The COAL Community

Sample syllabi, anyone?

Carey Adams — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 16:00:26 GMT

I'm sure I'm the only one among us who doesn't have his IDS 110 syllabus ready to photocopy yet ... Would anyone out there who has a syllabus ready, or maybe one from last year that just needs a little tweaking -- be willing to share theirs here?

My first First Year Experience

Carey Adams — Tue, 20 May 2008 14:11:25 GMT

This fall I'll make my first attempt at teaching IDS 110. There are 15 of us from COAL teaching 23 sections, about 23% of the campus total in both categories. That's not counting another 10 COAL faculty who are teaching UHC 110. I am not the only rookie in the bunch, and many people who have taught IDS 110 in the past are making significant changes this fall. I'm hoping we can learn from each other and discuss how the college might want to put its own "stamp" on the first year experience.

To kick off this forum, let me throw out a few basic questions to help us all get acquainted.

Which course (IDS/UHC) are you teaching this fall, and have you taught the class before?
Are you using a "theme" for your section. If so, what?
Are you using a text(s)? If so, what?
What's the biggest question you have about teaching the class this fall?

I'll start the ball rolling with my own responses:

I'm teaching IDS 110 for the first time.
Unless I change my mind by the first of June, the theme for my section is "Leaders as Storytellers: How Narratives Shape Organizations."
I'm using the Constance Staley text.
What do I choose to fit into 16 hours of class time? There's a lot of good information in the Staley text, but I could spend the whole 8 weeks doing nothing but covering that information. I'm much more interested in stimulating lively discussion and getting students engaged.

Addendum to Committee's November Report

ccadmin — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 18:28:49 GMT

Compensation Committee Addendum to the report submitted 11-16-06.

Compensation Committee November Report

ccadmin — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 22:15:09 GMT

Strategic Planning - Compensation Committee Report submitted 11-16-2006.

All-College November Meeting Minutes

ccadmin — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 15:43:49 GMT

All-College Meeting Minutes 11-16-2006

Technology November Report

ccadmin — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 15:38:07 GMT

Strategic Planning - Technology Report submitted 11-16-2006.

Student Access and Retention November Report

ccadmin — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 15:37:34 GMT

Strategic Planning - Student Access and Retention Report submitted 11-16-2006.

Space November Report

ccadmin — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 15:36:50 GMT

Strategic Planning - Space Report submitted 11-16-2006.

Personnel and Staffing November Report

ccadmin — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 15:36:08 GMT

Strategic Planning - Personnel and Staffing Report submitted 11-16-2006.

Mission November Report

ccadmin — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 15:35:20 GMT

Strategic Planning - Mission Report submitted 11-16-2006.

Graduate Education November Report

ccadmin — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 15:34:44 GMT

Strategic Planning - Graduate Education Report submitted 11-16-2006.

Development November Report

ccadmin — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 15:33:58 GMT

Strategic Planning - Development Report submitted 11-16-2006.

Academic Programs November Report

ccadmin — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 15:32:16 GMT

Strategic Planning - Academic Programs Report submitted 11-16-2006.

Questions Concerning Public Art

Adele Newson-Horst — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 15:58:11 GMT

Colleagues and Friends of the University. I have prepared the following questions in the spirit of a free exchange of ideas. I hope that they will encourage discussion beyond this forum.

What is public art?

Is it any art placed in a public space?

Is public art only a large statue in a public space?

Is it only meant to beautify our public spaces?

In the past, art placed in public place has served many purposes. Do we

always recognize the intent of these pieces? What, in fact, constitutes the

meanings that these works embody?

What constitutes public art today?

How has the role of traditional public (i.e. government owned) art changed in our

contemporary culture?

How have the changing conditions of public space and mass communications

altered the whole relationship between art and its potential audiences?

Could public art be an event staged in a public space that would leave no record

of itself after the staging is complete?

Who is the public for which this art is displayed?

