Training Verbivores

Life at work: At Dallas Theological Seminary (DTS) the name “Kate” evokes dread fear followed by trembling, knees shaking, and teeth gnashing. (I am speaking, of course, of Kate Turabian. If you have encountered her, you know what I mean.) Kate’s format has caused many would-be pastors to imbibe in Early Gray tea and is responsible for an eternity of sleepless nights. Surely, Turabian hath murdered sleep.

Something else about DTS...every year on the Thursday before graduation we have an event called “senior chapel” in which the graduating class entertains everyone with a dramatic musical (often satirical) production. One year we had a “Fiddler at His Desk” who spent from sunset to sunrise studying. The year “Dances with Wolves” premiered we had “Preaches with Notes.” (Everyone at DTS knows no self-respecting communicator uses notes.) When Les Mis came to the Fair Park Music Hall, we held our own version of “The Miserables” complete with the robed language profs performing “Masters of the Word,” proving their scholarship with a chorus of verb declensions in both Greek and Hebrew.

Yet my all-time favorite was “Greece,” with music based on the John Travolta/Olivia Newton John movie by the same—but not—title. The show that year ended with “Prof” Hendricks giving the answer to the test question, “After Paul went through Macedonia, where does Acts 2 say he went?” The answer: “Greece is the word.”

I tell you all this so you can appreciate what follows.

Every Monday morning this semester I teach an advanced creative writing class. This past week everyone read Macbeth before arriving. Then in class we watched a video clip from “Smoke” wherein Harvey Keitel’s smoke-shop-owner character quotes Macbeth’s “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” speech. After that we watched a segment of Lady Macbeth’s death scene, from which the “tomorrow” lines were taken (the Roman Polanski version). After that I proceeded to lecture on “prose and poetry in Macbeth,” attempting to show ways in which the bard used poetic structure in his characterization.

In the discussion that followed we talked about how today’s readers love to find snippets of great poetry in everyday life. (For example, from Macbeth we get The Sound and the Fury and “Death Becomes Her.”) My students have the best news in the world to communicate, and they need to write it in excellent prose. Even if readers don’t know what they are alluding to in the wording, readers like it (assuming we do it right). If they discover the source later, all the better.

Case in point: As I was growing up, whenever the commode overflowed, my father would trot off hunting for the plumber’s helper, and as he went he’d call out, “Double, double, toilet trouble—come a-runnin’ on the double.” Not until I took “Shakespeare Tragedies” in my PhD program more than three decades later did I realize my father had put his own spin on the witches’ speech (Double, double, toil and trouble, fire burn, and cauldron bubble… )! There I was slogging through all that pentameter when suddenly I realized how literate the old man was. Who knew?

My point: For years I enjoyed the rhyme without knowing the background—and without having to know the background to appreciate something in it. Later, when I discovered its origin, all the better.

So, I encouraged my students to read great poetry and to weave in a good turn of phrase even if readers didn’t always know enough to appreciate where it came from.

Well, if you know grad students, you can imagine it didn’t take long for the banter to begin and the ideas to emerge. And by the end of class they had come up with a possible topic for next year’s senior chapel. Imagine hearing, say, a song about adapting to campus life (“A Whole New World"). Then add an Alladin-esque musical piece with a mentor helping a student learn proper formatting (“You’ve Gotta Have a Friend Like Me”). I’m not sure how they would weave in “Prince Ali,” but in the end, the musical would surely need a title that evoked the proper awe in every student. And indeed these would-be playwrights had come up with just the thing: Turabian Nights.