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About Oregon daily emerald. (Eugene, Or.) 1920-2012 | View Entire Issue (April 10, 1998)
CONTACTING US NEWSROOM: ADDRESS: (541)346-5511 Oregon Daily Emerald E-MAIL: P.O.BOX 3159 ode@oregon. uoregon.edu Eugene, Oregon 97403 ONLINE EDITION: www.uoregon.edu/~ode EDITOR IN CHIEF Sarah Kickler EDITORIAL EDITOR Mike Schmierbach NIGHT EDITOR Nicole Krueger The years have put the youthful desire to ‘de-school' with a book and a beer in perspective spent most of my senior year as an undergraduate at some comer spot in the library, stu -JL. dent union or against a log on the beach, in late spring, reading Thomas Wolfe. I was not taking a literature class on Wolfe or South ern writers, but I was very tired of everything about school after 16 unrelenting years of it. I yearned to spring from what seemed to me to be the holding tank of America’s middle class plus youth. I wanted to move and breathe in the real world, to be an equal with it. I had ripened all I could in the schooling environ and the time had come to “de school” myself and the rest of so ciety, which I sensed would be a lifetime task. After classes, my friends and I would go to bars that were indif ferent to our IDs. Languishing in that particular kind of rigor mor tis due to the insularity and ho mogeneity of life at a small, pri vate university under flat gray Northwest skies in a city on the F list, I would leave our table after throwing down a few beers and move to a stool at the bar, situat ing myself for conversations with people who’d had experience with life, at least the kind I hadn’t and maybe wouldn’t. One hairy, beet-faced regular read me his only poem on the back of a dirty pink invoice from “Larry’s and Gary’s Automotive” that he delicately pulled from his billfold whenever he saw me. Each of his readings revealed a new profundity about love and loneliness with each pitcher of Miller drained. It was easy, then, to blame life for having failed him and to commiserate by sharing smokes and brew. Once I invited some of the “folks” back to school and gave them a tour of my pro gressive sorority. They had never had a reason to be on campus. Hannah Dillon tourists asked me what hap pened when “the sisters” got into fights with one another. It doesn’t happen, I said, but if it did, we’d re solve it by talk mg it out. iNO, she said. I mean fighting, like with fists and feet? I turned most of my back on my required studies the deeper I got into Wolfe and the closer gradua tion got. 1 could no longer force a devotion to the social sciences and urban education. I was one of a very small group of students who were majors of a radical new program on campus. We consid ered ourselves the avant garde of cultural and educational change. “Cultural pluralism” was our ban ner. Systems analysis and man agement for institutional and so cietal transformation was our objective, gestalt the process. We were cautioned by our pro fessors that the concept of cultur al pluralism alone would take about 20 years to work its way into the consciousness and ver nacular of the mainstream. We couldn’t wait that long and be lieved, despite evidence other wise, that the majority of Ameri cans would be receptive to our unraveling of the myth of the “melting pot” perpetrated by the powers that were and still are. Af ter all, we were a society whose cultural pluralism had always been, had resisted the forces of white-washing and needed to be respected, nurtured, promulgated and rejoiced in by all. We felt commissioned to make that hap pen and confident it would. But then there was Wolfe’s opus “Of Time and the River” and his protagonist Eugene Gant’s splendent soul, his restless wan derings and insatiable hunger for life. His poetic sensibilities were honed in the sore of youth’s soli tary receptivity to life that is both intoxicatingly lovely and exquis itely cruel. Eugene was trying to make sense of it all while trying to free himself from his compulsion to and repulsion by his idiosyncrat ic family in the Carolinas. I was Gant and had to find out more about the man who had exuber antly authored me. I read every biography on Wolfe, which lead to biographies on Maxwell Perkins, his saintly editor at Scribners. Wolfe would stand and scrawl in pencil on mounds of paper on the top of his refrigerator, some times all night. Perkins would come to his office in the morning and there were Wolfe’s worn box es wound with rubber bands con taining his mad night’s work. I was Thomas Wolfe. And so I was too busy and preoccupied to tend to the last of my formal studies. The textbooks for my classes nev er engaged that deep-down place that sought corners to read in un til my eyes ached, dinner was missed and my heart raw from resonation. I haven’t been able to read Wolfe since, but it was because of his fictional Eugene Gant that I applied to graduate school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he had