The motivation for bringing out my recent books is clear and has absolutely nothing to do with the marketplace: it's to make my archives, particularly the print archive at the Univ. of Oregon, easier to browse. I am thinking of 50 years from now, after I'm long gone, and there's a grad student in literature shelf-shopping for something new to write about, for work that hasn't been analyzed to death. I am offering, like decorative flies to a trout, as many options as possible.
If you laugh at the absurdity of this, consider this: something similar has already happened to me three times in my career. If the work is available, it can be found, no matter how much dust has settled over it. Sirc has written eloquently about "discovering" an essay of mine over 30 years after it had been published. His story gives me goose bumps, still, because this is the connection, the understanding, that gives me the most satisfaction.
"Ah, the Happenings. All dressed up in ice cream and candlelight, they had nowhere to go in Composition. Before we knew it, our goal went from participants in the electric drama reengaging their hearts to having students "appreciate the varieties and excellences of academic discourse" (Lindemann 311). Deemer gave up and went off to write plays."
(I love that line!)
"Macrorie's theory, Coles's classroom work, Deemer's and Lutz's materials . . . reading them is like sitting in a circle and listening to a patient elder gently guide us on the vision-quest, using parables and jokes and truths. It's so retro, it's become avant-garde."
"Charles Deemer's (un)original allegory has been a pleasure to cover. I salute the next remake of English Composition as a Happening, on and on through n-dimensions. A great era of the legend continues."
If you laugh at the absurdity of this, consider this: something similar has already happened to me three times in my career. If the work is available, it can be found, no matter how much dust has settled over it. Sirc has written eloquently about "discovering" an essay of mine over 30 years after it had been published. His story gives me goose bumps, still, because this is the connection, the understanding, that gives me the most satisfaction.
From English Composition as a Happening by Geoffrey Sirc:"One of the Composition-specific articles in this genre of radical sixties pedagogy, one which I have never been able to forget since the day I first read it in the dimly-lit stacks of my university's library, was written in 1967 by a young graduate teaching assistant at the University of Oregon, Charles Deemer. His article, "English Composition as a Happening," did what many of these articles did, but did it in a formally compelling way (the article is a collage of brief sound-bite snippets, alternating between Deemer's own poetic reflections-as-manifesto and quotations from Sontag, McLuhan, Dewey, Goodman, and others), and Deemer's ideas seemed to catalyze my own discontent with what passed for Composition during the 1980s."More from Sirc:
"Ah, the Happenings. All dressed up in ice cream and candlelight, they had nowhere to go in Composition. Before we knew it, our goal went from participants in the electric drama reengaging their hearts to having students "appreciate the varieties and excellences of academic discourse" (Lindemann 311). Deemer gave up and went off to write plays."
(I love that line!)
"Macrorie's theory, Coles's classroom work, Deemer's and Lutz's materials . . . reading them is like sitting in a circle and listening to a patient elder gently guide us on the vision-quest, using parables and jokes and truths. It's so retro, it's become avant-garde."
"Charles Deemer's (un)original allegory has been a pleasure to cover. I salute the next remake of English Composition as a Happening, on and on through n-dimensions. A great era of the legend continues."
