For whatever reason, this summer I’ve started missing teaching. I have an acquaintance, a very intelligent and accomplished young woman who is trilingual, spent a couple of years in Africa with the Peace Corps but who now suffers from what I’ll call low-grade ennui, her post jungle job not as satisfying as it seemed on paper. I see her occasionally at Chico Feo, and I ask her how her ennui is going, I’ve also been reciting snippets of poems dealing with profound boredom, riffing on Baudelaire, Yeats, Eliot, Roethke, Berryman, and Bukowski. 

For example, J. Alfred Prufrock is no stranger to tedium.

For I have known them all already, known them all:

Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.

She enjoys these snippets, leans in so she can hear Prufrock above piped-in music. 

Contemporary culture is so impoverished. TikTok, Insta, Facebook, et. al offer quick fixes to sate the need for constant stimulation, but they’re about as nourishing as cardboard. It’s not only fun but also life enhancing turning young people on to what Matthew Arnold called “the best that has been thought and said.” As a teacher, I especially enjoyed explaining how the elements of cultures reinforce each other and how the best art incorporates contemporary science and history into its mix: Planck and Einstein + WW1 + Freud = Modernism. 

   And no rock

   If there were rock

   And also water

   And water

   A spring

   A pool among the rock

   If there were the sound of water only

   Not the cicada

   And dry grass singing

   But sound of water over a rock

   Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees

   Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop

   But there is no water

So yeah, I miss that (but not meetings, emails, EpiPens, essay grading, overwrought parents, dress code violations, and all that life-negating rigmarole. 

***

What brought this nostalgia to mind was watching last night a video of Elvis Costello in 1978 performing “Watching the Detectives” in Kohn, Germany. We had a tradition that if every student in my class scored a 100 on a reading or vocabulary quiz, we’d have what I called a “Festival” and turn them on to some really wonderful music videos like Etta James and Dr. John performing “”I’d Rather Be a Blind Girl” or the Pogues doing “Dirty Old Town.” I considered it not a waste of time but an enrichment of their lives.^[1]

“Watching the Detectives” is an homage to film noir, and the lyrics mimic a screenplay: 

Long shot at that jumping sign
Invisible shivers running down my spine
Cut to baby taking off her clothes
Close-up of the sign that says, ‘We never close’
He snatched at you and you match his cigarette
She pulls the eyes out with a face like a magnet
I don’t know how much more of this I can take
She’s filing her nails while they’re dragging the lake.

And the music that supports these lyrics percolates ska-like. It’s such a good song, and I wish I could share it with someone and explain it to them^[2] why it’s relevant. 

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^[1] Also, it was a huge incentive to read the assignments. 

^[2] Yeah, I know, I know, “them” should be a singular pronoun.