Hyper Opposition Disorder

Nature Loves Redundancy even if Eng & Creative Wrtg Teachers Don't

              The Playboy & The Puritan
                   Rake & Revisionist
                     & why can’t they

                      just get along?    

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—us 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  Goddard 

group to relocate--she and Ellen Bryant, with their falling

cadence &  you used to  have some free  wine to listen

to  this professional sighing night after night.
 
(My Hyper Oppositional Disorder acting up here:  diagnosis

I got from a student  who  worked at a Varieties of Learning
Disabilities  camp one 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, ooo

damnit  trial&erroring  margins and rooms for play that

inspires and informs the process--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 & everyone

with our own Simon Says if it don’t kill you makes youi

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