DAN TESSITORE

When I'm not on stage telling strangers about my penis, I'm in front of a classroom of university freshmen telling them about writing and literature. Whenever I assign a new reading, I take a survey of my 70 or so students to see how many of them have read the poem/story/play, and the results are always the same:

ZERO.

I can understand that their high school English teachers weren't putting Russell Edson or Tobias Wolff on their reading lists (because they probably haven't read these writers themselves), but Hemingway? Really? Not only have the vast majority of the 19-year-olds I've met in the past several years never read a short story by Hemingway - they've never even heard of him. Ditto Franz Kafka, John Keats, Arthur Miller, Sophocles, Sylvia Plath, Raymond Carver, John Cheever, T.S. Eliot, Richard Wright, and Flannery O'Connor.

The results are so consistent, year after year, that they do in fact cease to amaze me. What hasn't yet ceased to amaze me is their equally dismal knowledge of film. I expect them not to have seen Jim Jarmusch's latest. I expect them to have never heard of Fellini. But believe it or not, in this week's survey of my current crop, I learned that more than 90% of them have never seen a Monty Python film. One (out of nearly 70) had seen 2001: A Space Odyssey. Here's a partial list of the movies none of them have ever seen:

Network
Blade Runner
Barton Fink
Do The Right Thing
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Raging Bull
The Godfather
Harold and Maude
Trainspotting
The Usual Suspects
Being John Malkovich
Full Metal Jacket
The Big Lebowski
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Heathers

Some of these are less surprising than others. I'm not exactly shocked that none of them have seen Network, but given the ubiquity of the Howard Beale monologue (it's all over YouTube and featured in who knows how many documentaries), I am a bit surprised that not one of them has any inkling of it. One student has seen, and absolutely loves, A Clockwork Orange, but has never seen any other Kubrick film. The one who has seen 2001 has also seen Full Metal Jacket but had no idea that they were both directed by the same dude.

And that's what gets me. It's not so much the shallowness of their reading and viewing (fuck, they're 19) as it is the lack of basic intellectual curiosity that leads one to find out - almost without effort - that The Departed and Goodfellas were both directed by the same guy. One student had seen Mulholland Drive (Naomi Watts lesbian scene = hot). When I asked what other David Lynch films he liked, he answered, "Who's that?"

My students are people who do not remember a time when any piece of information was not available at their fingertips via the internet. But they don't bother, and that scares me. I get papers with every instance of the word their spelled there, despite the fact that I tell them on day one that spell-check doesn't give a shit if they have the wrong word so long as it's spelled correctly, and that dictionary.com is fucking free. Only one student this year bothered to type "Franz Kafka" - or any other author - into a search engine, and every semester at least one of them will ask whether they are required to know the authors of the works I assign. Why wouldn't you bother to know that? How difficult is it to note that Kafka wrote The Metamorphosis or that Jonathan Nolan's Memento Mori is indeed the story the movie Memento is based on, and yes, the director Christopher Nolan is his brother? How is it possible that an entire generation, who can learn any fact or factoid without leaving their dorm rooms, has no desire to do so? Really, I'm perplexed as hell.

To be continued...