People That Try too Hard

I don't know why it is, but nowadays, all of my students have got to have an angle. I have known some that have gone whole weeks without having one, too. And they are sorry souls. Sometimes, I have seen them hanging out in the garden waiting and waiting for that new angle like it is coming in the mail from the planet Venus. I have seen them eating pansies in the rain after all of the dogs have gone home. I have seen them hanging out at bars and drinking booze and looking for ways to make angles where there are only corners. I have seen them doing things I would not want to do myself when they should be playing a kazoo behind the shed and beating a pan with a stick.

Nowadays, you have got to have a better angle than Joe Bloh or you have got to wear the right colored bracelets on your ankles and sing a song that you have made up on your flute and even ride a unicycle with your bare hands or you cannot show others that you are into the right angles. I have known a fellow once that tried to write with his own blood but he could not do it with only a rusty knife, and his finger turned blue and grew too big to fit his glove. And I have known another one that got together so many angles that when he wrote you thought that maybe he had a sack on his head and it was stuffed up with geometry and story problems.

One time I thought I was reading a paper all about toxic waste dumps and I said to this here student, "Hyuk hyar hyuk I enjoyed your story on the toxic dumps" and he said, "Oh? but what about the Hamlet?" You see, I did not know it was about the play with Hamlet in it. I said the part about Denmark turning puce and Beowulf rising from the muck was interesting. And he said, "But that was Hamlet," and as you can see I had missed his angle altogether.

Another time, I thought it was a grocery list I had, but it was supposed to be about the fate of trees in South America. I said to this student to get the issue straight, "Then what is this about tomatoes and bananas and figs squashed on the windshield of Kumgloss's Renault?" and she said that it was a streaming consciousness thing inside the head of a bitter blind narrator who was relenting this story to this pygmy who was to carry the story back to civilization. And I said that must be a new angle and she said that it surely was.

I do not want to carp too much or make my students feel the worst for trying harder things. This writing business is hard work and you have got to work hard to make it go. But I am not so sure you have to work too hard and hurt your head and bruise your ears and flog yourself with a stick until you have got a thing to say. My students have got all the new angles and all the paper hats and the banana skins in the street and the talking heads and they have got all the disguise and mystery and all the balloons and surprises and church bells ringing all of the time. And some of them have even tried to knock my socks off, but I am not so sure I like it much at all.

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