Hyper Opposition Disorder

To A Colleague who shall Remain Anonymous
& all the Rest Across the Curriculum
(courses without borders series)


Re The Dialogue & Dialectic between
Abandonment & Reform
Prodigality & Return
The Playboy & The Puritan
Rake & Revisionist
Augustinianism: Before & After
The Descent into Hell-O…

With startled delight, a soulful spirit slipped
into a French asylum for 8 months in 1841
in order to move unhampered through the
hallucinatory vision of Gerard de Nerval as
he collapsed time past, time present, and time
future and began in earnest to document the
reaches of his secret world…

Edward Hirsch, the demon and the angel.

Peter Elbow was a big influence on me--back in the 80's.
Especially Embracing Contraries --way more about reciprocal
thinking and collaboration than just unilateral composing.

The dialectic between recklessness & reform is what fires
me up—me swimming in an accrediting matrix & regulating
environmentalism where the mess and guess of process is
underdog and the protocol strategies of reform and revision
rule. This comes with the territory of industrialized education
and proliferating MFA programs educationalizing the process.

I was dean when we seduced Louise Gluck and the
Bennington group to relocate--she and Ellen Bryant,
with their falling cadence & you got to have some free
wine to listen to this professionalization night after night.

(My Hyper Oppositional Disorder acting
up here: diagnosis I got from a student
at the English Tea last Thursday who
worked at a Varieties of Learning
Disabilities camp last summer and
this one—H O D—was a new one on me,
just right & I embrace it, that & Restless
Leg Syndrome! We have Names for stuff
now that wasn’t differentiated back in the
50’s when it was all like HFD (Huck Finns’
Disease) or the less severe TSD: Tom Sawyer
Disorder.)

I guess Ginsburg's Shithouse Retrospective does the
same kind of reductive injustice to the whole process
of composing as Poe's "Philosophy of Composition."
Shifts attention from decent fired-up irrational impulse
to re-visionary rationalization—what I call Howard
Cosel-ing or Monday Morning Quarterbacking. Not that
there's any thing wrong with THAT: it's what we do.
Rationalize the process. Write books on it. Offer courses in it.
Credit & grades. Lop-sided is all I'm saying. We privilege the
CONTROL side. (Who can blame us--we're always up for
re-accreditation etc.)

"Hyper Opposition," for me, is my knee JERK reaction to
the over-emphasis of the control-it & regulate-it side at
the expense of the cloud-of-unknowing, ooops, ooodamnit
trial&erroring margins and rooms for play that inspires and
informs theprocess--if not reforms.

I saw a best mind of the MFA one summer session weeping
in the corner of 2nd-floor Jensen after a round-house
work-shopping group-critique feedback and re-visionary
session which is part of the whole process, too--driving &
crying, tears & fears: an American Idol competition & every
one with our own Simon Says. Got to be strong.

Forgive me. Right here: this here back&forth is the action of
academics-best-sense for me. Liberal art going on. I would
wish this kind of non-unilateral reciprocity might inform our
Faculty L --thinking & writing across the curriculum. Wouldn't
we all get better at it? How not?

IT might could solve some Retention problem, too: good time
being had by ALL: trickle down like a great golden chain of being!

xxxooo, Sam