Toni Morrison's reaction did not surprise me, as I had tried to make it through Beloved, but could discern no tour guide in the form of a plot. Her reaction almost amused me, except she wasn't joking. Well that, along with Becket's getting kicked out of Joyce Carol Oate's creative writing workshop for his linear mind, inspired the following section in The Drake Raft Field Trip, as narrated by Timber-- a fifteen year old from Chapel Hill, during his weekend adventure at Princeton. Have fun! And like keep in mind that almost none of it is fiction-- Joyce Carol Oates actually said that Salinger wasn't a writer. She didn't say why, but what the heck-- liberals don't have to. They just "feel" something, and it's true.

So then I got up, and I was headed back to the theater, to see if maybe Cliff was back, and I saw one of those signs for the creative poetry seminar that Sycorax was runnin'-- it was goin' on just about then, so I figured I'd drop on by, 'cause I was always curious about how people made things rhyme, and mean things at the same time. So I ducked in the building, and poked my head in the door, at the back, and Sycorax saw me, and told me to come on in--

"Come on in, my child. Come sit up front." Everyone turned and smiled at me. "It's a pleasure to see someone representing today's youth yet interested in the printed word. I feared you might all be irrevocably glued to the MTV." Everybody laughed, and like I was caught in her tractor beam, and I went on up front. "Is our youth excessively nihilistic these days, or is it just me?"

Then she went on-- "Before we critique all of your poems, many of which I was deeply impressed by-- well let me just say that there are several geniuses among us. But before we critique the poems, let us loosen the conscious restraints which keep us from being the poets we are, and let us release our proverbial inner childs, and together, as a community of poets, synthesize some verbal Jazz. Jazz-- we all know Jazz is the celebration of democracy, where all members of the community are equally important, and there is no central authority-- only supervisors such as myself who are in tune to the lowest common denominator. We have about half as many computers here as there are people, so half of you will be typing, while the other half will be primarily creating the hyper text. All the computers are linked so that whatever you type on your screen shall appear on all other screens, and the job of the typer is to type whatever word he wants onto the computer, while the job of the creator is to feel the flow of emotions, and sense the movement, and shout the words. Creativity is the penultimate painful process-- like slamming your fingers in a car door, but that's why we have come together, to empower one another, and by our conglomerate multifaceted diversity, endure."

Then she opened a book. "I have here with me today a seed-- I shall give this seed to one of you, and you shall read it to provide us with a common denominator to interact with-- from it shall sprout our hyper text. It is my favorite poem by John Updike-- a masterpiece. It's a love sonnet. Here, you read it." She handed it to me, and this is what it was.

In love's rubber armor I come to you;
b
oo
b.
c,
d
c;
d:
e
f
e
f--
g
g.

So I read it, "In love's rubber armor I come for you, uh, boob--"

"No, no, no-- " she grabbed it away from me, and she read it herself the right way.

Then the yelling started, and like people were calling out whatever, and things, and stuff, which I can't remember, but I don't think it'd be much help if I did-- you can just choose your own random words, if you want. This went on for about half an hour, and then they printed it out, and everyone got a copy with it, along with a creative writing certificate that said they'd completed the course.

"Excuse me." This one bald man with glasses said. "But when we sit down to write, shouldn't we have a structure in mind? Some idea of where we're going?" Everyone looked at him. "I mean for instance, when Shakespeare sat down to write Hamlet."

Everyone laughed, and Sycorax like snickered too. "High ambitions for the afternoon?" She said. Everyone laughed some more. Then she strutted across the front of the stage. "All the structure takes care of itself. The important thing to do is to just feel the rhythm of the words, feel the sub-textural waves of idiom and irony, to feel the inexpressible, to feel the poetry-- and then all the structure follows-- though the structure is but illusory-- only the sub-text exists."

