Yesterday got a kick out of your rant about silence, Sartre, and loud rock music in Booking Pleasures. (p 81)
Your comments on Scully & Jobs are very timely too.
Thanks
Mike

Well, let me preface this statement by saying that when I came to OU, back in 89, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to go into the Creative Writing program, and I wanted to be a writer. In truth, I already was a writer, but it takes some polishing and a good kick in the behind before you can really put a capital W in front of the riter, if you know what I mean.

Uncle Jack was the kick.

After a few go-arounds with the obnoxious reality that it’d be hard to get into any creative writing fiction classes, since graduating seniors with ABD business degrees invariably muscled into that they thought would be an easy class in their last term, booting us underclassmen to the curb, I eventually tried applying in person. One instructor sniffed that she didn’t accept genre writing (said as though we were discussing a noxious skin malady) so I tried Uncle Jack. And he hemmed and hawed and told me that I still had plenty of time to take the course, but let me in, anyway, once I showed I wasn’t just trying to get a gimmie. I wanted this like Christmas, and maybe it showed.

So he made a show of begrudgingly letting me in the following quarter. It was like being given the key to a hot rod filled with booze, bombs, and hookers. At least, the entrance to the kingdom was mine!

But there was a price to be paid, and he took it from me.

Uncle Jack is one of those walking contradictions that shudder-stomp their way across campus, leaving questions and statements in their wake in equal measure. He did not suffer nonsense, but yet joyously spread it about. His playful attitude masked stern countenance that could cut steel, but yet still inspire. In retrospect I think he let the ABDs slide into C position, but those of us who wanted more got a real poking when we tried to rest on those laurels.

I will never forget the time he informed me, in a meeting in his office, that my counters to his claims about the rough work I’d turned in were “bullshit” (said as only he can say it)

“Jim, you’re not trying to learn anything. You’re trying to see what you can get away with.” He said, and he was right. I knew I had to smarten up my act and get serious. I may not have complied right then and there, but the turning of the watch to the correct time started from that point on.

The best advice Uncle Jack ever gave me was that you have to learn the rules before you can break them. The other good bit was that stereotypes are what they are because they’re true, but sometimes they’re a little too true, and should be tweaked with in order to become both less and yet more believable.

Would he like my current work? Probably not. He would say it’s too cartoony for his liking. And maybe it is.

But Uncle Jack gave me the push off the cliff of my Sophomore complacency, forcing me to craft wings on the way down. If I soar a little higher today it’s because of that afternoon in his office, and those sessions around the table in Ellis hall.

Thanks, Unc. “We’ll meet again.”

As a novice book collector, I’d love to hear more about his acquisitions.