page midterm papers on George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda. Sitting at the wide wooden table, I watched her serenely slide each stack of stapled paper to my fellow students. I watched several of my peers sheepishly collect their papers and grimace at the notes. My first paper on Wordsworth received an ‘A.’ The only note appeared on the last page and pontificated on how hard it is to “relate the sonic values of a poem” while writing about the language in an academic essay. Less a critique and more an observation. She was simply sharing her thoughts! It is hard to mimic the sonic implications of words when people are reading those words silently. My writing was near-perfect save for the fact I couldn’t quite express the mouthfeel of Wordsworth’s poetry while analyzing it. That first paper was enough for this professor to ask me to walk her to her office so I could talk about my goals, my high school education, my life up to that point. We walked in the orange glow of the evening sun past boisterous students excitedly marching in big groups to the cafeteria for dinner.
In that first office meeting, I felt like she was trying to adopt me. I never in my life had someone show such a keen interest in my mind. Until then, my teachers had a vague sense that I was going to squander whatever potential they saw in me. It felt like they were preemptively disappointed. This professor wanted to talk to me. She liked hearing my thoughts, and we had a great rapport in those office meetings. It didn’t hurt that she was a gorgeous 20-something woman with thick black curly hair, a slight lisp that made me look at her lips whenever she was speaking, and she wrote poetry about her bike seat inadvertently making her come when she rode it. I know I wasn’t the only person on campus who found her ethereally sexy because a male faculty member came up to me in the cafeteria holding the student newspaper in his hand, pointed at my quote, and said “she’s a force of nature” which is a smart adult’s way of saying “this lady fucks” or “I wish I could say more but I’d get fired.” I was smitten and ready to give up my film degree if it meant visiting this office every week to stare at her Velma glasses and the bright orange baubles she wore around her neck that called attention to where the neckline on her sweaters ended.
Before we get ahead of ourselves, nothing happened. I think it would be bad if something had happened, and I never got the vibe that she was interested in me in that way. I was simply in the running for her prize student. She would ask me to attend lectures with her and introduce me to her visiting professor friends and give them a “see, I told you he was smart” look when I shared a thought about a Jay Z line that matched a rhyme scheme in a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem. My friends joked that there was chemistry, and my face would flush, but it never embarrassed me enough to stop walking to her office after class if I was still excited about that day’s lesson.
When I turned in my second paper, I felt like I had given her a passable but disappointing interpretation of the George Eliot novel I clearly did not read all the way through. Our class had a choice between writing our second paper of the semester on a Coleridge poem or the 800-page novel none of us made it through in the three weeks we had to read it. In hindsight, I should have written about a different, shorter text.
In high school, I had an English teacher who convinced himself none of his students were reading the books he assigned and implored us not to use Sparknotes. The experience of reading the synopsis was not the same as engaging with the text itself.
“You have to relish the book to understand it, you have to spend the time on it.” That’s great advice if you want a 16-year-old to enjoy reading for the first time, but terrible advice for an overloaded 18-year-old with three other classes to worry about on top of the one where a professor assigned big fat novels.
I picked up several bad habits in high school when balancing homework, applying to schools, seeing my girlfriend, partying, rehearsing for The Laramie Project, Speech and Debate, and playing sports all became overwhelming. Namely, I cut into my sleep schedule. I slept from 3 AM to 8 AM most nights. Since I lived a block from my school, and rehearsals usually started an hour after classes ended, I went home and would take a 48-minute nap and set an alarm for five minutes before rehearsal started. I’d show up sweating, half awake, lines memorized, but often gave an erratic performance. The director asked me in earnest one day if I was on heroin.
For the record, I couldn’t finish Daniel Deronda in under a month at age 34 during the pandemic lockdown when I was unemployed and didn’t see any of my friends. As an 18-year-old college freshman, I was not ready to finish that book in 3 weeks. Still, I took my old high school teacher’s advice to heart and made a schedule to guarantee I finished the book without using Sparknotes: if I read 50 pages a day, every day, I’d have a full two days left over to write the paper.
I even pitched my thesis beforehand to my professor in her office. I wowed her by speaking on Jeremy Bentham’s Utilitarianism and how the novel had become some additional product of the Industrial Revolution, that Daniel’s concerns about identity didn’t amount to much in the great churning business of “progress” booming all around him. If you’re wondering what the hell I meant, so do I. My professor smiled and told me to go for it.
