Where Books Go To Die

The last book I read was culturally significant but certainly not a page-turner. It was not light summer reading and now that we’re in the throes of summer in North Florida, I need something fun and familiar to read at night. It is about this time every year that I grow extremely homesick for Illinois and I was feeling a bit nostalgic so I picked a book that I’ve already read several times and one that reminds me of home. “Straight Man” by Richard Russo. The reason I get homesick at this time of year is mostly due to the extreme humidity coupled with the heat. As we say in the Midwest, “It’s not so much the heat as the humidity.” I feel like a fish out of water or more accurately, a human in water. It’s something I’ll never get used to and for about five months out of the year I feel that it’s best to stay indoors as I long for the cool breezes that are generated after a Midwestern rainstorm. After it rains in Tallahassee you can see the steam rise up from the pavement and things go from bad to worse.  I still see people mowing their lawns at noon or jogging at 3:00 in the afternoon when the heat index is 105 and I just don’t understand this species of humans called Southerners. Short of moving back home, I’ll just curl up in the air conditioning with a good book and long for days gone by.  

Illinois cornfield near my hometown

During my first semester at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, I showed up for Freshman Composition just like every other student. I was greeted by a particularly angry graduate student who seemed to hate our very existence every day of the week, or at least the three days a week that we were in his classroom. There was a lot of yelling and a fair amount of belittling. I just accepted this as the way things were but someone else (or several someone elses) must’ve complained because one day about seven weeks into the semester we showed up to class and he wasn’t there anymore. In his place stood Beckie Hendrick with her southern accent and her Sigourney Weaver hair and she was telling us that she was now our instructor and that we were starting the semester over. Our grades were being thrown out and we were getting a do-over with her. Needless to say, I liked her so much that I signed up for her American Literature class the next semester. She showed up as Beckie Flannagan as she’d gotten married since I had seen her last but otherwise, she was the same.

On the first day of American Literature, Beckie asked us to turn in a piece of paper with our name and what kinds of things we liked to read, and then she said the most amazing thing. She said it could be a comic book or the newspaper or whatever we really enjoyed reading. She wasn’t looking for the classics, just honesty. Since I had been sneaking into my dad’s room when he wasn’t home and reading his books chapter by chapter since I was nine years old, I wrote down Stephen King.

One day Beckie Flannagan brought in a novel called “The Risk Pool” by Richard Russo and she told us that her professor had written it and that we were going to be reading and discussing this book. Outside of my own dad’s high school rhetoric classes where we dissected mostly ancient writings such as “Beowulf,” and maybe “The Great Gatsby” in another high school class, I had never discussed a book before. I had only read them. Here we were talking about characters and plot and writing and all things pertaining to a book that was not only set in my lifetime but was also written right there at my university by my instructor’s professor. Everything felt so accessible. And then there was Beckie Flannagan herself. Isn’t that just the greatest literary name you’ve ever heard? She was smart and kind and funny and maybe I’m reading too much into this but I think she may have been the first feminist that I knew. She never told me that she was a feminist but just the fact that she had taken over the classroom from this horrible man my freshman year and turned everything around pretty much sealed the deal for me. I loved her.

I never saw her again after that semester but when I went home that summer with “The Risk Pool” in hand, my dad saw it and showed me that he had Russo’s first and third novels and so we exchanged them and each read the books we hadn’t previously read. He told me the third book was being made into a movie with Paul Newman and I really felt this was a rare moment of connection between my dad and I, standing in his basement of books, discussing books. I remember going to see the movie with him and we both left mumbling the age-old, “wasn’t as good as the book.” Dad died in 1997 before “Straight Man” came out in paperback, which means he never got a chance to read it unless he borrowed the hardcover from the library as he rarely spent the money on hardcover editions. It definitely wasn’t in his collection when he died. I know he would’ve loved it. Even though he was a high school teacher in rural Illinois, I know he would’ve related to the main character’s dry humor and his struggle with academic life at a small college in Pennsylvania.

