My Buffy Problem

I figured I'd go ahead and try to put my finger on it. Why do I love Buffy so? Those of you who know me well enough to know my personal interests have on more than one occasion been informed of my obsession with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. For example, in a conversation with Taryn the other day, I mentioned that my Buffy viewing habits, which have flared up in the last month or so, are now down to a negligible one episode every other day. Although in the last year, Buffy and I have kept some distance between us, the pressure of finishing up the semester brought about last month's relapse.

During the less frantic times of the semester, Jen and I usually spend our evenings watching independent films, musicals, sitcoms like Seinfeld or Father Ted that we haven't seen before. But due to some idiosyncrasy in my personality, I find it impossible to absorb new media during stressful periods. Hence, the return of the slayer into my life. But this time around, as I rewatched numerous episodes, beginning with the picky criteria of watching only the quirkier stand alone episodes, I began to wonder why this show, unlike any other, has won my life long affection.

First of all, the fact that the show is endlessly rewatchable must have something to do with it. I've seen, and purchased, many films before that I found extraordinary, even breath-taking, but realized I couldn't bring myself to watch them again and again. For example, Muholland Drive is an amazing film with several beautiful shots that fascinated me the first time through. But on a second watching, I found the movie's mood a little suffocating. Once you know that the exciting mystery of the dream is only a dream in the mind of a depressed and washed up Hollywood extra, Muholland loses its drive and just becomes downright depressing.

Despite the wonkiness of linking Lynch to Whedon, I think there's something to it. Buffy is the opposite of suffocating. It's a breath of fresh air, a wide open vista. You would not expect this not to be the case in a show about a handful of characters guarding something called the "hellmouth" that releases all order of evil into the world on a regular basis. But I think that's just it, the show shines in the face of darkness.

For example, my favorite episode of all time is one called "lover's walk," which takes place in season three. In this episode, Spike, a British vamp, who dresses like the lead singer of the sex pistols and is particularly bad ass (as opposed to generally bad ass, I guess), who has just been spurned by his psycho vamp lover, Drusilla, returns to Sunnydale (the venue of the show for all seven of its seasons) to make Willow, Buffy's friend, who's been dabbling in the black arts, concoct a love potion for him. First of all, this is wonderful because the rebel without a cause comes crawling home whining and not very dangerous in his temporarily neutered state, a perfect example of the fragility of villainy. But a quick dose of the action in always happening old Sunnydale provides a much needed restorative, and he drives off into the sunset (with his windows spray-painted black to avoid immolation of course) to chain and torture his mad X until she sees reason.

Remarkably, minus the girlfriend torture, this is very close to how I feel when I watch the show. I might start in a pouty mood but after a full shot of its wit, pep, and action, I become a new man.

Here are some other passing observations I've had in attempting to account for the show's magnetic attraction:

The heroes are all highly self-critical; that is, humble. But this means that they're not always raring to go. And the show deals with this constant battle against the demons of motivation in addition to the ones that draw real blood.

Lines like Buffy's "I didn't jump to conclusions. I took a small step, and conclusions there were." or Spike's "If every vampire who said he was at the Crucifixion was actually there it would've been like Woodstock. I was at Woodstock. I fed off a flower person and I spent six hours watching my hand move."

The fact that the characters manage to be more than their occupations, their objectives, or their desires. Sometimes the show lets you simply enjoy their company as they dally.

And finally, the presence of magic. I'm normally not a massive fantasy fan although I take in the occasional otherworldly flic. But the episodes premised on magic lead to some highly amusing situations, like a botched love spell that makes one man the scarily obsessed over crush of every woman who comes near him; an invoked amulet that makes everyone burst out in song, turning Sunnydale into Brigadoon; or another spell gone wrong that makes the scooby gang (as Buffy and her friends are often called) all forget their memory and stand around for half the episode figuring out who they are. Not only do these episodes that are based on a slightly tweaked or completely eliminated law of nature provide oodles of entertainment, they somehow manage to further explore the personality of the characters and further move the plot along.

I'm sure that it will never become perfectly clear why Buffy so captures my heart, and I probably won't ever know since my inability to judge it with a level head is part of the reason I love it. It does something emotionally that no technical masterpiece could ever do intellectually.

