Ben Friedlander

 

The dispute of sorts over the relationship of the 3^rd Gen New York School & the University of Chicago – it seems clear now that Berrigan taught elsewhere in Chicago, but that’s not the same as saying that key members of Gen 3 didn’t attend there, which is actually what Jordan Davis wrote – was followed by Ben F. (presumably Friedlander) taking me to task for my comment about “those deadly little state college reading series,” to which he replied “Yeah, cuz they really rock the joint at those Ivy Leagues. C'mon, Ron, how about a little class solidarity here?” At the very same time, Jerome Karabal’s The Chosen, which documents the ways in which Ivy League schools changed admissions policies early in the 20^th century to minimize the number, literally, of Jews on campus, is getting reviewed pretty much everywhere right now, as it should be. For the record, Friedlander and I both attended the same state school, the University of California at Berkeley, before he went on to SUNY-Buffalo (the same school that I very nearly attended in the early 1970s). Berkeley, like Madison, Ann Arbor, Austin & one or two other places, is a town that is home to a state university so widely known that perhaps only on the sports pages do you hear people refer to the school as anything other than the town with which it has become synonymous.

All of which does raise the question about schools (the degree granting kind) & schools (the literary tendency kind). As Jordan Davis notes, the first generation NY School had several former Harvard students in it, but Black Mountain did as well. If the second generation NY School tended to matriculate uptown at Columbia, it was on the same quad where the Beat generation had gotten its start in the late 1940s. During that same decade, the Berkeley Renaissance was very clearly the U.C. Berkeley renaissance, as Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Robin Blaser all worked on the campus magazine while hanging around with such disparate friends as Philip K. Dick, Landis Everson & even Rod McKuen. Langpo has a significant relationship to Yale (Kit Robinson, Steve Benson, Alan Bernheimer), Harvard/Radcliff (Bob Grenier, Michael Palmer, Lyn Hejinian, Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein), Berkeley (myself, David Bromige, Barrett Watten, Bob Perelman, Rae Armantrout, David Melnick) the University of Chicago (Melnick, Tom Mandel), SF State (Michael Davidson, myself, Rae Armantrout), U.C. Irvine (Carla Harryman, Steve Benson) & even – gasp – the University of Iowa (Grenier, Watten, Perelman, Ray Di Palma). And – right at about the point where, in Jordan Davis’ narrative, you would put the 4^th gen NY School, it seemed as tho every single major series in New York had major input from then-recent graduates of Bard, Brown & Buffalo, perhaps the first female-majority age cohort on the NY scene. Even more recently the western phenomenon of New Brutalism can be traced back to students from just two schools, U.C. Santa Cruz & Mills College. Indeed, this kind of close correlation between literature & schools can be traced back at least to the invention of modernism by four poets, all of whom had some relationship with the University of Pennsylvania (Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, H.D., Marianne Moore).

So what is the relationship between schools & schools here? And how important is this? Did any of the langpo Harvard students even know of one another when they went there (over quite an extended period)? Does it tell more about a writer to know that Lydia Davis attended the same private school as Eliot Weinberger & Bob Perelman than it does that her half-brother is Nation columnist Alexander Cockburn? At dinner the other night, we ascertained that David Shapiro had played violin during his college years with James Sherry’s brother, the cellist Fred Sherry, something I don’t think either realized before last week. But how much of this is the cotton candy of gossip, and how much is not?