Time flies . . . whether you’re having fun or not. And it sure has flown by as far as my blogging is concerned: I haven’t posted an entry in more than two months. I’ll not bother to proffer excuses; instead I’ll try to get back in blogging stride with the words below . . . which are actually, verbatim, a transcription of the brief remarks I had the pleasure—and the honor—of offering a week or so ago (on November 4th, to be exact) to lead off the celebration of the publication of the latest title in the catalogue of the University of Massachusetts Press, Boston: Voices and Visions, an anthology edited by my friend and colleague Shaun O’Connell. I am prompted to post these remarks in blog form partly to justify the posting of the pleasing snapshot of Shaun and yours truly (see below), taken by UMass Boston master photographer Harry Brett, that landed in my inbox this morning!
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For most of you gathered here today, Shaun O’Connell is the proverbial “man who needs no introduction.” Now in his 46th year as a member of the UMass Boston English Department, Shaun is the literal “last man standing” of the literal “founding fathers” of both the University and the Department. Picturing how the highlight reel of that exemplary career would play—the decades of teaching, of writing, of serving the Department and the University in myriad ways, of representing UMass Boston beyond these walls as a major public intellectual—we might all recall how Fyodor Dostoevsky, acknowledging the influence of short story master Nikolai Gogol, reportedly once said of an entire generation of Russian writers, “We have all come out from under Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’.” (“The Overcoat” being one of Gogol’s signature short stories.) Shaun O’Connell’s “overcoat”—in Irish (I can’t resist), his cóta mór . . . his great coat—has been just as capacious. Colleague, mentor and friend to so many of us over almost five decades, those descriptors could well chime with William Butler Yeats’s praise reserved for Major Robert Gregory: “Soldier, scholar, horseman, he . . .”
But I come not to bury Shaun—not even in mounds of collegial admiration and perso
nal affection—nor simply to praise him inadequately, but to give some sort of context for Boston: Voices and Visions.
Actually, Shaun himself gives that context in his first book, Imagining Boston: A Literary Landscape, published 20 years ago this month. In that book Shaun established the essential coordinates for a coherent reading of—or mapping of—what he described as the “emblems and visions of place created by Greater Boston’s writers, writers who have invented and extended America’s sense of the city upon a hill.” Titling the seminal chapter “Hawthorne’s Boston and Other Imaginary Places,” Shaun set in motion his critical and scholarly analysis of a broad cross-section of writers—from our own Phillis Wheatley through William Dean Howells and Henry James to Edwin O’Connor and John Updike and beyond—who have indeed imagined into literary life not just “a city upon a hill” (or “the Athens of America” or “the Hub of the solar system”) but countless variations on the theme of Boston and environs as place and as possibility.
In one respect, Boston: Voices and Visions reads as Shaun O’Connell’s revisiting of that earlier inscription of Boston’s literary landscape by way of incisive introductions that frame the six thematic groupings of his generous selection of primary texts. The crucial difference, however, is that by way of Shaun’s carefully-chosen medley of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry—extending from John Winthrop in 1630 to Patricia Powell (our former UMass Boston colleague) in 2004—this wide-ranging and far-reaching anthology adds high relief contours to that earlier mapping of Boston’s literary terrain. In a sense, it is the complement to, or perhaps even the completion of, that earlier project. Twenty years in the making? Shaun himself should be feeling high relief right about now!
But around six weeks ago, I was chatting with Shaun about the imminent publication of Boston: Voices and Visions. As blasphemous as it might sound, we ended up talking about the “pertinence” (or was it the “impertinence”?) of such a compilation in our age of Googlebooks and other electronic media that put entire libraries at our fingertips. Shaun wondered: “What is the place of such an anthology in this day and age?” Good question. And I hope tha
t I proffered a good answer. “It’s a way of shaping the conversation,” I started. Then I became appropriately metaphorical: “It’s about defining the topography . . . of putting the full scope of ‘literary Boston’ literally on the map, not only for today’s readers but also for posterity.” I wish that I had had my wits—or my wit—sufficiently about me to borrow from John Winthrop and say, “The eyes of all people are upon you.” I was a bit more prosaic but no less certain: “It’s your legacy, Shaun.” And today, as we come together to help Shaun launch this landmark and landmarking book, we are the immediate beneficiaries . . .