Richard Russo had moved on from SIU-C when I was still in attendance there and long before “Straight Man” was written but this passage from the book always stops me in my tracks when I come upon it.

        “On my way back across campus, I see Bodie Pie slip into Social Sciences via the back door and remember she wanted to talk to me, so I follow, risking the possibility that I’ll get lost in the building’s legendary labyrinths. Social Sciences, the newest building on campus, was built in the midseventies, when there was money for both buildings and faculty. According to myth, the structure was designed to prevent student takeovers, and this may be true. A series of pods, it’s all zigzagging corridors and abrupt mezzanines that make it impossible to walk from one end of the building to another. At one point, if you’re on the first floor, either you have to go up two floors, over, and down again or you have to go outside the building and then in again in order to arrive at an office you can see from where you’re standing. The campus joke is that Lou Steinmetz has an office in the building but no one knows where.”

It is obvious to me that he is writing about Faner Hall at SIU-C. This is where the English department was housed and probably where Russo’s office was located. This is the building where the previous classes that I wrote about took place. As a student, if you received your schedule and you had a class in Faner Hall, you always went the day before classes began and tried to find your classroom. It usually took about 30 minutes to figure out which door you should enter and which stairway you needed to take even if you’d had multiple classes there before. We usually went in groups so no one got lost, as if we were on a dangerous hiking expedition. We were also told that it was built after the Vietnam War protests in the 1970’s that burned down the old campus. There was a monument next to the building in homage to Old Main. It was considered a “riot proof” building. Russo describes it perfectly. We HATED it. I wonder if Russo had become nostalgic about that building as he writes about it and about the hilarity of the tensions and hierarchy of academic life.

During my junior year at my summer job at the university library, I would see the graduate student from my class who lost his teaching job. We were both working on the 7th floor in the archives, or as the long term employees called it, “where the books go to die.” He seemed the same to me although to be fair, no one who worked on the 7th floor seemed happy. The students weren’t allowed to talk to each other and we had to ask to use the restroom. I thought it was the perfect place for him to live out his days.

After having been to graduate school myself and briefly teaching as an adjunct instructor, I start to think maybe there was more to that angry graduate student than I was aware of. Having spent a small amount of time in Academia, I am now aware that removing a graduate student from a teaching assignment is no small feat. We never asked any questions about where he went or what had prompted his removal. We just didn’t care. We were happy about who The Universe and the English department had plopped down in his place and we didn’t rock the boat with questions for fear that things could change again.

God help anyone who ever had to grade anything that I wrote. I once took an honors class where all we did was read Tennessee Williams plays and then watch them in movie form and then we had to write a couple of papers. The only reason I was in the honors program is because I was an art major and got really good grades in all my art classes. The other students in class were science majors who were taking a break by being in this honors class. They thought I was inferior and they certainly let me know. I remember the professor used to give my papers back with comments such as, “Your writing is awful” written in red ink. I know that I overuse commas and sometimes change tenses mid-sentence. I am aware that art is my strength. Out of all of the classes outside of the art department that I ever took as an undergraduate student, Beckie Hendrick Flannagan is the only instructor’s name that I still remember these 27 years later and I only remember one thing she told me and it was on that very first day of American Literature. It doesn’t matter what you’re reading as long as you’re reading. I can still hear her voice in my head with every page I turn. 

-Julie

Burning With Optimism's Flames

1987 Me

A few weeks ago my husband, Clayton, called to tell me he had found a mixed tape in my old boom box. Written on the outside was, “Julie’s Music Sampler II” and he asked if I knew what that was. He said he had listened to the first song and he thought it sounded pretty good. The next Saturday, I played the tape and forced him to sit through the first side, “Music to Get Groovy To,” while we were eating lunch, which mostly consisted of me dancing around the kitchen while he shook his head and rolled his eyes at me.