I read every day but only managed to get through about 5-10 pages of Daniel Deronda before falling asleep or needing to work on a paper for another class or attend an evening film screening for Film History. I fell asleep in those so often, I started to bring a thermos of coffee with me, but then I needed to pee every 20 minutes so I missed long sections of the films either way. If I couldn’t stay awake for Vertigo, what chance was there for me to finish reading George Eliot?
I read as much of the book as I could without so much as outlining my paper on the novel. Pro-tip for students: you can read a secondary source that summarizes the novel and use it to formulate your thoughts — even begin writing some ideas or structure for your argument — before you crack the book. It sounds like cheating but it’s the equivalent of reading a good translator’s cogent thoughts in an introduction to the Iliad before you even hit the words “Rage, Muse.” It’s good to know a little bit about what you’re planning to ingest. Especially if you have to write about it.
I made it through enough of the novel to sort of keep up in class discussions. I heard all kinds of plot points I didn’t recognize, and Easter Eggs like the word “harlot” rhyming with a main character’s surname “Harleth.” One student kept repeating the word “mimesis” (a word I didn’t know then and still don’t fully understand now) much to the delight of the professor I was so desperate to impress. Someone compared a scene of two characters speaking and thinking at the same time to that scene from Annie Hall with the subtitles. We watched the movie clip in the middle of class. That’s all I know about Daniel Deronda.
After all those classes and hustling to finish reading the novel, I started writing my paper on Tuesday evening at 4 PM. It was due Wednesday at noon.
If you account for a necessary dinner break, you’re looking at 2-3 writing hours before you eat, then a full 4 hours (maybe longer!) until midnight, then you set an alarm for 6 AM and finish the rest of the paper at the computer lab. Piece of cake. I’d outline the paper Tuesday night, get a full 6 hours of sleep, and have another 6 hours to write in the morning, print, and hand it in.
Who couldn’t pull off 8 pages in that much time? We’re talking about a double-spaced, college paper full of unnecessary preambles and jargon. Words like “forthwith” and “naturally” begin every sentence when they’re objectively unnecessary. Also, you spend a lot of space repeating what you just wrote a sentence ago in a different way. You hope the order of the words makes the reader feel differently about the sentence they just read.
I had more than enough time.
There were several problems:
I was averaging roughly 3 hours of sleep a night, and one short nap a day in the library or film building.
My social life, which included those unexpected long chats with acquaintances and close friends that make college worth attending took up roughly 80% of my waking hours, and some, if I forgot to lock my door, of my semi-unconscious ones. My dorm mates would come into my room high to play video games in my room and eat from the giant tub of Garrett popcorn my mom had sent me in the mail. I’d sit up in bed to talk and pretend I wasn’t sleeping. Once, a kid came in looking for a wine opener, and settled for a pair of scissors he found on my desk, jammed the cork down into the bottle, and sprayed red wine all over me and my sheets. I got up and drank the wine with him while the sheets dried. Not in the washer/dryer. I mean I put a fan near the bed and later slept in the dried wine-stained sheets. College! (If you’re asking why didn’t I lock my door and get some sleep, shut up, nerd! We were having fun. Also, my friends were like cats. If you locked them out, they scratched at the door for food and attention.)
I did not understand the 300 of 800 pages I had read of Daniel Deronda.
So, I wrote nothing Tuesday night, and at 1 AM, I set my alarm for 4:00 AM. 8 hours between 4 and noon = 8-page paper. No sweat.
To my credit, I did not sleep through my alarm. Instead, and likely worse, I woke up in that hot, panicked sweat that comes from anxiety impeding any good sleep you might have gotten. Like when you have to wake up early for a flight but the stress of worrying you’re going to miss the plane makes you toss and turn all night.
I ran straight to the computer lab and started typing.
I read some of the paper back to myself while it was printing. Pretty good stuff, I thought.
