My last two surviving college notebooks, from the period just before I began personal journaling, nevertheless offered some clues to my state of mind at the beginning of the ‘70s. From the cover, I see I lived in I lived in G253, an honors dorm in the Graduate Residence Center. Yes, some undergrads were allowed.
Terence Martin turns out to have been on his way to a distinguished career he ended as a professor emeritus. “His first book, The Instructured Vision: Scottish Common Sense Philosophy and the Origins of American Fiction, became a classic study of how Americans wrote fiction in a society deeply suspicious of the imagination.”
In addition to Seth and Diane Rubinstein/Rubenstein, my classmates included Monroe Anderson, Julie Harvey, and Jeff Hersh.
The reading list:
- Ken Kesey One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
- Tom Wolfe Electric Acid Kool-Aid Test (which was largely about Kesey)
- Kurt Vonnegut God Bless You Mr. Rosewater and Cat’s Cradle.
- Robert Coover: The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop.
- Ralph Ellison Invisible Man
- Joseph Heller Catch-22
- John Hawkes Second Skin
- John Barth Floating Opera
- Donald Barthelme Snow White
- Thomas Pynchon V
- Ishmael Reed The Yellow-Black Radio Broke Down and the Freelance Pallbearers
- Peter S. Beagle Last Unicorn
In retrospect, I’m seeing how much this course shaped my own attempts at fiction. Do note that there were no women and no Kerouac on the list.
For a closer look at the course and the authors, see While Their Novels Were Still New in Thistle Finch editions.
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Mention of AFSC in Dayton – draft counseling?
Natt Thompson may have known Joe Elder.
Roy and Alice Leak or Leaky, faculty from North Carolina.
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End matter had a page of journalism recruiters on campus, February 17 through March 11, from Chicago Tribune, Milwaukee Journal, Wall Street Journal, Miami Herald, Lindsay-Schaub papers (Decatur, Illinois), Louisville Times. Unfortunately, a wave of layoffs shortly afterward meant the job interviews were for nil.
There’s also a listing of Chekov pages for my Russian lit course (though taught by the Russian language department, the readings were in English).
Another page sketches plans for a “cell in the woods,” something with a glass roof and a cot or hammock. Buckminster Fuller had his geodesic dome; I was playing with a square-turned-diamond (from the gable end), the bottom corner sunk into the ground, diagonal width 12 feet at ground level – the overhang would leave two sides sheltered. Maybe I’d stack firewood there. The cot would be at one end, rather than the workbench I expect.
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From Spiralbound Daffodil, with commentary from now.
Jnana's Red Barn 