Reading something both dumb and disingenuous last week in a college newspaper by a college freshman, I scoffed for the half-beat it took me to remember my own career as a college freshman.
I realized two things, if not in the first semester, then in the second:
1. I had not yet acquired any original ideas, or even begun to consolidate my public education or the my other childhood adventures and misadventures into anything resembling an honest conviction, or even a discernible point of view.
2. I didn’t need ideas or convictions a point of view, because I could write well enough to slap my English instructors out of their perpetual sad hangovers with well-structured sentences and the occasional extended metaphor, however sophomoric.
I wasn’t the only student who knew how to write substantive-sounding claptrap, of course. We all frankly discussed “bullshitting” as a known and reliable alternative for actually researching, thinking or communicating anything new—but filling the required pages anyway.
I once turned in a paper on Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood that senselessly belabored the very most obvious insight about the book’s structure—that Capote builds suspense by switching his focus back and forth, back and forth, from the victims-to-be on a Kansas farm going about their wholesome daily lives, and the murderers’ mixed-up machinations.
A smart spaniel would have identified that plot pattern. But only a young David Rutherford Murray thought to bullshit for seven double-spaced pages, elaborately comparing Capote’s plot, and “The Crash at Crush”—a head-on steam-locomotive collision staged for commercial entertainment at Crush, Texas, in 1896. This, I had read about in a book with a title that appealed to a little feller with a big Lionel layout: The Great Train Wrecks.
So I wrote, on my plastic 1987 Smith-Corona (with a space-age auto-correct feature that remembered your fuck-ups and covered them over with the strike of a “delete” button), Capote puts his readers in the same position as the organizers of the premeditated train calamity put its spectators: First looking at oncoming object, now just a dot on the right horizon. Then, that one, a growing blob on the left. Now a discernible thing, bearing down on the right. Back to the left!—and the right!—and the left!—and the right!—until at some moment, each monster enters the crowd’s peripheral vision and can be seen at once. And then, both on the Clutter farm and in Crush, Texas.
As we all know, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock murdered the Clutter family for less than $50 in cash, got caught and were eventually executed. Meanwhile at Crush, as The Dallas Morning News reported in 1896, “A crash, a sound of timbers rent and torn, and then a shower of splinters … There was just a swift instance of silence, and then as if controlled by a single impulse both boilers exploded simultaneously and the air was filled with flying missiles of iron and steel varying in size from a postage stamp to half of a driving wheel.” The crowd turned and ran, but not before two were killed and six injured by flying debris—including a photographer, Jarvis “Joe” Dean of Waco, Texas, who (while capturing this photograph) took a flying bolt in the eye.
Of course I got an A on that paper on Capote and the Crash at Crush (see “perpetual hangover,” above).
And now, 35 years later, I’ve gotten you to read about the whole caper.
Looks like I’ve still got it.
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