Is it homogenous?

Might there be dissent?

How does censorship factor into choices about public art?

What is the relationship of the audience/viewer to the art object?

What sort of educational programs/initiatives might accompany the process of

acquisition of art for our campus? Would this be appropriate?

Public Art and the Artist:

How is making art for the public different than the usual work of the artist in the

studio?

Can the artists themselves initiate public art works?

Public Art and Missouri State University:

How does public art fit into our public affairs mission and our ambitions as a

research institution?

What sort of public art might be appropriate for Missouri State University as we

attempt to build a new image—one that is more focused on research and

scholarship? Can we use this opportunity to shape a scholarly debate on this

subject by bringing experts in the field to our campus for a symposium and/or

by creating a publication on this topic?

What should be the role of the art professionals in the Art & Design Department

in the process of making decisions about art on campus?

How might the choices made concerning public art at Missouri State University

enhance the reputation of the Art & Design Department and its faculty as well

as that of the College of Arts and Letters?

Nov. 5-7: Frank McCourt visits Missouri State University

ccadmin — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 14:59:32 GMT

The College of Arts & Letters Lecture Series presents
Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author Frank McCourt

Sunday, November 5
7:30 p.m. - Informal Presentation with Educators
9:30 p.m. - Reception and Book Signing

Monday, November 6
10 a.m. - Presentation to High School Students
2 p.m. - Presentation to Missouri State, Area College Students
7:30 p.m. - Lecture and Book Signing at Juanita K. Hammons Hall for the Performing Arts
(Admission is FREE, but tickets are required. Call the Missouri State Box Office at 417-836-7678
or toll free at 1-888-476-7849)

Tuesday, November 7
8 a.m. - Community Breakfast

As a precursor to McCourt's three-day visit, a discussion of his three books will be held at Barnes & Noble Booksellers on Thursday, October 26 at 7:00 p.m. Joining moderator Dr. Adele Newson-Horst, Dean of the College of Arts & Letters, will be Dr. W.D. Blackmon, Head of the English Department; Annie Busch, Director of Springfield-Greene County Library Systems; Mayor Tom Carlson; Karen Horny, Dean of Meyer Library; Dr. Norm Ridder, Superintendent Springfield R-12 Schools; and Don Wyatt, Editor of the Springfield News-Leader.

Before writing his Pulitzer Prize winning book, Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt spent twenty-seven years teaching in the New York City public school system. His love for and commitment to education and children is evident in his writing, his teaching, his lectures, his life.

Angela’s Ashes, which tells McCourt’s story of being born in Depression-era Brooklyn, moving to the slums of Ireland, and enduring a drunken father, flea-ridden mattresses and dying siblings, was published in 1996. This his first novel, spent 117 weeks on the New York Times Best-Seller List with over two million copies in print in eighteen countries. In 1997 the book won the Pulitzer Prize for best Autobiography, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the ABBY Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Award.

For more event information contact Barb Jones, Director of Special Events for the College at (417) 836-6605 or by e-mail at BarbaraJones@MissouriState.edu.

This event is co-sponsored by the Writers Hall of Fame® of America

To support the COAL Lecture Series, please consider making a gift to the Missouri State University Foundation/COAL Lecture Series. For more information call Marie Murphree, Director of Development for the College, at (417) 836-6740.

Book Schedule and Meeting Information

ccadmin — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 06:31:47 GMT

The College of Arts and Letters is sponsoring a staff book discussion group. Angela Anderson and Marnie Farmer are the group coordinators and they announce the following:

Book Schedule
*September & October’s Selection: Teacher Man by Frank McCourt
*November & December – no meetings
*January & February’s Selection: Childhood: Biography of a Place by Harry Crews
*March & April’s Selection: Dispatches From the Edge by Anderson Cooper
*May & June’s Selections: The Bean Trees and Pigs in Heaven by Barbara Kingsolver

Meeting Information
Place: Anna Lou Blair Room (Craig 321)

