the one about the lord of the flies interview

Most of my Lord of the Flies presentation was to be an updated rehash of the paper I turned in the year before in high school, though I did have to double its length and the number of sources. I don’t recall doing this for anything in Comp I so this may have been the first year I was required to visit the library and seek out various periodicals with already published essays and reference them on the token bibliography page. As for the presentation, for what I was to distribute to the class, I constructed a sort of “family tree” of the characters (granted, none were really related) with hand-drawn caricatures that identified everyone by name, their role, and what they symbolized.

In the days leading up to my presentation (which was to be a Thursday) Michael Arthur and I went over what was to happen. Part of me recalls us visiting the room late one day to go over the layout and the best plan of action. The only thing Michel really blanched at was that he had to be up and ready to go by 7:00. Other than that, I think he was just as anxious as me to see how this was going to be pulled off. I think Ms. Fontaine was curious, too – a few sessions before the presentation I asked if it would be a problem using props or other characters. She said not all: those sorts of things could only serve to boost one’s grade. From the way she looked at me I could tell she wondered what I had up my sleeve.

Here’s what happened.

Thursday morning Michael and I got to the room a little before 7:30. I had noticed over a period of several weeks that students usually went straight to their seats when they arrived – no one ever walked around the partition between the podium and west wall. This meant that Michael could quietly sit back here among the surplus equipment and wait for my cue during the presentation. Ah, but when would that be? Today would be four more (possibly the last four) though, as I cautioned Mike, I had no clue when I’d get to go. My hopes were to get this over and done with as quickly as possible and let Mike go back to bed – but I couldn’t make any promises.

When class started Ms. Fontaine took her seat in the audience with the students and called the first speaker for the day. It wasn't me. While I was somewhat anxious to get started, I was thankful that class had started without anyone discovering the secret that stood (or, as I was told later, spread out reading a paper) on the other side of the wall.

At about 8:45 it was finally my turn. I got up and handed out the “study guides” to the class and began reading my research on The Lord of the Flies. First there was Ralph, then Jack, and maybe Sam and Eric next – I forget the order but I knew I needed to have Piggy near the end. A few seconds after I began reading the section about Piggy there came a knock on the glass door behind the wall. It obviously woke everyone up and I played off being startled.

“...and...oh, yeah, hey, I thought it might be best to actually bring in someone who knows a lot about this character an’ so I’ve asked the one and only Piggy to join us today. Hold on a sec!”

I walked around the wall and signaled to Mike to open the door loudly. Seeing the faces of my classmates when I came back around the wall was priceless.

“Well, welcome then Piggy, thanks for stopping...do you want to come in and be seen?”

“No,” wheezed Michael in a loud, whiny voice. “I’ve been stranded on a desert island for I dunno how many weeks and I didn’t wash up b’fore I came in so I smell pretty bad. Plus I gots assmar.”

“Huh-huh. Well, sucks to your assmar. Tell us a bit about yourself....”

Michael, with a copy of my research notes in hand, proceeded to read off information about Piggy and how life was good when the conch was around and how things got out of hand when Jack had his way. I half-sat on the tabletop of the right wing seats, situated in a way where I could see both Michael standing and the rest of the class wondering just what the hell was going on. I hammed it up, too, turning periodically to the class and acting impressed at what was going on. This ran for a few minutes before we decided to wrap this “interview” up in a most disastrous way. As I thanked Piggy for coming by, Michael threw open the doors and started yelling and making rambunctious noises to indicate he was being dragged away by Jack. As I said before, Michael knew The Lord of the Flies well enough to throw in some other jabs – “No...no! Don’t kill the pig! No! No! Take your hand off me...stop...” – and then, for icing on the cake, he tossed an old pair of glasses from the behind the wall onto the floor. Finally, with a thunderous noise, Michael dragged himself outside and slammed the doors. The interview was officially over.

“Piggy, everyone.” I started clapping and, while the rest of the class began applauding with mild confusion, I nonchalantly retrieved the glasses from the floor and went right back into the presentation, ending with a brief spiel on the titular character.

When I was done nodded a brief thank you and returned to my seat while everyone applauded once again. In my seat, the girl in front of me turned around and smiled: “that was good...but how did he know when to come by and be interviewed.” Because he’s Piggy, I said coyly. Mrs. Fontaine, also seated in the row in front of me, turned around as the next student ascended the podium and also said good job: “but he really didn’t look like Piggy,” she said with a wink. When I turned around I realized that from where she sat one could see through the large wall-length windows and anyone passing by. I always assumed she only witnessed one person walking along the old Avenue E service road that morning: a tall, skinny kid with unkempt hair that looked nothing like the character described and who was probably making a bee-line straight back to bed.

That didn’t cost me any points, though – I easily aced the presentation with an A.

Later than morning I met up with the rest of the Octumvirate and Michael and I laughed at pulling off such a bizarre interview. Who would have guessed that what had originally been a one-shot joke with the pizza server would go on to be a memorable college experience?

