This one goes out to all the teachers who have ever felt their grip on the English language slipping due to excessive contact with linguistically confused students:

I don't usually go to a bar with one of my students. It is almost always a mistake.

But Cornelius was having trouble with irony.

The whole class was having trouble with irony. They do much better with realism. Realism, they think, is simply a matter of imitating Ernest Hemingway. Short flat sentences, an adjective before every noun. Ernest Hemingway himself, the idea of him that they have from the writing, makes them uncomfortable. They disapprove of him. They don't like him or the white hunter in "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber." The bravado, the resentment in the writing excites them, but they cannot allow themselves to feel it. Hemingway, they've decided, Hemingway the person, isn't cool.

I considered giving them Naipaul to read, A Bend in the River or Guerillas, but I decided that they would be so sensibly outraged by the beating, murdering, and dismembering of women that they might not be able to see the intelligence in the books. I wondered if they would like Graham Greene. Brighton Rock perhaps. But I had forgotten, I don't know how, the dream in which the murderer, straight razor in hand, says only two words: "Such tits."

Stream of consciousness, which some of them thought at first was stream of conscienceness, doesn't seem to give them much trouble. They think it's like writing down your dreams except without punctuation. Some of them admitted that before completing the Virginia Woolf assignment they'd smoked a little dope and it had helped. They make these confessions to me in a shyly flirtatious way, as if they were trying to seduce me. Which, of course, they are. Not sexually, but almost sexually. It would be sexual if they knew any better. And someday they will. Know better.

But irony terrifies them. To begin with, they don't understand it. It's not easy to explain irony. Either you get it or you don't. I am reduced to giving examples, like the baby who is saved from death in the emergency room only to be hit by a bus on the way home. That helps a little. Cornelius said that he preferred realism to irony because irony turned conceived wisdom on its head. Whether he meant to say conventional wisdom or received wisdom, I don't know. I was so distracted by an image of wisdom being turned on its head that I simply nodded and let him go on. Irony is like ranking someone or something, he said, but no one knows for sure you're doing it.

That's close enough, I said.

In other recreational reading news, I've recently finished reading Charles Portis' True Grit, a 1968 spiritual cousin to Mark Twain's 1885 classic, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Portis sets his story in Arkansas and the nearby Indian territory during the same time period that Huck and Jim would have been sliding down the Mississippi on their raft, and it's hard not to read the novel as having evolved in some insensible way from Twain's unrelenting criticism of the stupidity of people from Arkansas (Portis, who lived in Arkansas, would have been acutely alive to Twain's regional slurs). The broad similarities between the two novels are unmistakable--Portis' heroine, fourteen-year-old Mattie Ross, lights out into the territories (just as Huck does at the end of his novel) to avenge the death of her father. She hires a guide in the figure of the hard-drinking, gambling Rooster Cogburn, and together they make, like Huck and Jim, an unlikely pair whose bond deepens over the course of their adventures. Mattie is smart like Huck and not dumb like Twain's Arkansans; she's in many ways a cagey, tough, weirdly ladylike companion to Huck, a girl who, to borrow Huck's own term of highest praise, is just full of sand. It's a good read, and good, too, are the critical assessments of Portis' work by Donna Tartt, who wrote the introduction for Bloomsbury's new edition of the novel, and Scott McLemee, who writes more generally about Portis' work and speculates on why such a central figure in American literature should have had so much trouble staying in print.

I love True Grit so much that I cannot express it. The last few sentences are among the finest in all of first person narrative. I'll have to go find the new edition (I've got a hardback; it's not a first - I don't collect - but I reread it often enough that I need a hardback) and read Donna Tart on it.

Don't miss the movie. John Wayne and Glen Campbell (yes, really!) The actress who played the girl, Kim Darby, was spectactular, but the only other thing I've seen her in was a Star Trek ep. I loved the scene where the bad guys had her and she looked after the apparently retreating Cogburn and said in disgust, "They told me he had grit. He doesn't have grit."

True Grit is a little classic, and Charles Portis is a treasure. Just a few weeks ago I noticed one of his books, The Dog of the South, on Professor Bainbridge's reading list. Read it. You need to read Norwood, too, his first book, which is laugh aloud funny. It caused me to give up trying to imitate Hemingway when I was just beginning to attempt book length writing and mimic Portis instead. A dramatic failure, alas. Portis, incidentally, worked at the Herald Tribune with two more of my heroes, Tom Wolfe and Jimmy Breslin. Don't I wish I could have been there at that time.