Dates & Times:

Thursday 9/28/06 -- 5:15-6:45 First ½ of Teacher Man
Thursday 10/26/06 -- 5:15-6:45 Second ½ of Teacher Man

Wednesday 1/24/07 -- 5:15-6:45 First ½ of Childhood: Biography of a Place
Wednesday 2/21/07 -- 5:15-6:45 Second ½ of Childhood: Biography of a Place

Wednesday 3/28/07 -- 5:15-6:45 First ½ of Dispatches From the Edge
Wednesday 4/25/07 -- 5:15-6:45 Second ½ of Dispatches From the Edge

Wednesday 5/23/07 -- 5:15-6:45 The Bean Trees
Wednesday 6/25/07 -- 5:15-6:45 Pigs In Heaven

Refreshments will be served at each meeting.

Angela's Ashes, by Frank McCourt

Adele Newson-Horst — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 13:35:15 GMT

Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir
Frank McCourt
Simon & Schuster, 1996
Reviewed by Adele Newson-Horst
Dean, College of Arts and Letters

A good memoir tells a credible story that stimulates thought and features characters who endure long after the narrative ends. Frank McCourt himself says in the work that as a child he wondered “what kind of world it is where anyone can sing anyone else’s song.” In other words, he seems to want to suggest that there are experiences in the world that you own and they are worth sharing. Angela’s Ashes demonstrates that this is true and it is simply one of the best books I have read in a long while.

McCourt’s story begins in New York during the early years of the Great Depression, and then moves to Ireland. It ends in New York where the reader is hopeful for a new beginning. His mother, Angela Sheenan, is a devout, long-suffering woman from the South of Ireland. Her husband, Malachy McCourt is a notorious drinker from the North of Ireland with, as Angela’s relatives are fond of observing, “a very odd manner” and “a look of the Presbyterian about him.” McCourt’s narrative relates the difficult childhood he and his siblings faced in both America and Ireland, the moments of family tenderness, the tragedy of loss, and the peculiarities of clashing Irish cultures.

Though it would seem that criticisms of the Catholic Church are in vogue, McCourt’s account of his First Confession and First Communion are reminiscent of the short story “First Confession” by Frank O’Connor. Critiques are possible without the posture of attack. In the end they provide recognition of common experiences and are ultimately as liberating as they are amusing.

Angela, the mother for whom the memoir is named, is a complicated character. She appears as independent as she is dependent; as inspired as she is superstitious, and immanently likeable. By turns, the reader comes to understand that the sacrifices she makes for her family are nothing short of extraordinary. But the book’s real genius rests with the voice of the child Frank.

I’m ten years old and ready to go to St. Joseph’s Church for my Confirmation….

Priests and masters tell us Confirmation means you’re a true soldier of the

Church and that entitles you to die and be a martyr in case we’re invaded by

Protestants or Mohammedans or any other class of a heathen. More dying.

I want to tell them I won’t be able to die for the Faith because I’m already

booked to die for Ireland.

The gift that each character has for storytelling is also noteworthy—particularly the father, Malachy. According to Frank,

He tells me about the old days in Ireland when the English wouldn’t let the

Catholics have schools because they wanted to keep the people ignorant,

that the Catholic children met in hedge schools in the depths of the country

and learned English, Irish, Latin and Greek. The people loved learning. They

loved stories and poetry even if none of this was any good for getting a job.

Maligning the liberal and creative arts is not a new thing, certainly. Yet, interestingly it is actually the liberal and creative arts that help sustain the family during most desperate of times.

Veterans Day Events - Missouri State Tribute to WWII

Julie Johnson — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 13:44:14 GMT

Veterans Day 2006

Missouri State Tribute to

WWII Veterans

November 10th

8:00-10:00 am Veterans Recognition Breakfast in PSU West Ballroom highlights

MSU and WWII veterans in video, with words of welcome from the

University. WWII veteran Ralph Manley will provide short remarks.