"Look, I don't understand all your terminology, but I'm pickin' up enough of it just to feel that Shakespeare didn't do that, is what I'm saying. He borrowed the plot, and enhanced it with his feel ings and thoughts-- there's a lot of philosophical things in there-- you know, I really don't think he was just feeling. I think a problem today is that--"

"Yes, but Shakespeare lived in a stratified society-- where everyone had to be loyal to the queen or suffer death. A very rigid, oppressed society where truths could only be hinted at, or written around. A fascist society, before Darwinian logic and quantum theory and chaos released us from our deistic tendencies. But we live in a democracy, where all men and women are created equal-- and our art should reflect that, as well as nature's reality of chaos."

"Why? Why shouldn't art be superior to nature, if nature is but an untamed jungle of chaotic meaninglessness, like how all you deconstructionist, pseudo scientists say it is. Ah ha! Your favorite poet Updike states that "nature is static, and man is music," or something along those lines. I happen to be a scientist, an d I think that all this science has been vastly overextended into realms where it simply does not belong, but people are afraid to argue with any pursuit that has the word science appended to it, because granted, science did give us the bomb and MTV. And I suppose all these vast, rapid changes in our society have lent science a revolutionary authority-- for what other force could have toppled the pre-eminent white male institution, the church, but let's not kid ourselves here-- this random blurting out of words here today has nothing to do with a scientific pursuit of the truth, nor art. It's a bunch of hogwash, as we say in Arkansas." Everyone just looked at him, kind of wide eyed.

"Indeed I believe you must be extremely talented in science, to be a pro fessor here, and we all admire your courage and brave spirit to enter a creative writing class-- not many of us would be brave enough to attend a physics seminar, and offer our opinion. But as you well know that insight into the subtle intricacies of what might seem obvious to a layman is something that is the result of many years of intensive studies. Do you not find areas in physics that are counter-intuitive, realms which one can only navigate after years of highly specialized training?"

"Training is death for maverick scientists-- Einstein was a patent clerk, not a physicist when--"

She interrupted him. "So please try to respect this field, for although it might seem strange and unusual to you, an outside observer, it is an area every bit as refined as physics, and just as important in the arena of human experience. I grant you that Shakespeare was a genius-- but he is gone, and now we must be. We must push onwards, and experiment, and shape and mold the language to suit our democratic needs."

"Listen-- my fifteen year old daughter was writing a report on The Catcher in the Rye, and even she-- even she was analyzing the plot structure of the book. When Salinger sat down he had a skeleton in mind-- Shakespeare didn't even invent the plot for Hamlet. Granted they both fleshed out their work with feeling, but without structure the feelings can never reach towards the sky, and they are sentenced to remain in the quagmire of meaninglessness."

"Yes, yes." Sycorax shook her head and laughed. "But Sali nger's not what we consider a writer. He was merely a fad, a Copland, or an Ellis of the fifties-- a time that you must well know had not yet caught up with the insights of quantum theory."

"This is ridiculous!" The man stood up. "You're runnin' a scam!" He laughed. "I can't believe you get paid for this garbage!"

"Are you a physicist, by any chance?"

"A physicist-- yes, I am."

"Well then that explains your tendency toward linear thought. But humans are not equations, and your tendency to reduce the class to something you must understand in a mathematical manner is impeding the creative process of the class."

"The what? Ah Ah AH!?" He was totally freaking, like all pissed off and laughing at the same time-- I thought he was goin' to have a Beavis seizure. "I'm impeding this-- this verbal masturbation?" There was complete silence. "AH! AH!"

"Uh sir, we all have our talents in certain areas. Now you're very lucky to be in science, but please respect that there are other sides to a human being that can not be captured in your equations. Remember that science ends just where all that is human begins."

"This-- that's not my point. You're accusing me of being-- I mean my point is-- my point is what is art? Is this art? Can you really call this-- what is art?"

"Sir, I have a seminar to run." She said, totally calmly. "If you could find it within yourself to participate in a positive manner it would be greatly appreciated; we would all enjoy hearing about neutron stars and the age of the uni verse. But if not I'll have to ask you to--"

"Fine-- fine-- and I demand a refund. This is a con you have here! This is a con game you're running! I'm going to report this to Dean Shofshefsky."

"He's here."

"He's what?" The guy turned around. "Uh, hello-- uh."

"Now we'd all be grateful if you could make a decision-- precipitate or evaporate." And like the guy took off, shaking.