Daniel Handler sent out a mass e-mail to get more writer and art type outrage:
Hello all,
First of all let me apologize for the mass e-mail, but as some of you know there's been something going on that's a cause for concern. The Academy of Art University here in San Francisco - the biggest art school in the country - recently expelled a student for writing a violent short story, and then fired his instructor for teaching a story by David Foster Wallace the administration also found offensive.
As this story broke in the press (http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/03/25/MNGI85QTK11.DTL) the school has responded by announcing stringent policies regarding the content of students' artwork (writing, visual art, film, video game design, etc.), what can be taught in the classroom, and who is allowed to speak on campus. This was brought home to me when an instructor at the college invited me to speak to his class (along with the fired teacher and a representative of the First Amendment Project) and I was physically barred from entering the building.
Obviously this is creepy and idiotic, and the First Amendment Project is (as usual) doing a bang-up job bringing these issues to the public. I'd love to add your name - and the names of anyone you forward this to - to a growing list of people who want this kind of nonsense to stop. On Wednesday, an instructor is inviting a horde of artists to speak on free expression, and we'll be presenting a list to the Academy saying "We support free expression and oppose the misguided policies you have recently adopted regarding what can and cannot be expressed at your institution." If you live in the Bay Area, and would like to come down, that'd be great, but in any case, I'd love it if you just hit the reply button so we can put your name below that statement.
Thanks,
Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket)
― Jessa (Jessa), Thursday, 15 April 2004 17:00 (twenty-one years ago)
Solitude and the Fortresses of Youth
April 13, 2004
By MICHAEL CHABON
SAN FRANCISCO - Earlier this month my local paper, The San
Francisco Chronicle, reported that a college student had
been expelled from art school here for submitting a story
"rife with gruesome details about sexual torture,
dismemberment and bloodlust" to his creative writing class.
The instructor, a poet named Jan Richman, subsequently
found herself out of a job. The university chose not to
explain its failure to renew Ms. Richman's contract, but
she intimated that she was being punished for having set
the tone for the class by assigning a well-regarded if
disturbing short story by the MacArthur-winning novelist
David Foster Wallace, "Girl with Curious Hair." Ms. Richman
had been troubled enough by the student's work to report it
to her superiors in the first place, in spite of the fact
that it was not, according to the Chronicle, "the first
serial-killer story she had read in her six semesters on
the faculty at the Academy of Art University."
Homicide inspectors were called in; a criminal profiler
went to work on the student. The officers found no evidence
of wrongdoing. The unnamed student had made no threat; his
behavior was not considered suspicious. In the end, no
criminal charges were brought.
In this regard, the San Francisco case differs from other
incidents in California, and around the country, in which
students, unlucky enough to have as literary precursor the
Columbine mass-murderer Dylan Klebold, have found
themselves expelled, even prosecuted and convicted on
criminal charges, because of the violence depicted in their
stories and poems. The threat posed by these prosecutions
to civil liberties, to the First Amendment rights of our
young people, is grave enough. But as a writer, a parent
and a former teenager, I see the workings of something more
iniquitous: not merely the denial of teenagers' rights in
the name of their own protection, but the denial of their
humanity in the name of preserving their innocence.
It is in the nature of a teenager to want to destroy. The
destructive impulse is universal among children of all
ages, rises to a peak of vividness, ingenuity and
fascination in adolescence, and thereafter never entirely
goes away. Violence and hatred, and the fear of our own
inability to control them in ourselves, are a fundamental
part of our birthright, along with altruism, creativity,
tenderness, pity and love. It therefore requires an immense
act of hypocrisy to stigmatize our young adults and
teenagers as agents of deviance and disorder. It requires a
policy of dishonesty about and blindness to our own
histories, as a species, as a nation, and as individuals
who were troubled as teenagers, and who will always be
troubled, by the same dark impulses. It also requires that
favorite tool of the hypocritical, dishonest and fearful:
the suppression of constitutional rights.