After another week of going to a diner at 2 AM to drunkenly eat their version of a Grand Slam with my friends, I arrived in class slightly more refreshed. Midterms were over, all the papers were in. I’d written something decent about The Rules of The Game for Film History. I’d written another decent paper on Plato’s Symposium for First Year Seminar. I’d written a halfway decent story, one of three I had to write that semester to be offered to the ravenous fiction workshop peers who would tear it apart as revenge for whatever terrible but truthful notes I handed them about their stories. That’s what I took my first semester: 4 classes that required I read and write more than any sane person could read or write in four months. The requirements were quixotic. Fittingly, Don Quixote also lost his mind because he stayed up too late reading books. At the beginning of the semester, my advisor highly encouraged me to get a math or language credit out of the way instead of taking classes that centered on such cerebral tasks. “Or take a music class or something.” I didn’t listen. Not listening to people who know better is an undergrad student’s modus operandi. Fuck you, old man! I came here to learn! I don’t want to be stuck in your job 10 years from now. Why would I take the same path? I was going to prove him wrong.
I added up the workload. In 15 weeks, I was expected to read:
-1 book a week for film class
-1 book a week for First Year Seminar
-Roughly 8 books for English Lit class
-A few books and two short stories a week for my fiction workshop
I mean… who hasn’t been able to read 38+ books in 4 months? It’s not that hard. Especially when you’re away from everyone who’s ever loved you for the first time in your life!
Total pages I was required to write for these classes: 87
87 pages of good writing in that short a period is possible if you’re on drugs or manic or both.
Oh, did I mention I was also in a play? And that I was already doing stand-up a few times a week? That I went to every event anyone invited me to attend, including weird dance recitals and parties where the main appeal was free Yuenglings and a fire pit? I hung out hard. I met people I still consider my best friends and the only reason we’re so close is because we never stopped hanging out until we all fell asleep in each others’ rooms. I went through two breakups in one semester and started dating a third girl during finals. I drank nearly every day. I packed it in that first semester.
What do teachers know? I didn’t need sleep. I was getting everything done!
When I arrived in my English Lit III class to get my graded paper back, I had high hopes that my grit — my utter disregard for bodily needs when on a deadline — would pay off.
My professor started by saying, “If you see more red on your papers, it means I was intrigued and engaging with your ideas! So don’t flip to the end to look at the grade until you’ve seen what I’ve written."
I thought: that’s great news because there’s a lot of red ink on my paper! Mostly question marks and phrases like “I don’t follow?” On page three, the red ink disappeared. I held out hope as I flipped to the end that maybe I had started to make a point. I realized she had given up on reading my paper altogether.
On the last page, I found a short paragraph: “I cannot find an argument — nay, even a grammatical sentence — in this paper. Please see me in my office as soon as possible as I am deeply concerned.” Then, circled underneath, the letter ‘F.'
I failed. Not like Lisa Simpson getting an F that’s actually a ‘B+’ but an ‘F’ for failure. Like when Lisa gets an ‘F’ and thinks she must be dreaming.
Harvey Pekar, Ohio’s finest writer if you don’t include Toni Morrison, wrote a graphic novel called The Quitter before he died. In it, he describes dropping out of school after getting a low grade in a required math class. I rewatched the movie American Splendor this week and Harvey alludes to that single grade in that single class as justification for his leaving college.
My life flashed before my eyes when I saw the letter ‘F’ on my paper. American Splendor was one of my favorite movies, and I saw my future as a raspy file clerk who has to move back to his hometown as a fait accompli. My career in the arts and writing was over. Worst of all, I had disappointed the woman I said publicly I was going to marry.
I was frightened to follow her to her office that day.
“I'm not on drugs!” is how I started the meeting. A friend of mine had recently taken too much acid and, after staying awake for 3 days, left a long screed on the college president’s doorstep that got him kicked out of school.
“You can do all the drugs you want." She said. “This is scary, though. It scared me.”
“No sleep!” I said.
“No sleep." She repeated skeptically. She wasn’t angry, but genuinely concerned about my mental wellbeing.
I took the time this week to try to read the paper. It’s frightening. A guy we used to call Dr. Stevens would come to my old bookstore in Brooklyn wearing a tweed jacket with elbow patches and talk as if he were lecturing about the books he saw in the store but when you listened closely he was letting word salad fall from his mouth. This paper made less sense than that man’s speeches. At least Dr. Stevens trailed off when he knew he’d forgotten what he was saying. I wrote this paper as if I were delivering the 10 Commandments to my teacher. I wrote with a madman’s authority. I was interpreting the book like the insane narcissist picks apart the poem in Nabokov’s Pale Fire. Insane drivel with a few mentions of texts I thought smart people liked. At one point, I started describing Herbert Spencer’s “Social Darwinism” which I think another student had mentioned in class but had little to do with the novel.
The paper included this paragraph:
Duty to the same degree parallels this forced prostitution. External influence.
