I got a pretty good education out the public colleges and universities I went to. I discovered how, by asking around other students. My first drawing teacher was suggested by my girlfriend who was a semester ahead of me. One nice thing about art is you can see who is a good teacher right on the wall. Good teachers tend to get good work out of their students.
You can also tell by going to the bookstore and going through the reading lists. Up here, there was also Slate, a semester review written by students with professor names and descriptions of their lectures, style, and exams. Then there was register to go see and unregister fast if you don't like what you see. I also had some luck. CSUN was near brand new and had several profs who ended up there because there was a certain kind of creativity in the air. The Anthro dept wanted somebody to set up and teach a film and media series. The Art dept wanted to set up a printshop, and flesh out a craft section with photography and design. The Philosophy dept wanted to fill in some continental philosophy in addition to the usual suspects in the Anglo-American tradition. Psychology was morphing into something that Aldous Huxley might have liked, as in Doors of Perception. My anthro prof, Carpenter tried to get him to come and talk, but he died that same fall. So, Carpenter got Ashley Montagu instead. Music had a professional studio were the LA jazz groups could come and record. Fred Katz who was a cellist ran a series of classes featuring Chico Hamilton's group. I had an intro music teacher who played clubs and studio work and conducted class at the piano. All the cultural resources of a big city were there to use. The art studio teachers would hand out shows announcements. Some pretty good students showed up to fill in transfer units back to Berkeley or UCLA. It also had a lot of foreign students. The Persians were notorious for pestering women in the cafeteria. Me and my next girlfriend (who was doing a semester off from Berkeley) used to study these guys for fun. They made every wrong move in the book. An interesting thing happened in Iowa City. It was the second choice for a lot of grad students from the East Coast who didn't get into their first choice. English, Drama, and Art for some reason were hopping. I really lucked out with housing. I went over to the Art dept looking for a studio, but found a big room in a big old house. The whole place was filled with grad students in art, english, and music. And then there was Berkeley. The Art dept sucked, but the grad students were doing a lot of good work. So I learned from them. Also the dept had one year invitations and summer sessions with a lot of the NYC crew. Mark Rothko showed up. But the lesser known lights were better teachers, and certainly better than the tentured faculty. God damn it was fun to go to school and really learn. It might have been an illusion, but the US felt like a creative place in the era, vital, alive. It was nothing like this dreary endless bullshit fight with nothing but capital and its war-prison machine dominanting everything and crushing it to death. CG _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
