Professor knew how to hook ‘em

Thursday, November 21, 2013

I’m wandering off topic today to say farewell to James Parins, who died Sunday.

Parins was a successful author and longtime literature professor at UALR, and he was a major influence on my career.

Parins ran an informal classroom. It was more like a moderated bull session. He was personally interested in the works he shared with us, and his enthusiasm was infectious.

One book we studied was an obscure novel written by the late John Kennedy Toole called, A Confederacy of Dunces.

I didn’t do in-depth assigned reading back then. I just skimmed the high points and winged it through exams. At the beginning of that semester, however, I blew out my left knee in a flag football game, so my mobility was limited for a few weeks.

I drove a 1974 Toyota Celica with a manual transmission. I couldn’t depress the clutch pedal with my left foot because of the knee, so I shifted gears by pressing the clutch pedal with my grandmother’s cane. Accelerating from a stop on a steep hill was always an adventure.

Anyway, I couldn’t do much except read, so I plunged into A Confederacy of Dunces. Up to that point, my exposure to literature was through moldy classical authors who bored me. I didn’t know how authors became famous, or even how they were published. I just assumed that Hemingway was always Hemingway, and that Steinbeck was always Steinbeck. I didn’t know that Dickens was so danged windy because he wrote mostly for periodicals and was paid by the word.

I figured authors were somehow born to their profession, like nobility.

Toole was near my age, with a sense of humor and warped perspective that were close to mine. Dunces was the funniest thing I had ever read. More important, it demonstrated to me that regular guys write, and that I could do it, too. My senior English teacher at Little Rock Central, Barry Hardin, planted that seed, but Parins gave me the keys to the car, so to speak.

He taught me to appreciate some of the moldy classical authors, too. He introduced me to James Joyce’s Dubliners, a work that becomes increasingly relevant the older I get.

Parins was also a big fan of Gordon Lightfoot, the folk singer. We studied his lyrics, his phrasing, cadence and structure. He floated the idea once of inviting Lightfoot to campus to read his lyrics without music. That was a watershed moment for me, too.

I had a very narrow view of what I considered to be cool, and Gordon Lightfoot was most definitely not cool. Through Parins, I saw him and others in a different light. I learned that performers have little control over how they are packaged, and Lightfoot’s packaging was what repulsed me. I learned to ignore it and enjoy creativity on its merits.

I had some fantastic professors during my five years at UALR, like Jay Friendlander, Rob Bellamy, Lynn Wahl, Sonny Sanders and the incomparable David Guerra. Leslie Newell’s Journalism 101 class converted me from a B-minus student to a fixture on the dean’s list.

My time with Parins was comparatively short, but he made an indelible impression on me.

BASS PRO GIFT

Bass Pro Shops donated $75,000 of its opening day proceeds to the Arkansas Game and Fish Foundation. The amount was 50 percent of the store’s opening day receipts.

Steve Smith, president of the AGFF, said the foundation will use the money for conservation education programs at the Fred Berry Conservation Education Center on Crooked Creek and at the Cook’s Lake Conservation Education Center.

“FIRST” CERTIFICATE

Hunters who kill their first deer or duck can obtain a commemorative certificate from the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission’s Facebook site.

The First Deer certificate bears a color photo of a buck and doe, as well as the signatures of Director Mike Knoedl and Brad Carner, chief of the AGFC’s wildlife management division. You can insert a digital photo into the certificate, and you can print the duck certificate from Facebook.

Nancy Ledbetter, chief of the AGFC’s communications division, said the agency will also offer a similar certificate for a first fish.

CORRECTION

In a recent column about the government shutdown, I erroneously cited a quote from an article titled, “Refuges close despite pact,” from the Nov. 16, 1995, issue of the Southwest Times-Record. I attributed the quote to Len Pitcock. The quote was actually from Marcus Kilburn, former chief of the AGFC’s information and education division.

Sports, Pages 25 on 11/21/2013