Bud
This morning, if you'd asked me, I would've said that I haven't seen Professor Bernard "Bud" Hirsch for close to sixteen years, and then I would have said that I should send him another e-mail. I've been making it a tradition to contact my former teachers each New Year's and tell them what an influence they've had on me, thank them for everything, see how they are, etc. A couple winters ago I sent such an e-mail to Bud, one of my English Professors from KU. I took a course in Byron and Shelley from him, at a moment in my life when I was realizing that I didn't really want to be a doctor, as I kept telling everyone I did, and Bud's class made me see what a literature professor could do.
He had an amazing way of remembering a student's faltering, half-assed remark about a poem, blurted awkwardly at the opening of a class, and bringing it back forty minutes later as a brilliant observation, but with attribution to the student: "I guess we could expand Becca's earlier point -- about the ambivalent morality of Byron's narrator in the early stanzas -- to Canto Three as a whole, couldn't we?" Now Becca may not have realized she was making a point at the time, but she sure did when the professor cited it. And maybe she expanded that point into a thesis, and worked it into an essay that got a B, for which she worked harder than she ever had.
He was the best teacher on campus, as far as I was concerned, and probably the best person, and every time I do something successful in a literature classroom, I should probably attribute it to him. He was the kind of guy who made you make up reasons to go to his office hours and talk to him. I read Frankenstein for the first time just because he was enthusiastic about it, not because it was assigned, and when we were talking about it I realized that I'd accidentally read the 1818 version and not the standard, Percy-edited version. But it had only just been edited for the first time, so Bud got terribly excited to know where I had run across it. So my interest in textual editing can probably be traced to him, too. And also my love of Wrigley Field.
A year after I had his class, I still ran into him. He'd spot me in the cafeteria and ask me about my frustrations with organic chemistry, when I had ducked out of lab to get a sandwich and escape whatever experiment I was currently botching. His continued empathy was all the more remarkable since the entire time I knew him he was watching his wife Elaine succumb to the cancer that finally took her in 1996. Somehow he managed to come to class and teach us laugh at the bawdiness of Don Juan and its cynicism toward marriage, while knowing that the love of his life was slipping away.
So this morning when my friend, who like Bud is a scholar of Native American studies, remembered over coffee that I'd gone to Kansas, he asked if I knew "that guy from KU -- really short -- worked on Native commodity culture...Hirsch?" "Bud Hirsch!" I said. "I love that guy!"
"You know he died, right? In 2006? Brain tumor?"
Well no, I hadn't known that. That would explain why he never replied to the e-mail I sent him in December 2007, thanking him. It wasn't like him not to have written back, I thought. He's been gone for nearly four years, but I didn't feel it until today.
He had an amazing way of remembering a student's faltering, half-assed remark about a poem, blurted awkwardly at the opening of a class, and bringing it back forty minutes later as a brilliant observation, but with attribution to the student: "I guess we could expand Becca's earlier point -- about the ambivalent morality of Byron's narrator in the early stanzas -- to Canto Three as a whole, couldn't we?" Now Becca may not have realized she was making a point at the time, but she sure did when the professor cited it. And maybe she expanded that point into a thesis, and worked it into an essay that got a B, for which she worked harder than she ever had.
He was the best teacher on campus, as far as I was concerned, and probably the best person, and every time I do something successful in a literature classroom, I should probably attribute it to him. He was the kind of guy who made you make up reasons to go to his office hours and talk to him. I read Frankenstein for the first time just because he was enthusiastic about it, not because it was assigned, and when we were talking about it I realized that I'd accidentally read the 1818 version and not the standard, Percy-edited version. But it had only just been edited for the first time, so Bud got terribly excited to know where I had run across it. So my interest in textual editing can probably be traced to him, too. And also my love of Wrigley Field.
A year after I had his class, I still ran into him. He'd spot me in the cafeteria and ask me about my frustrations with organic chemistry, when I had ducked out of lab to get a sandwich and escape whatever experiment I was currently botching. His continued empathy was all the more remarkable since the entire time I knew him he was watching his wife Elaine succumb to the cancer that finally took her in 1996. Somehow he managed to come to class and teach us laugh at the bawdiness of Don Juan and its cynicism toward marriage, while knowing that the love of his life was slipping away.
So this morning when my friend, who like Bud is a scholar of Native American studies, remembered over coffee that I'd gone to Kansas, he asked if I knew "that guy from KU -- really short -- worked on Native commodity culture...Hirsch?" "Bud Hirsch!" I said. "I love that guy!"
"You know he died, right? In 2006? Brain tumor?"
Well no, I hadn't known that. That would explain why he never replied to the e-mail I sent him in December 2007, thanking him. It wasn't like him not to have written back, I thought. He's been gone for nearly four years, but I didn't feel it until today.
posted by James at 6:28 PM
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