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Lord of the Flies
(Gers, Harris)
Iron Maiden
From the album The X Factor
1995

I don't care for this world anymore
I just want to live my own fantasy
Fate has brought us to these shores
What was meant to be is now happening

I've found that I like this living in danger
Living on the edge: it feels, it makes feel as one
Who cares now what's right or wrong? It's reality
Killing so we survive wherever we may roam
Wherever we may hide, we've got to get away

I don't want existence to end
We must prepare ourselves for the elements
I just want to feel like we're strong
We don't need a code of morality

I like all the mixed emotion and anger
It brings out the animal, the power you can feel
And feeling so high with this much adrenaline
Excited, but scary to believe what we've become

Saints and sinners, something within' us
We are lord of the flies
Saints and sinners, something willing us
To be lord of the flies...

the one about finding piggy

One year before I was a student in English Composition II, I was a student in a senior-level high school English class. The major topic for that spring was an all-out study of William Golding’s classic, The Lord of the Flies, part of which involved me composing an “in character diary” as well as a short essay (maybe three or four pages). Golding’s novel struck a nerve and I ended up quoting bits of it in high school and – apparently – into college (though I doubt I was ever in a position to chant “kill the pig, cut her throat” in conversation, polite or otherwise).

What with the memorable character of Piggy still fresh on the mind, I came to college and during my first semester discovered a modern-day Piggy working behind the pizza counter in the Belvedere-Agora cafeteria. In my mind, Piggy looked like the young boys from The Far Side cartoons: dumpy-looking children with striped shirts tightly fit over a balloon-shaped frame and wearing glasses with thick, clear lenses that may (or may not) hide pea-sized eyes. This too described Piggy in the cafeteria, though this “young man” had elected to add “facial hair” into the already burgeoning equation. It wasn’t pretty – but his annoyed grunts waving the pizza spatula around were always worth a laugh. Someone had put him on pizza patrol and there was no way he lettin’ anyone walk away with both an entrée and a slice of pizza on the same tray. Sucks to that rule...and yeah, sucks to his assmar while we’re at it, too.

Also versed in The Lord of the Flies was fellow student Michael Arthur who I had met my first semester on campus through a mutual acquaintance. Late into that semester I had tried ordering pizza for dinner, only to get read the riot act because I couldn’t have two main courses at the same time. It might have been an important statute in the cafeteria code but it sounded asinine coming from this student.

By now it was the spring semester and in Comp II, Ms. Fontaine directed us to pick something – practically anything – from the realm of literature and compose a ten-or-so page essay on some aspect of it. We had done minor writing assignments most of that semester but this major essay came midway into the course and would serve as a sort of mid-term project. Honestly, I was a bit lazy and therefore got permission to revisit The Lord of the Flies – careful of course to not mention that a huge chunk of my essay would come from something a year old. Oh, yeah: other requirements for this essay included that we read the completed text aloud to the rest of the class and that we create a one-page capsule review to share. At the end of the project each student would have 25 or so one-page write-ups that would go on to become – surprise! – potential test material.

Somewhere along the way genius struck. If this was to be a presentation then I needed something that grabbed everyone’s attention, something memorable. My topic was to be the symbolism behind the names and traits of the characters – Ralph and Jack, Simon and so on – of which Piggy always seemed the popular one for various reasons. (I’m sure the fat, loud, nerdish types are popular literary stereotypes.) What better way to introduce the character of Piggy then by interviewing him about his time on the island and his encounters with the other characters! (Never mind the fact he never leaves the island....) And what better person to portray Piggy than that guy serving pizza in the cafeteria?

Alas that was not to be and so I asked Michael if he’d be interested in this plum role. As soon as he agreed – and I like to think it wasn’t a difficult sell – I began drafting just how this would play out.

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Piggy
(Simmerlein)
The Fringe
From the album Chardonnay
1997

the one about english composition, part two

As the uninspired name suggested, English Composition II was the follow-up to English Composition I. Both geared toward freshmen, I often wondered if upperclassmen ever enrolled? Or was the idea that the English department required passing grades in English Composition I and II before any other English courses could be attempted? Maybe...I wasn’t an English major so I don’t know.

English Composition II was very much the class I thought English Composition I should have been. Part II seemed more structured and organized. Part I seemed hastily tossed together. Part II seemed to actually dwell on composing essays. Part I seemed more interested in discussing how you’d piece together an essay, given the chance. Part I also focused more on basic capitalization and punctuation skills that I felt was overkill. For part II, a thick textbook of short stories and poetry was promptly dumped in our laps in our first class (well, not really – we had to pay through the nose for the book first) and we quickly dove into travelers from antique lands, decreeing stately pleasure-domes, and observing lumps of lapis lazuli for tomb effigies of soon-to-deceased clergy.

At the helm of the class was Ms. Eva Fontaine, a demure caricature of the token spinster librarian figure. She’d probably been teaching for decades and hadn’t yet found any displeasure in the honorable act – though she surely wasn’t too excited about the actions of the modern student. Still, for all her wrinkles and stutters, Ms. Fontaine was sharp as a tack and exuded a fierce determination to teach and instill some redeeming qualities in her classes.

