Ransom Center Magazine

Harry Ransom Center

Billy Collins virtual poetry reading and discussion set for Dec. 3

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Billy Collins is one of the most widely read poets in America, and his witty, conversational poems illuminate the poignant details that often go unnoticed in everyday life. Within his archive at the Ransom Center are notebooks, drafts, proofs, and other documents relating to his poetry, essays, and other published works. His archive includes travel diaries, datebooks, sketchbooks and drawings, childhood writings, teaching materials, correspondence, and other materials that document his life ad career.

On Dec. 3, 2020, tune in to hear this celebrated poet read from his new collection, Whale Day (Penguin Random House, 2020), followed by a discussion with Ransom Center Director Stephen Enniss. U.S. Poet Laureate from 2001 to 2003, Collins is the author of 12 collections of poetry, including The Rain in Portugal, Aimless Love, Horoscopes for the Dead, Ballistics, The Trouble with Poetry, Nine Horses, and Sailing Alone Around the Room, among others. His new collection brings together more than 50 poems that highlight his deft mixing of the playful and the serious. Collins has said, “It is a good idea to get poetry off the shelves and into public life, ” and his “Poetry Broadcasts” on social media have infused poetry into the daily life of many during the COVID-19 pandemic, exemplifying the accessibility of his poetry. Please RSVP here for he program that will stream live on Facebook and YouTube.

Billy Collins, Whale Day and Other Poems (Penguin Random House, 2020).

 

Me First

—Poem excerpted from Whale Day and Other Poems (Penguin Random House, 2020) © Billy Collins.

We often fly in the sky together,
and we’re always okay—there’s our luggage now
waiting for us on the carousel.

And we drive lots of places
in all manner of hectic traffic,
yet here we are pulling in the driveway again.

So many opportunities to die together,
but no meteor has hit our house,
no tornado has lifted us into its funnel.

The odds say then that one of us will go
before the other, like heading off
into a heavy snow storm, leaving

the other one behind to stand in the kitchen
or lie on the bed under the fan.
So why not let me, the older one, go first?

I don’t want to see you everywhere
as I wait for the snow to stop,
before setting out with a crooked stick, calling your name.

© Billy Collins

EXCERPT: Famous Writers I Have Known by James Magnuson

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by JAMES MAGNUSON

The following is excerpted from the book, Famous Writers I Have Known (W. W. Norton & Company, 2014), by author James Magnuson. 

A small time con-man is posing as a famously reclusive writer named V. S. Mohle. He manages to get hired by a well-funded graduate writing program at a large university in Texas. Sound familiar? He has never written anything or been in a college classroom. Here’s what happens when he teaches his first class:   [Read more…] about EXCERPT: Famous Writers I Have Known by James Magnuson

JAMES MAGNUSON: A literary Life & Legacy

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by GREGORY CURTIS

The Ransom Center recently acquired the archive of a vitally important literary figure. James Magnuson is a widely respected author. He has published nine well-received novels, won awards while writing for the movies and for television, and has seen so many of his plays produced that he has lost count. 

Read an excerpt from his 2014 book, Famous Writers I Have Known (W. W. Norton & Company).

 But in addition to his writing, Magnuson has held a position that both augments the importance of his archive and ensures his place in any future history of contemporary American literature. He has recently retired after 23 years as director of the James A. Michener Center for Writers at The University of Texas at Austin. During Magnuson’s long tenure he guided the Michener Center to prominence as one of a small handful of leading writing programs in the United States. The Michener Center’s importance in American literature during the last quarter of the twentieth century cannot be overstated.  

In addition to his own notes, novels, and plays—and his novels to come—Magnuson’s archives also include his notes, letters, and memorabilia that show him to be a man at the center of a literary network that extended from Austin and his office at the Michener Center to the entire English-speaking world. His archive will be essential to anyone writing about literature during the first two decades of the 21st century.

It all began, as so often things do, with money. James Michener sold so many books during his long writing career that he single-handedly kept his publisher, Random House, afloat for more than 20 years. Popular as his books were, Michener got little respect or even mention from serious critics of his era. He mixed history in with his fiction so that his readers could enjoy his stories while feeling that they were learning something at the same time. Late in his career he was lured to Texas where he wrote a book called—predictably; Michener wasn’t much with titles—Texas. But Michener remained living in Austin until his death in 1997. He donated his collection of art to the University of Texas, now housed in the Blanton Museum on campus. And he began to talk to important people in the university administration and in the English department about endowing a writing program.  

