The Great FSU Shit Controversy
Q: What was the great FSU shit controversy?
A: In 1968, or 1969, the English Department little magazine published a
short story that contained the word shit.
The faculty adviser had
deliberated over the matter and ruled that the word was essential to the story, not
used gratuitously, and not that far out of line with the language students saw and
heard in the world around them.
Q: Like the Berkeley Free Speech Movement (FSM) five years before?
A: Yes. Florida is a backward state. Five years behind California.
Anyhow the college president suppressed the magazine, the faculty senate forced his
resignation, and the reactionary elements on campus got a man from the School of
Education appointed president. Stanley Marshall.
The campus was polarized.
It was the College of Arts and Sciences, and liberal students majoring in fields
that belonged to Arts and Sciences, versus everybody else--the Schools of Business,
Education, Criminology, Social Welfare, and Library Science, plus Hotel and Restaurant
Management, of course, teaching students to serve catfish and charge for trout, and
the Athletic Department, with its alumni who were influential tire recappers from
Titusville and state legislators.
Stanley Marshall was an advocate of the
Harvard Business School management model, with manhour accounting, work codes, timesheets,
and so forth. Everything rationalized, accounted for, weighed, measured. Standardized.
A course in Introductory Anthropology at any state university ought to cover the
same material--exactly the same material--as the same course taught at any other
state university, no matter who taught it, and a full professor, with tenure, should
be able to account for all of his time, in increments of tenths of an hour, whether
he was teaching, engaged in research, attending faculty meetings, conferring with
graduate students about their course work, or thesis, like a green helper on a construction
crew could punch in and punch out on a timeclock and take only scheduled lunch and
coffee breaks.
His or her manager would sign his or her card, to certify
that the hours claimed were accurate.
Dr. Dailey told me this was the end
of university life as he had known it.
He was an employee, not an independent
scholar.
He was a hireling, not an autonomous professional.
The College
of Arts and Sciences had won the battle and lost the war.
The Schools of
Education, and Business, might have been a joke, to the College of Arts and Sciences,
but they were tired of being ridiculed, and they were going to get payback, their
pound of flesh, from the snobs who snubbed them.
The effete corps of impudent
snobs. The nattering nabobs of negativism.
Spiro Agnew was their spokesman.
Of course Spiro Agnew was a crook, who had to resign for taking kickbacks from highway
contractors, when he was governor, but that didn't alter the truth of what he said.
Q: What Marshall McLuhan did at Toronto was create a new discipline. He
was an English professor. Ted Carpenter was an anthropologist. He greatly expanded
the horizons of the discipline.
How would they have accounted for that?
Under Stanley Marshall's model?
A: It would not have been allowed. The would have had to lie.
Q: I didn't think that could happen to a university.
A: It has happened to literature.
Literature has been corporatized.
To fit the business school management model.
Where they know the cost of
everything and the value of nothing.
Q: So when you dropped out of graduate school, to write, you were jumping out of the firing pan, and into the fire.
A: I was changing life-narratives from an institutional one, to that of
the outcast, the charismatic personality. Charisma is related to grace.
Also to gratis. Free.
If you want to be free, you have to pay for
it.
But think of the plot.
From rags to riches. From obsc urity
to fame. Where else but in the arts can a character make it on his own efforts,
plus the help of family and friends.
If you do it, it will be recognized.
It can't be faked, and it will not be denied.
Think of Henri Rousseau, so
poor had had to play a fiddle in the streets, like a busker, creating the avant-garde.
Think of Erik Satie, playing piano in a movie theater. Think of Samuel Beckett,
writing Waiting for Godot.
Q: You were taken by the romantic ideal of artist as hero. Of life as a quest.
A: I would find the pearl, Kerouac said.
I would dive into the
bucket of shit that is life and come up with a pearl.
I would work like a
monk.
Willem de Kooning kept painting to the end. After he had an Alzheimer's-like
dementia.
I have PSD. Pre-senile dementia.
That's
why I got mad at Hunter S. Thompson.
Why was he pissing it all away, to get
fucked up?
He had the resources an artist needs. What was he doing with
them? Getting his head bad. Acting the fool.
Q: Willem de Kooning said it wasn't about art, it was about getting your own studio, and getting out of those cafeterias.
A: I have my own studio.
I don't have to drive and hour and a half
to work and shut my writing off when I get there.
I can spring to the easel,
in the clothes I wore to bed.
Just empty the slop jar and take up where I
left off. Continue the story from where I left it.
Q: You have a room of your own with a door on it.
A: Yes, and an income of so many pounds a month too, while it lasts.
Q: So it's not exactly retirement. You're working harder than ever.
A: But working at my own work.
That's like a vacation.
Holidays are for working, Marc Chagall said.
Q: Chagall had it made. All he had to do was paint. He had a dealer to
sell them. A mistress to sleep with him, and make his food.
It wasn't enough.
He married a rich, politically connected woman, moved to Paris, and attended parties,
to advance his reputation, because he was jealous of Picasso and Matisse.
A: Artists are jealous of each other. W. C. Fields was jealous of Charlie
Chaplin.
Jackson Pollock was jealous of de Kooning.
Hemingway was
jealous of Faulkner.
I've never seen the Faulkner house, in Oxford, Mississippi.
But I have seen the Hemingway house, in Key West.
Compared to them I have
simplified my life.
Compared to them I am Hoke Moseley in his one-piece fatigues,
making a pot-au-feu once a week to eat on all week.
You know, in New
Hope for the Dead, the problem Hoke had to solve was finding a house to live
in on the pay he made.