Guest Post by Daniel Clausen

Hello folks,

Today I bring you a guest post by Daniel Clausen, who reviews the last book written by his late writing teacher, Lester Goran.

Enjoy :)

There are No Good Stories at a University (Lester Goran’s Bing Crosby’s Last Song)

The following is an excerpt from an extended book review of Lester Goran’s book “Bing Crosby’s Last Song.” The book review is written more like a creative essay / short story than a book review. If you are interested in reading the entire review, you can do so here.



When I knew Lester Goran from 2002 to 2003, he seemed to me an offensive creature – on campus, in his writing. Sometimes, he seemed like he was trying to be offensive on purpose. In class, I think he openly called college and writing a “racket.” My memory isn’t clear on this, but I think he also said he would probably stay at his job until he died because after growing up in the projects a racket like tenure was just too good to walk away from. College was an insider’s game – you played the system and got rewarded. Something like that. I don’t need to make up bad things he said about universities or university teachers – he put most of his ideas into words through the mouthpiece of Daly Racklin in his last novel.

*

I ask Lester to listen in on a scene from his book about the University of Pittsburgh. This scene takes place as Silk (an old boxer) and Daly are walking through the University of Pittsburgh, as kind of tourists.

Silk has just finished telling Daly about his troubles picking up college girls when he was younger. He says that he would often try to pass as a college student to pick up a girl, but that once they started talking he couldn’t stand to listen to them.

You can read this part starting on page 258.



“It made no sense.” [This is Silk talking.]

Daly laughed. “Don’t say that too loud, they’ll put us out. You’ll be closing down a racket going for centuries, them what thinks they have the superiority handed to them by paying tuition, and them what believes the propaganda and accepts the crumbs from the table.”

“They’re dumb as I am most of them around here, and I can’t think worse to say of them.” [this is Silk talking again.].

“Now you got the secret, only you not knowing that is what keeps them in place.” [p. 258].



I tell Lester: “This is you talking through your characters.”

He seems red and drunk and obnoxious to me now. I don’t want him to deny it to me. College was always my holy place, warts and all, there are few places holier to me. I want to slap him across the face and shit in his crappy little bar. Irish Club be damned.

But you can’t slap a dead man, and there’s no point shitting in a fictional bar, so there it is, and I stare at my reconstructed version of him, red and drunk, and about to say something and I let my image of him collapse.

He used to say there were no good stories at a university. I tend to think the same thing about bars.

*

Here is a better insight on the university – something that makes Lester’s more than fifty odd years as a writing professor seem better. Daly says, “College felt like an extension of St. Agnes, priests, brothers, classes in religion, an extension of being good and virtuous – and good ain’t easy, as we have come to know, right?” (p. 259).

“So, Lester,” I say, “there is nothing sacred or holy about the legacy you left at the University of Miami? It was all just racketeering and passing the time, collecting paychecks, and using the written word to remember the good old days in Pittsburgh?” I ask it, not knowing what he would answer, what he can answer.

Here’s what he writes about the Irish Club: “the Irish Club and its visionary drinkers, a child’s city on the hill” (p. 201). It’s hard for me to read a passage like this. I don’t think of drinking as visionary or child-like, but rather as sinful. Let every drunkard become a pot-smoker is my motto.

Perhaps he was being sarcastic. I don’t think so, though.