Confession: I have watched the broader-than-broad comedy Caddyshack two, three, four times, every year, since its release in 1980.

I have often asked myself: What is it that draws me to watching this movie more than 50 times, far more than any other movie I have seen?

Part of it has to be nostalgia. It’s an amorphous term, nostalgia, and one I don’t feel like dealing with completely. It’s a word one has to deal with when one thinks about a movie released when one is 12 years old. It’s also kind of boring.

But I also have this inchoate idea that the movie lifts me out of early-spring doldrums, which I tend to have. Unlike many who feel ebullient when the weather turns, I feel the need to stay inside, play records, read, sulk. I have never been able to explain this.

Somewhere in the mix lies Caddyshack, directed by Harold Ramis, who would go on to direct Groundhog Day, Analyze This and That, and this summer’s  Year One.

One of my projects this summer is to write a full-fledged essay about this. Now, other writers have written about Caddyshack. There’s the Book of Caddyshack that is chockful of interesting anecdotes and scene-by-scene analysis. Literary lion George Plimpton penned an occasional piece as well. And I’ve already written a sonnet, “Caddyshackesque,” which appears here on Linebreak. That poem alludes to some of the things I want to write about: how the movie reminds me of Northrop Frye’s idea of the “Green World” of Shakespeare, for example.  I’ve also been researching comedy in general, the poetics of listlessness, and the changing critical perception of the film. The New York Times‘ film critic Vincent Canby, for example, famously dismissed Caddyshack in his piece “The Golden Age of Junk” as “immediately forgettable.”

Me, I can’t forget Caddyshack. So I have this project going for me.  Which is nice.

***
I’d like to thank the kind folks at Linebreak for having me this week as their guest blogger.  It’s one of my favorite literary journals, and I think they do a great job here.  I almost typed the word “knob”; I always do that.

I don’t normally blog so much as shamelessly self-promote over at my own personal website, so it’s been cool to actually blog here. I will be back around October or November to coincide with the release of my next book, How to Be Inappropriate, a collection of humorous noncition, which I urge you all to pre-order, order upon release, then order again.

OK, I’ll stop.

Boy my brothers are weird.
Hmm, but it’s mostly Charlie and Timmy that’s weird.
One of my brothers are weird. Hmmm.
This isn’t making much sense, but
Laughing gulls aren’t weirder than my brothers.
Um, no–don’t put that.
Hmm, wait I have one.
Uh-uh.
Now the seatide is coming in.
Yeah, my brothers are drowning–but not Charlie.
But Charlie got shot by a nuclear torpedo that was launched into space. Johnny and Timmy lived inside the submarine that shot the torpedo.

Charlie is a smelly poop-bag. Siblings
tend to shoot nuclear submarine torpedoes at each other and call each other poop-bags.
The seagulls will feast on their dead flesh after I destroy them with an atom bomb.
But Charlie forgot he was in space.
Hmm.
Timmy makes grunts and slobbers very much like my childhood dog, Snuffy.
Maybe Timmy is Snuffy.
Timmy was soon put to sleep and then reincarnated as a seagull.

Update from Johnathon [4:50 p.m.]: Yes, we have the technology.

Not the actual ceramic apple, but an approximation.

The Ceramic Apple

From deep inside the ceramic apple
on top of the family fridge, I noodle out
a photo, hidden for years.  The Fourth of July
parade, Maryville, Tennessee, the eastern tip
of the state, visiting relatives.  I was a punky kid
with long bangs, and sulked on the curb,
skinny legs wide-flung in shorts,
watching bands march by. I refused to smile.
Both of my hairless balls were hanging out
in the snapshot, and were visible from across the street.
Why did my mom keep this embarrassment,
tucked under tacks and spare birthday candles?
Whole color guards must have passed, distracted
by my sagging family jewels. I was reunited
at last with distant cousins.  Like Dicky Bird Nester.
He was cool.  He had a speedboat
and was my new hero.  I told Dicky Bird
about junior high band, and how I played trombone,
the cruelest instrument for a pubescent
boy to play.  The slide was always
barreling out, jutting, knotted, protruding.  I still know
one song, the bass part
to that damn Coke commercial,
“I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing,”
when everyone held candles, singing,
beaming for the camera.

–first published in Mudfish, 1997

1. Douglas Rothschild’s Theogeny.  Douglas’s poetic family tree comes from second- and third-wave Language poets and fourth- and fifth-wave New York School.  That’s his poetic DNA. The result, however, is a kind of poem that is straightforward, found, outsider, schooled, subversive, arch, and tender, often all at the same time. In person, even Douglas would admit he’s a complete eccentric (just look at the above photo, taken from his book launch, all zoot suited and making rolls out of quarters for one of his jobs, running a couple of laundromats); he is also a died-in-wool poet.  I’m hard-pressed to think of a post-Language, post-NY Schooler who can write a poem feeling and human/e presence.

