Before I release my own version of today’s “vomit” into this blog, here’s the 43rd episode of Gagavision, for your viewing enjoyment: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6Gs6d1-Sew. Watching it will offer you some context, I promise, for the spew below….
I really do teach at a university, and when I started this blog, I meant it to be mostly “professorial,” with nods to Lady Gaga and other pop cultural figures and stories along the way. So today finds me grading the first of a batch of research papers from my freshman composition students. I do my best, and I do quite well. When I’ve taught this course in the past (though, true, it’s been a few years), I’ve used the same general sorts of assignments — library work, research proposal, annotated bibliography, exercises on blending quotes and analysis, etc. — and the students have done fairly well overall. Something else is happening this semester, though. And I won’t go into detail, except to provide for your delectation and horror a few short quotes from the papers I’ve read so far. (Sorry, I refuse to name the authors here.)
From a paper about hate crimes against GLBT people: “Another example of a hate crime is a man who believes in the Jewish faith who is walking with a Yakama on, carrying a Bible, and an agnostic approaches him screaming and punching him for being Jewish man and being a believer in this faith.”
From a paper about, believe it or not, whether violent depictions in pornography can lead to violent behavior and crimes: “The masturbation process shouldn’t take hours and hours to fulfill, it should be something that is done within the time of an average sitcom.”
From a paper about the correlation between racial profiling and deportation of undocumented immigrants: “Considering the complaints that are heard every day about having a job that actually requires physical movement, we can automatically assume that most citizens will not make an effort to fill these positions. When you look at the workforce levels, Hispanics, or Latinos, preserve at the bottom.”
From a paper about underaged drinking: “If we were to add alcohol to the mix, like some students do, we could be more affluent to react in violent ways.” And one more from the same paper, after the student quotes a poll saying that 9% of teens admit to drinking more than they should and 14% think their parents drink more than they should: “This also means that 91 percent of the teens believe they don’t consume enough alcohol and 86 percent believe that their parents don’t drink enough.”
Please notice that only the final claim is affiliated with any real research.
Exasperated though I may become with such fallacy-ridden claims, I know that my job is to help the students improve their work, to identify when they’ve strayed from grounded research and analysis, and to suggest ways to think more deeply and logically into their topics. I don’t make the corrections for them, no way. I also try to remember what it was like to be 17 and 18, a freshman in college. Back then and there, I wasn’t required to apply “critical thinking” to my writing. It was a lot of bubblegum and fluff, what I turned in. I could write a catchy introductory paragraph, focus my body paragraphs on one point apiece, and finish with an exciting conclusion. I stayed entirely on topic, and my writing was error-free (thanks to a high school teacher who looked for fatal errors — just one missing or misplaced comma or one misspelled word, for instance, would mean the highest grade we could receive was a high F). But nothing I wrote could rightly be called profound, thought-provoking, controversial, or in the least way argumentative. Look, folks, I wrote a paper about the benefits of cheating, something about all the exercise one could get while trying to stretch and distort one’s body so as to sneak a glimpse of someone else’s paper. Sheer satire, that. It sure as hell wasn’t about risking expulsion to get a better grade by copying someone else’s work.
What I’m saying is we seem to ask a lot of our freshmen these days. I’m not saying we should return to the olden days of my freshman education and demand little to nothing of them. Critical thinking is difficult enough for most adults who are well into their adulthood. Why should we demand the same level of thought from adults who are brand new at adulthood?
At any rate, as part of the requirements for their final, my students must revise their work. In this case, I’m not just talking about my students in freshman comp. I mean to include my creative writing students as well. They have to revise their essays. And here is where Lady Gaga’s saying, “Honor your vomit,” comes in.
First things first: I’m not attracted to the phrasing of the imperative. It’s revolting. It doesn’t make me love her (work) less. It certainly doesn’t make me love her more. It’s a catchy phrase, though, and I can imagine bunches of Little Monsters grabbing hold of it and repeating it into the ground. Honor your vomit, honor your vomit, honor your vomit. I can also imagine haters of Lady Gaga — you know, the ones who hate her so much that they have to pay attention to everything she does because they need something and someone to hate to make themselves feel greater than? those people — I can imagine them vomiting at length about how revolting her phrasing is. But I’ll leave that to them.
When she says it, Lady Gaga is lying fully clothed in an otherwise empty big old porcelain bathtub, and she’s talking about her music and songwriting, specifically on the Born This Way album. She says the initial creative process for each song takes all of 15 minutes — she works out the melody or the chord progression, she says, and some idea of the “theme” or lyrics. And she compares this part of the creative act to vomiting. Then she adds that she continues to work on each song for “days, weeks, months, years” of “fine-tuning.” Here comes the quote: “You have to honor your vomit. You have to honor those 15 minutes.”
I ended last semester’s creative writing class with what I called some lessons from Lady Gaga. One was to know the tradition(s) you’re working from. Study what’s come before you. Then move it all forward. Take risks. Experiment.
There’s a lesson here, too, in this idea of honoring one’s vomit. But it’s more complex than that. Gaga is focusing on the impetus for creation — she’s saying to honor that, whatever inkling or seed there was at the very beginning. Too many students are contented just to do the vomiting, to look at the initial spew and call it art, call it finished. The important part of what Gaga’s saying here has to do with the hard work that follows the first vomit, the “fine-tuning.” She dedicates time far beyond that first 15 minutes to crafting her work: “days, weeks, months, years.” That’s what I’d have my students pay attention to should they wish to move forward with their creative works. By all means, they should remember what compelled them to write their essays and stories to being with; they should never lose sight of that. But they have to commit to working on it afterward, to making it better, to making it more, um, palatable?, to bring it closer to that thing called art.
So back to grading, back to the vomit. I hope my students honor theirs by committing some time and dedicated hard work to revisions.
PROFESSOR GAGA 