This isn’t a book or movie review, but I just wrote it out as a facebook post and felt like I dunno, I needed to put it somewhere else too.
I happened to be looking at the Reed magazine online and found, to my utter dismay, an obituary for one of my favorite professors. I wrote a little bit about Roger Porter in Reading Together, and had been meaning to send him a copy with a note of thanks, because his class on autobiography turned out to be so profoundly influential in my life. He was the one who encouraged me to submit an abstract to a conference on life writing based on one of my undergraduate thesis chapters, and it got accepted, and Reed gave me travel funding, and baby undergraduate me flew to Hong Kong (!!) and gave a conference paper. And a journal editor was in the audience and invited me to submit it and that was my first publication. I’m only slightly consoled by the vague certainty that I wrote to him at some point while I was still teaching at Monmouth and told him something along those lines, and speculated that perhaps the best evidence is that I have ended up teaching so many of the books that I first read in that class (Nabokov’s Speak Memory, Perec’s W, or the Memory of Childhood, Art Spiegelman’s Maus). But I wish I could have told him how it’s still true 10 years later, and even more so.
I was also remembering his class recently because it met in the morning, at 10:30 I think, which was early enough that on September 11, 2001 classes hadn’t yet been cancelled for the entire day because the news was still too fresh, and nobody really understood what was going on. We walked in and he asked us whether we still wanted to have class (and then had to explain to some bewildered people why he was asking), and we all decided that we did, and he reflected that perhaps it was a comfort in such times to continue our work. I’ve since been in that same position as a professor a few times, and have been grateful to have had his good example to draw on of the classroom as humble offering of community.
I know that a lot of people who knew him far better than I did are writing tributes (the one in the Reed Magazine by Lena Lencek is lovely). I didn’t even know what a foodie he was, though I came to realize later that it was something he was especially known for. But I admired and appreciated him so much. He was so warm and funny and kind. And I think he genuinely loved teaching — certainly, he loved literature, and his appreciation for it was infectious. I feel so lucky to have gotten to learn from him.
Kasia Reads 