=========================================
For most of you gathered here today, Shaun O’Connell is the proverbial “man who needs no introduction.” Now in his 46th year as a member of the UMass Boston English Department, Shaun is the literal “last man standing” of the literal “founding fathers” of both the University and the Department. Picturing how the highlight reel of that exemplary career would play—the decades of teaching, of writing, of serving the Department and the University in myriad ways, of representing UMass Boston beyond these walls as a major public intellectual—we might all recall how Fyodor Dostoevsky, acknowledging the influence of short story master Nikolai Gogol, reportedly once said of an entire generation of Russian writers, “We have all come out from under Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’.” (“The Overcoat” being one of Gogol’s signature short stories.) Shaun O’Connell’s “overcoat”—in Irish (I can’t resist), his cóta mór . . . his great coat—has been just as capacious. Colleague, mentor and friend to so many of us over almost five decades, those descriptors could well chime with William Butler Yeats’s praise reserved for Major Robert Gregory: “Soldier, scholar, horseman, he . . .”
But I come not to bury Shaun—not even in mounds of collegial admiration and perso
nal affection—nor simply to praise him inadequately, but to give some sort of context for Boston: Voices and Visions.Actually, Shaun himself gives that context in his first book, Imagining Boston: A Literary Landscape, published 20 years ago this month. In that book Shaun established the essential coordinates for a coherent reading of—or mapping of—what he described as the “emblems and visions of place created by Greater Boston’s writers, writers who have invented and extended America’s sense of the city upon a hill.” Titling the seminal chapter “Hawthorne’s Boston and Other Imaginary Places,” Shaun set in motion his critical and scholarly analysis of a broad cross-section of writers—from our own Phillis Wheatley through William Dean Howells and Henry James to Edwin O’Connor and John Updike and beyond—who have indeed imagined into literary life not just “a city upon a hill” (or “the Athens of America” or “the Hub of the solar system”) but countless variations on the theme of Boston and environs as place and as possibility.
In one respect, Boston: Voices and Visions reads as Shaun O’Connell’s revisiting of that earlier inscription of Boston’s literary landscape by way of incisive introductions that frame the six thematic groupings of his generous selection of primary texts. The crucial difference, however, is that by way of Shaun’s carefully-chosen medley of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry—extending from John Winthrop in 1630 to Patricia Powell (our former UMass Boston colleague) in 2004—this wide-ranging and far-reaching anthology adds high relief contours to that earlier mapping of Boston’s literary terrain. In a sense, it is the complement to, or perhaps even the completion of, that earlier project. Twenty years in the making? Shaun himself should be feeling high relief right about now!
But around six weeks ago, I was chatting with Shaun about the imminent publication of Boston: Voices and Visions. As blasphemous as it might sound, we ended up talking about the “pertinence” (or was it the “impertinence”?) of such a compilation in our age of Googlebooks and other electronic media that put entire libraries at our fingertips. Shaun wondered: “What is the place of such an anthology in this day and age?” Good question. And I hope tha
t I proffered a good answer. “It’s a way of shaping the conversation,” I started. Then I became appropriately metaphorical: “It’s about defining the topography . . . of putting the full scope of ‘literary Boston’ literally on the map, not only for today’s readers but also for posterity.” I wish that I had had my wits—or my wit—sufficiently about me to borrow from John Winthrop and say, “The eyes of all people are upon you.” I was a bit more prosaic but no less certain: “It’s your legacy, Shaun.” And today, as we come together to help Shaun launch this landmark and landmarking book, we are the immediate beneficiaries . . .
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