Your guess is as good as mine.
Another one read:
Music and acting, the prominent themes which reveal truth about character’s inner selves (ie talent) is also a frivolous activity since it is the most transient of arts. Musicians and actors, unless composing pieces themselves, are on a par with the forced prostitution of the Victorian era.
I would have called my parents too if I had been the teacher reading this paper.
I believed that if I didn’t drop out of school that week, I was about to be thrown out for academic negligence. It takes a particularly high-strung person to believe one failing grade on one paper is enough to derail an entire academic career, but I did change majors, and I lost all confidence in my abilities as a writer for months if not years. I’m still afraid that I will write an essay so inscrutable that not only will I lose fans and friends alike, but someone will call in a wellness check. Every single time I write, I know there’s a real chance I will fail.
I could feel myself slump, physically and spiritually, getting closer to Harvey Pekar than I’d ever felt before. Worst of all, my relationship with my professor was destroyed. A wall was put up. I did not feel welcome in her office. We met to discuss my final paper and it felt like I was being let go from a job. I couldn’t get more than a “hmm” when I said anything in class. I stopped volunteering my thoughts. I couldn’t please her. We were now in a bad, sexless marriage. We resented each other and nothing I said could bring back those halcyon days of my first fall at college. It was winter now.
On my birthday, a Friday, the play I was in opened. I was Einstein in Steve Martin’s Picasso at the Lapin Agile. Minutes after curtain call, I ran, in costume, to the campus center to close the stand-up show I normally hosted there. I told a long disgusting story about a party I attended at Amherst when I was 15 and how it was more debauched than anything I’d seen at Bard so far. I called on my fellow students to host better orgies. As soon as I was done, I felt panic set in. It was the only time in my life I felt I needed a drink to calm down. I walked back to my dormitory, a temporary trailer the school had built for us quickly due to a housing crunch. More students than usual had said yes to their acceptance letters. Maybe Vassar was sending a lot of rejections that year. I pulled the flimsy glass doors open and stepped into the carpeted hallway that reminded me of a doctor’s office. It was silent. I was happy because that meant I could wash my wavy Einstein hair before anyone saw me. I had to keep the stupid mustache for two more nights of shows though. I passed the empty common room and standing by the communal bathrooms were eight of my friends who all yelled “happy birthday!” One friend gave me a card, another a small chocolate cake with a single candle in it, and one guy popped a bottle of sparkling wine and pointed it toward me. In lieu of plastic cups, we all took turns pulling from the bottle. I tried to act like it was the carbonation making me tear up. They eventually tried to coax me into attending a party on the other side of campus but I don’t think I’d have survived the walk there. My friend opened another bottle and handed it to me before leading the chatty mob out into the night. I slumped against the hallway wall and drank the bottle alone.
Age 18 is the one year of my life I would not want to relive. The spring before that first semester of college, I had to find out as a high schooler that I wasn’t Northwestern or Yale material before I even got to Bard, my safety school. Then, I had to find out I wasn’t cut out for Bard’s curriculum either. I never felt smarter and dumber in the course of a week than I did that fall.
The only lesson I learned was that you can ask for an extension on papers, especially during finals when the professor is exhausted and has already decided to pass you but just needs your final paper to submit the grade sometime in the “next few weeks.” I saved a few important ones for when I was back home in Cleveland with nothing to do in January but walk through the empty streets in the bitter cold and continue my Harvey Pekar cosplay. This only backfired once when I did not turn in a paper due for my “Bible as Literature” course in the spring because I decided to go to a concert and a few parties during the final weekend of my first year at college.
See me there, laughing and cheering in the middle of Bard Hall, a small repurposed church with wood floors near the center of campus that held concerts. A hundred of us were packed into the tiny one-room venue, more were outside smoking cigarettes or joints, 40s of Olde English in their hands. I wasn’t carefree exactly. In fact, I was full of fear about what might happen as a consequence of blowing off an assignment. I was giddy. I didn’t know if the professor would accept late work. I had merely guessed he would and sent an email at 9 PM on a Friday night with the subject line “Extension?” and went to the show. I decided at that moment, it was better to ditch the work than force another rush job. I was leaving it for another day. I chugged a PBR and watched my friend Raphael sing a love song he’d written about his inner ear, a student folk band backing him. I’d never been so happy with a decision in my life.
ughh my english lit teachers were my favorite