Play. Stephen, I'd say, Yes, but look at what you're saying, that the
erotic tension is between teacher & subject, that somehow or other, as
in a work of art itself, s/he expresses how powerfully what s/he is
teaching affects her or him. And, with poetry at least, Id say, that
means getting down and dirty with the text, not just 'assessing' it
from a high theoretical 'site.'
Something like that. That the teacher we (I anyway) remember is the
one who demonstrated that passion for the subject.
Doug
On 14-May-09, at 11:36 AM, Stephen Vincent wrote:
> Without questioning the power and manipulative nature of sexual
> relations between a student and his or her professor, I would like
> to hear thoughts on whether or not good teaching is by definition
> "erotic". And by that I do not mean something that leads to sexual
> unions between professor and student(s). But something of a
> relationship more akin to a dance, at times sensual. then counter-
> sensual (some might even say "meta-sensual" in its arrival at
> intellectual resolution and pleasure,) I can think remember some
> of my best experiences as a student were when a teacher embraced the
> subject as a "real body" of knowledge, as well as invited our
> embrace of that "body." In terms of poetry, when there is a
> resentment against the discussion of the poem is primarily defined
> as a theoretical object, isn't that resentment fueled by the sense
> that poem is literally losing its body, the one we, as readers, want
> to embrace most fundamentally on the level of
> sensations, syllable by syllable, accent by accent?
>
> Stephen Vincent
> http://stephenvincent.net/blog/
>
>
> --- On Wed, 5/13/09, Amanda Surkont <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> From: Amanda Surkont <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Re: Walcott & His Discontents
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Date: Wednesday, May 13, 2009, 9:20 PM
>
> Well said, Ken. I have issues with those who hide behind anonymity
> in this
> type of situaton. Opening the debate of his worthiness of the
> position is one
> thing, sending anonymous packets is not the way to do that, IMHO.
> best, manda
>
> --- On Wed, 5/13/09, Kenneth Wolman <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> From: Kenneth Wolman <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Walcott & His Discontents
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Date: Wednesday, May 13, 2009, 10:22 PM
>
> Mark Weiss wrote:
>> OK, I'll weigh in.
>>
>> I have a very rigid code about these things. That a lot of
>> inappropriate
> behavior happens doesn't excuse it.
>
> Of course it does not "excuse" anything. If Derek Wolcott sexually
> harassed or even had a "consensual" affair with a freshman female
> student young enough to be his daughter, he was a scumbag and
> deserved his trip
> to the pillory and stocks.
>
> What does it mean to say Yes? A year or two ago a man in my area was
> photographed having sexual relations with a female Rottweiler. He
> was arrested
> and hauled in front of a judge who said "How could you do a thing like
> this?" The man's reply?--"It was consensual." He went to
> jail. What a surprise.
>
> I have had female sexuality waved at me, too: the cloying smile, the
> change to
> seductive vocal tone from a female student while talking to me only
> in the hall
> or in another public space. I have read the psychoanalyst Michael
> Eigen's
> significant mentions of temptation in his analytic practice. He
> seems far more
> candid than most men (or women) in his position might wish to be;
> indeed, Eigen
> seems to have invented the TMI as a way of communicating. The
> temptation is
> real. It is probably like priestly vows of celibacy in pre-Scandal
> Catholic
> seminaries. That is, does anyone ever really *talk* about this
> aspect, or is it
> left to an easily-deluded conscience to sort it out?
>
> The same temptation is thrown at any clergyman, often at teachers,
> often at
> anyone perceived as being in a position of power or authority. How
> could a human
> bullfrog like Sen.Wilbur Mills gain the favors of Fanny Foxe, the
> Tidal Basin
> Bombshell, unless his power was the largest part of his anatomy?
>
> However, there is a statute of limitation on all crimes save
> murder. When
> does Wolcott finish his sentence? A shit-sling of the type that
> seems to have
> occurred now comes about 27 years after the incident, alleged or
> real. If I
> recall this even halfway accurately, Wolcott had to leave Harvard,
> only to
> resurface (I believe) across the river at Boston University, one-
> time home of
> another vowed celibate, Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV.
>
> In grad school 30+ years ago, a young man had a habit of "affairing"
> with a girl from his just-concluded class. Not DURING it, after it.
> He had a
> code.