And that was the odd thing about our class: there probably weren’t more than 25 of us, meeting in a fairly large auditorium Tuesday and Thursday morning at eight o’clock sharp. Getting up and out the door by seven thirty or so wasn’t difficult by my second semester. I forget what I did for breakfast these days but I could easily amble my way from the dorm to the quad in mere minutes and find where I was going with little interruption. But where I ended up...geesh! This half of the Eckert Complex was the old band building and perhaps where this class met was once a performance hall. Many of the rooms in this part of the building had been practice rooms for band members – now they were over-sized offices that held two or more instructors.

The auditorium was obviously empty every time I arrived since I was constantly early; on my first day, I took an aisle seat three or four rows from the front (on stage left of Ms. Fontaine). Since the class was so small she asked that I take a seat in one of the first four or five rows in the middle section, instead. I remember grumbling, thinking how everyone always says your interest in a class is shown by your distance from the instructor (those down front find the topic engrossing, those in the back care not but for passing). Here I was showing an interest and being asked to move. So I took a seat as far back would allow: aisle seat, five rows back. By myself.

Since I arrived early I was usually by myself in the room for a few minutes before anyone else materialized and so I took to examining my surroundings. It was a well-lit room, for one, as the room jutted out on the west side of the building and had floor-to-ceiling windows on two walls. The third wall was partially masked by a shortened wall that served as a backdrop for the instructor or speaker. This dividing wall was about two-third the length of the western wall of the room; one could easily walk around either end and stumble into various equipment such as a television/VCR combo, an overhead projector, and stacks of extra chairs. There was nowhere else to store this in the room so it was stashed here, out of sight. Sort of. Opposite the equipment was the western wall of the room and two sets of doors that led outside and into the long-disused remnants of Avenue E. Why expensive equipment was stored mere inches from a door that could easily lead to a getaway truck, I never knew. I assumed if it wasn’t anyone else’s concern then it shouldn’t be mine, either.

By the time someone else showed up for class I had been watching the world through the windows or doors for a few minutes. It gave me time to think and prepare for the day. It also went on to give me an idea for one of the funniest things I did in college.

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Composition II
(Guberman)
Morgan Guberman
From the album Hamadryas Baboon
1998

the one about having an eckert complex

Little ever seemed known about George M. Eckert (M for Mandrill, I later discovered), whose brief biography said he was originally from somewhere out east and had attended some college whose name began with a V. Vanderbilt? Villanova? Vatterott? I don’t remember. An English professor by trade, he came to Grandville in the mid-1920s and reportedly left town in five years for bigger and better pastures; one assumes this position at GU was just one in a series of small steps leading to bigger and better things for Mr. Eckert. But that too is a bit unclear.

George Eckert must have been held in high esteem by the colleagues that remained in Grandville because his name seems to have been evoked for years. An occasional dip into the yearbooks of the time indicate he was well-liked and, from those volumes immediately following his departure, much-missed. Looking sort of like a poor man’s John Updike, George Eckert’s name was finally etched on the face of the university in the 1950s with the construction of the Eckert English Building. As I noted years later, I can’t think of a more interesting honor for someone whose only association with the school is five years of teaching English.

The three-story Eckert English Building was a proud looking structure of grayish-cream colored stone whose short end opened out onto the main quadrangle. Its front doors, and the two-story windows directly above the door, were framed by a multi-colored brick façade that ran the height of the building; from a distance it appeared as jagged cut stone, something perhaps to give it the resemblance of a little texture.

Next to the Eckert Building was the band hall. In the 1980s the administration decided to not knock down the English and band buildings but to combine the two structures into one. This wasn’t something entirely new on campus as a few dormitories had been structurally fused together in years past and went from being known as X Hall and Y Hall to the X-Y Complex. After the newly built section between the English and band buildings – which mostly contained an open and windowed walkway and staircase – was complete, the combined structure became known as the Eckert Complex.

Somewhere along the way another complex developed, this one speaking to the fact that the original two buildings did not stand on equal footing. This meant that when you entered the front doors of the original English building on the first floor and walked up the staircase in the new windowed walkway, you found yourself on the first floor of the original band building. It could be a confusing mess if, for example, a class schedule said to meet in room 105 and you entered at the wrong door – if you’re told something is on the first floor, and you’re fairly sure you’re on the first floor, then you don’t usually go up flights of stairs in pursuit of a misplaced classroom. All this perceived confusion could have been avoided through signage but there was none during that school year I frequented the building (maybe there was some years prior or later but I don’t know). So in GU-speak, having an eckert complex meant you were prone to getting lost in the English building.

Ms. Getnam’s English Composition I class met in what was the basement of the original English Building. For English Composition II, I walked upstairs to the first floor, up another set of stairs to the first floor, and then down a long hall to an auditorium that was badly undersized for the number of students in the class.

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Complex
(Edwards, Unruh)
Unruh
From the album Setting Fire to Sinking Ships
1999