Being for the Protection of English Majors

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"Colleges across the country this spring have been wrestling with student requests for what are known as 'trigger warnings,' explicit alerts that the material they are about to read in a classroom might upset them" -- New York Times

The English department would like to alert potential majors that some of the literary works they encounter may spark unpleasant responses in populations with certain sensitivities. Please ask your instructor for suitable substitutes where appropriate. 

Do not read:

If you've had struggles or traumatic experiences with any of the following:

 

 Mrs. Dalloway

post-traumatic stress; defenestration; party planning

 The Scarlet Letter

slut-shaming; self-flagellation; heavy-handedness; Demi Moore sensitivity

 Lord of the Flies

beach vacations; pork products; sausage fests; Conch shell shock; summer camp

 King Lear

daddy issues; eye trauma; cracked cheeks; water damage

"The Metamorphosis"

pest control; fruit abuse; carapace irritation; familial intolerance of personal lifestyle

 To Kill a Mockingbird

mob-shaming; dog-shooting; recluse-pestering

"Dover Beach"

fear of heights; melancholia; open vowel syndrome

 The Corrections

repression; dementia; midwestern Protestantism; authorial condescension

 Atlas Shrugged

speechifying; people who like to talk about Atlas Shrugged 

"Hills Like White Elephants"

Drinking; bead curtains; similes; obliquity

"The Hollow Men"

rat phobias; pear intolerance; Conrad references

 Ulysses

leg-ogling; biscuit assault; underwear objectification; excessive allusion; June 16

 Moby Dick

whales; whaling; whale-centrism; accidental amputation; cetacean albinism; minutiae

“The Raven”

weakness/weariness; surcease of sorrow; letting go; ornithophobia

 Fifty Shades of Grey

Breath hitching; lip biting

 The Grapes of Wrath

Family road trips; dust allergies; lactose intolerance

16 Things

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Brandon-brandon-walsh-4284706-260-400

Back in the olden days of Facebook, when there were fewer ads but more weird poking, you might have found yourself besieged by people demanding that you write and publish 16 Random Things About Yourself.  (The number soon went up to 25.  Inflation was bad in those days.)  Because I often do what I'm told, I complied, and this is how it turned out:

1. I’ve marched on Washington. Not by myself but with crowds of other people. It was a vibrant and exhilarating lesson in my complete and utter powerlessness. The experience did a lot to drive my later accomplishments in political paralysis. So now I write plays about politics, which is kind of like trying to cure diseases through puppetry.

2. I’ve met Jason Priestley. It was neither a highlight nor a lowlight. But I also met Jonathan Richman in a Denny’s late at night, and that was pretty cool. I’ve never met David Strathairn but he and I kept turning up in the same places in NYC over the course of one weekend and I like to think he thought I was stalking him.

3. I don’t get what’s so great about TV On The Radio. But I’m tentatively willing to accept that it might just be me. I also don’t understand manga but I’m tentatively willing to consider that it might be because I’m old. I also don’t like Dave Matthews or Dane Cook, though, and in those cases I’m confident: it’s them, it’s all on them. It’s all on you, suckas!

4. My infatuation with Tina Fey dates back to October 2000, but there is nothing cool or advantageous about being ahead of the curve in vicarious crushes. It’s not like buying Microsoft stock early. It doesn’t reflect positively on your character or judgment in any way. It’s just one more thing to feel secretly smug about. Unless you also once had a thing for, say, Alyssa Milano, in which case the Tina Fey thing isn’t so much anticipating the zeitgeist as it is a sign that you probably have lots of crushes.

5. Someone recently asked me to name a time when I had an exhilarating or transcendent experience in the theater--not interesting or engaging or smart or provocative but just really transporting--and it took me two days to think of something. I think this is theater’s problem, not mine. (The examples I finally thought of involved Caryl Churchill and Mary Zimmerman. Both were also moments without any words.)

6. I’m co-author of a novel that’s been translated into Russian and Portuguese and has been read worldwide by literally tens of people.