Now you listen

Two days ago, I turned in a 13 page seminar paper that basically argued how Freud wasn't a charlatan, but a genius. Despite the obvious problem with this argument (that it's a big lie) the paper contained a special significance: it was the last paper that I will ever turn in at the end of a seminar. 20 odd years ago, when I was a dumb kid, I struggled to write my first sentence. Now look at me, I can whip up a load of crap over the weekend. You want sentences? I've got them coming out my ass. What's even more special about this piece of coursework was that I turned it in for my last course ever, the capstone of my class-taking career, the end of my education, the final flippin' feather in my credit-earning cap. I've come so far--from Mrs. Freedman to Prof. Dharvadker, from Mr. A (I will never forget the dear letter people) to Mr. Modernity. The feeling of liberation that comes with this is quite big, big as a... schoolbus even. I've spent 20 years of my life in classes to finally reach a point where I never have to take one again. That's it. No more sitting in tiny uncomfortable chairs that grew ever smaller, as I grew ever bigger, and the classes ever longer. No more rolling my eyes at annoying classmates. And most importantly, what I find to be most emancipating about being done with classes, no more being lectured to. No more listening to people who know better. And I'm serious about this last one. I firmly believe that being done with classes permits me to plug up my ears and never listen again. The next Joe off the street who steps up to tell me a thing or two will promptly receive a "Listen buddy, you must be misinformed, I'm done taking classes. In fact, I'm a dissertator now so sit down and prepare to be dissertated to." Now that I think about it, us classless dissertators ("classless," of course, as in not taking classes, not as in being unfashionable, which in no way describes the almighty, all knowing, all well-dressing dissertator) should take our title more seriously. If we really lived up to our occupational descriptions, we'd be dissertatin' every chance we get. At parties, at home, at church, at weddings, at funerals, at our children's birthday parties. Really, being a dissertator is basically tantamount to having something to say that everyone else must listen to for their own damn good. It's a kind of noblesse oblige; it's having class without classes.

Tony's Vision

I had a hunch people thought of me this way, but I never knew for sure until now. Here's the "vision" Tony had when I told him my new apartment had a fireplace:

"I have a vision of you, Kevin, in a burgandy robe, drinking single malt scotch in this huge rimmed, bulbous glass with a cigar in the ash tray, reading some Dostoyevsky by the firelight in that huge wooden chair of yours."

Close, but no cigar.

Study A Broad

It's likely that the rest of you have already heard of this man with the shit-eating grin, but for those of you who haven't, he's been a student of UW-Whitewater for 12 years and has even qualified for some special tax on students who take too long to complete their degree. My favorite thing about CNN's coverage of him is the above picture. Notice the fully stocked bar to the right and the segment of the word whisky to the left of his Sean William Scott spiked hair (remember Dude, Where's My Car). Paradoxically, despite the frat boy demeanor, his long list of majors includes education and women's studies. So I can't put my finger on him. Is this guy for real or is he playing the full time liberal arts student to meet women, as this picture suggests? The article is about his decision to stay on a twelth year because he never studied abroad. Again, broaden mind or meet broads? Remembering Tristram Shandy, it occurs to me that these two things aren't always cast as entirely separate.

Smooth Move

Jen and I have now finally completed the shortest move ever from the second to the fourth floor of our building. This was an interesting move, to be sure, since we weren't required to actually pack everything. For example, instead of packing kitchen utensils into boxes, I just carried the kitchen drawers up and unloaded them into the conveniently corresponding spaces within our new kitchen. As smooth as our move was, we still encountered some amusing obstacles along the way:

Billie, our bullying tuxedo cat, has a history of going scaredy on us when in transit. During our last move, she cowered in the closet for three days. This time around, she peed all over Jen who was in the process of comforting her.

We learned how heavy our recently purchased mattress is. For Jen and I to carry it upstairs (with the help of a push cart and an elevator!), we had to stop three times to keep Jen from hyperventilating. This was the price she paid for insisting that only we could move our mattress, it being so precious and all.

An extremely fit and Herculean lesbian friend (let's just call her Britomart), who had offered a hand, decided that carrying a bookshelf into the elevator wasn't challenging enough. So she talked me into carrying it up two flights of winding stairs. It did the trick. Even I felt mighty afterwards. Why not make moving a sport?

