A Bad Day For People Who Love To Read: Robert B. Parker and Erich Segal

Since reading mystery books got me through graduate school with my mind intact (OK, mystery books and Tina Turner's Private Dancer album), imagine my shock this morning when I opened the Paper of Record and learned that Robert B. Parker died at his desk yesterday. Parker, who wrote five pages a day, every day, was the creator and alter-ego of my beloved Spenser, Boston's literary private dick and modern Knight of the Round Table. I will never forget reading my first Spenser, at the urging of my first real, grown-up, live-in girlfriend, while I was studying for my comprehensives. I then read the next fifteen, and haven't missed buying them in hardback since. Next time you are in a rough spot with an administrator, try this kind of retort on for size (quoted in the obituary):

“Look, Dr. Forbes,” Spenser says to the long-winded college president who is hiring him. “I went to college once. I don’t wear my hat indoors. And if a clue comes along and bites me on the ankle, I grab it. I am not, however, an Oxford don. I am a private detective. Is there something you’d like me to detect, or are you just polishing up your elocution for next year’s commencement?”

Don't forget your deadpan expression. Because of Spenser I took to drinking Rolling Rocks "in the long neck returnable bottles," began to take extra pride in my cooking skills, and imagined that a small gun that fit just under the armpit wouldn't be such a terrible idea on the first day of class. One I went to a book signing in New York and found, to my shock, that at 5'8", I was about half a foot taller than the otherwise Spenser-ian Robert Parker, which shook me up a little bit, but it didn't disrupt my belief that as long as Spenser stalked the earth all would be well.

If this were not enough loss for one day, the POR also reported the death of Love Story author Erich Segal, the classics professor who wrote that one, blockbuster, touch-a-nerve book that allowed him to live the rest of his life in peace and prosperity. Yeah, this was the guy who coined the phrase “Love means not ever having to say you’re sorry," most famously ripped off as "Tenure means not ever having to say you're sorry." This book came out when I was in the seventh grade and became an instant hit in the world and in the seventh grade, in part because a small crowd of our classmates began to date that year and Love Story (as well as a a certain passage from the wedding scene at the beginning of Mario Puzo's The Godfather) allowed most of us to read about what a few of us were doing. My mother prohibited me from reading Love Story on principle because she thought it was such romantic junk, which forced me to borrow a copy from someone else and read it under my desk during math class. Naturally, of course, I identified with Oliver, and for the rest of the semester, as other people learned algebra, I drifted away, imagining myself walking the streets of Cambridge, blind with tears, as my beautiful wife, who spoke all my feelings so I did not have to, died prettily of leukemia in a hospital bed.

The good thing about books? You can always read them again. But while I doubt that I could make it through Love Story or any of its sequels at this age, Spenser stayed with me for decades and (after the two books that are still in the pipeline) now he'll be gone. Oh sure, the novels had become predictable. But that is, in part, why I loved them. So many things in life changed, but Spenser stayed the same.

This Is What You Do: A Shooting On Campus

Over two years ago, on April 17, 2009, after the Virginia Tech shootings, I wrote this post. Towards the end I wrote:

So far, two faculty members have been identified as among the dead, one of whom may have tried to block the classroom door to give his students time to escape through a second story window. Another faculty member, interviewed yesterday on NPR's Fresh Air, described barricading himself in his office as he heard the gunfire below, listening to students and faculty being shot and not knowing where his two children (enrolled at Tech) were at that precise moment. And I know that I am thinking about this because the human mind grasps precisely what it can handle and no more but: am I the only college teacher wondering whether I would have the courage to try to save student lives in such a pointlessly horrible situation, knowing that mine might be taken in the process? Or the flip side: have you imagined the agony of hearing or watching students being murdered while knowing that you were powerless to do anything to help them?

Well, one of the things I know now is that mostly it isn't that dramatic. What happened at around 1:30 today is that my administrative assistant came to my office and said calmly, "There has been a shooting on campus. A woman has been hit and the shooter got away." The shooter is, we think, her ex-boyfriend (it turned out the suspect is an older man from her hometown), and it happened in the middle of the campus bookstore. No one around me panicked, and I thought calmly, "OK, I am responsible for these people. What do I need to do?" We locked the doors and windows and went upstairs; two of us called the people who were not at the office and told them not to come in. Then we waited up on the second floor.

A student came by for office hours. We invited him in, I talked to him for a bit, and sent him home. He had no idea anything was happening.

We read our email alerts, deleted messages from our cell phones, and waited some more.