Dear Erin,
I'm glad that you enjoyed "True Grit".I first read it at age 11,and have read it several times since over the past 30 years(still on my bookshelf now!)I have a Rooster Cogburn story if you would like to hear it(rather funny)
Scott

Any sort of subtle meaning, or anything other than gross obvious meaning, is tough reading for many teens. Many don't get much subtlty in their lives anymore.

My favorite line in the movie (don't remember if it's in the book) occurs when Cogburn throws in with the Texas Ranger who is also pursuing Lucky Ned Pepper. At a major river ford, Cogburn and the ranger hire the only ferry in miles and tells Mattie to go back to Fort Smith and let him and the ranger go after Pepper. Mattie will have none of this and decides to cross the river on her own. As the ranger looks on in anger, Cogburn delivers the highest compliment he can think of - "By god, she reminds me of me!"

can anyone here supply, general contempt for popular and youth culture notwithstanding, either convincing evidence that today's teenagers are the semiliterate caricatures that the majority of comments here make them out to be or a justifiable reason to prefer 'subtle' rather than 'gross' meaning (I'd ask for a cohesive definition of either, but then I'd probably be accused of having read Foucault).

Thank you, bsf, for saying what needed to be said here.

Majority of comments?

Karen - every now and then i break my geas on responding to internet messages for that very reason, thanks for the thumbs up.

Laura - i was unclear. Only one comment on this post is reflective of the attitude i describe, the 'majority' was to refer to most of the comments on "Free to be stunningly ignorant"

addendum: not to mention "no high school student left behind"

I'm also contemplating the fact that this is Erin's blog, yet Karen feels herself competent to decide what needs to be said here. I would think that that is Erin's prerogative.

Sorry, Erin, that was off-topic and snarky.

Being the mother of a teenager, and one smart enough to score 36 on the reading portion of the ACT and 795 verbal SAT, and not to mention remembering being a teenager myself, I think it's not too horrifying that teens don't "get" irony and subtlety like adults do. (Although I'm not sure I'm subtle enough to enjoy Brighton Rock, from the brief description of it.) There is no substitute for brain maturity and life experience, I don't care how well-read the teen is or how good her education. My daughter reads books that I read in my teens, and that I reread now with a totally different perspective, and she has the viewpoints that I had the first time. A lot of stuff just goes over her head unless I point it out.

On the other hand, she walked past me last night to get her Latin book to do homework; they're translating the Aeneid; and she remarked, "We're at the part where Dido is chewing [whatever his name is] out for being such a jerk. It's strangely satisfying."
: )

evidence?--i teach college comp. many students don't get subtlety or irony. my guess is that they just don't have a lot of reading experience. the students with experience do tend to "get" the stuff we read in class. to get a full appreciation of any piece students should look at the obvious meaning as well as more subtle aspects of the story.

Sure, anecdotal evidence is available. Hell, I teach some rhet/comp myself, and I get all the typical mistakes, from hilarious diction errors ("diluted" for "deluded" being a recent favorite) to large-scale failures to grasp analysis and interpretation.

But I guess why I'm reluctant to see today's youth as what bsf called "semiliterate caricatures" is that I'd like to see evidence that the students of today are somehow more dense than the students of yore, yesteryear, or ye days of olde. And standardized test scores don't prove bupkes. Success or failure on them prove largely one's ability to master the particular test.

Still, I'm all in favor of increasing the school year, increasing the funding in public schools, increasing teacher salaries in order to woo more folks into those positions, getting better textbooks into the classroom, increasing teacher autonomy in the classroom . . . any reforms, in fact, provided they don't turn our classrooms into mirror versions of the one in Pink Floyd's *The Wall* (silliest movie of all time? silliest album of all time? silliest band of all time? In Lil Jon's words, "Yeah!").

you're right, i don't think they're more dense--they certainly have finesse with technology. my suspicion is that most of them are too lazy. they don't understand assigned essays because they are too lazy to do the work. i have a tiny amount of experience working with high school students and i saw this as well. i saw posted grades (using students' id numbers) where at least two thirds of the class was failing because they hadn't done the work (0's for scores). i would like to see a study that measured students' work ethic--we all know that learning takes work. i am willing to bet that a big problem in education is not that today's students are less intelligent, but that they are lazier; they refuse to make any effort.

