Not down at the archives today.
Instead, writing at home in the basement office.
A nice space for writing:
- Old futon lugged from Tucson. Right now my dog, Hyatt, is sleeping right in the middle of the futon.
- Big oak library table for a desk. From an auction in Oxford, OH.
- Arizona Wildcats popcorn tin. Nicole brought this home during, I believe, the 2001 NCAAs.
- Laptop. Back and forth between futon and desk.
- Framed print of Youngstown Vindicator from August 14, 1945. “Japanese Surrender; World War II Ends.” My grandpa had this in his ‘basement office’ (the corner by the sump pump where he had his own artifacts: stuff found walking around northside of Youngstown, tools, bottles for homemade wine) for nearly 45 years.
- Ohio Writing Project mug.
- Various legal pads with notes from meetings, notes from reading, notes from sitting around at Caribou Coffee (the preferred spot when *both* the archives and home office have grown stale.
- Miscelaneous books, including autographed Billy Collins, Jim Daniels, Elmore Leonard, and Naomi Shihab Nye; some rhet/comp stuff I never took down to school; a stack of Joyce Carol Oates novels from the library.
- Record player and vinyl collection.
The latter may be the most important component of the writing room. I like to listen to records while writing. Getting up every twenty-five minutes or so to flip sides or change discs is just about perfect. I need to stand frequently, look away from the screen, stretch, move around. The music gives as much rhythm to my breaks as to the writing itself. This a.m., while writing: Mahalia Jackson-You’ll Never Walk Alone, Mahalia Jackson-Songs of Faith and Devotion, Split Enz-Mental Notes (their weird, Eno-esque, early stuff before Neil Finn joined the band, produced by Phil Manzanera of Roxy Music, GREAT art rock), The Fabulous Wailers-At the Castle.
As a break from the archival research, on days when I don’t feel like driving down to the Reuther, I’ve been working on a piece about Joyce Carol Oates’ time in Detroit, re-reading some of her early novels and thinking about Oates-as-pedagogue. The piece by Kynard in TETYC has got me thinking about the ways teachers tell stories about students. Kynard is polemical. In her great Detroit novel them, Oates is distant and cold and po-mo (“this is a work of history in fictional form…”), as she narrates the supposedly true tales of Maureen Wendall, her U of D student. She uses her title to position “herself,” as writer, apart from the working poor, and “herself,” as teacher, apart from her students. This piece may grow into an essay for TETYC. Pumped out about three pages very, very quickly, so we’ll see…
Must stop writing about Oates now and head down to campus. Page proofs arrived from Pittsburgh Press and I must send chapters to individual authors for their review, so this late afternoon’s going to be copying, filling out priority mail envelopes, etc. Book should be out in late fall or early winter. Happy happy.
5 comments:
When I was on faculty at UDM, one person was still there from Oats' brief tenure - Ed Wolf. He told me that we were in the same office she had (the first semester I was there, folks shared offices - Ed was my office mate). He didn't share too many details - or I don't remember too many details- other than she left quickly for Windsor. You might try to contact Ed - who was there when you were an undergrad.
I took a couple brit lit surveys with Ed. I spelled his last name wrong (I think it's Woolf, if memory serves) on the heading of a paper once and he freaked out on me. Part of the Oates book is epistolary and the Maurren character makes reference to a "Mr. Kovac"--wasn't sure if that was an homage to Dick Kowalczyk (was he still there during your time at UDM?).
No, I believe he had passed before I got there. The Sister in the dept had just passed as well.
Woolf also had a story about a hotel that used to be across the street - maybe where the coney island is now - and that was owned by the university. It was barely used, but profs would go there to have sex. Jesuit purity was never really pure.
My favorite line from Ed was when I got there:
Him: "Have you met the priests yet?"
Me: "Yes."
Him: "They're all bastards!"
Ed was part of a group of gritty old boys who were still around when I was an undergrad, a group headed up by my advisor Jim MacDonald, who once told our class he pissed himself in a London bar when he met TS Eliot. He also threatened to bring in sausage sandwiches for everybody while we were studying The Jungle.
Yeah, the sister. That would be Sr. Koontz, who was the only department member who ever said much about rhetoric (I think she had a 'rhetoric and linguistics' PhD from Catholic University), although she certainly leaned toward a pretty hardcore expressivist philosophy in the classroom.
upton sinclair, a genius. i love the jungle - real american grit with the social consciousness built right into the engine block.
as for oates, all those great detroit short stories from "where are you going, where have you been" offer a wealth great material for riffing on detroit and the ongoing, unsettled relationship with the suburbs.
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