A University of Pennsylvania English course taught by a poet who performed for President Obama at the White House ended up exactly as the professor envisioned it: college kids watching porn.
"Wasting Time on the Internet," a once-a-week creative writing course taught by Kenneth Goldsmith that required students to stare at a computer screen for three hours completed its first class this spring.
Goldsmith wrote last fall that students could use the three hours to watch porn, and then "use it as the basis for compelling erotica."
"I’ve never taught this class before, but I have a hunch that it’s going to be a success," he said.
At least one student agreed. Speaking to the College Fix, a female student who took the course described it as "one of the best classes I’ve ever taken."
During the class students sat in a circle and pushed play on the same porno on multiple computers at the same time.
"It created a very uncomfortable environment for us—some of the class even got up part of the way through and left because they were uncomfortable," the girl said.
It was "hard to really pinpoint… one thing that I learned," about the course overall, she added.
The course cost approximately $3,202.
The goal of "Wasting Time on the Internet" was for students to surf the web and then write about it.
"What if these activities — clicking, SMSing, status-updating, and random surfing — were used as raw material for creating compelling and emotional works of literature?" the course description states. "Could we reconstruct our autobiography using only Facebook? Could we write a great novella by plundering our Twitter feed? Could we reframe the Internet as the greatest poem ever written?"
Goldsmith said "nothing was off limits" in an piece he wrote for the New Yorker’s "Page-Turner" blog before the class began.
Aside from porn, Goldsmith hoped that students would spend time on conservative media sites in order to be inspired for "hate-filled" material for a spy book.
"Students watching three hours of porn can use it as the basis for compelling erotica; they can troll nefarious right-wing sites, scraping hate-filled language for spy thrillers; they can render celebrity Twitter feeds into epic Dadaist poetry; they can recast Facebook feeds as novellas; or they can simply hand in their browser history at the end of a session and present it as a memoir," he said.
However, the writing portion for the course, which is listed as a requirement for the English Creative Writing Track at UPenn, was dropped. Goldsmith told Slate he "eliminated the writing requirement and instead solicited activities for the class to do together."
"What we create together is so much more exciting than any physical artifact we might take from it or produce afterward," he said. "Sometimes I don’t even remember what we’ve done that day—that’s how strange, how ephemeral it is."
Goldsmith previously taught a course about erotic acts and computer code. The course was described as "often violent and disturbing" and "not for the faint-hearted." In another course, "Uncreative Writing," he teaches his students to plagiarize.
As a poet, Goldsmith adapts the spoken words and writings of others as his own.
He passed the autopsy report of Michael Brown off as poetry, during a performance in March. His last line was, "The remaining male genitalia system is unremarkable."
When he performed at the White House in 2011, Goldsmith read excerpts from Walt Whitman’s "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" and "To Brooklyn Bridge" by Hart Crane.
He then read his own poetry, which was a transcript of traffic reports from a New York City AM radio station.
Goldsmith says he "just kept dropping armatures" with his poetry, ending up with literal transcriptions of other people’s writing and language. He spent a year and a half working on his most famous book, Day, by reprinting every word that appeared in a single edition of the New York Times.
"It’s sort of that stupid and that simple," he said.