The Longest Day

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The Longest Day topic started 6/22/2005; 11:04:10 PM last post 6/24/2005; 7:51:23 PM

alansimes@m... - The Longest Day   6/22/2005; 10:04:10 PM (reads: 4597, responses: 1) I first met John in 1987. I had been hired to teach part-time for Winter quarter 1988 and showed up on campus some weeks before the quarter began to check things out—it was my first real teaching job. I walked down a hallway and there he was at the end of it. I said I had just been hired to teach part-time, and, in that unmistakable voice, and sporting his 70s, Robert Redford-style moustache, he cooly declaimed on the subject at hand. It was thirty minutes before I was able to spy a clock around his shoulder—or get a word in. Little did I know that when I was hired full-time that I would be assigned an office in that same hall just a few feet away from where I first met him. John was not only the first faculty I met at De Anza he was the most influential. After I had made a mess of the first developmental class I ever taught, I sought him out. Without regard to clocks or notes, he went through his entire EWRT 100B course, the rational, the texts, the grading, the students. I took notes and his approach formed the basis of my own—and I used a very rough draft of what became his developmental textbook as the basis for the readings in the 100B classes I taught for some years after. He provided for me a similar intellectual basis for EWRT 1B as well as grading standard that serves as the basis for the grading rubric I use to this day. His courses weren’t merely a book order and five essays; they were carefully thought-out, and thoroughly designed, and they always managed to be deeply weird in some respect. He loved subverting the traditional English course expectations with unexpected, free-wheeling gestures and activities, and often did so by using provocative material but in a deliberately played-down style ( I still can’t forget the seemingly life-sized reproduction of an erect penis-in-condom he used for a section on analyzing advertising, just as if it were only one more image to deconstruct). We were involved throughout the years as collaborative colleagues: a summer 100B experiment called the Goldilocks Project (or was it Perplex?), a 1A course involving team teaching and course planning with five instructors, a Honors colloquia that I taught (badly) using his (admittingly fuzzy) course outline/rubrics, a panel discussion of British literature instructors conducted in a shared class of American and British lit students (our version of the canon wars). And of course there were committees, and department meetings, and division retreats, etc. At one division meeting, the discussion of campus concerns descended to the lower depths when one now retired English department member offered an embittered diatribe about the state of the mens’ bathrooms in the “L” quad classroom. He was in full whine when a voice boomed out, “Grow up, Ted!” I smile to think of that story now, but there weren’t many smiles in the room that day. For as all of us know John Lovas was not universally liked. Both his voice and his reputation preceeded him, and many could not brook his manner—or sacrifice the minutes and hours a conversation with him demanded. He could be ignorant of personal space, and stepped on many toes. But he didn’t break them. In all the years I knew John I never once heard him engage in the kind of backdoor character assassination now so common. Unafraid of what other people said—or thought—about him, was often his downfall but also a source of pride. We are both the products of Catholic schooling, right down to the Jesuit colleges we both attended,so I think I can understand how the surety and conviction of belief learned there remained with John his entire life. Certainly his ideas were not always, or even frequently of late, popular, but they were honest, original, and they got you thinking. Yes, they advanced his own position and certainly he could jockey for power with the best of them. I didn’t share all his views, and I can recall quite a few moments of exasperation, irritation or worse because of something he said or did. But I never discounted his ideas and always learned from them. But I know people had and still have trouble separating the man from the manner. These last few years he seemed to assume a kind of Don Quixote/Ancient Mariner role at De Anza and I’m not sure many were willing anymore to listen patiently to what he had to say, let alone act on it. So he took his message to cyberspace—this cyberspace—and it flourished there. I heard about John’s illness Friday, June 10th, from John Swensson and it sounded ominous. On Tuesday the week before his death, Luis Limcolioc and I visited John at Kaiser hospital in Redwood City. John was asleep when we arrived and so, since Luis had written a witty and moving parody of a Hopkins poem (Gerard Manley being John's favorite), I went to dash off a few sodden lines just in case. When I came back to the room he was awake and talking to Luis. It took him a few moments to break through the morphine haze and the lack of sleep (he’d been without real sleep for several days at that point). The morphine was great for pain but hell on every other bodily function. But still he talked and we listened, and he gave no indication that he’d been delivered of his own personal memento mori. I left with him what I had written and we each gave him a hug. We left thinking both that we might never see him again and that he wasn’t finished. And he didn’t believe he was—he was still worrying about the classess and students he had left behind on Sunday night two days before his death. De Anza College was his life, right down to the end of it. Let me just add, how fitting it is that John Lovas died on the longest day of the year, summer solstice 2005, for he loomed far on the horizon. Against that day his death casts a long shadow, but I don’t see a baleful one, instead one watchful, immense and proud. Discuss mjlovas@p... - Re: The Longest Day   6/24/2005; 6:51:23 PM (reads: 6696, responses: 0) Thanks for sharing all this. You captured my brother, right up to the end. Discuss