Briefly brooding on teaching & rules

This entry's obligatory image is just another pic that I stole as-is from the daily junk-ads. I'm still trying to quit using photos of food as source material, but it's hard, thus I often relapse; for these still-life compositions are so beautiful, especially when you see them as artworks commissioned by multinational corporations.

Dear diary,

Imagine taking a class called "How to be an outlaw", or "How to break rules". Or a class called "How to fail this class". Would it be better or worse for a student to get a passing grade?

I think the police of your town would probably say: We prefer people to do well and to receive a diploma from the "How to be an outlaw" class; cuz then we, the officers of the law, have an easier job finding and stopping criminals. We know that everyone who breaks the law will do so in accordance with the teachings set forth by sterling Professor Jupiter; thus, in order to fulfill our duty to society, we can just keep an eye out for the telltale signs of accredited outlaws. We then place these outlaws into our paddy wagon, or police van, and drive them to the station, where we mercilessly abuse them. (There's no class to teach one how to administer justice.)

And some poets would endorse the "How to break rules" class, while other poets would spurn it. I think the reason for this is that poetry is neither about shirking nor following rules, at least not altogether; poetry sort of resides in a halfway state between the two states: rule-following and rulelessness. (Poetry resides nowhere and everywhere, just not precisely here or over there.) It's like: Make your own rules. And to dream up one's own guidelines, templates, statutes, and legislation, and to trace these terms upon either stone or gold tablets, with one's own finger, and then to hand-deliver these suggestions to oneself upon a mountaintop, or at least to claim in a reasonably persuasive way that one did so, and to appoint oneself as one's own AND ONLY proper mouthpiece, which is to say, one's prophet — this essentially poetic endeavor just might benefit from what one learned in the "How to break rules" class (which incidentally shares its curriculum with the "How to break tablets" class). Not just because one must know the law before one can constructively destroy the law, but also because often a strict adherence to, compliance with, and obeying of the law is actually the least expected and most deviant behavior possible. But, on the other hand, the class might also prove useless. Either way, it's expensive. I'd maybe sign up to enroll but then skip all the lectures.

Lastly, the "How to fail this class" class. How did you manage to fail the "How to fail this class" class? Answer: Be a dutiful student. Our grading scale went from one to five stars, with five being the best, and I earned a perfect score: 5 out of 5 stars. Therefore the teacher failed me. So that solves that.

However, my main concern today, which, till now, I didn't realize was even on my mind, let alone on the tiptop of my mind, is the following question: Should there be children's books or not? Cuz I could see a good argument being made in favor of having children's books in our world, and I could equally envision a world where no children's books exist because children are simply expected to read the same books as adults, since all the finest books (which are the only ones that people deign to read) appeal to both groups fully and equally: children and adults.

Here's my proposal — I believe that this will solve our great dilemma: Let us rename ALL literature "Children's Literature". That's all we'd have to do. Just shuffle the entirety of the contents into the same classification, and give the children what they want. For tell me: Why should a child not enjoy reading Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations as well as the biblical Book of Jonah or Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons (etc., etc... I could list a thrillion more titles; and I purposely avoid mentioning the very best, like Edward Lear's Complete Nonsense or Lewis Carroll's Alice books and The Hunting of the Snark, because those are obviously already universally famous, and rightly so, as exemplars of this adult-child category)?