http://calitreview.com/36 Book reviews, essays, and author interviews. Sat, 20 Mar 2010 23:56:18 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.1 hourly 1 http://calitreview.com/36/comment-page-1#comment-469 Sam Bluefarb Mon, 28 May 2007 01:02:10 +0000 http://calitreview.com//essays/a-long-day%e2%80%99s-day-with-james-dickey/#comment-469 Dear Jascha Kessler: In an attempt to sift through some of the silt of the past--old (late) professors, college pals--I ran across yr essay on James Dickey. What initially gave me pause was an item in the search-engine which mentions the late Majl Ewing, head of the English Dept. when I was a student at UCLA,'48-'51 and a student of Ewing's--his two semester course in English prose. I was sorry to see the invidious comparison between Ewing and professional poet James Dicky. Yes, Ewing made no great breakthrough to scholarship or esthetics, but in that respect, he was no different from 1000s of other academics. I knew Ewing as a student, so my biased view of him is perhaps not less so than yours. When I had to interrupt my studies to go into the Long Beach vets hospital for a service-connected condition, he was the soul of compassion, and let me take my senior semester final exam in his office before exam time. To me, he was always the courtly, old-line gentleman--as opposed to the shrill radical ideologues of today's academy. My encomium and (belated) eulogy to him appeared in the Daily Bruin some years ago. I have a copy somewhere, but have mislaid it. But if Bruin's archives are on disk, as I suspect they are, if interested, you should have no problem in locating it. I also mention him in my self-published memoir "Odyssey: 1945-70" which, unlike my other work, was never trade published, tho I may have sent a copy to UCLA's Grad. Library. Since this format doesn't allow me to paste a passage, I'll copy it out--if not prevented by the limitations of this e-mail format: "Once, years after I graduated from UCLA, I dropped in to visit one of my old professors, the late Majl Ewing....I confessed to feeling twinges of guilt at having elected to take my Master's degree at...USC. [His] response--he had an elegant Southern way about him--was gracious. 'Please do not feel at all guilty, Mr. Bluefarb. Our loyalt[ies] should not so much be to our schools, but to our profession.'" --Sam Bluefarb Dear Jascha Kessler: In an attempt to sift through some of the silt of the past–old (late) professors, college pals–I ran across yr essay on James Dickey. What initially gave me pause was an item in the search-engine which mentions the late Majl Ewing, head of the English Dept. when I was a student at UCLA,’48-’51 and a student of Ewing’s–his two semester course in English prose. I was sorry to see the invidious comparison between Ewing and professional poet James Dicky. Yes, Ewing made no great breakthrough to scholarship or esthetics, but in that respect, he was no different from 1000s of other academics. I knew Ewing as a student, so my biased view of him is perhaps not less so than yours. When I had to interrupt my studies to go into the Long Beach vets hospital for a service-connected condition, he was the soul of compassion, and let me take my senior semester final exam in his office before exam time. To me, he was always the courtly, old-line gentleman–as opposed to the shrill radical ideologues of today’s academy. My encomium and (belated) eulogy to him appeared in the Daily Bruin some years ago. I have a copy somewhere, but have mislaid it. But if Bruin’s archives are on disk, as I suspect they are, if interested, you should have no problem in locating it. I also mention him in my self-published memoir “Odyssey: 1945-70″ which, unlike my other work, was never trade published, tho I may have sent a copy to UCLA’s Grad. Library. Since this format doesn’t allow me to paste a passage, I’ll copy it out–if not prevented by the limitations of this e-mail format: “Once, years after I graduated from UCLA, I dropped in to visit one of my old professors, the late Majl Ewing….I confessed to feeling twinges of guilt at having elected to take my Master’s degree at…USC. [His] response–he had an elegant Southern way about him–was gracious. ‘Please do not feel at all guilty, Mr. Bluefarb. Our loyalt[ies] should not so much be to our schools, but to our profession.’”
–Sam Bluefarb

]]>