Asterisks and Daggers

For years, I have been lamenting the fact that today's students have never heard of "Casey at the Bat." It's not that the poem by Ernest L. Thayer is a shining example of balladry or that Thayer was an exemplary poet (he may not have published another thing in his lifetime). It's that an English teacher has so few resources when it comes to cultural relevance, and this perfect story of a cocky baseball player has great kid appeal.

The reason this matters to me is that I teach a college composition course, and the final assignment is to take a well-known work of literature or poetry and rewrite it in one of two ways: in the same style with a different point of view or in a different style but from the same point of view. So students can write Hamlet's Cat's Soliloquy or the verse as a rap. Another example is Thayer's ballad and the Garrison Keillor* version, which is such wicked fun!

But every year, fewer and fewer of my students know the poem, which means all the allusions to "no joy in Mudville" from sports writers will soon go unrecognized. (Perhaps these allusions are no longer made for the same reasons.)

I reflect now upon cultural literacy because I just finished reading the selections I assigned from my course textbook, Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum. The latest edition is full of footnotes to the original authors' essays, and asterisks and daggers pepper this week's reading assignment about malls. Donny and Marie Osmond, Sally Jessy Raphael, Red Square, and St. Peter's Basilica are explained in detail, as are M.C. Escher, The Emerald City, and Never-Never Land! ("Arnold Schwarzenegger," the book's editors explain, "needs no introduction.") Could people really not know Red Square? Never-Never Land?

I guess I prefer to remain under the delusion that the world and I are aging together, that the things I thought were important in life still are, and that I am not a coelacanth** just because my first rock concert was David Cassidy*** at the Merriweather Post Pavillion.

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* Garrison Keillor is author of Lake Wobegon Days, among other books, and host of NPR's "Prairie Home Companion."

** A coelacanth is a 400-million-year-old fish.

*** David Cassidy? If you have to ask, you don't deserve to know.