My Scholastic Failure

a photo I found in 

a book of photos of Australia.  

I have since framed it,

unframed it temporarily,

and scanned it.

In a sense my application to graduate school was the inevitable culmination of my life’s narrative.  As all toddlers do I developed the basic skills of a scholar, allowing me to thrive in kindergarten and elementary school.  I read Goosebumps instead of playing outside for all of 3rd grade.  I applied to the Monterey Academy of Oceanographic Sciences in 8th grade, putting me on a successful academic track, and I graduated with a 4.17 weighted GPA and acceptance into several fine institutions.  I received a BA in English four odd years later.   And three years later I applied to the PhD programs in English Literature at UCs Berkeley and Santa Cruz.  What is inevitable cannot always happen by itself; often what’s inevitable can never actually occur.

In another sense, however, applying to to go back to school was the final ritual in a massive institutional timeline of distraction after distraction from what I ultimately have decided to be my life; and by that ("my life") I mean a process managed on my own terms, based on my own goals, directed by my own affinities, accelerated by my own talents, tapered by my own inabilities.  

For the last three years I have worked in elementary schools, first as a substitute teacher, and met dozens and dozens of 6-year-old inmates fresh into society’s citizen-making system.  In my interaction with these uncompromised individuals, walled fountains of idiosyncrasy, I have learned much about school, childhood, and where the two meet, those 17 academic years that tie my recently-graduated self to these kindergartners.

I recently remembered in 1st grade when we put on a play about the pilgrim’s arrival in America, I was given the task during the stormy passage of the Mayflower to flip the lights on and off to simulate lightning.  As I came to know classes I realized that there would only be 1 or 2 students that I would give permission to flip the lights on and off; and I therefore learned what it meant to be that kid—as I child I was the quietest most obedient kid in the class.  I sort of always knew this, but I guess I never thought about what that objectively entailed, that why I acted why I did and what I did was so definitely this.  I was the kid who liked school, did well, and was rewarded.

On the last day of 3rd grade I was the second kid in class to get ice cream because I read in excess of 2 hours a day after school.   My brother would come into my room and beg me to play outside with him and the neighbor children and I would continue to sit on by bed throne across the room from my desk opting for continued dominion over my own reality.  By some incomprehensible feat of dedication Priscilla Yen succeeding in reading twice as much as me.  The reading logs of the 30-student class in sum did not even equal mine.  She may have tripled my log.  As I remember it wasn’t even close.

My second job in primary education was as a proctor for the mandatory English test for students whose parents marked that Spanish was spoken at home, even if English was also checked.  I interviewed 5 year olds two weeks into kindergarten asking them to point to (I am not allowed to discuss the specifics of the test; I do not know how binding this is 3 years later; but just conjure typical testing imagery and you’ll have the idea).  One young man said simply to me, in response to the first question, pero, Señor, yo no hablo inglés.  Luckily I was allowed to call off the test at that point.  However, when a student managed a single correct response in English we had to go through the whole painful charade.

I could tell already some of them would not like school, and they had in excess of a decade left.  I worked the month of May two years later with a group of 60 young scholars about to enter kindergarten.  One mother asked me if I had any suggestions on the first moment that she and her daughter would be separated, how to create it, manage it, make it something that would happen for the first time and then happen nearly every day of the rest of their lives.  I did not pretend to have any advice.  I was an expert on the alphabet, but not this.

I qualified my post-graduate education-industry experience as a learning experience for my Statement of History Statement for UC Berkeley, so as to justify just what exactly I’ve been doing with myself since I graduated, how working with marginalized youngsters gave me a meaningful perspective on the world:

These lessons have infused all reading that I now do; I approach situations with a new empathy and appreciation for what I may contribute; I see movies differently, seeking to understand how the film critiques or contributes to the current power structure; I wonder how an article or a billboard closes or opens opportunities for the struggling.  And such lessons always bring me back to the Steinbeck books I have been reading my whole life.  I always could quote, “Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can’t eat, I’ll be there,” but I never really understood it, because I was never really there.  But now I have been and I do not plan to drop out like the preacher of Grapes of Wrath and reappear as an instigator in times of injustice.  I aspire to contribute to UC Berkeley’s institutionalization of social justice and profound questioning of the ways we have been living, describing and studying our world and its literature. 