Breakfast is free to all veterans and their guests. Please call 836-4825, MSU Transit Center, to reserve seats.

The following activities are all free and open to the public. The Air & Military Museum of the Ozarks will host displays in Plaster Student Union throughout the day and a Blackhawk helicopter will be available for inspection on campus. Videos of Missouri State veterans and WWII veterans will be shown in the PSU Theatre.

10:30-11:00 am Raising of the Colors on the greens just north of Plaster Stadium with participation by Missouri State University employees and students and WWII reenactors, 35th Division, providing color guard, music, and flag escort. Chaplain Hockensmith, US Army (Ret.) will provide a prayer and State Representative Sara Lampe will speak. The dedication of a new Missouri State Veterans Memorial monument and taps will signalize remembrance of the fallen.

11:15-12:00 pm Campus USO Recreates a WWII Canteen featuring students and alumni as performers with participation by the Sugar Bears in Plaster Student Union’s food court near the north entrances to PSU.

12:15-1:30 pm Veterans Day Box Luncheon and Discussion Panel in the Traywick Room, 313 Plaster Student Union will feature veterans from WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Desert Storm, and Operation Iraqi Freedom to discuss their service and take questions from audience participants. Box lunches are provided for audience members.

For the full month of November, Plaster Student Union will feature a third floor photo exhibit "Images of WWII" and Meyer Library will display "Items WWII Troops Carried".

Veterans attending campus events on November 10th are invited to park in Visitors Lot 13, on the corner of National and Monroe, one-half block from Plaster Student Union. For those in need of assistance, a drop-off location and personal assistance can be arranged by calling (417) 836-4825. Parking is also available at the Bear Park North parking garage on Cherry and Holland Streets, a park and ride facility. For further information on any of the events listed or for additional parking information, call the Missouri State Parking Administration Office at (417) 836-4825.

Missouri State is an EO/AA institution.

Mercy, by Lucille Clifton

Jane Hoogestraat — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 17:31:21 GMT

Mercy

Lucille Clifton

BOA Editions, 2004

Reviewed by Jane Hoogestraat

Professor of English

Recently, a former student referred me back to Lucille Clifton. We talked about how her aesthetic is accessible, although not simple, and how because of the former, her work may be underrated. In Mercy, Clifton articulates a social consciousness with a clearly spiritual underpinning—her work is not about easy forgiveness (or forgetfulness), but there is a certain gentleness to poems such as “the river between us,” which reads (in part):

in the river that your father fished

my father was baptized. it was

their hunger that defined them,

one, a man who knew he could

feed himself if it all came down,

the other a man who knew he needed help.

this is about more than color. it is

about how we learn to see ourselves.

it is about geography and memory.

American poetry has not developed a sufficient vocabulary (yet) for talking about the forms that underlie free verse (poetry not written in traditional meter or rhyme.) I do not have a theory to account for Clifton’s use of the lower case or her experiments with syntax and punctuation, except to say that things are more complicated than they seem.

Notably, Mercy contains the fine sequence “september song a poem in 7 days.” In a poem dated the third day, Clifton writes:

the firemen

ascend

like Jacobs ladder

into the mouth of

history

There are more references in Clifton to the various names of God than I had remembered, more surprising turns on the spiritual than I had seen before. My former student referred me even more specifically to Clifton’s long poem “the message from The Ones,” which includes the haunting lines:

the angels have no wings

they come to you wearing

their own clothes

they have learned to love you

and will keep coming

unless you insist on wings

The Gillioz "Theatre Beautiful"

Mark Trevor Smith — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 15:57:03 GMT

The Gillioz “Theatre Beautiful”: Remembering Springfield’s Theatre History 1926-2006
James S. Baumlin, et al.
Moon City Press, 2006
Reviewed by Mark Trevor Smith
Professor of English

The Gillioz “Theatre Beautiful”: Remembering Springfield’s Theatre History 1926-2006 lays out the history of a downtown Springfield jewel within the setting of twentieth-century America. Vaudeville ends, movies begin, and automobiles roll while economic ups and downs, presidential stars, imaginative leaps of business, and sheer eruptions of creativity swirl around all the action.