>
> In grad school 30+ years ago, a young woman came onto me in Pathmark
> with all
> the subtlety of a Canal Street doxy in Civil War New York. She did
> this in front
> of my wife. I had no clue. My laughing and sarcastic wife had to
> clue me into
> the dynamic she spotted. Men never have a clue unless they are natural
> predators, and I would like to believe I was not that way back in
> 1972. But
> women spot everything.
>
>> When I taught, and when I was a therapist, students and patients
>> flirted
> with me all the time, often outrageously. Of course it turned me on,
> but I
> didn't respond, because I had a responsibility not to, and because
> they
> weren't flirting with me so much as with my position of authority.
> This
> wasn't easy, as the women were often very close to me in age, and I
> might
> have been interested in other circumstances. I did date an adult
> student of mine
> in an ungraded non-degree extension course, but only after the
> course was
> over--we didn't even flirt till then.
>
> You were fortunate. I had weekly smoke-by-the-cars discussions in
> the parking
> lot with a 40 year old Israeli doctor's wife in my class. Her hints of
> abandonment and discomfort surely were meant to lure me. They did
> not. We
> arranged we would talk at semester's end. She didn't call and neither
> did I. Maybe we both got smart.
>
>> Yup, lots of teachers and some therapists succumb to the temptation
>> or
> initiate a flirtation. Therapists risk losing their licenses, and
> they should.
> Increasingly, teachers risk losing their jobs. That seems fair to
> me, whether
> it's a man coming on to a female student, or a woman etc etc etc. At
> the
> very least, the relationship distorts the class as a whole. And most
> of the time
> it's taking advantage of the student's pathology.
>>
> My older son stands to "inherit" a high school English teaching job
> from his years-ago 9th grade English teacher, who finally is
> retiring. The man
> married one of his former students. Rumors were rife about how he
> "dated" high school girls. To call this "cheesy" is to
> insult cows in Wisconsin.
>
>> But the disparity between student and teacher is different in kind
>> than
> that between doctor and nurse, say, or between an older and a
> younger faculty
> member. The teacher of young students becomes a parental projection,
> whether he
> or she likes it. To take advantage of this can be extremely
> destructive. When it
> goes as far as marriage the destructiveness is often more extensive--
> wife
> eventually grows up and dumps the prick.
>
> See the above. A man in his 40s marries a high school girl. Songs of
> Innocence
> and Experience. The girls look experienced, some may very well be--
> yet to grab
> Dylan's line, "[they] break just like a little girl." If they
> break away from you, you're seen the core of innocence triumphant.
> For the
> young lady, at least.
>
>> And then there's the case at hand. Walcott is in fact pretty
> notorious. Some interesting anecdotes have been coming up on WOMPO,
> but
> there's been noise about him for a long time. And we're talking
> about a
> forty or fifty year age discrepancy. Plus what would seem to be an
> overwhelming
> sense of entitlement, coupled with a great deal of drinking. Trial
> by internet
> is a terrible way to go about things, but the poetry chair is a very
> public
> appointment. Like it or not, this was to be expected.
>
> If Wolcott is what you say, then there's very little to extenuate his
> behavior before, during, or since the Radcliffe incident. What
> continues to
> bother me is the apparently endless vengeance of people who are
> rerunning stuff
> that happened 35+ years ago. To prove what?--that Wolcott is unfit
> to hold his
> position? Who might they have preferred in times past? Berryman,
> Lowell,
> Dickey? Again: where is the statute of limitations to cap Wolcott's
> offense? Perhaps his statement that he's avoided commenting on the
> 1982
> incident is inflaming tempers; if he addressed it honestly and without
> subterfuge, might it have gone differently? Quien sabe?
>
> Ken
>
> -- Ken Wolman http://awfulrowing.wordpress.com/
> http://www.petsit.com/content317832.html
> ---------------------------------
> "All writers are hunters, and parents are the most available
> prey."--Francine du Plessix Gray
>
Douglas Barbour
[log in to unmask]
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
Latest books:
Continuations (with Sheila E Murphy)
http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=664
Wednesdays'
http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/2008/03/new-from-aboveground-press_10.html
and this is 'life' and we owe at least this much
contemplation to our western fact: to Rise,
Decline, Fall, to futility and larks,
to the bright crustaceans of the oversky.
Phyllis Webb
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