As I reread these paragraphs now I can pick apart all the mistakes: how can I see the same thing in one situation in a situation that is completely different, and why tie it to the biggest and easiest cliche to come from Steinbeck's pen?    What bullshit was I attending to instead of committing myself to applying to graduate school, applying myself to commit to graduate school? Part of me believes that I set myself up to fail.  I didn’t really want to go and I dropped clues in my Statements of Purpose, hinting that I wanted to deconstruct writing so broadly and in so many contexts that this very application was both literary theory and literature at the same time.  As I read it now it sounds like a sick joke on myself and anyone else who decided—and failed—to live in the world of letters. 

At the end of my second year of college I seemed to be radiating literary inquiry to the point where a stranger asked me in all sincerity to co-author his memoir.  Within a nine-month period I had taken five literature classes, to the detriment of my general education performance, and found myself wholly immersed in literary theory and works from Chaucer to Dostoyevsky to Billy Collins, often in the same moment.  I presented a paper at my first conference, 2007’s Northwest Undergraduate Conference on Literature at the University of Portland, and won fifty dollars and a certificate for best all-around essay.  It was at this moment, the beginning of summer vacation, that a homeless man named Ed made my acquaintance and enlisted me in his project. I often felt I was assisting Ed with nothing more than a glass of water or a brief respite on the porch, yet we both played into each others' myths.  I was the young scholar who could see the literary depth in our dialogue; and he was Jack Kerouac, the spontaneous, drunken storyteller, whose language dripped with experience.   By the time the work reached a sort of conclusion, through layering my first-person account of our process with his stories told from memory and transcribed by me, Ed was evicted from the park where we would meet and I had moved from the neighborhood.  I never saw him again.  

Reading Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy at the suggestion of my adviser at the time, during a summer meeting on this project, gave me first-hand insight into the relationship between power and storytelling.  It put into all-too-real clarity the work of Roland Barthes and other theorists that I had read all semester long in my Literary Theory class. This experience inspired me to reach a point where my research, my writing, and my influence could affect the way we conceive phenomena as natural instead of historical.  Ed’s predicament is not an inevitable result of civilization moving forward; it is the consequence of an imperfect and usury development.  I could see so clearly the interrelationship between the language of our humble experiment and the larger social phenomenon of Native American disenfranchisement in Portland, Oregon, but I could not share it; I was not able to make others see.  I still apply my rigorous academic training to the social facts around me.   Presently, I am writing on the uneasy relationship between the history of Pacific Grove and its “Feast of Lanterns” summer celebration.   

Even now I don’t really know what I am proposing—expanding literature and its study to the most everyday, unliterary narrative phenomena that appears, from a homeless man’s stream of conscious recollections to a small town yellowface pageant in the place where I presently live.  Literary anthropology?  I then go into this surreal high school beauty pageant: 

In 1906—the year after the first “Feast”—an act of probable arson drove out Pacific Grove’s Chinese population.  Meanwhile, the yearly ceremony continues to appropriate much of Chinese culture, presenting a fascinating disjunction between these two stories that says much about power and storytelling.    Gerry Low-Sabado, an outspoken activist and direct descendent of the Chinese fishing village, with whom I have been communicating, only recently learned of her heritage, as her family’s story and language was lost in the process of assimilation.  The “Feast” revolves around a dramatized tableau, a “Chinese myth” (that actually has English origins), begging literary study in the way Roland Barthes’ Mythologies did.   Such collisions of literature and cultural mythmaking are precisely what interest me.

The “modes of writing, or of representations,” that may “serve as a support of mythical speech” extend past the “written discourse…photography, cinema, reporting, sport, shows, publicity” of Barthes’ Mythologies.  New “modes of writing” and “representation” continuously appear, with languages distinct to each; sit-coms, tweets, stories on This American Life, and small town festivals are composed of literary tropes and will continue to influence literary thought.  I am thrilled to be a student of language, and its most literarily significant manifestations, at such an exciting time; and I am especially eager to apply to a program that explores the relationship between the evolutions of literary technology and form.

