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This Issue 11/18/2004

Also in this issue

• From the editor
• Cheap shoes, cheap gal
• Jerry Bruckheimer is a Garish Assclown
• Cures for Senioritis

Kenneth Goldsmith is uniquely unoriginal. Among his published works are Fidget, an account of every movement his body made for 13 hours on Bloomsday, 1997, and Soliloquy, a record of everything he said during one week. He is teaching Uncreative Writing to thieving Penn students this fall; he will teach again next year.

What are you training your students to do?

I'm training them to forget everything they've ever learned about writing: their ego, their sense of narrative, their urge toward the Romantic, the smallness of their own minds and instead tap into something that's much larger than themselves: the world of available language. Our class tools are appropriation, theft, stealing, plundering and sampling -- cheating, fraud and identity theft are all encouraged. We rewrote the Penn Code of Ethics to become The English 111 Code of Unethics. If the kids are too original, they get penalized.

Where and how does this theft take place?

We try to do things that don't happen elsewhere in academia. For example, for one three-hour class, I just had the students continuously write while watching TV shows and films: an episode of The Osbournes, Andy Warhol's Blow Job (a silent film of a man getting a blow job, but all you see is his face for 35 minutes), an episode of Good Times and a half-hour of Ali G. The language -- or lack thereof -- was incredibly different in each, as was the students' response to each.

For another assignment, I gave them the simple instructions to retype five pages of their choice and [they] came in the next week, dreading their response to the most dry, dull assignment I could give them. But much to my surprise, they were charged. Their responses were varied and full of revelations: some found it enlightening to become a machine. Others said that it was the most intense reading experience they ever had, with many actually embodying the characters they were retyping. Out of the class of 18, there was only one girl who didn't have some sort of a transcendental experience with the mundane act of typing. She was a waitress who took it upon herself to retype her restaurant's menu in order to learn it better for work. She ended up hating the task and even hating her job more.

Have you ever had a job you really hated?

No. I've loved them all. I've found the tedium to be seductive. Some of the jobs I've held have been: garbage man, chicken delivery man, ski shop attendant, floor sweeper, cocaine dealer, short order cook, bartender, dishwasher, waiter, carpenter, cabinet maker, plaster caster, artists assistant, autoCAD operator, layout editor, web designer, creative director, consultant, lecturer, music critic, radio personality, writer, artist and now university professor. For many years I was a creative director in advertising. If that's creativity, then I don't want to be creative.