7. Perhaps one of the most distinctive features about parenting is that it’s one of the quickest and most efficient ways to become really judgmental of others. I’d say that’s probably one of my greatest strengths as a parent.

8. Once I was in the audience at one of my plays and at intermission the women in front of me turned around and said “Excuse me, sir? Do you have any idea what this play’s about?”

9. In the struggle between who I really am and who I want people on Facebook to think I am, the latter always wins. It’s not even much of a fight, really. The real me puts up only token resistance. That’s why my profile makes it look like my tastes are remarkably similar to those of Pitchfork’s staff writers, and not so much like I’m someone who turns up the car radio when Aqua’s “Barbie Girl” comes on. Which I don’t. Yes, I do. No I really don’t and I can learn to love TV On The Radio. You see what I’m saying?

10. I’ll probably never feel confident using the words “inchoate” or “synecdoche.”

11. I’m more ticklish than any grownup person ought to be. It’s an absurd and apparently incurable condition. And possibly inchoate.

12. When I was a kid I thought Three’s Company was a supreme human achievement in the field of comedy. Turns out I was wrong. Also: M*A*S*H isn’t as good as you remember.

13. My first job out of college was as a file clerk. Second job was putting up Christmas trees in a department store. Third was operating a lathe in a factory. Go to college, kids!

14. Two things I miss doing: drawing a daily comic strip, and improv/sketch comedy. Something I don’t miss doing: putting up Christmas trees in a department store.

15. I recently played The Man In The Yellow Hat in a local TV commercial. It was not a good look for me. But no experience is wasted: knowing this should save me some coin on hats. And on yellow.

16. There are literally only 15 random things about me.

"I Gave Myself the Best Part"

