i do not want a wide reading audience even if…

Richard Halls (1938) US government travel poster

Patricia Nelson Limerick, “Dancing with Professors: The Trouble with Academic Prose” in The New York Times Book Review, 31 October 1993, p. 3—

“We must remember,” he [a classics professor] declared, “that professors are the ones nobody wanted to dance with in high school.” This is an insight that lights up the universe—or at least the university. It is a proposition that every entering freshman should be told, and it is certainly a proposition that helps to explain the problem of [unintelligible] academic writing. What one sees in professors, repeatedly, is exactly the manner that anyone would adopt after a couple of sad evenings side-lined under the crepe-paper streamers in the gym, sitting on a folding chair while everyone else danced. Dignity, for professors, perches pre-cariously on how well they can convey this message: “I am immersed in some very important thoughts, which unsophisticated people could not even begin to understand. Thus, I would not want to dance, even if one of you unsophisticated people were to ask me.” Think of this, then, the next time you look at an unintelligible academic text. “I would not want the attention of a wide reading audience, even if a wide audience were to ask for me.”

A designer remembers the writer Guy Davenport

Remembering Guy Davenport

Guy Davenport was an American essayist, fiction writer, poet, translator, painter, illustrator, university scholar and professor, and a recipient in 1992 of a "genius award" from the MacArthur Foundation. For more than a decade, he and I exchanged letters of a length of one or two pages, sometimes as often as weekly. I saved all his letters, with copies of nearly all of mine. To correspond with him for so many years was among the wisest things I’ve done. Yet in truth, it was always exhausting since the intensity of his letters was forever a woeful reminder that I was writing not simply to an ordinary person but to a remarkably talented man whose powers of observation were astonishing at very least. more>>>

Labels, Stamps, Currency | Blake Schlawin

Luggage labels © Blake Schlawin 2014

Above and below Proposals for luggage labels, postage stamps and currency for an imaginary country called Sequitur, designed by Blake Schlawin, graphic design student at the University of Northern Iowa, in a course called Graphic Design I, as taught by Roy R. Behrens.

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William H. Gass, interviewed in Tom LeClair and Larry McGaffery, eds., Anything Can Happen (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), p. 158—

I think contemporary fiction is divided between those who are still writing performatively and those who are not. Writing for voice, in which you imagine a performance in the auditory sense going on, is traditional and dying. The new mode is not performative and  not auditory. It's destined for the printed page, and you are really supposed to read it the way they teach you to read in speed reading. You are supposed to crisscross the page with your eye, getting references and gists; you are supposed to see it flowing on the page, and not sound it in the head. If you do sound it, it is so bad you can hardly proceed… By the mouth for the ear: that's the way I like to write. I can still admire the other—the way I admire surgeons, broncobusters, and tight ends. As writing, it is that foreign to me.

Block of stamps © Blake Schlawin 2014

Currency © Blake Schlawin 2014

Theatre Poster | Michelle Watson

Theatre poster © Michelle Watson 2011

Above Theatre poster designed by Michelle Watson, completed while an undergraduate graphic design student at the University of Northern Iowa.

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Stanley Elkin, Early Elkin (Flint MI: Bamberger Books, 1985)—

We read, I've told my classes, to die, not entirely certain what I mean but sure it has something to do with being alone, shutting the world out, doing books like beads, a mantra, the flu. Some perfect, hermetic concentration sealed as canned goods or pharmaceuticals. It is, I think, not so much a way of forgetting ourselves as engaging the totality of our attentions, as racing-car drivers or mountain climbers engage them, as surgeons and chess masters do. It's fine, precise, detailed work, the infinitely small motor management of diamond cutters and safecrackers that we do in our heads…I haven't said it here, am almost ashamed to own up, but once I opened books slowly, stately, plump imaginary orchestras going off in my head like overtures, like music behind the opening credits in films, humming the title page, whistling the copyright, turning myself into producer and pit band, usher and audience.

Doing Books Like Beads

American novelist Stanley Elkin in Pieces of Soap: Essays. NY: Simon and Schuster, 1992—

We read, I've told my classes, to die, not entirely certain what I mean but sure it has something to do with being alone, shutting the world out, doing books like beads, a mantra, the flu. Some perfect, hermetic concentration sealed as canned goods or pharmaceuticals. It is, I think, not so much a way of forgetting ourselves as engaging the totality of our attentions, as racing car drivers or mountain climbers engage them, as surgeons and chess masters do. It's fine, precise, detailed work, the infinitely small motor management of diamond cutters and safecrackers that we do in our heads… I haven't said it here, am almost ashamed to own up, but once I open books slowly, stately, plump imaginary orchestras going off in my head like overtures, like music behind the opening credits in films, humming the title page, whistling the copyright, turning myself into producer and pit band, usher and audience…