attend ed. After my degree, I would teach literature, I thought. It would be the means through which I would give air to voices outside the canon that had not been heard. Why had I discovered the African Writers Series while in Africa? Where had it been? Where had I been? How was it that we had never met until after my schooling? How many others hadn’t we had the opportunity to meet? There was so much to recti fy Years later I sit in Knight Li brary and listen to the Universi ty’s own poet read from his new book “set in a Deep South river port.” The sounds of his craft and their richly textured evocations touch that deep-down place which has now aged, smells of cedar and camphor, and has be come quietly receptive to and re ligiously respectful of exceptional writing. Robert Hill Long’s “The Effigies” is exceptionally fine, compelling me, once again, to seek a comfortable comer. But no longer do I need to be the writer or protagonist. No longer do I actively seek experi ences. They arrive in plenitude of their own accord. No longer do I believe that I can help to make the world a more just and compas sionate place within a decade by my righteous will and dedicated toil in nonprofit organizations. And no longer do 1 desire to flee from academia by indulging my rebellion and stomping assertion in seedy taverns among broken lives or in lyrical volumes tran scending curricula. “A stone, a leaf, a door.” Oh, (happily) lost youth and its savory-sweet effi gies! Hannah Dillon is a columnistfor the Emerald. Her ivork appears on alternate Fridays. Her views do not necessarily represent those of the newspaper. Drawing i99°s V -at If AST it's *<* raxiauv jcghkatco# -H-1L .1 Didn’t atAuri wt cavt QuT'INTOLERANCE MERIT BADOEV lV TROOP 103 pmm cfPCMtwir LETTERS TO THE EDITOR! OSPIRG is vital The Oregon Student Public Interest Research Group is one of the most vital programs that we have on campus. OSPIRG is the most democra tic, student-oriented and effective organization that the Oregon student movement has seen. Every other year, OSPIRG goes to the ballot to have students approve their funding allocation from our student fees. Instead of having the ASUO president or Student Senate put them on the ballot as most groups do, they gather thousands of signatures to be put on the ballot. This year they gathered over 3,500 signatures. At the same time, there is no other organiza tion in this state that has worked harder to pro tect students’ rights to control student fees. The anti-student rights movement that wants to see OSPIRG removed is the same anti-student rights movement that believes that students should not have control over student fees. We have it good here in Oregon; the ability to con trol our student fees sets us apart from the rest of the nation. OSPIRG has been instrumental in protecting that student control. Join me in sending a clear message to the anti-student rights movement on this campus that we want student control of student fees. Vote yes on the OSPIRG ballot measure. Bill Miner ASUO President One candidate cares It is unfortunately seldom in people’s lives that they encounter a person who consistently acts out of nothing more than caring. A person who, with no side agenda, will help others for the sake of being helpful and not for their own personal gain. When one recognizes this in such a person, I feel that it is important to give them the atten tion they deserve and learn from their good will. If we all spent more time studying such people, I believe that this giving perception could improve our lives and those around us. I write this letter because I recognize that one of the candidates for ASUO president is such a person. I am excited to see this type of person have the opportunity to help an entire univer sity population. She is truly the most caring person I have ever met, and I hope to see her in the position to help as many people as possi ble. Max LeeKwai Business/Japanese Restore credit unions On Thursday, March 26, the House Banking Committee passed HR 1151. It now goes to the full U.S. House of Representatives for a vote. Consumers need HR 1151 to preserve their right to choose a credit union. Since 1982, cred it unions have been allowed by regulators to add groups of people who were not in the origi nal membership group. These groups include many businesses too small to start their own credit union or could not provide the services demanded by consumers today. As of March 1996, there were 888,000 Oregonians working for firms of fewer than 500 employees. The Supreme Court took away the credit-union op tion for these Oregonians. HR 1151 will restore the right for 888,000 Oregon consumers to again choose a credit union for financial ser vices. Take the time to make a difference. Write your representative and senators today. Urge passage of HR 1151 to preserve the right to choose; 888,000 Oregonians will thank you. Gordon P. Hoerauf President/CEO U-Lane-0 Credit Union