For the occasion of the grand re-opening of the Gillioz Theater in October 2006, this book was created by Dr. James S. Baumlin, Professor of English at Missouri State University, and his students in English 600, the research course required of graduate students. Dr. Baumlin and the students--Joseph Donohue, Jill Duncan-Cook, Paul W. Johns, April Barbre, Valerie Hunt, Janice Lee, Craig A. Meyer, Michael Peters, Melissa Steele, Adam Thompson, Adam Veile, Emily England, Linden Mueller, Stephanie Ruhe—have crafted a superb combination of scholarship and entertainment.

A vast gallery of words and illustrations offers a panoramic sweep in broad brush and in exquisite detail. (Wait until you read about the fiery dangers of operating early film projectors!) You travel Route 66 as it shares a near-birthday with the Gillioz in the fall of 1926; you shake hands with mastermind M. E. Gillioz himself; you applaud President Harry Truman in cavalcade and future President Ronald Reagan in three movie debuts; you dryly endure Prohibition; you take the wheels of cars, both as a mobile nation and as an enthusiastic teen-ager. And most of all, you buy tickets (40 cents on opening night) to attend the Gillioz Theatre, which embodies the historical shifts that created the texture of our lives today. In cool, dark, majestic surroundings, you see the dancing, you hear the singing, you laugh at the vaudevillians, you thrill to the films. At the culmination of your whirlwind escapade, you rejoice in the renaissance of the Gillioz “Theatre Beautiful” in the year 2006.

Written with verve and precision, energy and exactitude, wit and style, this contribution to our cultural heritage will inform and delight you, whether you take the entire exhilarating journey from first chapter to last or merely dip in now and then for a few refreshing moments. The lists in this review can give you a hint of the book’s scope, but only your personal attention can choose the particular details, perhaps the votes banning Sunday shows or the photograph of the Weaver Brothers and Elviry or the Mighty Wurlitzer’s six ranks of pipes, that will bring this era alive for you.

Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box

Angela Barker — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 04:37:37 GMT

Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts,
and Fragments
Elizabeth Bishop, Ed. Alice Quinn
Farrar, Straus And Giroux, 2006.
Reviewed by Jane Hoogestraat
Professor of English

Elizabeth Bishop ranks as one of the most important twentieth century poets, despite having published only a few more than a hundred poems in her lifetime.  Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box adds a considerable number of poems from Bishop’s unpublished work, including the haunting lines from the title poem:

       Easily through the darkened room
       the juke-box burns; the music falls.
       Starlight, La Conga, all the dance-halls
       in the block of honkey-tonks,
       cavities in our waning moon,
       strung with bottles and blue lights
       and silvered coconuts and conches.

This edition deepens our understanding of Bishop’s biography and of her poetic process, including (for example) sixteen drafts of the villanelle “One Art.” An early draft begins with the prosaic “Mostly, one begins by ‘mislaying’: / keys, reading-glasses, fountain pens / - these are almost too easy to be mentioned,” lines that appear in the finished version as: “Lose something every day. Accept the fluster / of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. / The art of losing isn’t hard to master.” Bishop’s poems, always formal and polished, contain equal measures of lightness and sadness. These qualities are apparent even in drafts that she rejected, and in a poem like “Verdigris,” that the New Yorker rejected in 1950:

       Oh blue-green Seas of Greece, and in between,
       the olive-groves and copper roofs of Rome!
       The catalogues will tell you that they mean
       the time to watch for is when Time grows green.