I didn't mean to offend bsf, but I would illustrate my point with an example of the slide in reading and analytical skills in the US - the Federalist Papers and the responsive so-called Anti-Federalist Papers were essentially written for upstate New York farmers with very little formal education (most being subjected to home schooling by those Christian fundamentalist sorts held in such disdain by current academia). These works are beyond the grasp of most high school students and are challenging to the recents crops of law school students. It has been a long slide rather than a recent phenomenon.

krm: they're also written in the everyday language of the time, rather than the everyday language of our time. To illustrate: shakespeare was written for a popular audience in his time. At the time of the writing of the Federalist Papers, it is unlikely that a british farmer with very little formal education would be able to 'comprehend' a viewing of a shakespeare play in the same way that a british farmer with very little formal education would be able to in Shakespeare's time. Not to mention that the federalist papers have also been subject to over 200 years worth of argument, interpretation, intervention, revision, clarification etc....There's a lot more said about them now than there had been then.

boiled down: today's popular lexicon is tomorrow's standard lexicon, and our documents will be just as frustrating to the next generation as the preceding generations were to us.

jason: to listen to middle aged conservatives talk, history has been a constant downward progression in which each successive generation is lazier than the last. don't believe the hype.

Actually, KRM, I wouldn't generalize too much about the original audience of the Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers. The composition of the state assembly of New York in the 1780s featured 37 farmers, but a total of 55 merchants, professionals, artisans, and large landowners. The southern state assemblies were largely large landowners.

Furthermore, the Federalists appealed -- even if they weren't overtly writing for -- to wealthy citizens. Of state senators, 82% of the wealthy were Federalists; 42% of even the state senators of moderate means were Federalist.

In the votes of delegates to the Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and New Hampshire ratifying conventions, by occupation, 84% were merchants, manufacturers, doctors, lawyers, ministers, and large landholders -- "blue state latte elites"!

[Data from: http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/historyonline/us8.cfm]

But bsf's point is still the money shot: if the narrative of steady decline was true, our forefathers and -mothers were natural geniuses and we must be total troglodytes. Then again, I'm still waiting for the Enlightenment to catch on in America, so many the decline and fall narrative is right.

I never thought of the parallels between Huckleberry Fin and True Grit. (Haven't read Grit, only seen the film.) But now that you mention it, it seems that Twain DID have something against Arkansans.

It's human nature to want to have somebody to look down on.

I've always thought of Fort Smith, Arkansas as just being the name of the town, never really thinking of its meaning: Fortsmith. Like Little Rock or Fayetteville. In the story, when they talked about Indian Territory as being a lawless place where decent folks feared to go, "Fort Smith" took on a different meaning for me. Then of course I felt stupid that I'd never really contemplated why a fort would be stuck somewhere in Arkansas.

I work with college students, and their parents, also have a nephew who is senior in high school. My nephew used epiphany for epitome a week or two ago in a spoken statement to me. I was happy he was reaching and did not correct the error. I am not around him enough to pretend to do that. Neither of his parents would comfortably use either word.

He operates in a spoken climate primarily, and one with a vocabulary environment that I am sure is very narrow. He has always been a reader, but not widely read. My overall feeling is that the pool of words actually used in much of contemporary teen life is very small. It makes me think of The Autobiography of Malcom X.

"Then again, I'm still waiting for the Enlightenment to catch on in America, so many the decline and fall narrative is right."

funny how American culture just sorta skipped to postmodern without going through that whole enlightenment/modernity phase.

In any case, the general improvement of the American education system would serve interests precisely and empirically opposed to those of the conservative Knights of the Great Books, so my general suggestion would be to let sleeping dogs lie. I suggest that everyone bemoaning both the general malaise in American higher education and the propensity for leftist viewpoints on campus console themselves with the knowledge that miseducated, misinformed, and apathetic youth rarely grow up to join unions.

bsf, have you ever read True Grit? Or watched the movie?

Laura: Read the book (albeit quite some time ago), never seen the movie. I enjoyed it immensely btw.