JOURNAL EXCERPT: May 20, Sat.1978 6:45 PM

"I started reading The Notebooks of Thomas Wolfe.He excites me. He became so immersed in the world around him. I have only read You Can't Go Home Again by him. I started The Web and the Rock, got about three-fourths of the way through and wasn't able to finish it. It became too much of a struggle. It also became very boring. You Can't Go Home Again was a much better book; more cohesive. I also have Look Homeward, Angel by Wolfe, but haven't read it yet.

"Received a letter from Ida a few days ago. Surprised the hell out of me. I haven't written her back yet.

"I've decided to start writing poetry again. Hope I'm ready for it now. My past poetry hasn't been too good."

MANHOOD REDO: Looking back, I think I was drawn to the study of literature because it seemed like a way into the world of emotions; I suspect that explains the sentence, "He became so immersed in the world around him." Whereas I felt cut off from the world around me, locked in a frozen emotional state, standing on the board but unable to dive headfirst into the messy human world, stuck in a place of feelings stunted by masculinity, Wolfe in my mind could feel everything, enter fully into his environment. He felt all the pains, darkness, and glories of childhood, captured the rolling emotional states of a town, a community, savored the struggles and transitions into adulthood. He reveled in the complexity and comprehensiveness of a lived life. It all seemed so different, such a nontraditional way for a man to be in the world.

The same applied to writing. I could spill feelings onto the page, whether a journal, a story, a poem. I was reading and writing to save myself, to start the thawing process.

Of course, later in grad school, I learned that the study of literature had its own very traditonally masculine qualities. And it became hard to hold onto that deep-seated emotional revelation in stories. Some twenty-five years after grad school, it's still not as strong as when I first began reading literature on my own in my twenties, although there are flashes of it.

JOURNAL EXCERPT: April 27, Thurs. 1978 8:10 PM

"I mailed the forms for readmission to [Texas] Tech [University] today. I hope they don't take too long in answering. Didn't get much writing done. Half a page. Mom interrupted me. Wanted me to take her to get a new state inspection sticker on her car. Then we had to go get Jennifer from track practice, then back over to get her car. It was almost 5 o'clock by the time we got home. I ate. Then, since I was being bomarded with little hints, like, 'You haven't mowed the front yard, Pat,' I mowed the front yard. Then I listened to some records (Nilsson and the Beatles). Then I ran. Another exciting and fulfilling day."

MANHOOD REDO: The above excerpt is kind of all over the place, so I'm going to focus on the first couple sentences about reapplying to Tech since I've thought a lot about school and masculinity. It took me a long time to think of myself as an academic, as a learner. Some people saw it before I did. The priest I wrote about earlier who was a close friend of the family told my mother he thought I would do something with my mind. There wasn't much indication of that through high school and on into the first couple years of college; I was the sort of student who when he had a book report due would read the first and last chapters and make up details as filler, hoping that the English teacher either hadn't read the book or had forgotten most of what he or she had read. While I wasn't one of the "bad boys" who sat in the back of the room disrupting the class, I wasn't exactly what you would call a model student. In English, when we were supposed to write a poem, I plagarized lyrics from a Beatles' song, "Doctor Robert," which one of the other students recognized. I worried he would turn me in.

I wrote in an earlier blog about my relationship with school but what I didn't get into were economic class issues and masculinity. My understanding is that the above descriptions would fairly accurately represent my father's relationship with school. He has told me he wasn't a serious student. He became an accountant almost by happenchance. On his walk to a factory job every morning he went by a two year business school and eventually thought he might as well try it, so he became a student and scraped by in the grade department, managing to graduate with a C average. I can't help but think that the poverty he experienced growing up in significant ways shaped his relationship with the educational system and my relationship with it. While he went on to become an excellent accountant in charge of accounting departments and provided his family with a comfortable middle class life, I'm certain I unknowingly harbored some historical residue tied to the lower economic position he occupied earlier in his life. If nothing else, neither he nor my mother could provide much in the way of concrete advice about or insight into college since neither of them had attended a four year institution of higher education. They definitely did everything they could to support my attending college, but I can't help but wonder if that connection with a working class background and the traditional masculine stereotypes that accompany it, almost sabotaged their efforts.