We watched as Public Safety cleared Foss Hill, where the students were holding their annual Spring Fling. The celebration -- a festival of music and partying (in 1972, the Grateful Dead came!) which marks the end of classes and the beginning of reading period -- had just begun when the shooting occurred. Coincidence?

Then we waited.

There was a police car outside our building, blocking off one of the streets, with lights swirling: the officer stood next to it with his hand on his gun.

And we waited.

After an hour, we all agreed to go home, and to leave in a group. Those of us old enough to have taken feminist self-defense classes in the 1970s rehearsed the classic moves to defeat a patriarchal aggressor: Jam the heel of your hand upward into the nose! Preferably hard enough to drive the cartilidge into the brain! Sharply slam your knee into his patriarchal nuts!

This all assumes that you even get to Feminist Move #1 and he doesn't just shoot you dead on the spot.

But as I say, it really isn't that dramatic. We saw each other safely to our cars, which were in a parking lot behind the DKE house, where the brothers had assembled some appropriate beverages, music, and were playing with the many wiffle ball sets they pass down from generation to generation. My friend Dr. Victorian noted brightly that had we known there were so many strapping young men available to protect us, we might have left earlier.

I came home and found out that the student has died; as I understand it, she was shot five times. There may be a second student who was hit.

Then I cried.

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You can read everything I know about it here and here and here. When I first wrote this post, I had heard rumors about who had been murdered, but was not sure. Since then it has been confirmed: the murdered student's name is Johanna Justin-Jinich, and I have inserted her picture above. As of 8:30 P.M., while the police claim to know who her killer is, they have not released his name.

All About Eve: Eve Sedgwick, May 2, 1950 – April 12, 2009

As I am a historian and not a literary scholar, I don't have much of a claim to memorialize Eve Sedgwick, who died Sunday after a long and brave struggle with cancer. I didn't know her -- I knew of her, I read her, and our paths intersected here and there. And yet there are often certain figures present at the founding of a field who provide glimmers of insight and inspiration, lighting candles in corners of the intellectual world previously dark. They have a disproportionate effect on all scholarship, reaching far beyond their own discipline or specialty to alter the way we think.

Eve was one of these people, and historians have felt her influence in profound ways. While many scholars would look at Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire and Epistemology of the Closet as Eve's most crucial contributions to queer studies, for me it was Tendencies, a group of essays that were like little diamonds strewn on the grass, gesturing at where the rest of us might go. All you had to do was pick them up and run with them. And we have.

It's hard to remember now, when the insights of queer studies are so entrenched in so many fields that the original theoretical frame has become commonplace, how much people like Eve struggled to be heard. But young people: pull up a chair and listen to your old Uncle Radical. There was a time not so long ago that queer theory, driven mainly by literary scholars, was so new and edgy and that you could actually read everything that was published in the field. What a club to be in that was! Why, Judith Butler wasn't a cult figure yet; one shared taxicabs with her. And Eve, criticized as she often was for claiming insight into the ontological condition of gay men at a moment when identity politics was about to implode (in no small part due to her efforts, though ironically people often claimed the opposite), was the mother of us all. A reader of this blog and a former student of Eve's reminded me last night on Facebook that in Tendencies Eve takes up Roger Kimball's attack on the "tenured radicals." And of course my ironic use of that phrase on this blog is a trace of Eve's influence that is now so commonplace, here on this blog and everywhere it appears, as to have utterly lost its origins in her deft approach to Kimball's right-wing ravings.

I haven't seen Eve in years and we were never friends. But I remember, as a much younger scholar, being fascinated by the steady, serene appeal of a woman whose self-confidence was never expressed as self-importance. Once, probably at American Studies Association, I went to a panel on teaching queer studies. This was at a time when queer courses were being taught at fewer than two dozen schools, and almost nobody held an appointment dedicated to the field. The problem of identity came up: were queer courses for queer students or all students? How did one navigate the chasm between straight and gay students in teaching this material --a chasm of hostility, shame and rage? Eve smiled happily and said, "Oh I tell my students at the beginning of the semester that I am going to assume that they are all queer."

At the time, a novice teacher, I remember thinking, "Oh yeah, that will help." But as I grew in experience, I realized, of course, that is exactly how the queer class (not to mention all other classes) ought to be taught because -- well, it's true. To teach on any other basis would be to undermine what one is actually teaching. Furthermore, this fundamental truth can help us perceive, and struggle with, the mechanisms designed to produce "normal students" that we navigate and promote every day -- testing, grading, honors programs, majors, core curricula, requirements, and even regulations designed to "normalize" students with disabilities.

