As the daughter of an icon ish professor (Stanley Aronowitz) I know how one negative word from him could cut me to the quick. He also had that sexual allure even though he had terrible hygiene. Ellen(Willis) the only person who was able to transform him into a semi good human being. I have also been at war with a garden munching groundhog here in Montclair, NJ for 20 years. I love your writing and look forward to more.
I knew Ellen well at the Voice and of course your father, perfectly described! I'm so happy you like my writing. What could be better. Please write to me so we can be properly acquainted: lauriestone@substack.com
"We keep hearing our names called out because it’s the past wanting back in and for us to tell another story about it. The past wants to be seen as it was, and we can’t do that."
One of my favorite lines in all literature is, "Something real, cool, and solid lies before you, unromantic as Monday morning," from Currer Bell's criminally underappreciated novel Shirley. I was extremely fortunate to have, as my personal skeleton key to the Bell sisters and their brilliant, dissolute brother Branford, Helene Moglen, aleyha hashalom, before she decamped to the other coast. Helene's first book, Charlotte Brontë: The Self Conceived, was for me an unlikely kind of secret decoder ring; as with Elizabeth Hardwick's Seduction and Betrayal, it made the case for academic writing that blazed not only with original intelligence but also with passion, even anger. I was also lucky enough to have introduced the dying Agnes De Mille -- an obsessed Charlotte fan -- to the pleasures of Shirley (and, later, to have made my own pilgrimage to cramped, tidy, isolated Haworth Parsonage. Finally, I also worked for an editor you mention, though I had the pleasure of quitting before he could fire me. (How lucky was I to have, at the same time, Esther Newton just as she had published Mother Camp, to open another kind of not-Victorian world to my curious mind.)
Marcus' written comment on your paper, "I don't ever want to see anything like this again" - OK, Daddy! Jesus Christ, what a condescending jerk. I understand there are a few of them in academia (and writing). Although, maybe because I attended a small Catholic school upstate, I was lucky to have very supportive, encouraging writing instructors, all of them women, which is maybe relevant? I certainly never got a comment like that.
Your observation that you wanted Marcus to like you, and "[w]hen you want someone to like you, when you can feel it overtaking you, they are never going to like you" - as old as I am, I felt like that was a lesson I could've used a long time ago. It's kind of applicable to something going on in my life right now, in fact. It still sucks. For years I've been trying to write a song, a sort of take-off on the Temptations/Supremes classic, "I'm Gonna Make You Love Me," only mine would be called, "I'm Gonna Make You Like Me." It's currently 18 minutes long. It's laudable that you can see the humor in this perverse paradox of human nature - "Like me?" "Nope!" - and in the fact that we can't write the past as it really was, no matter what the ghosts want.
FInally, "I'm mentioning this so you won't think we're mean to animals. I don't know why I care what you think." Oh, did I need that laugh. Thank you, Laurie!.
This is so strange — I was actually thinking of S. Marcus, and his comments on a paper, just a few hours ago. I had a different experience: I was an undergrad, it was a required survey course, and his criticism, though forthright, was gentle enough. It helped me enormously over many years.
But a similar experience to the one you’re describing happened with a different member of that department.
I was a newly-arrived freshman, and knew his work, and was so, so excited to stop by his office during office hours — it was going to be the beginning of a wonderful set conversations. I think that I was planning to ask him to be my departmental advisor.
He said in essence that he was only interested in talking to graduate students, and the entire conversation took less than 3 minutes. I never saw or talked to him again, but have never forgotten it; it flavors how I feel whoever I see his (excellent) work.
The other experience was pretty awful, and I didn’t stay with that department in the end. But yes, SM was a good force in my case, though I doubt that I ever spoke to him.
It could be that you were indeed developing your personal style. I still laugh about when I went back to college at middle age and after years of keeping an avid and ambitious diary, had to take a 101 writing class. My first paper was returned commented in heavy ,furious red ink: "This is NOT an essay!!!!"
I was already getting well published, as I mention. I don't know how or what I wrote in that chapter. There are more, there is an unfinished dissertation in a file cabinet in the basement. Whatever writing of interest it may contain, I am going to assume got installed into many of the pieces I wrote about Victorian literature after drifting away from the dissertation.
Great piece, Laurie! I’ve worked with thousands of scholarly writers over the years, and I’m sorry to say that your story about SM is one that I’ve heard again and again in various forms — often, though not always, with a gendered component. The arrogance, the dismissiveness, the academic impulse to “discipline” (pun intended) students and colleagues into becoming clones of themselves (but inferior clones, needless to say). Those stories break my heart! Your evil groundhog is just doing his thing, being a groundhog (and a pretty successful one, from the sound of it). But human beings — professors, peer reviewers, scholarly colleagues — have a choice whether they’re going to root up all your parsley or not. Why not help you plant more instead?