Teacher Man

Angela Barker — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 05:00:49 GMT

Teacher Man
Frank McCourt
Scribner, 2005
Reviewed by W.D. Blackmon
Department Head, English

** Note: Frank McCourt will be visiting the Missouri State University campus from November 5 through November 7 and will speak to various audiences (including our faculty and students, high school students, and community education and business leaders). Alert your students, other faculty on campus, and your friends and family about this visit. Detailed schedules of the visit can be found at coal.missouristate.edu.

Teacher Man is the third memoir by Pulitzer-Prize-winning writer Frank McCourt. His first memoir, Angela’s Ashes, is still his most famous work, and ‘Tis is his second book. Teacher Man is the most inspiring book I’ve read about teaching. It’s also incredibly funny throughout, although it never reaches the gymnastic levels of despair found in Angela’s Ashes (and it doesn’t need to–teaching high school English for over thirty years in New York City is certainly a difficult-enough life).

If there is to be a fourth memoir by McCourt, I assume it will be something along the line of Rich, Famous Writer Man. I would be eager to read this book, as well; in fact, one of the funniest motifs in Teacher Man details McCourt’s fantasies, as a poor, overworked high school teacher, of the high life he will lead as a rich and famous writer (these fantasies are all the funnier because he doesn’t really begin his writing career until he retires from teaching). These fantasies are also funny because of the horrendous weekly cart load of homework McCourt must deal with (successful creative writing in the face of this workload is absurd). Near the end of his memoir he details the workload he faces at home after teaching five classes every day. He has 175 students, and the weekly essay assignments he makes are 350 words each (assuming he makes only one writing assignment that week). He struggles valiantly to critique, in detailed and meaningful ways, the 43,750 words he had to “read, correct, evaluate and grade on evenings and weekends” every week. Despite his vigilance, though, he often finds himself nodding off, dreaming about the voluptuous starlets he would associate with on a daily basis as a rich and famous writer.

McCourt’s style is to immerse the reader in the immediacy of each ongoing scene, so much so that much of the book is written in present tense (the same approach he used in Angela’s Ashes). Much of the humor (drama and pathos) of the book comes from the monstrous difficulty of teaching high school English students in New York City beginning in 1958 at McKee Vocational and Technical High School on Staten Island. Teachers reading the book will recognize the universality of the challenge he faces in the classroom. Before you can hope to teach students anything, you have to get their attention and “win them over.” McCourt’s initial attempts in this area nearly got him fired his first two days of teaching. The first day he picked up and ate in front of the class (to the class’s delight) a thrown bologna sandwich he intercepted; the second day he answered a student’s question, “So, mister, did you go out with girls in Ireland?” with “No, dammit. Sheep. We went out with sheep.” His later attempts getting students excited about reading, writing, and learning were much more sophisticated and successful. He knew his students’ best writing in his early years consisted exclusively of the forged excuse notes they wrote to him, notes supposedly written by their parents. He had one of his classes totally engaged in the writing process by giving the assignment to write excuse notes from “history” (from Adam or Eve to God, for example). At New York’s most prestigious public high school, Stuyvesant High School, he had his academic all-star creative writing students ecstatically reading dramatically from cookbooks to various colorful forms of musical accompaniment (teaching them vocabulary, history, sheer delight).

Obviously, I could go on and on about this book. It’s a great book (especially for teachers), and, as my seven-year old son would say, “There’s no boring part to it.”

On Beauty

Angela Barker — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 04:25:46 GMT

On Beauty
Zadie Smith
Penguin, 2005
Reviewed by Clark Closser
Professor of English

I’ve been asked to add my note on the novel it seems everyone has already read or is reading, Zadie Smith’s On Beauty. A review that likened Smith’s style to Nabokov’s led me to the book. I failed to find anything like the lapidary prose of VN, but Smith is a talented and occasionally brilliant writer. She has a gift for vivid dialogue and well-observed sensory detail. More impressive is her successful and humorous handling of a large cast of diverse characters depicted through an accomplished and varied narrative voice.