Application statements of purpose are a very phony genre of writing; at the same time they are the most direct and sincere account of exactly what we think, believe and desire to accomplish at our most idealistic and positive.  I have taken out a bit here because it is very specific about why this department would suit my ambitions and hopes; so it is both boring and sad.

I recently had the fortuitous experience of reading Frederick Tuten's Tin Tin in the New World and Tom McCarthy's Tin Tin and the Secret of Literature. The former is an imaginative collision of the characters of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain with those of Hergé's Tin Tin universe, and what transpires when they meet in Machu Pichu; and the latter is a rigorous study of the literariness of the comic strip, and its expression of the concurrent ideas occurring in the 20th-century literary theory. The only thing that would excite me more than to study the overlap of all of the texts involved would be to design and teach a class on the accomplishments of Mann, Hergé, Tuten, and McCarthy individually and in conjunction.   Such a contextualization would shed insight on the extent to which a work critiques and discusses its narrative, or the extent to which it is  “the type of speech chosen by history,” as Roland Barthes refers to myth, a formed charged with “giving an historical intention a natural justification, and making contingency seem eternal.”  Hergé and the “Feast of Lanterns,” by means of comic strip and theater, make history “natural” and “eternal.” Hergé’s fascist tendencies in his earlier strips and his collaboration with the Nazis during occupation are forgiven and forgotten as he re-writes Tin Tin as an allegory for liberalism; and “Feast of Lanterns” updates itself, phases out full Chinese make-up, and ignores explicit reference to a Chinese presence in the town’s history.

The work with Ed, however, was never able to interact dynamically with society’s language of mythmaking.  I shared the text we created with my creative fiction professor Pauls Toutonghi and we tweaked it to some sort of clarity.  Ultimately, he said, it was too short for a book and too long for an article.  After I graduated I self-published Tom and I—what Ed always wanted to call it, Tom was his brother—as a contribution to my friend’s art space.    With the help of UC Santa Cruz, my future contributions will be more focused and have more of an impact.

I went to UC Santa Cruz in December, not to get to know the department, or stroll the grounds, or pick the brains of current graduate students.  To apply to Berkeley (but not Santa Cruz) I had to take the subject test of the GRE for English.  

The September before I had to take the general exam at a testing agency in San Jose.  I had been to one already to qualify to substitute teach, in a strip mall office building off the 101, I think.  I did fantastic on the math section, but just barely passed the writing.  

From the beginning I resented the GRE with an intensity that often manifested itself physically.  I was taking the general test the week after my girlfriend moved to Los Angeles; and therefore any preparation I did for the test was time I was not spending with her, also not working, also not relaxing, also not imagining, etc.   Helping her move while working full-time and not having a car and worrying about a test I knew I was not prepared for was, simply put, very stressful for me.  On the weekday I woke up at my parent’s house (so I could borrow my father’s Prius to drive to San Jose to take the GRE) my mother woke up early to make me coffee so I could be on my way by 6:15 to make it there by 8:30.  

When I plan to drive to the airport in San Jose I allow an hour.  But this was morning weekday rush hour, a place I'd never been to, and important to my future.  I gave myself over 2 hours.  It was like I was 17 again waking up early for the SATs.  My life depended on four hours spent in a classroom where I was to learn only the stress and fear that standardized tests can create, especially when admission is based upon them.

There's a dreadful ironic circle about realizing that the exact terribleness about the thing is exactly why you don't really want to be doing it, having to do it anyway for the bigger reasons, and then dealing with the terribleness in question, repeat.  Needless to say when I was on California 85 not moving in 5 lanes of traffic, still an unknown distance from the testing center at 8:20—when I could not reach anybody on the phone number given to me on my official testing center print out, when I began crying and literally shouting out of desperation, frustration, failure, and deep sadness all at once, alone in my father's prius—I was not going through the pre-test morning rituals they drill into your head from 3rd grade.

