I'll take Jeff Bridges
Don’t miss Stanley Fish on True Grit in today’s NYT.
In 1971, I talked my way into a graduate seminar that Stanley Fish was teaching at the Linguistic Institute, a summer program that hit Buffalo that year. This was a very different kind of traveling circus, one where Noam Chomsky and other luminaries were the ringleaders. I was an undergraduate English major at University of Buffalo, surely the most interesting English department in the country at the time, home of Leslie Fiedler, John Barth, Diane Christian, a place where you could take a semester to read King Lear with Lacanian analyst Stuart Schneiderman and have a really good time.
Stanley Fish was already well known in lit crit circles; he was at Berkeley, which was the second most interesting English department in the country. (Ok, department partisans, duke it out. And I don’t mean Duke!)
I had a nervous time in his seminar, struggling to keep up. But at the end, I must have written a hell of a paper, because he agreed to meet with me to talk about graduate school. Or maybe I was the mini-skirt du jour. I’d like to think it was the paper.
Fish was encouraging, but immediately dismissed my plan to stay in Buffalo. “You need to get the hell out of here,” he said, waving a hand towards the trailers that housed the overcrowded Buffalo English department. On a ripped off piece of paper, he wrote a list of graduate schools; I don’t think I’d heard of any of them other than Berkeley. What does a girl from Jackson Heights and an orthodox Jewish family know about UC Santa Cruz? Still, I had the balls to ask for his recommendation.
My then boyfriend was applying to MD PhD programs and we were hoping to end up in the same city. Couldn’t make it happen….the boyfriend decided to stay in New York. So when University of Virginia sent a lovely letter pronouncing me a “Cabell and Seay Fellow,” whatever what was, I said yes. I studied Charlottesville on the map and figured that we could make it work.
I went to U Va, sight unseen. In hindsight, I’m not sure that Charlottesville was much less of a culture shock than Santa Cruz would have been. I had a McGovern-Shriver bumper sticker on my bike and got a lot of nasty car honks in that summer of the Watergate hearings. For my first rock concert in C’ville, The Kinks! I chose an outfit that looked just fine in Buffalo for The Grateful Dead. Turns out it was Homecoming Weekend and the women were in long dresses, guys in jackets.
I still cherish my U Va connection, but I was also happy to come back after one year and yes, reader, marry him.
So when I see great work from Stanley Fish, like today’s review of True Grit, I feel oddly proprietary, mostly because I marvel at my own teenage willingness to take risks, recognize good advice, and act on it.
All things considered, I don’t think I squandered Fish’s recommendation or that he’d be disappointed at how things turned out for me.