"Yo, professor, yo!"

DOORBELL: DING DONG!

SEK: Who could that be? I have no friends.

(walks and answers door)

HISPANIC GUY FROM POOL: Yo, professor, yo!

SEK: Howdy?

HISPANIC GUY FROM POOL: So I'm doing this battle tonight, and I was thinking, with you being a professor and all, you know some poetry and shit.

SEK: I've read poems, but I'm not really the—

HISPANIC GUY FROM POOL: That's what I'm talking about, yo.  So check this, I know the crowd, and and half through I'm gonna switch it up on them.

SEK: Wait, crowd?  Switch it up on?  What?

HISPANIC GUY FROM POOL: You know, they think they get this, then I deliver:

(proceeds to rap in Spanish for what feels like hours)

SEK: (doing his teacherly best) You'll have a tactical advantage?

HISPANIC GUY FROM POOL: 'Xactly.  So if you could help me out with my rhymes, yo?

SEK: I'll do what I can.

HISPANIC GUY FROM POOL: So here's what I got. 

(proceeds to list a seemingly endless string of Spanish end- and slant-rhymes)

SEK: You do know I don't know Spanish, right?

HISPANIC GUY FROM POOL: Thought you said you taught literature and shit.

SEK: I did ... and do.

HISPANIC GUY FROM POOL: Told me I should read Don Quijote.

SEK: I did.

HISPANIC GUY FROM POOL: How you read it if you don't speak Spanish, yo?

SEK: In translation?

HISPANIC GUY FROM POOL: They do that for books?

Comments

[Ahistoricality]

SEK: (doing his teacherly best) You'll have a tactical advantage?

Nice save!

[SEK]

I've had a lot of practice.

[The Modesto Kid]

For some superior Spanish-language rap you could have him study Ditirambo's work.

[SEK]

You mighta coulda, but not me. I'll tell him about the link when I see him at the pool tomorrow. (Or Sunday, as I have a feeling he won't be at the pool tomorrow if he's battling tonight.)

[Rich Puchalsky]

Ah, the L.A. poetry scene! Which I sort of remember that you're near, even though you're not in L.A. I spent my formative poetry years in the more or less white version of this, the 5 minute open mic.

Cultural differences aside, I'm guessing that the ultimate tactical advantage you could provide for this guy would be to go to his battle and listen and *not be one of the people battling*. It's more or less a rule, if these are anything like the spoken word poetry I'm familiar with, that the only people who go are people who do poetry themselves. (Or, rarely, family members, which is lame but you probably wouldn't look like one.) Although, I don't know, people might assume that you're his lover or something. You'd puzzle them, anyways.

Admittedly you'd have to listen to a whole lot of rap in Spanish. Probably not a good idea.

But yeah, people tend to assume that English professors know how to compose literature of any sort. As you know, Bob, I recently alluded to this. It's not a bad folk belief, to be thought more competent than you are in some minor way. Perhaps a bit annoying at times, but every field has something similar: when I was in Astrophysics there would always be one person at a party who would want to talk to me about the visible night sky, which I knew nothing about since I was a radio observer.

[Le-trombone]

They do that for books?

Not often enough, unfortunately. I'm currently reading Metropole (<http://www.librarything.com/work/5669008>). It took 38 years to get this translated? Argh.

[alkau]

Nice to know you are getting to know those around you. Perhaps Meg can translate for you when she returns.