James Magnuson with James Michener in Michener’s backyard in Austin, circa 1992.

Jim Magnuson, 42 years old, married with two young children, broke, and living in rural Mississippi, managed to snag a job teaching writing at the university. He arrived in Austin in 1985, never having been in Texas before. Two years later an old friend contacted him out of the blue and offered him a job writing for the nighttime television soap opera Knots Landing, which had begun floundering in the ratings. Magnuson moved with his family to Los Angeles where he quickly became the workhorse of the writing staff. “I had one mantra in the story meetings,” he said later. “It gets worse. No matter how bad things are at the start of a show, it gets worse.”  

Meanwhile, in Texas things started small. Michener donated $2 million to the university for a writing center. It offered lectures and attracted a few literary luminaries to the campus. Novelist Rolando Hinojosa-Smith was the director. A little while later, while the Magnusons were still in Los Angeles, Michener added another $18 million and under Joe Kruppa of the English department and David Cohen of theater and dance, plans were begun to create the Center’s own MFA program.  

A photograph of James Magnuson at the age of 27.

The Magnusons returned to Austin in 1992 where he participated in meetings with Michener and various important figures on the campus about what the Michener Center would be. Michener envisioned an interdisciplinary program that would teach writing fiction, poetry, plays, and screenplays. This was a revolutionary approach at the time and is still unusual. In most programs students work only in one discipline. Magnuson, however, had a varied background. After growing up in Wisconsin and graduating from the University of Wisconsin, he began writing fiction. But after moving east, he had also written plays while on a fellowship at Princeton and spent several years in New York doing street theatre in Harlem. And he had current experience in television and several of his novels were being developed as films.  

Finally William Livingston, university vice president and dean of Graduate Studies, called Magnuson into his office and offered him the job as director of what eventually became called the Michener Center for Writers. Magnuson hadn’t expected this and was flabbergasted. “Bill,” Magnuson finally blurted out, “I’m working for Hollywood money now. You can’t afford me.” Magnuson was halfway joking, but he held his ground and six weeks later Livingston returned with a sweeter offer and Magnuson accepted.  

Magnuson horsing around with fellow author Denis Johnson. As director of UT’s Michener Center for Writers, Magnuson connected literary figures from around the world.

Magnuson had never thought of himself as an administrator, but now he had become one. And he had to create the process of selecting students, recruit a faculty, and work out the details of the program that the students would follow once they were in Austin. First of all he began inviting notable writers to come to Austin to work with students, sometimes for as long as a semester. Among many others, these included J. M. Coetzee, Colm Toibin, Marie Howe, Richard Ford, Geoff Dyer, and many others. Each person admitted to the program—they are known as Michener fellows—would get a large enough stipend to live on during their three years in Austin. The fellows would work together in seminars and meet privately from time to time with individual faculty. And during their time in Austin the fellows are expected to complete a novel or a play or a screenplay or a cycle of poems. The list of publications, prizes, and awards earned by Michener fellows is too long to list here but they are all available on the Center’s website. The Center began meeting in the Perry-Castañeda library, but in 1997, J. Frank Dobie’s house on Waller Creek right across the street from the law school became available. The university raised the money to buy it and the offices and meeting rooms of the Center have been there ever since. 

Magnuson’s archive will be essential to anyone writing about literature in English during the first two decades of the 21st century.

W. S. Merwin with James Magnuson at the Harry Ransom Center.

Magnuson was careful to have an agreement that allowed him time for his own writing. All during his time as director he spent most mornings at a desk working longhand on legal pads. On Saturdays and Sundays he went to Dobie’s house for long hours of work alone. Still, as he approached 75, he began to worry about finishing the books he still had in mind and realized that the only way he could do so would be to resign from the Michener Center, now under the direction of Bret Anthony Johnston. 

In addition to his own notes, novels, and plays—and his novels to come—Magnuson’s archives also include his notes, letters, and memorabilia that show him to be a man at the center of a literary network that extended from Austin and his office at the Michener Center to the entire English-speaking world. Just as the Center’s Norman Mailer archive, with its abundance of letters and artifacts, is essential to anyone working on the history of American literature from the 1940s to the 1980s, Magnuson’s archive will be essential to anyone writing about literature in English during the first two decades of the 21st century. Magnuson was a connector—not the only connector but an important one—of literary figures around the world. He continues to leave a legacy that will never be erased. 

ABOUT GREGORY CURTIS

Curtis is the editor of the Ransom Center Magazine. 

