" Literary Licenses"

I’d left English 104 on my to-do list like over-cooked peas on a dinner plate, pushing them around from term to term in the hopes they would miraculously disappear. Since it was Spring of my senior year, I made the faulty assumption that any instructor would give me a “pass” just to clear the air of desperation; as luck would have it, I ended up with a teacher who believed in the power of words, except when it came to unadulterated begging.           Her name was Miss Kleinschmidt, and she’d earned every harrowing vowel that rolled off her tongue. In this class, the methodology of analyzing literature was the fist approach of unmitigated overkill. Every comma was a sperm in the grandiloquent scheme of artistic endeavor and every ‘t’ (crossed or uncrossed) carried a crucifix of the modern world; if you didn’t wring out the contents of a poem like a wet kitchen towel and yank out every weed of hidden meaning by its roots, you were considered terminally hopeless in the interpretation department. This woman could find phallic imagery in everything from a dill pickle to a field mouse. I gave it my best shot, but those little suckers always seemed to get past me, no matter how many times my friends handed me the answer in a paper airplane when her back was turned.          The more out in left-field an analysis was, the more sense it made. Rather like a baseball that goes so far out of bounds it rolls into the boy’s locker room on its own accord. Literary criticism soon felt like the blunt end of old umbrella going places that couldn’t actually be discussed in mixed company. I’m not all that fond of the stale cushions on a psychoanalytical couch, but I was sure Miss Kleinschmidt hadn’t been laid since the American Revolution. Even then, it must have been a major disappointment, because she did the “pick, pick, pick” to every thread of a passage until nothing remained but a very confused-looking emperor without so much as a scrap of dignity left on the poor guy’s Fruit of the Looms. Now, I’ll admit I’ve missed my share of interpretive taxi-cabs, but her stream of consciousness stretched from the tip of Alaska to Timbuktu and there wasn’t an outhouse of reason anywhere on the map.          Kleinschmidt had what could only be described as the art of anal discernment. A marigold was gold: therefore, it was money. A rose had thorns: therefore, it was the retaliatory carnage of Mother nature; birds were attracted to worms; therefore, they had a “control” problem.” They obviously weren’t the only ones: she was so determined to lead us down the path of the “great masters” that one of our first assignments was to steal a line from Browning (“How do I love thee?/Let me count the ways”) and then finish the poem. I remember taking the Erma Bombeck approach and watering the roots of reality, but when I wrote “I love thee like a hot-fudge sundae after I’ve already had three...and a flat tire on a deserted road...and a honeymoon in the African Jungle,” her sense of humor evaporated like the last decent nail file in the confines of San Quentin. She could transform jellyfish in a sand dune into ovum in channels of the grandiose “uterus” of the universe, but ask her to dig up something with logic attached or assign it a practical application, and you went straight to death row, without lunch I might add.           One day, right before the mid-term, she asked us why Sylvia Plath stuck her head in an oven. Utter silence. “Quiet” was usually court-martialed in this class and she quickly began soliciting volunteer victims. I’d vaguely remembered something about the theme of depression, so I selflessly passed my neighbor an answer under the desk: “She used the oven because the microwave hadn’t been invented yet.” What I thought was an obvious and well-centered nail on the head of reason back-fired like a drunken sailor and I had to stay after class and hose down the chalk boards.           Imagistic offerings in English 104 were like fish hooks. She made us wiggle them in our mouths until the teeth sunk in; then she mercilessly reeled us in and served our blushing cheeks to the principal like a side-order of fries. One Friday, Kleinschmidt was out sick and I conned the janitor into filling in for her so we wouldn’t lose any time with this monster of a syllabus. He renewed my faith in God and humanity when I discovered I wasn’t the only one on earth who believed that Joyce created Finnegan’s Wake to give English professors something to do with their pencils over summer break.           Miss Kleinschmidt alluded to her spinsterhood more than once and never let anyone address her with “Ms.” We ran that one through the analytical blender and decided that whatever she “was” had to rhyme with “Hiss” for the sake of consistency in the tone and meter department. Every selection on the syllabus revealed, in some way, her preoccupation with anatomy. “A Rose for Emily,” she said, “was written by a man who was deep-down an unfulfilled woman.” I knew the protagonist was a little too caught up the doo-doo of the Deep South, but nobody, even Faulkner, ties up the corpse of their husband and stashes it in the attic in an effort to underscore the need for sexual liberation; we had one sick puppy on our hands and I wasn’t goin’ near that one without Arnold Swartznegger and a German tank, even if my grade depended on it.           When we read Langston Hughes’ “On the Road,” I thought our dainty minds would escape the clenching jaws of sexual orientation (after all the story is grounded in an urban snowstorm and no one goes around without their clothes on in sub-zero temperatures). Wrong again. “The snow,” she said, “wasn’t snow; it was something else.” I was looking around for some LSD or a six-pack, but coming from firmly prudish Republican mind-stock, I enjoy living under the delusion that an Emily Dickinson wanna-be doesn’t get toasted before 9:00 a.m. I asked who put the weed in the brownies on her desk; since no one would own up, I was forced to take her at her word.           One of the most disgusting sights in my academic career took place the last week of class. There was this absolutely crystal-clear kiss-ass parked like a tow-truck in the front row, trying to buy an ‘A’ for the course. I can grovel with the best of them if the circumstances call for it, but “falling snow” is not “dandruff on the bleached and tattered soul of human nature,” unless you’re Yul Brenner shopping for a new toupee because his grand-kid buried it in baby powder when he went into the kitchen to grab a beer.           On the final exam, Kleinschmidt asked us all to define “poetic license.” This one was just too good to pass up: “It’s what you show a cop when he’s giving you a DUI and you can’t find your driver’s thingy-ma-jig.” I had to go to summer-school and take the class again. This time, however, the teacher was a foreign exchange student with a limited visa. I was forced to rethink my strategy for a moment, but when inspiration finally struck, it was well worth the wait: I pasted a photo of Dolly Parton half-naked on the cover of my empty journal and taught the guy how to say “Me, American” and make it stick...passed that class without ever crackin’ a book. - Janet I. Buck

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