I met Phil at summer drama camp, 30 years ago, when I was 16 years old. I don’t remember the moment we met, but I do remember a few of our interactions from that week. I had arrived armed with the only two albums that Phil had deemed worthy of anything. “The Joshua Tree” by U2, and the soundtrack to “Pretty in Pink.” Everything else I had was crap. I lived in a small farming community in Illinois and everyone was either listening to country music, heavy metal or whatever 80’s pop music was available on the radio station that we were able to tune into. I’m pretty sure Phil even thought that U2 had sold out with “The Joshua Tree” if that gives you any insight into his level of music snobbery. I arrived at the final camp event (the dance) wearing my hair in a banana clip like so many girls in the mid-80’s were doing. Phil immediately took it out of my hair and told me I shouldn’t try to be like everyone else. To be fair, my hair never looked good in those things so he was right on that front.

He wore Dickies brand work pants and plain t-shirts and had a crew cut with an interpretation of a small duck tail in front. He spoke really fast and looked me right in the eye when he talked to me, which made me super uncomfortable. I don’t think a boy had ever looked at me that way before. After we returned to our respective towns, I received the first envelope of what would turn out to be a fairly vigorous written correspondence. Phil didn’t just send letters, he sent experiences. They always arrived in manila envelopes and were filled with written pages that sometimes stretched over a series of days. There were little trinkets that were probably procured from bubble gum machines. Little bits of trivia on cardboard, pieces of paper with information from I don’t know where, drawings etc. It was like a little package of a journal of his days, walking around school and his town. I imagine him picking stuff up and sending it all to me along with his thoughts in a rambling letter. The things that he told me were probably typical of any teenager but what was so stunning to me is that a boy would tell me these things. Sure, my girlfriends and I talked to each other about the problems in our life that seemed so important and urgent and horrible at that time but I had never experienced a boy revealing these things to anyone, let alone to me. And then there was the music he sent me.

Phil would do things like jump over five rows of seats at an Echo and The Bunnymen show when he saw me in the crowd. He pushed his entire body up onto a slanted glass window when he saw me at a U2 show. He picked me up in his gorgeous antique car and we went out with a few friends one time. I remember him standing up on the booth at a diner and yelling things like Vince Vaughn did in “Swingers.” This was way before “Swingers” came out and somehow it feels different when it’s happening in person. Phil was like a combination of John Cusack’s character in Say Anything and John Cusack’s character in High Fidelity with a healthy dose of adrenaline thrown in when you least expected it. I used to watch movies in the 80’s and think that I wanted to meet someone like those characters. I wanted a boy to make grand gestures like Duckie Dale in “Pretty in Pink,” dancing around the record store singing Otis Redding. I wanted a boy to stand outside my window with a boom box, playing our song up to my window. But in reality, when those kinds of things happen to me, it is really uncomfortable. Years later at my wedding, I had it written in the program that guests should remain seated while I walked down the aisle because I knew I would pass out if everyone stood up and turned to look at me. It turns out that I hate grand gestures.

In person Phil was intense. But letter writing Phil was my lifeline to the outside world. The music he sent me was life changing. There was The Cure’s “Standing on a Beach” singles. There was another mixed tape that came before the one my husband found but I don’t remember what was on it. The second one was my favorite. When I listened to it the other day, I still remembered each song that was coming next. It was like hanging out with an old friend.

I feel like I need to mention that when I met Phil, I was having a difficult time. I never told him this but the previous year I had a humiliating experience at my school. It was one of those things that for anyone else might have been easily forgotten but for a sensitive child, these kinds of events tend to shape the person you become. Sure, in the years before this, I had experienced betrayals by friends and in the years after I would deal with cheating boyfriends and other difficult life experiences. But I can honestly say that this single event in my life became the thing that changed me forever. It was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Knowing that everyone at school knew about it was bad enough but finding out that my family had known about it before it happened and had done nothing to warn me was what hurt the most. It was at that moment, standing in my kitchen with my mom and my sister that I formed the belief system that would stay with me for a long time. One that I still struggle to de-bunk, even today. The idea that no one is to be trusted and that I am totally on my own in this world. The belief that people who look like they belong are mean and should be avoided at all costs. If the mainstream world didn’t want me, I would reject them first.

