The Whining Stranger on Politics and Current Events: On 9/11

Given my profession, it's no surprise that I believe art and literature have a messianic propensity for salvation--or at least for offering the understanding of experience, the shaping of chaos into form, that seems to offer salvation as we stumble through our lives. Today I try to remember my early reactions to that tragic morning, five years ago. The disbelief that clouded my early day as I watched mass murder on television. The uncertainty that seemed to hover in the air in the weeks that followed.

This, of course, was all before insidious politicians tried to shape circumstance for me. It preceded the appropriation of grief to encourage a blind faith in unjustified violence. Before garish magnetic ribbons on the backs of gas-guzzling vehicles criss-crossing the empire's highways.

Five years later, one of the best responses to 9/11 is still one of the earliest: Toni Morrison's poem, "The Dead of September 11," which I first read in Vanity Fair around November of that weighty autumn. Read it and think about Morrison's compassionate response, and how it makes so much more sense--it shapes the chaos so much more efficiently--than so much of the nonsense that's followed in the half-decade since.

Musings: In Memoriam: Professor J.D. (1938-2006)

Last night my sister called me from back home with very sad news: my favorite undergraduate professor passed away yesterday. And just like that I have lost one of the most important influences in my life. He inspired me to become a literature professor. ("What? A life of talking about books with people? I can get paid for that?") He was one of the surrogate father figures to whom I turned when I lost my father suddenly at age eighteen. Professor J.D. was a model for me in so many ways, ranging from the profound to the superficial. I admired his self-deprecating wit in the classroom. I marvelled at his productivity (he was an internationally admired scholar of American literature; he was a prolific poet; he was a music critic too). I was helplessly flattered when he assigned me an A+ in a creative writing workshop and told me that he hoped it went to my head. I loved our lunches together, when we'd meet over beer and sandwiches at one of the campus pubs, and talk throughout the afternoon about novels and music and sports... Even the way I dress is, in part, indebted to him, such a fan was I of his L.L. Bean sweaters and tweed jackets and pressed khakis.

Last year, when my first academic book was in the proofs stage, I remembered (thankfully) at the last minute to include J.D.'s name in the acknowledgments. He'd long since been a first-hand influence on my scholarly work, but I wanted to register in some public way the long shadow he cast over all that I do professionally. It will long be one of my deepest regrets that I didn't send him a copy of those acknowledgments when the book was published, so he could see while he was alive how I held him in such high regard.

I pray that on some level he knew.

And I'll say now, that if I can ever touch a student even half as much as J.D. touched me in this lifetime, then this career will have been a successful one.

I will miss you, John.