Ironically, of course, what this also points to is that queer studies has always contained within it the seeds of its own destruction. Viewed as too specialized, too marginal, and too abstruse for several decades, on a certain level the brilliant insights of Eve and her generation are in many ways now too obviously true not to melt into larger, more universal scholarly tendencies. A field articulated by autodidacts is now organized into lists of work mandated for doctoral exams, and I hear people in the know asking whether queer studies really exists as a discrete field under all the circumstances I have described.

But for now, let's pretend it does. And if it doesn't, perhaps --as Eve suggested on that panel so long ago -- we might then turn to the obvious: that it might be best to assume that all scholarly endeavors are queer.

Cross posted at Cliopatria. Go to Roxie's World for a collection of tributes.

Elegy For A Really Good Administrator

Over the weekend, our associate provost died suddenly and very young. Early in both our careers we had our struggles with each other. As I matured, I acquired the attitude that maybe being pleasant rather than obnoxious would help me get on better with everyone who ran the university, which, shockingly, did turn out to be a better way to get things done. As the Mother of the Radical (MOTheR) always said, "Good manners can't hurt, and smile when you say that." (Or was that John Wayne who gave me that advice?) Anyway, when I became a chair, and then chair of a major faculty committee, I realized that being pleasant was the only route to go, and in the process came to understand that most of the people who run Zenith are hard-working individuals who try to do their best for the faculty and the students.

Which is how I ended up forming a relationship with Paula Lawson. Oh sure, we didn't socialize; we didn't hang out. We did business. I don't think we ever even had lunch. But she became very good at her job as I was trying to become better at mine, and I came to like her very much. I am proud to say that we learned to help each other and solve problems together. The end result was a relationship that I consider one of the great successes of my career because it wasn't so obvious that it would work. All it took on my part was paying attention to who she was, assuming we were on the same team and looking at the business we did as a two-way street.

Today, when I found out that Paula had died, I tried to absorb the e-mail message at home, wrote a couple people who had left the university and would want to know, and then went to the office with a list of things that had to be done today. Upon arrival, the first thing I did was pick up my voice mail, and there was a message from Paula, in her normal, clipped voice. "Hey Claire -- Paula. It's about 2:30. Give me a call. I need to ask you about something." It must have been from Friday.

Which was when I put down my stuff, went into the bathroom, locked the door, and just sat down and cried. Because that was our relationship in a nutshell: "Can you do this for me?" "Sure -- and while you are at it, can you check on X because I've got to talk to professor Y this afternoon, and I need an answer." "Uh-huh. And by the way, did you ever hear from Z about the new budget line?" "Nope." "O.K., I'll give her a push." "Thanks, I really appreciate it." "No problem."

Once I stopped crying, I realized that there wasn't any point in doing what I was supposed to do that day, because every item was either supposed to go straight to Paula, or to her office via someone else. She had gone from being "an" administrator to being "the" administrator whose office tracked pretty much everything. It was, as I explained to several colleagues today, as if you were trying to run the nation's air traffic with the Chicago control towers out of order.

Many academics have veiled, or not-so-veiled, contempt for administrative labor. In an earlier life, I will admit that I was guilty of this thing, something I now regret if it ever got back to the people I was being churlish about. This snobbishness towards "the administration" is, by the way, one of the few attitudes that crosses both political lines and rank in the academy. It is based on the idea that faculty labor is a cherished mystery that no one on an administrative line can possibly understand in its intricacies and privileges. I suspect we faculty act this way because we believe, either consciously or subconsciously, that administrators are "failed" academics who do not do the exacting and specialized work "we" do (although one might argue that they are the people who get it that the criteria for academic success are often the career equivalent of the Emperor's Invisible Suit.) There is, in other words, a little of the "there but for the grace of God go I" attitude, which is usually expressed in sarcasm or anger at some imagined or unimagined infringement of faculty authority. We rarely wrap our heads around the notion that some people choose to be caretakers of budgets, grades, contracts, review committees, and whatnot.

So, since this is a time in my life where I have been a quasi-administrator for close to five years, let me tell you: it's people like Paula who get things done. They get us hired and paid, they get our research accounts set up, they straighten out something confusing with the registrar's office, they squeeze the budget for an extra visitor when you need one. They are the blood and the bones of the university, and they go on doing their jobs as best they can despite the lack of recognition, or often appreciation, they get.

So here's a job for tomorrow: think of someone in your administration who has done something nice for you, and call them to say thank you. I think Paula knew how much I appreciated her, but I still wish I had gotten that phone message, and ended it the way I often did: "Hey thanks for taking the time. Yeah. I really appreciate it."