And then Phil’s letters came and they contained this music that was unlike anything I had heard before. No one I knew was listening to anything like this. I started dressing differently, shopping at thrift stores, wearing my dad’s old black letterman’s cardigan from the 1960’s. I teased my hair to look like Robert Smith from The Cure. I started talking back to my teachers. I listened to “Dear God” by XTC before going to youth group meetings at my church. I developed my best “What are you looking at” glare. Sure, I still managed to be a pretty good kid but by all outward appearances, I was fairly strange looking for my farm community and that’s the way I wanted it.

Phil and I were never romantically involved, (save for 15 minutes at drama camp) but I think his friendship changed my life forever. Later that year we both went on to date our high school sweethearts and the letters tapered off during our senior year. He went to college in Chicago and I left for the southern part of the state. We re-connected after college for a bit. I looked him up and we hung out for a week in California. I was moving out of the state after a horrible job experience and he was moving in, trying to get something going in L.A. Eventually we met up again in Illinois for a time, saw a couple shows together. I haven’t heard from him in over 20 years. I don’t think there were any bad words between us, no reason for it but it’s hard for me to say. My dad died shortly after that and everything around that time is a blur for me. I know that he had made me another mixed tape in California that had some Radiohead and a throwback “Under the Milky Way”. There was another tape that had Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska” on one side and a Low album on the other, making it possibly the most depressing tape ever made. By this time we had both gotten into Americana and Alt-Country and I had made a little detour into some folk. Phil had evened out a lot, he was much quieter and easier to be with and I was a bit more anxious and depressed.

Phil’s internet footprint is almost non-existent, unlike mine. But I do know this. He looks just as he did the first time I met him and just as he did the last time I saw him. As for me, I occasionally try to fit into mainstream society. It does sometimes make me really uncomfortable. I think I’ve managed to find a balance. To figure out who the real me is and to break down some of my walls. The truth is, no matter how high you tease your hair, and what music you listen to, you’re still the same person underneath. I’ve done a lot of work to figure out who that person is and I’m pretty happy these days. The other day my husband and I went out to breakfast and as we were driving out of the parking lot, there was a man standing there, looking at me. He must’ve looked a little too long because I said out loud, “What are you looking at?” Only those aren’t exactly the words I used. My husband just started laughing and shaking his head. Despite my constant encouraging of him in the last few years to join me in being a little more positive in life, he knows that deep down inside, my 16 year old self is still there, sending out a little warning to the world that I’ve got my eye on you all the time. Just in case I have to put those walls back up, head to my bedroom and put in that mixed tape.

-Julie

*I created a Spotify playlist if you'd like to check it out HERE.

Me and Clayton 2017

Went for Coffee, Be Right Back.

The last few weeks looked like this: Magnificent vacation for a week. Then return to the studio for a week. Then my mom came to visit for a week. And now the unbelievable heat is arriving in North Florida and I’ve lost all momentum and motivation and I’m just supposed to go back into the studio and get to work? Day One was not very productive. Sure, I got started working on a wholesale order and then as I was waiting for things to dry so I could put them away, I started to check Facebook to see how everyone else’s day was going. What new and ridiculous things have our elected officials done this week? Today? In the last 20 minutes? Basically, I’m not using my time in a very productive way.

And then I found the wasps nest in my studio bathroom which forced me to use the bathroom at the coffee shop which forced me to purchase an iced mocha because I can’t in good conscious use another business’s bathroom without being a customer, right? So, now I’m really on a break because I have a coffee and I’m just hanging out and it’s hot and I haven’t seen a customer all day.

So, I decide I’ll write a blog post and then my time will be productive. But what to write about? How about how sometimes we just have these kinds of days and I get a do-over tomorrow? Tomorrow I’ll get up at 6:00 a.m. and lift weights and then get into the studio early, break for lunch and work through the afternoon, finishing up this wholesale order (at least stage one of the order) and feeling super accomplished. Yeah. Sure, I’ll still have to battle that wasp in the bathroom but tomorrow I’ll be ready for him. Worst-case scenario, I’ll be ready for another iced mocha. 

-Julie