long days, Faulkner and Hemingway

Yesterday was the first day of an experiment: 14 hours on campus, 8am - 10pm, every Wednesday from now until the end of April. I was a little uncertain about the whole endeavor, worried that perhaps I would run out of steam before my 7pm seminar on Faulkner and Hemingway. This is the only course I'm taking this semester, and the first time I've taken an English class since Hasan Malik's "Introduction to Fiction" class in Chapel Hill, fall semester of 1996.

To my knowledge, Malik wasn't a professor, merely a lowly graduate teaching assistant like myself. He was a skinny man with wild eyes and a sparse beard, and he was crazy about literature. I had never seen someone so passionate when he spoke. He would stand in front of the room, sweating and flailing his arms about like some ridiculous octopus in an Ed Wood movie. It made no difference to him if it was Stendhal or Borges or Nabakov; he was in love with each of them, and listening to his rants I fell in love with each of them. Most of all I remember the way he described every writer, no matter who is was as "mad" in his clipped Pakistani accent.

Hasan Malik was my first and, up until yesterday, last literature instructor. The lure of the moving image (and the threat of long boring novels expounded by long boring professors) pulled me away from the written word. I still read of course, and in retrospect it would have probably been wiser if I had sought adult supervision for some of the books I read; Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment comes to mind.

But this is beside the point.

The point is that last night I stumbled into a professor worthy of the seed sewn by Malik nearly fifteen years ago. In the interim I have witnessed all manners of calamity and glory: despair, delusion and delight. Sometimes the distinctions between them were indecipherable, other times they were indelible. Each of them was perfect, each of them was unique, each of them prepared my for the coming months' study of these shirtless drunkards:

'Papa' and 'Pappy'

[lapse]

The professor walks in wearing a yellow bow-tie and tweed jacket. I had heard rumors about him, that he was obsessed with Faulkner – so much so that he chose to be born in Mississippi. He opens his mouth to speak; everything I heard was true. It is the voice of a 70-year old man coming from the mouth of a 35-year old body.

"Perversion," he tells us. "Misogynistic... Racist... Disturbing."

He pauses.

"Disturbing."

He taps his fingers on the table like my great grandfather.

"But..." He connects three imaginary dots on the table with his index finger.

"When it comes down to putting one words after another..."

He shakes his head... reverently... disbelievingly.

"They were pretty good, they were pretty good."