 Bartleby explained.... One of the things I’ve been doing recently—one of the many things I’ve been doing—as this semester winds down, and my time at Texas A&M winds down, is saying goodbye to the classrooms I’ve taught in over the years.
All these rooms have ghosts, right? Memories. These were rooms full of good students and rotten students, nice students and rude ones. Sometimes I did some good teaching. Many times education happened!
Some pictures….
Blocker 110
Blocker 121
Blocker 106
Blocker 105
The first classroom I ever taught a class in was Blocker 105, and I’ve written elsewhere about that first day—how I stood there, going over the syllabus for my composition class, and I looked up and out at the back of the classroom, and there was this—stain—on the wall. Stains. Big damn grease stains from where the heads of bored, sleepy students had been bumping and staining the wall—for years. A feeling of futility filled me right there and then! All those generations of bored students! But as I thought about it, I decided to be a teacher whose students weren’t all bored and falling asleep. And I sort of think I have been….
At any rate, the Blocker 105 was remodeled a couple of years ago, and the grease stains were painted over—and now, I guess, the grease stains are ghosts, too.
 Though I will leave my memories of 9-11 for another anniversary, I will say that I was from the first very concerned with what it meant—how, beyond the immediate shock and sadness, it would change our lives in the US. I figured we’d have a war in Afghanistan, and I worried that
political opportunists might use the attack to turn Americans against each other. But I would never have guessed that 10 years later the wars would still be going on, seemingly endlessly, and I grossly under-estimated the political divisions that would emerge from the attack, and I never imagined the growth of the security state.
We’ve now had the 10-year anniversary, and I wondered what my students thought of everything that’s happened. So yesterday I asked them—what are the most important events of the last 25 years? (Most of the students are about 20 years old—I chose 25 years of recent history so that the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 could be included; one student called it).
I was very surprised when no student included the 2000 Election! So I included it for them….
From left to right: 2000 Election; 9-11, with arrows to the Global War on Terror, the Iraq War, and the Afghan War; Technology; Katrina; Great Recession; Obama; Government Limitations; 1989/Berlin Wall; Climate Change; Pluto losing planet status.
Looking at this, I guess I have to see the 2000 Election as the seminal event of our time—if we can engage in counterfactual historical speculation, we can assume that Gore’s reaction to 9-11 would surely have been different than Bush’s, that the Iraq War at least would not have happened, that the huge tax cuts which contributed to the Great Recession and ongoing Government Limitations would not have occurred, and perhaps the flooding of New Orleans would have been better handled. But maybe not. Who knows?
At any rate, I urged the students to pay attention to all this, everything, to the world around them—to the tumult of the ongoing crises and also to the people going about their daily lives. I told them to use their awareness in their writing, of course, but to also pay close attention because their future grandchildren will want to know what life was like during this complex and confusing time….
 I really love these photographs. No up or down about it.
I came across them when searching through public
photo archives for work I could use for the cover of my book, Long Time Ago Good—and from first glance I was wholly captivated. They’re the work of Marc St. Gil, who produced them for the Environmental Protection Agency as part of the Documerica Project.
Documerica hired 100 or so photographers to document the American environment of the mid-1970s. Over 15,000 photos were taken for the project, and every one I look at I find consistently amazing and astonishing and miraculous. I can—and have—lost hours staring into the computer screen, connecting with this past world, or trying to….
Though the project as a whole covered the entire US, I’ve concentrated on St. Gil’s Texas pictures. They really fit well with the stories in my book.
Who are these kids? What happened to them? There is an intense mystery here in these images that totally captures my heart…they're part of the great forgotten.... I don’t just love the photos—I love these people, too. I hope they’re all alive and well and happy…. In addition to the book cover, I used a series of these St. Gil photos to make a trailer for Long Time Ago Good:
As I mentioned in an earlier post, this was the original shot for the book cover….
Which became this….
 This semester I’ve been assigned to teach in an ancient building called “Animal Industries.” The name sounds creepy, and the building is in fact very creepy, and several students have told me it’s haunted. (No doubt we’ll be doing some creative writing ghost hunting here before long). But, you know, despite (or maybe because of) its creepiness, this building is also really, really cool. We’re in the second week of classes now, and I’m very happy with our location.
Look! My classroom has windows—and a clock!
Interesting, creepy, and mysterious detailing in the hallways…. Across the way, the new Liberal Arts building is under construction....
And of course you know the new building will be terribly sterile and bland, part of the ongoing devolution of the American Soul….Give me Animal Industries any day!
 This is one of my favorite stories to perform—the narrative is pretty strong and the rising level of ridiculosity always seems to keep the audience hanging in there. “Guts :( ” [and my blogging platform can’t handle the strikethrough on GUTS or the little frowny-face that follows] is another story about a city in a time of change and dislocation. Wes Leonard is the humor columnist for the Austin newspaper, and he is assigned to go cover a chitlins cookoff. But he's tired of writing about colorful and folksy community events, and he doesn’t want to go—he’d rather spend the afternoon in a bar getting drunk.
*
...colorful and folksy was getting harder and harder to find: the city had changed, was changing. There were big-assed skyscrapers downtown now, and tech millionaires cruising around in Maserattis, and waves of immigrants from California and Mexico—and everywhere else on the planet, seemingly—had changed the texture of the town. Colorful and folksy, real colorful and folksy, was getting hard to find. Wes tried a few times to write about the new city he was seeing all around him—he wrote about the gentrification of the east side, about inappropriately huge mansions in old neighborhoods, about traffic and traffic and traffic, about air and water pollution, about the loss of friendly old bars and restaurants, and the snootiness of new bars and restaurants—he wrote columns about the new city, and nobody liked them. They were downers. They sounded like the carpings of a cranky old man. Nobody wanted to read that. People wanted colorful and folksy—at least from him, they wanted colorful and folksy. He went back to recycling old topics. In the end all it got him was a gig as the celebrity judge at the Greater Southwest Chitlins Cookoff and Jamboree.
*
An obvious choice for music here is “My City Was Gone,” by the Pretenders. Though perhaps it’s too obvious. And over the years the song has been co-opted and appropriated for evil purposes. Also it’s about Ohio. How about:
My first visit to Austin was in August, 1978. I was coming down from Minnesota on I-35, and after I crossed the Red River, I veered off and hit US 281 at Jacksboro and headed on south. When I got past Johnson City I struck east on US 90, and came into Austin in the late afternoon, and just past the Y in Oak Hill I fumbled around looking for a radio station and found KLBJ-FM—ha! I KLBJ! That was pretty funny, I thought, and I had much to learn about Austin and Lyndon Johnson—and then Genya Ravan and Lou Reed came surging out of the speakers, brassy and sexy and exciting. It's not the kind of song that that most people might think of when they're considering Austin, but for me it capured a moment. A new place! New possibilities!
What was I doing in Texas? Exploring. Seeing what was there. There was a lot to see—something new every day. A lot to explore. Four years later, The Clash came to Austin for a pair of concerts and filmed a video for “Rock the Casbah.” The RF4Cs at 2:34 figure in a story we’ll come to later, “The Speed of Sound.” At 3:08 you can see—me—off to the side of the screen. I was trying to stay out of the camera range, and of course now I wish I’d been up front jumping around. At 2:04, you can see the characters running west on Sixth Street toward the Alamo Hotel, a place that figures in my novel, That Demon Life, and whose bar, the Alamo Lounge, was no doubt a favorite hangout of Wes Leonard. But that’s all in the past. “GUTS :( ” is a story that takes place in the present, and it's Wes’s doom is to live unhappily in that present while writing about traces of the golden past.
|
RSS Feed