Reynolds Price: If you can NOT write, then don’t

“While living in Durham, N.C., back in the 1980s, I met a guy who was studying creative writing at Duke University. I have come to think of him as the doomed acolyte. One day he told me that his teacher, venerable Reynolds Price, rolled into the classroom in his wheelchair and gave the class a curious assignment. Price told the students they were not to touch the short stories they were working on for the next week. Don’t change a single word. Don’t add or delete a comma. Don’t even look at your stories.

“When the class reconvened the following week, Price asked how many had fulfilled the assignment.  About half of the students, including the doomed acolyte, raised a hand. Price then stunned the room by advising those who were able to follow his instructions that they should consider dropping out of the course. His reasoning was brutal and simple: Anyone who is able to stop writing for an entire week — even for a single day — does not have the right stuff to become a writer.  True writers, Price was saying, are in the grip of a compulsion. They have to write, and they are powerless to stop doing it. It is why they are alive and it is what keeps them alive.”

— From Can Writers Retire? Let Us Count the Ways” by Bill Morris at themillions.com (Feb. 7, 2013)

 

Duke and UNC: ‘alike as two peas in a pod’?

On this day in 1958: Capping an 18-year legal struggle, the Ackland Art Museum is dedicated at the University of North Carolina. As specified in his bequest, the museum’s benefactor, William Hayes Ackland, is interred within the building with a recumbent statue on his marble sarcophagus.

When he died in 1940, Ackland, a Washington lawyer, left $1,395,000 to Duke University for an art museum. The school’s trustees declined — reportedly out of the belief that the sarcophagi and recumbent statues of three Dukes in the Duke Memorial Chapel were ample. UNC and Rollins College, Ackland’s second and third choices in an earlier will, were left to wage a long court struggle over the bequest. UNC — whose lawyers were not above arguing that that Duke and UNC were “alike as two peas in a pod” — finally won out.

 

Death noted: William Styron’s roommate

“Am now rooming [at Duke] with Art Katz of Memphis and Claude Kirk of Montgomery, Ala. Both are transfers from Emory, and they’re good guys.”

— Letter from William Styron to his father, March 12, 1944

“[Florida Gov. Claude Kirk] rises to the challenge, occasionally with a fine and almost classic use of the language… ‘Styron taught me about language, about balance and words and how to put them together and get the most out of them.’ ”

— Harper’s magazine, 1968

“Styron settles down to his second Bloody Mary, made with lemons sent him every year by his college roommate….”

— Yale Literary magazine (Fall 1968)

Hard to imagine odder roomies than the saturnine man of letters and the “spectacularly colorful” demagogue…. also hard to imagine that Kirk absorbed such an appreciation of the language while bunking with Styron — couldn’t have been more than a semester or two. I think I once asked Styron about their relationship but can’t find any evidence thereof.

 

 

 

Jane Fonda, free range lecturer in political science

“If you understood what communism was, you would hope and pray on your knees that we would someday be communist. I am a socialist, I think that we should strive toward a socialist society — all the way to communism.”

— Jane Fonda, speaking at Duke University in 1979

 

How Duke University lost its religion

“Trinity, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was a small Methodist college with strict rules governing student conduct, required daily chapel attendance and college-sponsored annual revivals. As the school expanded [and was renamed for benefactor James B. Duke], students began  to engage in more and more extracurricular and social affairs, student self-government took over the burden of overseeing campus discipline and the religious orientation and enthusiasm of students declined markedly. The YMCA  lost its once central position to become an object of barely veiled contempt….

“In 1924 the editor of the Chronicle noted the general indifference to religion that marked an undergraduate’s life: ‘Someday he may settle down to the pew and the prayerbook, the prayer meeting and the Sunday sermon. But not now. Life is too sweet and too short….’

“Religion had become an encumbrance to students at Trinity-Duke.  Revivals were officially suspended in 1927 and required chapel exercises significantly reduced.”

– From “The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s” by Paula S. Fass (1977)

Reynolds Price: ‘Paradise Lost,’ connection found

“Reynolds Price was doodling on a paper placemat in a Harvard Square cafe on a spring morning in 1992 when he told me about the copy of ‘Paradise Lost’ he had bought for himself five years earlier after surviving extensive treatment for spinal cancer. Price… teaches a course on John Milton at Duke University, but stressed that the thin volume means considerably more to him than love of the great poet’s work.

” ‘Milton as in his early 40s, and I was in my early 50s when we both underwent a physically devastating illness, and in both our lives the experience led to some kind of mysterious renewal of good work,’ he explained. ‘Milton wrote his best books after he lost his sight. I have written 11 books since I had cancer, and it represents some of the very best work I have have ever done.

” ‘My copy of “Paradise Lost” once belonged to Deborah Milton Clarke, the daughter who took Milton’s dictation after he went blind. For me, it was like the apostolic succession. I was touching the hand that touched the hand that touched the Hand.’ ”

— From “A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes and the Eternal Passion for Books” by Nicholas A. Basbanes (1995)

Until his death Jan. 20 at age 77, Price continued to produce novels, essays, poems, plays and children’s books.

Duke today celebrates his life.

What’s the frequency, Ngram Viewer?

The Google Books Ngram Viewer may not be remembered as one of the 21st Century’s most useful (or statistically sophisticated) inventions, but the patterns revealed in its phrase-frequency charts can be addictively entertaining. For example:

— Tar Heel vs. Tarheel

— beef barbecue vs. pork barbecue

— North Carolina football vs. North Carolina basketball

— University of North Carolina vs. Duke University

— Research Triangle vs. Bermuda Triangle and isosceles triangle

Dylan Thomas gave a reading to remember

On this day in 1953: Fred Chappell, a junior at Canton High School, hitchhikes 250 miles to Duke University to hear his hero, Welsh poet Dylan Thomas.

Chappell will soon enroll at Duke and study under writing professor William Blackburn, whose students over the years also include Reynolds Price, William Styron, Josephine Humphreys and Anne Tyler.

Later, as a professor at UNC-Greensboro and the state’s poet laureate, Chappell recalls Thomas’ reading: “They poured him on stage over at Page Auditorium. And you thought, ‘Oh geez. This is not going to happen.’ And he gave a magnificent reading. An impossible reading. And then they poured him off stage.”