The management company of our building kept delaying. First they pushed back the move-in date at the last minute and then they told us carpet was dry, when it was obviously soaking wet. The lady who opened the apartment for us actually bent down with me to test the carpet and lied to my face. Later, disregarding our warnings, the Trout got her socks all wet.

Tenants are expected to clean their bathrooms before they move out. Our tenants did a fair job except for failing to notice the nastiness built up within the grouts between the tiles. This calls to mind a pun. But in order to set it up, it will require a little background information. Those of you who live in Madison may have had the opportunity of entering the first floor men's bathroom of college library (half of you of course will not have been afforded this privilege, and I advise sneaking a peak). On the urinal walls within this facility, there are phrases written onto the grouts between the tiles. To my great satisfaction, these phrases are all plays on the word grout: "no grout about it," "down and grout," "the groutful dead," and, my personal favorite, "grout expectations." As for my own tiles, suffice it to say, the previous tenants have failed to live up to my "grout expectations."

Overconcerned?

Three weeks back, I stayed up late into the night feverishly grading the last of a set of papers for a course on Modern American Literature that I'm teaching this semester. The papers bothered me tremendously because I couldn't help but feel a certain level of casualness in the way they were written. I remember turning in to bed, jaw clenched at the nerve of my students, to wake up not much calmer. Later that morning, I attempted to shoot a dose of rigor into my classes (by personally doping up on caffeine beforehand), hoping I could magically make the disaffected spirit that I had detected disappear forever. During, what by my standards were, two successful classes, I dropped a short, but sharp criticism about how the last three weeks of discussion had been sub-par. Although they didn't seem too distressed by it, I still felt guilty. And then I almost followed up with an email reminder about the level of effort I expected. Basically, I was mad at my kids, who are supposed to substantiate my view that I'm a good teacher by dazzling me with fabulous papers. Luckily, I caught myself before sending out this supplemental raillery as all the external factors like the dragging winter, my own preoccupations with my dissertation, and the sheer difficulty of the novel we were reading forced themselves into my view. It occurred to me that most of my students were trying... hard... to get 'A's in the class. (Several of my students confirmed this view when I met with them later to be told that they had gone to writing center twice, put in hours of labor, and other forms of preparation that they now thought of as time wasted.) It occurred to me that for the first time in my teaching career I had become so invested and obsessed with my students' performance that I was going too far. So I backed off and spent the rest of the semester encouraging and cultivating their strengths as opposed to pointing out their weaknesses.

Although I knew deep down at the time and see it very clearly now that this sort of paranoid sensitivity to the mood swings of a classroom is dangerous, it somehow had the positive effect of opening up a new perspective on my teaching. Once more, I leave a set of classes thinking of my students as my best ever. But what isn't usual this semester is that I can actually say that I have genuinely come to love teaching. Every semester since I've started, I've liked my students more and more. And even though I firmly believe that each incoming class at this university has been smarter than the last, I still believe that, regardless of this fact, my attitude has shifted. For the first time, I allowed myself to feel their highs and lows, ups and downs, euphoria and desperation. I guess I realized this semester that one can't help but step out from behind the wall of formality and professionalism teachers must build between themselves and their students. This leaves me in an unfortunate bind. I know it's not healthy to become personally invested in my students, but if I don't become attached, then I tend to put the ball in their hands with a kind of "college is what you make of it" attitude. This was the cliche chosen by my mostly forgotten college president at my commencement address. (How many 17 year olds really have their lives together enough to make good this advice?) I guess this is the difference between envisioning myself as the seller or the advertiser of a product. When I'm invested, I'm actively pitching my practice, trying to convince my students of its merits, while carefully monitoring their reactions.

I know that there's a scholarly debate related to this very subject. Is literary criticism a field that ought to be tailored to the general public or kept in its less accessible, esoteric forms? I'm not saying that I'm dumbing down my field to my students-I'm not feeding it to them with a spoon-but that I'm trying to kindle interest. If I were steadfast in the belief that literary studies is available to the initiated only, then I'd naturally relate to my students in a self-satisfied, cynical, and pessimistic manner. I wouldn't be bothered one bit if they couldn't... or just wouldn't.

I can ask them to sink or swim, but only if I can convince them that swimming is a worthwhile activity in the first place. And no one actually drowns for failing intro to modern american literature.