IN FLIGHT: Don DeLillo’s The Silence

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by HENRY VEGGIAN
As hard as it may be to do, try to ignore the warning. That’s what I tell myself, but it’s still there, on the inside flap of the dust jacket. It has the tone of a press release, but it sounds more like the car horn you hear before the crash. “Don DeLillo completed this novel just weeks before the advent of COVID-19.”

My first reaction was an eye roll. Here we go again, I thought, the old story about DeLillo the prophet/artist who foresaw 9-11, who foresaw the Great Recession, who gives us a language in advance of the event. My Italian brain plucked a phrase from another life —“la vecchia lagna”—the boring old complaint.

Learn more about Don DeLillo’s new novel, The Silence ( Scribner, 2020).

I put the book down. When I pick it up again two days later, the sentence is still there, white ink against a pixelated background. Now, it is “advent” that catches my attention. The Roman Catholic brain kicks in. The Ambrosian Rite, prior to Christmas, followed (chased?) by another part of my brain that snuck away from Bible Study to read the adventures of Jules Verne, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Jack London. The “advent of COVID-19.” Is it a pandemic ritual? An expedition that ends with discovery of a new archipelago?

Our minds wander. It’s natural—we think in networks. I sit again with the book. My attention doesn’t wander to my phone this time. I continue reading. I have to—at some point, a writer must write. But that sentence hangs around the house, as things tend to do these days. Assuming we follow public health counsel, we don’t get out much. Distractions nonetheless pursue us. At the start—the advent—the old books took on new urgency.

Courtesy Simon & Schuster

I never would have imagined picking up Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (1722) again. But I did, and when I read the opening lines where the narrator receives news from across the Channel (the plague is loose in Holland!), I think of my aunt’s February phone calls from Italy. Defoe probably read the news on an Augustan broadsheet or gazette. My aunt called from a landline. She still sends telegrams around the holidays. Print, telegraphy, Alexander Graham Bell. I look at my smart phone. I saw the first news reports from China on New Year’s Day, ominous words about a new disease on the BBC website, while riding a train.

Maybe it isn’t a warning. It’s an invitation. How could the pandemic not be in play as I read The Silence?

Should I just admit that DeLillo has uncanny prescience about things?

The next sentence of the dust jacket pivots. If the first implied “Try not to read this as a book about the current pandemic,” or even “he saw it coming!”, the next sentence alludes to a “different catastrophe.” Should I ask how it is “different,” or simply admire the poetic “catastrophe?” Who wrote this jacket copy? The back-flap names an “Office…” and the copyright page names a designer. Who is the author?

These lattices of associations, the techno-memory and the pesky voices of reluctance would converge as I finally began to read the novel. I will try to explain.

The biographical blurb in the back matter counts The Silence as Don DeLillo’s 17th novel, but that depends on how you count the books. Should Pafko at the Wall, published separately from Underworld as well as part of the latter, be considered a stand-alone work? What of the elegant short book The Body Artist? It’s a novella, really, a long story. One might also make a similar case for the dense Point Omega¸ as well as for The Silence, which reads quickly. There is also the disavowed book that few discuss.

These are questions for scholars working through the DeLillo papers at the Ransom Center to answer, I suppose, but since I am in the biographical blurb, I am struck by the continued relevance of his work. His first publications date from the early 1960s. His first novel appeared when I was born, in 1971. I’ve been trapped at home for nearly a year; I can barely muster the focus to sit and read a short book, and this guy has been writing fiction, stories, essays, screenplays, pamphlets, and plays for over 60 years.

The Silence begins on a trans-Atlantic flight. The skies have been mostly empty for eight months. The airports are even less crowded. There are airplanes everywhere in DeLillo’s works. It’s how we used to travel.

That first novel, Americana, ends with a traumatized protagonist leaving Dallas on a plane. Players (1977) begins with a character dissecting an in-flight film. In White Noise (1984), a plane that is briefly in free-fall provides one of the funnier scenes in one of the funniest novels in American literature. In Underworld, Klara Sax makes art from airplanes. Valparaiso (1999) is an entire play about airports and airplanes and air travel. Perhaps only an artist born before commercial air travel could find so much wonder in air travel, when the world still marveled at Lindbergh’s trans-Atlantic flight (I admit I had to look up the year on my phone).

Listen to author Don DeLillo’s talk about his novel, Underworld, in this 1997 interview with NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross.