The hapless ‘hero’ is Howard Belsey, a 57-year-old Englishman teaching at a New England university. Opinionated, vain, adulterous, alcoholic, and pretentiously theoretical in his approach to art—his life’s work is debunking Rembrandt—Howard nevertheless invites compassion as his marriage and his career fall apart, and he is a swell fellow compared to his colleagues in this groves of academe setting. The actual protagonist is Howard’s African-American wife, Kiki, a monumental woman who loves Howard and their three nearly-adult children—desperately intellectual Nora, Christian Jerome, hip-hop Levi—in spite of themselves.

Kiki’s relationship with the mother of Howard’s nemesis, a visiting scholar also English but black and conservative, is one of the more compelling moments in the book and the occasion for a clever homage to an E.M. Forster novel. (Smith puts in so many clues, it’s like Python’s wink-wink, nudge, nudge.) Smith liberally scatters in other literary allusions and quotations, some acknowledged some not—from Keats, Zola, Sartre, Eliot (daughter Nora’s favorite poet), and many more. The references are annoying but fun, like an inside joke.

Smith doesn’t spell it out, but she seems to be coming down more on the side of life and experience as opposed to the abstract and theoretical. (She has the jargon down: Belsey invites his students to “interrogate” the “mytheme.”) But there’s not much beauty to On Beauty, aside from the author’s photograph on the dust jacket. Smith’s good looks, youth, and somewhat exotic origin (born in London in 1975 to a Jamaican mother and an English father) helped bring attention to her work when her debut novel, White Teeth, appeared in 2000. I’m told White Teeth is a better novel than On Beauty, and I may get around to it. But I’m in no hurry. For all its strengths, On Beauty is finally disappointing. More of the vital Kiki and less of the disintegrating Howard might have helped.

The Cuban Prospect

Adele Newson-Horst — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 04:01:31 GMT

The Cuban Prospect

Brian Shawver

The Overlook Press,

Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc. 2003

Reviewed by Adele Newson-Horst

Dean, College of Arts and Letters

To paraphrase author Flannery O’Connor, a story reveals, in a dramatic way, the mystery of personality—of what some people will do and do in spite of everything. Brian Shawver’s first novel The Cuban Prospect not only engages this notion of story but also links it to the work one performs in the world. The effect of which totally captures the reader’s imagination.

Dennis Birch, the narrator, is a failed baseball player on the Latin American circuit. He is called by "the organization" to assist the left handed pitcher Ramon Sargasta in his defection from Cuba. Sargasta is alternately depicted as genius, blessed, and larger than life. These attributes, the narrator would have the reader understand, enables the celebrated ball players deportment, actions, and choices in life. Totally, self-absorbed, Sargasta is able to gain legitimacy in his questionable actions and choices because of his gift.

Sargasta is everything the narrator would have liked to be. In fact, Birch’s great moment came, not during a baseball game, but rather at a kind of 3rd world 4-H Fair in San Juan. On the other hand, Sargasta’s baseball greatness inspires fans to own and reconstruct stories of his performances on the field. Birch continuously contemplates Sargasta’s story of defection and his own place in it. In other words, he subordinates himself to the genius of Ramon Sargasta.

Shawver connects personality to ability in this beautifully crafted work to make a larger statement that uses baseball as a metaphor for life—in spite of the narrator's vigorous arguments that the game of baseball is too complicated to serve as a metaphor for life. Shawver’s genius rests with his ability to create compelling characters and to weave a definite sense of place into the story of the journey of a Cuban ballplayer’s odyssey into the major American league.

First Meeting - 9/25*, 12:15 p.m., PSU 400

ccadmin — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 17:13:36 GMT

Reading Masters of Literature

Suggested novels:

The Literary Club, an initiative of the Modern and Classical Languages Department, meets the last Monday of each month from 12:15 - 1:15 p.m. in the Union Club (PSU 400). Contact Alessandra Pires for more information.

* date updated 9/18/2006.