We justly celebrate the ideals enshrined in the Bill of
Rights, but it is also a profoundly disillusioned document,
in the best sense of that adjective. It stipulates all the
worst impulses of humanity: toward repression, brutality,
intolerance and fear. It couples an unbridled faith in the
individual human being, redeemed time and again by his or
her singular capacity for tenderness, pity and all the
rest, with a profound disenchantment about groups of human
beings acting as governments, court systems, armies, state
religions and bureaucracies, unchecked by the sting of
individual conscience and only belatedly if ever capable of
anything resembling redemption.
In this light the Bill of Rights can be read as a classic
expression of the teenage spirit: a powerful imagination
reacting to a history of overwhelming institutional
repression, hypocrisy, chicanery and weakness. It is a
document written by men who, like teenagers, knew their
enemy intimately, and saw in themselves all the potential
they possessed to one day become him. We tend to view
idealism and cynicism as opposites, when in fact neither
possesses any merit or power unless tempered by, fused
with, the other. The Bill of Rights is the fruit of that
kind of fusion; so is the teenage imagination.
The imagination of teenagers is often - I'm tempted to say
always - the only sure capital they possess apart from the
love of their parents, which is a force far beyond their
capacity to comprehend or control. During my own
adolescence, my imagination, the kingdom inside my own
skull, was my sole source of refuge, my fortress of
solitude, at times my prison. But a fortress requires a
constant line of supply; those who take refuge in attics
and cellars require the unceasing aid of confederates;
prisoners need advocates, escape plans, or simply a window
that gives onto the sky.
Like all teenagers, I provisioned my garrison with art:
books, movies, music, comic books, television, role-playing
games. My secret confederates were the works of Monty
Python, H. P. Lovecraft, the cartoonist Vaughan Bod*©, and
the Ramones, among many others; they kept me watered and
fed. They baked files into cakes and, on occasion, for a
wondrous moment, made the walls of my prison disappear.
Given their nature as human creations, as artifacts and
devices of human nature, some of the provisions I consumed
were bound to be of a dark, violent, even bloody and
horrifying nature; otherwise I would not have cared for
them. Tales and displays of violence, blood and horror rang
true, answered a need, on some deep, angry level that maybe
only those with scant power or capital, regardless of their
age, can understand.
It was not long before I began to write: stories, poems,
snatches of autobiographical jazz. Often I imitated the
work of my confederates: stories of human beings in the
most extreme situations and states of emotion - horror
stories; accounts of madness and despair. In part - let's
say in large part, if that's what it takes to entitle the
writings of teenagers to unqualified protection under the
First Amendment - this was about expression. I was writing
what I felt, what I believed, wished for, raged against,
hoped and dreaded. But the main reason I wrote stories -
and the reason that I keep on writing them today - was not
to express myself. I started to write because once it had
been nourished, stoked and liberated by those secret
confederates, I could not hold back the force of my
imagination. I had been freed, and I felt that it was now
up to me to do the same for somebody else, somewhere,
trapped in his or her own lonely tower.
We don't want teenagers to write violent poems, horrifying
stories, explicit lyrics and rhymes; they're ugly, in
precisely the way that we are ugly, and out of
protectiveness and hypocrisy, even out of pity and love and
tenderness, we try to force young people to be innocent of
everything but the effects of that ugliness. And so we
censor the art they consume and produce, and prosecute and
suspend and expel them, and when, once in a great while, a
teenager reaches for an easy gun and shoots somebody or
himself, we tell ourselves that if we had only censored his
journals and curtailed his music and video games, that
awful burst of final ugliness could surely have been
prevented. As if art caused the ugliness, when of course
all it can ever do is reflect and, perhaps, attempt to
explain it.
Let teenagers languish, therefore, in their sense of
isolation, without outlet or nourishment, bereft of the
only thing that makes it all bearable: knowing that
somebody else has felt the way that you feel, has faced it,
run from it, rued it, lamented it and transformed it into
art; has been there, and returned, and lived, for the only
good reason we have: to tell the tale. How confident we
shall be, once we have done this, of never encountering the
ugliness again! How happy our children will be, and how
brave, and how safe!
Michael Chabon is the author of "The Amazing Adventures of
Kavalier & Clay," which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction
in 2001.
― scott seward (scott seward), Thursday, 15 April 2004 17:39 (twenty-one years ago)