college memories

i took mr. morgan's class the summer between freshman and sophomore year. he seemed to like my stories as well as my friend rachel's, as he would share them with the class. it was the same in dan mccall's class - somehow my work and my friend abe's were shared most often. we were all people who genuinely relished writing; we had a radar for each other and gravitated towards each other immediately.

rachel was a goth girl with fair skin and pitch black curls who wore velvet black skirts. i remember being impressed when she told me she read straight through every copy of 'story' magazine, from beginning to end (mr. morgan had first introduced it to us). i was more the type to leaf through them and gravitate toward specific stories immediately but not really want to read any others.

the writing styles that appealed to me at that age were very distinct. i liked bold language, honest accounts of pain, eccentric characters, and indiscernible situations. i liked julia alvarez, and a story about a man dealing with depression while taking care of a pet rabbit. i liked a short-short-story that had won a monthly contest, about a man who thought his deceased wife had come back when his small son appeared at the breakfast table wearing her wig. i liked another story whose dialogue was reminiscent of a mystery novel, where the characters called to each other from between a second-floor window and a lawn as if undergoing a detective's interrogation, only to be revealed as an ordinary couple having a fight.

mr. morgan brought me into my first awareness of the literary magazine world and made me feel confident about my writing. most memorably and kindly, he warned me that 'marijuana dried up the language part of the brain.' i never forgot those words, as they made me wary of the popular attitude that the drug had no negative effects. his words kept me from ever wanting to indulge in anything of the sort (and also offered a handy admonishment for friends who did). i always did wonder, though, if he had uttered them because he thought i was under the influence at the time - which i was not.

Robert Morgan, 'Funny Books'

Robert Morgan was my first creative writing professor in college. I just saw his poem 'Funny Books' posted in 'The Writer's Almanac':

http://writersalmanac.org/episodes/20170225/

Funny Books

by Robert Morgan

Because my parents had denied
me comic books as sordid and
salacious, I would sneak a look
at those of friends, the bold and bright
slick covers, pages rough as news
and inked in pinks and greens and blues
as cowboys shouted in balloons
and Indian yells were printed on
the clouds. I borrowed books and hid
them in the crib and under shoes
and under bed. The glories of
those hyperbolic zaps and screams
were my illuminated texts,
the chapbook prophets of forbidden
and secret art, the narratives
of quest and conquest in the West,
of Superman and Lash Larue.
The print and pictures cruder than
the catalog were sweeter than
the cake at Bible School. I crouched
in almost dark and swilled the words
that soared in their balloons and bulbs
of grainy breath into my pulse,
into the stratosphere of my
imagination, reaching Mach
and orbit speed, escape velocity
just at the edge of Sputnik’s age,
in stained glass windows of the page.

“Funny Books” by Robert Morgan from The Strange Attractor: New and Selected Poems. © Louisiana State University Press, 2004. Reprinted with permission.  (buy now)

on Araby

Some Thoughts On ‘Araby’

Sulyn Zan, Jan 29, 2017

The twelve-year-old narrator of “Araby” investigates a room left empty when a priest - his family's tenant - has died, and finds three books: one that emphasizes connection to Scotland (Mary, Queen of Scots), one that deals with extended rituals to be performed before and after receiving the Sacrament, and one written by a French author that deals more with secular mystery, prurience, and sensationalism. The boy notes that the last is the one he likes best because its "leaves were yellow," which implies his need for a holistic lifestyle unoppressed by solely Catholic values. He thus presents a complex portrait of a man of the cloth whose level of piety tends from extremely devout to indulging in some secular pleasures.

Shortly after this, the boy notes that he has found the priest’s “rusty bicycle pump” underneath a few straggling bushes in a "wild garden," and as these follow shortly on the heels of his last statement, they seem to extend upon that secular pleasure. He calls the priest “charitable,” having left everything in his will to society aside from a modest amount of furniture, which he has left to his sister. The boy, in appreciating the genuine level of societal objectivity and lack of self-interest on the part of the priest, seems more potently gifted by his recognition of a wilder side of life.

For that reason and more, the priest’s death appears to instill both a reverence for the great unknown - as exemplified by an “ever changing violet sky” that appears in the next paragraph and renders man-made lanterns “feeble,” raised toward it as if in deference - and an exuberant liveliness among those young folk who have survived him (whose bodies "glow" as they play in the streets). Indeed, the beauty of the language, the unashamed leap forward into life, the vividness of experience here seem possible only because of the impact of the death, whether for the writer or reader.

It is this unabashed exuberance that sets the stage for the narrator’s blossoming of first love and his courage to take the first small steps into fostering such a relationship. It's almost as if the death of the priest combined with the knowledge of his indulgences plants a seed in the narrator that blooms into a pious kind of infatuation for a girl, and that later, the thought of the girl allows the boy protection from his overwhelming sensitivities to a cruder world (“places hostile to romance”… “the jostling of a marketplace”... “shrill litanies”). This “pious romance” magically allows all of these sounds to “converge into a single sensation” as he imagines bearing his “chalice through a throng of foes.” The use of “chalice” as a representation of Christ’s blood, unification with God, and possibly the purity and healing of a holy grail, proves that there is a symbiotic development going on between religion and love/infatuation/sexuality. To protect his love and infatuation is to protect his own holiness. While the opening of the story introduces this connection, the language that develops throughout the paragraph continues to reinforce it, as “her name sprang to [his] lips in strange prayers and praises [he] did not understand,” and his body became like a “harp” with her “words and gestures” running upon the wires.

Indeed, the last few phrases represent the culmination of that intermingling, or mutual reinforcement, of piety and love/sexuality. And just as we reach that point - a risky point for the boy - the priest “reappears” in the story, or at least in the narrator’s consciousness. A pattern emerges here: whereas the sullied purity of the priest initially allowed him to accept love and sexuality as part of his own life, this second visit to the priest's room purifies the boy anew, cleansing him of any thought of physical indulgence; the rain heard from inside the room is celebrated here as “fine incessant needles” that “impinge upon the earth.” Correspondingly, rather than indulge in the sensuality represented by the harp-body, the boy now prefers to veil all of his senses, relieved even that he can “see” so little.

In keeping with the pattern, only after this second visit does the boy receive the answer to his “prayers” in any physical sense whatsoever - the girl actually speaks to him, asking him if he will go to the bazaar.

But what also emerges here - concretely, and for the first time - is a Catholic “device” which will now serve as physical obstacle to the narrator’s goals: the girl claims she, herself, cannot go to Araby because she must attend a retreat. The retreat ends up being the last Catholic entity that comes up in the narrative. Thereafter, we begin to witness the boy’s brush with a series of “exterior” cultures which collectively impel him toward a brave, exotic adventure only to disappoint him: the “eastern enchantment” of Araby, the “freemason” or protestant branding with which the aunt suspiciously condemns it, and ultimately, the English accents of the young woman and men who behave disdainfully toward him, leading to his disillusionment.

The final message of the story seems to express the ways in which a “secret” Catholic life imbued with ordinary but taboo aspects of human life such as sexuality are necessary to free the boy in a world so deeply interwoven with its edicts; however, the same Catholicism, ultimately shackling, forces him just as much to seek beyond its borders.

The boy is naturally and inevitably disappointed by the first stages of this “seeking”; but it is his shockingly precocious recognition that this disappointment comes from vanity, rather than, for example, merciless abandonment by other people or by God, that proves he is capable of beginning a larger and more real journey than most.