That November I, again, borrowed my fathers' prius to drive early one Saturday to UC Santa Cruz.  The radio spoke of the first Penn State football game without Joe Pa, the first game after the wake of the now-revealed abuse, the first game in the least innocent time for higher education that I have known in my lifetime.  It was early for a Saturday, but I was able to dedicate my full attention to the day's Saturday's Weekend Edition on NPR.  I had a lot of perspective on this football game.

Eventually I found what was literally named "Classroom Unit 2," after some arbitrary tooling through the forest.  I just looked for all of the other people who looked like they were just a little bit too old to be in college.  There was an ant line of them going to and from the building, for apparently, unbeknownst to us, cellular phones were not allowed in the testing room.  I luckily learned this in the parking lot and was not forced to walk all the way there with my phone and walk all the way back. 

I sat and waited in Classroom Unit 1 with everyone else who did what they were told, that is to arrive half an hour early for no reason and wait for the last person to show up, nearly an hour later, before we could begin to begin.  Of course we were not allowed to have anything, so I had nothing.  I sat there and overheard conversations between people who knew each other.  

I heard a conversation between Mathematics students, current UCSC students talking about the statistics of the situation.  How many people were taking the Biochemistry, Cell and Molecular Biology test (it turns out mostly everyone), how many the Psychology (a few), how many Literature in English (this of course I was curious about—which of these strangers were both my colleagues and competition?  Who was going for one of the 30 spots I had applied to in two schools?  There turned out to be three others), how many were Biology students?  How many people would end up going to graduate school?, etc.

I started to wonder how each discipline would approach this situation.  Would the psychology student think of social psychology studies on behavior and control? Were they studying the factors that make us pay to be in this situation where we submit our time, money, and selves to strangers for no immediately obvious reason?  Like the Stanford prison experiment we were new to these roles, the proctors had other jobs 99.9 percent of the time, and I did not take standardized tests 99.9 percent of the time, yet here we were, fulfilling these strange duties that are scripted for us.

Did the biologists think about their breakfast and the play between nutrition and synapses?

The answer to what a literature student would think about this scene, what author encapsulates the literary meaning present, is obvious: Kafka.  I was not Andrew Shaw-Kitch; I was ASK, going from one surreal bureaucratic nightmare to the next because I am vaguely aware that this will make me happy, that this is what I need to do.  I needed to go to Classroom Unit 2 at UCSC to take the GRE subject test, and wait in Classroom Unit 1 until I was called to wait in line, wait in line, go to my assigned seat segregated from the other English students, open my test booklet at the designated moment, etc.

Toward the end of my undergraduate experience I went to an information session about graduate school.  Several professors gave advice, anecdotes, and information about the applications and the experience itself.  One professor who spent 9 years on her PhD spoke of a woman with whom she studied who was still working on her dissertation.  The professor had worked for 5 years at my school after finishing her program.  I did the math: 14 years and counting as a graduate student.  4 years undergraduate. 6 years secondary.  7 years elementary.  31 years as a student.  That is a lot of faith that institutional scholasticism is the thing that will fulfill you, through which you will be the person you want to be.

It took me three years away from school to have the brick and ivy illusion seep back into my consciousness.  This inaction, statistically, already invalidated my seriousness.  I was not committed.   I was not a candidate willing to give all of myself to their institution, trusting them to reward me with a new tweed-coated self that could gesticulate passionately while discussing Keats, and change young lives for the better.  

Anyway, I already had a tweed coat.  I already gesticulated passionately while discussing Keats.  And when Bright Star opened at the movie theater I worked at, and I stood at the door waiting for the theater to be cleaned, I happily gave context to the folks waiting at the front of the line about which letters to Fannie Braun or Keats' sister were being referenced in the film, how the film played with his life and poetry and poetical theories to form a unique mold of the three.  I quoted Keats and changed their viewing experience for the better.  And then I tore their tickets.  And then I would clean the theaters at the next cycle because nobody should be forced to do door twice in one shift.