I am older now.. I read books left lying around the house by my college educated sister when i was in elementary school. (inc The Joy of Sex and The Hite Report (!)
The only formal education I have is an Associate of Applied Science for my RN and also my ABA paralegal certification. Also, I can’t stop reading.
I love this. I loved when you said something like “start in the middle, fail to arrive, make the reader hot … you sure do that for this reader.
I detested the Brontes because they just made me feel icky and Bad about love. I vastly prefer reading Orwell if I want to feel super Creepy ~ at least he kinda prepared me for the evil shitstorm we are currently swirling around in.
Additionally, I would really love to know your Prof’s viewpoint on my fantastic obsession with Infinite Jest. Eeeeeeek ~
Also if anyone wants to know, I am re-reading Pride and Prejudice again ~ because it’s Brilliant.
I had no felt reason to be there. I started in 1968. Bruce had a draft deferment teaching second grade in Oceanhill Brownsville, and we had to stay in the US. On my own, I wouldn't have gone to graduate school. I'm not sorry for the reading I did, but it wasn't an environment for me at all, and most of the male academics in the English department hated feminists and what they thought we represented. I think Marcus outright hated me. It hadn't occurred to me I couldn't charm a man if I wanted to because I hadn't calculated the hatred aroused by the ideas I was spreading and writing through. Still, I'm sorry not to have finished the degree. I was very close.
Thanks! Have you signed up for the next Zoom conversation? They are really fun. It's on June 22 from 3 to 4, email me for more info if you like: lauriestone@substack.com
Thanks Laurie, I bet they are fun. Being a kiwi, the real kind, not the fruit, and living down under...the time differential could be an issue but I will email and get details. :-)
As the daughter of an icon ish professor (Stanley Aronowitz) I know how one negative word from him could cut me to the quick. He also had that sexual allure even though he had terrible hygiene. Ellen(Willis) the only person who was able to transform him into a semi good human being. I have also been at war with a garden munching groundhog here in Montclair, NJ for 20 years. I love your writing and look forward to more.
I knew Ellen well at the Voice and of course your father, perfectly described! I'm so happy you like my writing. What could be better. Please write to me so we can be properly acquainted: lauriestone@substack.com
"We keep hearing our names called out because it’s the past wanting back in and for us to tell another story about it. The past wants to be seen as it was, and we can’t do that."
Perfect!
Thanks! xxL
One of my favorite lines in all literature is, "Something real, cool, and solid lies before you, unromantic as Monday morning," from Currer Bell's criminally underappreciated novel Shirley. I was extremely fortunate to have, as my personal skeleton key to the Bell sisters and their brilliant, dissolute brother Branford, Helene Moglen, aleyha hashalom, before she decamped to the other coast. Helene's first book, Charlotte Brontë: The Self Conceived, was for me an unlikely kind of secret decoder ring; as with Elizabeth Hardwick's Seduction and Betrayal, it made the case for academic writing that blazed not only with original intelligence but also with passion, even anger. I was also lucky enough to have introduced the dying Agnes De Mille -- an obsessed Charlotte fan -- to the pleasures of Shirley (and, later, to have made my own pilgrimage to cramped, tidy, isolated Haworth Parsonage. Finally, I also worked for an editor you mention, though I had the pleasure of quitting before he could fire me. (How lucky was I to have, at the same time, Esther Newton just as she had published Mother Camp, to open another kind of not-Victorian world to my curious mind.)
So much to take in here:
Marcus' written comment on your paper, "I don't ever want to see anything like this again" - OK, Daddy! Jesus Christ, what a condescending jerk. I understand there are a few of them in academia (and writing). Although, maybe because I attended a small Catholic school upstate, I was lucky to have very supportive, encouraging writing instructors, all of them women, which is maybe relevant? I certainly never got a comment like that.
Your observation that you wanted Marcus to like you, and "[w]hen you want someone to like you, when you can feel it overtaking you, they are never going to like you" - as old as I am, I felt like that was a lesson I could've used a long time ago. It's kind of applicable to something going on in my life right now, in fact. It still sucks. For years I've been trying to write a song, a sort of take-off on the Temptations/Supremes classic, "I'm Gonna Make You Love Me," only mine would be called, "I'm Gonna Make You Like Me." It's currently 18 minutes long. It's laudable that you can see the humor in this perverse paradox of human nature - "Like me?" "Nope!" - and in the fact that we can't write the past as it really was, no matter what the ghosts want.
FInally, "I'm mentioning this so you won't think we're mean to animals. I don't know why I care what you think." Oh, did I need that laugh. Thank you, Laurie!.
“I have unsoured the grapes of the past.” I love it. The sentence and the notion.
This is so strange — I was actually thinking of S. Marcus, and his comments on a paper, just a few hours ago. I had a different experience: I was an undergrad, it was a required survey course, and his criticism, though forthright, was gentle enough. It helped me enormously over many years.