Don DeLillo was born this week, on November 20th, 1936, in New York City. The Silence is set in contemporary New York, two years removed. The trans-Atlantic flight takes place on the Saturday prior to Super Bowl Sunday in the year 2022, where, as we later learn, the Seattle Seahawks are scheduled to play the Tennessee Titans.

The first characters we meet are Tessa Barrens and Jim Kripps, a wife and husband. She is a poet and he is an insurance adjuster. Tessa writes in a notebook while Jim reads from a screen on the seat back in front of him. She ignores him, or so it seems, only to interject when she remembers something relevant to an earlier point. Near the end of chapter one, she reflects on how she remembered a name that had earlier escaped her, and she did so now “without digital assistance.” Jim is fixed upon the screen, offering a running commentary on the digital pixels, temperature readings, and estimated arrival times. Their plane begins to fall from the sky.

Jim’s a bit neurotic, Tessa a bit distracted. The dialogue is clipped, ironic. We will meet three other characters in the next chapter, and for most of part one of the novel they will comprise a sort of greatest hits of DeLillo’s characters in their most ironic and disaffected forms. There is Max the bettor. Diane is a retired physics professor, and Martin, a teacher who is Diane’s former student and friend. Wry, intelligent, displaced, they gather to watch the Super Bowl in the East Side apartment and wait for Jim and Tessa to come over.

I can’t help but notice that, like these familiar characters, the great themes are also present from DeLillo’s other writings. Crowds, sports, science, medications, and cinema are all here, a script from which the characters project a voice-over-like narration to our habits. They notice the minutiae and cliché, turn it all inside out.

If you ever wanted DeLillo to “put it all together,” this is the novel for you. Sort of.

And that is because something has changed. It is not only because the plot involves the collapse of all digital and broadcast technologies, as well as anything else that requires electricity.

Diane is the most perceptive of the characters in this regard. Her observations are anthropological, her detachment increasingly detached from everyone’s usual detachment. Their irony troubles Diane after the event. Her partner Max’s incessant commentary on the Super Bowl becomes “pretentious nonsense.” She notices that the people around her have forgotten how to communicate. Near the end of part one, while observing the increasingly strange behavior of the men in the apartment, she observes the “wrong kind of normal.” If there is a soul to guide us through the strange, gradual apocalypse, it is Diane.

If you noticed it at the start, you got used to it while reading. Yes, there is a part 2 of The Silence. Things break down even further. Even the chapter numbers vanish.

But if you noticed it early, your eyes adjusted. If you didn’t notice it, you are probably as old as I am.

It’s the type. I don’t mean the “font,” though that is what it is. The letters on the page—they were typed. As in “They were typed on a mechanical typewriter.” Is the font in the book a facsimile? Probably. But that isn’t the point. The implication is what matters.

At the end of Orwell’s 1984, we learn that the secret diary of Winston Smith is considered a historical relic, evidence that has survived the totalitarian horror of Big Brother. It is meant to give us hope, that no matter what happens, the terror will pass.

The “typescript” look of The Silence suggests a similar optimism. The older mechanical technologies won’t fail us when the screens stop emitting signals. Tessa will write in her notebook. Memory will survive. We won’t need our phones. Life, expression, art will continue after the crash.

But for who?

The Harry Ransom Center houses the papers of author Don DeLillo (American, b. 1936). The collection contains notes, research materials, typescript drafts, editorial correspondence, reviews, and production materials for DeLillo’s novels, plays, screenplays, and short works of fiction and non-fiction. Learn more

ABOUT HENRY VEGGIAN
Henry Veggian teaches in the Department of English at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of Understanding Don DeLillo (2014).

75 YEARS HENCE: Arthur Miller adapts Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice for radio

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by JANINE BARCHAS
This essay is part of a slow research series, What is Research? Learn about the series and click here to add your voice to the conversation.  [Read more…] about 75 YEARS HENCE: Arthur Miller adapts Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice for radio

JANINE BARCHAS
Janine Barchas is the Louann and Larry Temple Centennial Professor of English Literature at The University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of The Lost Books of Jane Austen, which led to an exhibition entitled “Austen in Austin” at the Ransom Center in the fall of 2019. She has also contributed to The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Lit Hub.

ABOUT JENNIFER M. WILKS

Jennifer M. Wilks is an associate professor of English, African and African Diaspora Studies, and comparative literature at The University of Texas at Austin, where she directs the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies. Her cultural history of Carmen adaptations set in African diasporic contexts is under contract with Oxford University Press.

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