2. Sage Cohen’s Writing the Life Poetic. Imagine a cross of Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones, Lewis Turco’s The Book of Forms, and Jeffrey Yamaguchi’s 52 Projects, and you have Writing the Life Poetic. If you are teaching poetry to high school or undergraduate students, I suggest you consider adopting this puppy. Check out the book’s website here.

I used to think it was cheesy to call writing a “practice”: it seemed so yoga, so crunchy granola.  Then I did yoga, and then I started to eat and enjoy crunchy granola.  Oh, and then I also started teaching, and using terms such as “practice” and “deep listening” made more sense, made connections to students, moreso at first than, say, “objective correlative” and “negative capability.”  I save those cans of critical whoop-ass for later.

Anyway, there’s an idea that to teach poetry, at least to the beginning writer, means you have to in some sense “trick” the student into thinking they are not writing poetry, that they are really practicing, doing drills, running laps, all for the show, that never quite happens or arrives. And, whammo: those same people have written poems. They didn’t see it coming.

And that’s perhaps the common ground among these two quite different projects: in one, we have poems transcribed in part from voice mails, scrawlings on note books from the subway; and in another, we have a writer-teacher outlining just what it might take to enter that mindspace in which voice mails and writing in notebooks might lead to the life poetic.  Both present poetry as a lifestyle choice. I suggest you get both and enjoy.

there is a way a certain notion of moving that will make
you immune to any real criticism for instance a simple
pirhouette in perfect time on the one-count of most of what
passes for rock music harold bloom would be the only person
who would disagree with me here but what does he
know about movement the man is a freakin planet anyway
how in the fuck would he move he’s so large and in charge
when most of us see mick move even on a huge screen
it’s a spirit we’ve all lost to artifical tans and synchronized
swimming maybe some of those in the hollywood nostalgia
camp would like what’s going on but not mick even on screen
he’s understated in a way most of us could only hope to be
when he juices up a lame composition it’s like no other or
when he tries to put out solo albums that are distinctly modern
it’s exempt from what most of us would call lame or the anxiety
of being like him because he’s well he’s him for chrissakes there’s
no influence involved and so I said to my friend ross there is no
reason to be afraid of reading your work in public even when
other guys are trying to be modern with cool-ass shirts why because
mick jagger is not afraid and neither should you be

–first published in LIT, #7, 2003

So imagine your courageous guest blogger enconsed in his attic office, leafing through final seminar papers–anonymized, of course–and assessing them.  I should say, rather, that I am assessing said papers in order to help my department self-assess the job we do.  In order to do that, we must assess the students’ work.

Assessment, for you non-academics out there, is a quite the buzzword these days. It’s not just in the No Child Left Behind spheres of elementary and secondary education; no, it has spread to undergraduate and graduate college education.

Gerald Graff, president of the Modern Language Association, wrote an article in the MLA Newsletter called “Assessment Changes Everything” that addresses  how and what academics should do with assessment tools, learning outcomes, all that jazz.  (A version of that piece appears on Inside Higher Ed.)

Assessment–by which I mean statistics, proof-of-concepts, number-crunching, multi-phase studies–has become the way teachers of all stripes prove their worth and success, and that is certainly no exception in the humanities. “We make a huge mistake if we don’t try to articulate more publicly what it is we value in intellectual work,” Graff quotes University of Pittsburgh professor David Bartholomae. “We do this routinely for our students — so it should not be difficult to find the language we need to speak to parents and legislators.”

Still, as Graff says, “excellent teaching in itself doesn’t guarantee an excellent education.” A student might not be ready for that literary theory course, or another has taken advanced poetry too late in his or her academic career to really give it a chance. Assessment tools, those rubrics and checklists and tests we administer and take, at least at this point, don’t take too many of those variables and others into account.

I don’t have the answers, but when assessing students as well as myself, the one word I try to remember, one that has also entered the cultural zeitgeist lately, is this: empathy. I have yet to see empathy factor into, say, grammar skills. But it does and it should.  President Obama was taken to task by many a pundit for using that quality as a barometer for his selection of Sonia Sotomayor for as Supreme Court justice. I fall on the empathy side of assessment.

Anyway, back to assessing.

Have you gotten advice from mom or sister about business?

Well, my mom says that homosexuals are evil, but I think the guy that does my highlights is gay.  So I guess my mom is just really old-fashioned, because he does a really good job.

Daniel’s poem Stardust Memories appeared on Linebreak on March 4, by the way.

I am a former altar boy who went to 12 years of Catholic school. It would be safe these days to call me aggressively secular, even a heathen. Still, there is a childlike glee I get when I listen to ApologetiX, like I am doing something naughty. When I blast “I Love Apostle Paul,” the group’s take on Joan Jett and the Blackhearts’ “I Love Rock N’ Roll,” I feel that same transgression as when I heard Kiss’s “Plaster Caster” and found out who was doing the plastering and what was being castered, or when fake blood sprayed on my shirt at GWAR show in 1988.

(via Bookslut)