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Recently my new play Some Other Kind of Person closed at the InterAct Theater Company in Philadelphia, which had also commissioned and developed the script.  It was a terrific production and a great experience, and along the way the theater published on its blog an interview between me and the multitalented future superhero Kittson O'Neill, reposted below.KITTSON: Is there a childhood trauma that led you to write plays?  Tell us all about it?ERIC: Obviously there was.  I don’t want to go into too much detail but the experience left me with a crippling fear of prominence.  Playwriting, of course, was a natural career path.  It was either this or whittling.KITTSON: What is the first play of yours that was ever performed?  What was it like to watch?ERIC: The first was actually something I wrote in the third grade; I didn’t really watch it, as such, because I was in it; I gave myself the best part; and it was AWESOME.  I wrote a play every month of the school year.  Friends and I would put it on, and the rest of the class was forced to sit and watch it.  The concentrated doses of mandatory attention from my peers, along with occasional bursts of approval, were addictive and pretty much left me unfit to do anything else with my life.  It was my third grade teacher who suggested that I orchestrate these shows and it’s entirely possible she may be liable for some kind of educational malpractice.The first full-length play of mine that was performed when I was an adult playwright pretending to professionalism was an equally heady experience: it was a large-cast self-indulgent prop-heavy comedy with Brechtian banners, brief nudity, a full bathtub, and occasional musical interludes; there was no reason any sensible theater should have decided to do it and yet they did and the cast was terrific and the director was a hoot and the whole experience was, unfortunately, very, very encouraging.KITTSON: What other jobs have you done in the theater?ERIC: I’ve been a terrible actor and an uninspired director; I’ve been involved in ineffective marketing and half-hearted fundraising.  I barely passed the class in college where we had to hang lights and hammer stuff, and I’ve worked in multiple literary offices where my chief job function was to reject scripts that would later go on to great acclaim and financial success elsewhere.  The other night I was at a school event in my daughter’s cafegymnatorium and one of the other parents said “Hey, Eric, you know how to do theater stuff, come up here and close these curtains,” and I thought, “I’m totally going to break these curtains.”  The job I do is really the only one in my industry that I can do competently.  Everything else is, sadly, beyond me.  On another note, I’d like to mention that hyphenates are show-offs and no one likes them.KITTSON: Is that supposed to hurt our feelings?  Seth and I forgive you.  Is there a play or production that really blew your mind artistically?ERIC: I’d like to be able to say “Tons of them,” but it is of course common knowledge among frequent theatergoers that most shows fall regrettably short of mind-blowingness.  The fact that we keep going back and hoping for that kind of transcendence is a testament to how good the stuff can be when it’s really, really good — or of how bad we are at learning from experience.  The middle part of Caryl Churchill’s Far Away blew me away in performance, as did a wordless interval in Mary Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses.  I saw Brian Bedford in a pair of Moliere one-acts that played like someone had finally perfected this comedy thing everyone’s been tinkering with for all these centuries.  And I keep reading everything Young Jean Lee writes, waiting for her to stumble and let me down, but she hasn’t done it yet, which is, of course, very irritating.KITTSON: You are a pretty fearless writer.  What is the craziest thing you ever put in a script?ERIC: I’m reluctant to embrace the “fearless” designation since, to date, none of my writing projects has involved running into a burning building or catching a spider.  Still, I’m personally fond of the scene in one of my scripts that involves a parade of actual children in an elementary school pageant that has been hijacked by a fugitive bomber and turned into lurid anti-abortion propaganda.  Every time we get to that scene in a public reading of the script it makes me uncomfortable, which seems like maybe I’m doing something right.  Strangely, that play has yet to be produced anywhere.KITTSON: That’s from HUNTING HIGH, which is the first play of yours I read.  I thought it was awesome.  Okay, so what is the craziest thing of yours that you have seen make it on to the stage?ERIC: At the beseeching of an actor, I wrote a scene that required her to urinate at length on stage every night — so that was something that happened.  I’ve also got a one-act comedy that revolves around blackface and minstrelsy in ways that I think are interesting; that one’s been produced as well, albeit only once.  One anonymous online commenter called it “funny enough to stun a charging rhino” and another said, “I’m not sure but I think maybe it might be racist.”  Which I think are pretty good blurbs.KITTSON: What inspired you to write Some Other Kind of Person?ERIC: The initial inspiration came from the experiences of Nicholas Kristof, the genuinely fearless journalist who, in the course of reporting on the problem of sex slavery, purchased the freedom of two Cambodian prostitutes and followed up on their experiences thereafter.  Where others might hear such a heartbreaking story and say, “How can I help?” I heard it and thought, “Hey, I think I have an idea for a play.”KITTSON: There are a lot of allusions to fairy tales, particularly Cinderella, in SOME OTHER KIND OF PERSON.  You have kids.  Do you read them fairy tales?  The real ones or the not-so-nightmare-inducing versions?ERIC: I read my kids whatever we have on hand that’s shortest.  I mean, the kids are great and all, but I’ve got stuff to do.KITTSON: I know you are a huge nerd, so when are you going to write a superhero play?ERIC: No, you are!KITTSON: Nerds are the new cool kids. Seriously.ERIC: I’d love to write a superhero play, especially since I invariably feel like superhero movies fall short, but I sort of wonder if I’ve missed that window — seems like maybe there’s already a swell of geek theater happening, and from playwrights who have more nerd cred than I do.  That said, I have some ideas and you’d look great in a cape, so let’s talk.KITTSON: Your case of whiskey is in the mail.  So, have you been to Cambodia?  What did you do there?  Honestly, are you Bill?ERIC: Get out of my head!!!  I’ve done some traveling around the world — often, as it happens, on an employer’s dime, to do business, no just business, there wasn’t anything wrong with what we did — and so I do know well the cocoon of the corporate-friendly hotel, the siren song of room service, the frisson of risk that attends the notion of venturing out alone when you don’t know the language and don’t know what you might find if you get off at the wrong stop.  That said, my experiences overseas were less interesting than Bill’s, and very nearly 100% legal.KITTSON: Yeah right.