But a similar experience to the one you’re describing happened with a different member of that department.
I was a newly-arrived freshman, and knew his work, and was so, so excited to stop by his office during office hours — it was going to be the beginning of a wonderful set conversations. I think that I was planning to ask him to be my departmental advisor.
He said in essence that he was only interested in talking to graduate students, and the entire conversation took less than 3 minutes. I never saw or talked to him again, but have never forgotten it; it flavors how I feel whoever I see his (excellent) work.
So your excellent piece raised some strong memories…
Thanks! Glad SM was nice to you and it was a lasting benefit. xxL
The other experience was pretty awful, and I didn’t stay with that department in the end. But yes, SM was a good force in my case, though I doubt that I ever spoke to him.
“fang-dripping contempt” — so good!
So wise. Funny, painful and wise.
You are funny, girl. And a funny girl your own self. Oy, the Steven Marcuses of the world! xxL
We would be friends if we met - we have much in common.
I hope we will meet some day!
My first thought at Marcus's response to your dissertation: ah, but that is her writing style!
"...or a family relative." hahah! Also love the photo of the "ghost woman."
It was a very weird thing to read that description of the writing . . . I didn't read the chapter, but I think it's in a file cabinet.
It could be that you were indeed developing your personal style. I still laugh about when I went back to college at middle age and after years of keeping an avid and ambitious diary, had to take a 101 writing class. My first paper was returned commented in heavy ,furious red ink: "This is NOT an essay!!!!"
I was already getting well published, as I mention. I don't know how or what I wrote in that chapter. There are more, there is an unfinished dissertation in a file cabinet in the basement. Whatever writing of interest it may contain, I am going to assume got installed into many of the pieces I wrote about Victorian literature after drifting away from the dissertation.
I'm on my way to Hudson in a few weeks. I'll go down to your basement and see if I can find it. LOL!!
I think I know where it is!
Great piece, Laurie! I’ve worked with thousands of scholarly writers over the years, and I’m sorry to say that your story about SM is one that I’ve heard again and again in various forms — often, though not always, with a gendered component. The arrogance, the dismissiveness, the academic impulse to “discipline” (pun intended) students and colleagues into becoming clones of themselves (but inferior clones, needless to say). Those stories break my heart! Your evil groundhog is just doing his thing, being a groundhog (and a pretty successful one, from the sound of it). But human beings — professors, peer reviewers, scholarly colleagues — have a choice whether they’re going to root up all your parsley or not. Why not help you plant more instead?
My intention was to write a piece about memory, not blame, but SM was a prick, indeed.
Thanks Laurie. I sure will.
I am older now.. I read books left lying around the house by my college educated sister when i was in elementary school. (inc The Joy of Sex and The Hite Report (!)
The only formal education I have is an Associate of Applied Science for my RN and also my ABA paralegal certification. Also, I can’t stop reading.
I love this. I loved when you said something like “start in the middle, fail to arrive, make the reader hot … you sure do that for this reader.
I detested the Brontes because they just made me feel icky and Bad about love. I vastly prefer reading Orwell if I want to feel super Creepy ~ at least he kinda prepared me for the evil shitstorm we are currently swirling around in.
Additionally, I would really love to know your Prof’s viewpoint on my fantastic obsession with Infinite Jest. Eeeeeeek ~
Also if anyone wants to know, I am re-reading Pride and Prejudice again ~ because it’s Brilliant.
So there!
Steven Marcus died in 2018. I never spoke a word to him again. The Brontes are great. maybe give them another try some time.
A lot of rich voices get homogenized in grad school. So glad yours didn't. We may not always know we are, but it sure helps to know who we aren't.
I had no felt reason to be there. I started in 1968. Bruce had a draft deferment teaching second grade in Oceanhill Brownsville, and we had to stay in the US. On my own, I wouldn't have gone to graduate school. I'm not sorry for the reading I did, but it wasn't an environment for me at all, and most of the male academics in the English department hated feminists and what they thought we represented. I think Marcus outright hated me. It hadn't occurred to me I couldn't charm a man if I wanted to because I hadn't calculated the hatred aroused by the ideas I was spreading and writing through. Still, I'm sorry not to have finished the degree. I was very close.
I really love this read..........really really really.
Damn that groundhog. I can see him floating on the pallet.
So enjoy your words.
Thanks! Have you signed up for the next Zoom conversation? They are really fun. It's on June 22 from 3 to 4, email me for more info if you like: lauriestone@substack.com
Thanks Laurie, I bet they are fun. Being a kiwi, the real kind, not the fruit, and living down under...the time differential could be an issue but I will email and get details. :-)
..felt wrong to pick a quote, somehow. I relate to too much(no I'm not a writer)
hence the double restack.
like it's gonna put some mirror back together, only it won't, of course
thank you