It wasn't until I reapplied to Tech after dropping out for two years following my sophomore year that my attitudes began to change. I've always found it ironic that I taught for eight years at George Washington University, the most expensive private university in the country, and not only would attending it as an undergraduate have been well beyond my economic means, they never would have let me in with my grades.

JOURNAL EXCERPT: April 3, 1978 8:30 pm

A quick backtrack before moving forward:

I keep thinking about the March 30th journal excerpt and the fact that J--, the co-worker killed in a motorcycle accident, was black. Would that explain C--'s crass communication of his death? If it had been one of the white workers who had died in the same way, would C--, white himself, have conveyed the information in a similar manner? And what about me? Would it have had more impact on me if he had been white?

I keep struggling with the ideas of "masculinities" because it seems so amorphous that I can't wrap my head around it. It's easy to say that when you add whiteness to masculinity or blackness, it becomes racially pluralized. And maybe those differences were at play some 22 years ago on the newspaper dock, but it becomes even more complicated when you consider that there's no one whiteness or blackness. So you have whitenesses and masculinities, for instance, mixing in unpredictable and blurry ways.

I'll undoubtedly keeping trying to make more sense of those pluralities, but for now onto the excerpt:

"Woke up about 1:30 pm today. I didn't feel like drawing or writing, so I decided to go to some bookstores to try and add to my collections of Gor, Dray Prescot and Tarzan books. Mom and Linda went with me. We first went to a nursery (plants) out by the South Plains Mall. Mom had seen some hanging plants that she wanted to buy there. I had to loan her $20 so she could buy one. Dad had come with her the first time she saw the plants, but wouldn't let her buy any. We then went to Trails End Bookstore. The science fiction books there are about 1/3 higher that the rest of the books. That's ridiculous. I doubt if I'll be going there much more. I don't like the place, even though I've given them much business in the past. We checked out a new used bookstore on Ave. Q and it was pitiful. No selection at all. They also sold tools in the bookstore. Tools and books, what a combination. The proprietor smoked cigars, so the store really stunk. Then we went to the Book Rack once again. I love their 20 cents and 10 cents shelves. There is nothing better than getting a book, even if it is a little beat up, for 20 cents."

MANHOOD REDO: Where to start? First of all, I had never been much of a reader until up to this point, unless you count comic books, which I consumed voraciously (when I write about 'giving Trails End much business in the past,' it was in reference to buying stacks of used comics for a nickel each, then taking them back to trade two-for-one), so my masculinity had not been defined by book or school intelligence. At this point in my life, I had dropped out of college after attending for two years, my overall grade point dropping to a 1.93. I had never been studious, never made more than adequate grades that sometimes slipped into the D range, although never F. Everyone thought I was smart enough; I just didn't, as my seventh grade reading teacher said, apply myself.

Nowadays there's considerable discussion about how schools fail to help boys, that too many of them, compared to girls, do poorly. That seems overly simplistic to me and overlooks the ways masculinity often does a disservice to boys in the educational system. I know that I had the typical attitude prevelant in West Texas but also elsewhere: booklearning was, in the language of now, for punks. I already had strikes against me when it came to performing a cool masculine poise; I didn't want to add to them.

It took me a long time to overcome this attitude, so much so that when I returned to school and eventually went on to get graduate degrees, when I made nothing but As in classes, when I became passionate about literature, writing, and rhetoric, I kept thinking, I can do this but I'm not a true academic. I want a masculinity that allows boys the freedom to learn, to hold onto their deep-seated curiosities and desires to know that start the minute they're born.