Cheesy with a chance of Sleestaks

I may have reached a new low yesterday when I showed my upper-level literature students a clip from the 1970s Saturday-morning children's show Land of the Lost. One moment we're engaging in deep philosophical discussion of solipsism and whether unmediated experience exists, and the next we're watching Will and Holly encountering Chaka for the first time. How many Saturday mornings did I spend slavering over those cheesy special effects and terrible actors? And I wasn't even a child at the time--the show debuted when I was 13. It was kind of embarrassing to admit to my students how much I loved Land of the Lost even after I was old enough to know better, but at least there were no Sleestaks involved. I draw the line at Sleestaks in the classroom.

My special topics class Between Fact and Fiction is nearing the end--finally!--of the book that never ends: Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. They found the book amusing and engaging at first but they've reached the point when the narrator is just annoying, which prompts the question: why would he portray himself as annoying when he could have assumed a more heroic persona? Or is his willingness to portray his own annoyingness somehow heroic in itself? 

Yesterday we tried to unravel the process Eggers experiences (or says he experiences) while his friend John (not his real name) is admitted to the hospital after a suicide attempt. John is in the next room getting his stomach pumped while Dave agonizes over how best to turn his close friend's pain into narrative:

So there is first the experience, the friend and the threatened suicide, then there are the echoes from these things having been done before, then the awareness of echoes, the anger at the presence of echoes, then the acceptance, embracing of presence of echoes--as enrichment--and above all the recognition of the value of the friend threatening suicide and having stomach pumped, as both life experience and also as fodder for experimental short story or passage in novel, not to mention more reason to feel experientially superior to others one's age, especially those who have not seen what I have seen, all the things I have seen....So I could be aware of the dangers of the self-consciousness, but at the same time, I'll be plowing through the fog of all these echoes, plowing through mixed metaphors, noise, and will try to show the core, which is still there, as a core, and is valid, despite the fog. The core is the core is the core. There is always the core, that can't be articulated.  

It's kind of a lot to unpack, as you would expect from a book trying to articulate what can't be articulate, narrate what most resists narrative, eff the ineffable. In the end we agree that the book (novel/memoir/experimental whatever-it-is) is a self-consuming black hole, a monument to solipsism consuming itself and everything it encounters--but not before we've had a chance to visit the Land of the Lost so my students can understand just one in a vast array of allusions to works outside their awareness. One of my students informed me that the TV show was made into a film starring Will Ferrell in the early 2000s, and all I can do is be thankful at having escaped that particular echo.