A Eulogy for a Professor: Richard C. Tobias

A couple of years ago, I fell out of touch with a professor of English Literature I had as an undergraduate, Richard C. Tobias. I've been reticent to look him up because I feared for the worst, and I'm angry at myself for exhibiting such cowardice. But I think about him frequently, so I finally did some google searching, only to discover that he passed away on September 12, 2006 at the age of 81. This comes a year-and-a-half too late, but I wanted to honor him with a few words.

My first interaction with Tobias (or "Tob" as he liked to be called) was over the phone in 1993, while I croaked away at him with laryngitis trying to ask him questions about our upcoming semester abroad in London, for which he was teaching "Shakespeare and His Plays." The only thing I seem to remember was that after he heard my voice he kept saying, "Poor baby."

The semester in London was one of the most important times in my life and for the first time, I was able to connect with a larger sense of humanity due to the age of what I was seeing all around me. As I was embracing our great chain of being in the abstract, I suspect that this time was critical for Tobias as well, but for much more difficult and personal reasons: shortly before our trip, his wife Barbara passed away from a brain aneurysm. I remember him telling us the story of how he was holding her on the couch. She had a headache, got up to get an aspirin, and never returned.

At the time, due to my lack of life experience, I was not able to strongly empathize with the grief he must have endured (much to my shame), but I admire that he kept moving forward with his life and held on to London and teaching and found a connection to his love and his past at every turn, pointing out flowers that Barbara knew and liked. He loved his family very much and was quite proud of them. I remember him discussing one of his daughter's weddings. He said of his daughter and her husband, "He didn't choose her. She didn't choose him. They chose each other." That always stayed with me as an ideal of an egalitarian romance.

I also can't help but remember him on a tour bus ride through the Cotswolds jumping up down, pointing and shouting, "Gypsy camp! Gypsy camp!" as we passed by a series of tents. That always makes me smile.

He was a tall and slim man who often wore a Captain's hat. He wasn't ostentatious, but I remember the fancy sequined vest he bought himself in London, as well as the convertible Saab he bought with his inheritance from his aunt.

Of course I took more classes with him once we returned. Every time he'd see me around campus, he'd nearly sing, "There she is...Miss America!" I never understood why, although I suppose I did sort of exude a kind of squeaky-clean Americanism. I also suspect it was because he liked tall women.

In his Modernist Poetry class, I was mistaken for his mistress. I arrived late the first day, and the only seat left open was one directly next to him (he liked to arrange his class in a circle). People tended to select the same seats every week, thus I found myself next to him most every class. Whenever we'd read something by Pound or Eliot that referenced something in London, he would excitedly grab my arm or my hand and say, "Remember when WE SAW THAT!?!" This went on for weeks, and I was eventually confronted by two other students who point-blank asked me if I was having an affair with him. I wasn't. He was just a truly enthusiastic and high-energy person.

I was the leader of a particular student group in the English department as well as the acting president of another group for whom Tob was the faculty advisor, so we collaborated closely. When my parents came to an honors ceremony, Tobias said of me, "Your daughter is like a brick...filling in where needed." I'd never before or since been compared to a brick, and it became something of a joke within my family.

Once, we invited him over to our home for dinner. My mother served him a meal of stuffed pork chops and mashed potatoes. He gave it the highest compliment: "It tastes like Ohio [his home state]." (This always stuck with me, but really hit home when I recently watched Ratatouille and saw that the antagonist was won over with cuisine from his working-class youth. My mother was savvy enough to suspect her food would have that effect.)

As for my academic work, he helped me craft some of my "objective" reporting habits acquired from a brief stint in journalism school into a style that better fit literary criticism.

We hand-wrote our essays on our London trip, and he responded with type-written notes, all of which I've kept. And, I'll always keep a copy of his letter of recommendation for me for graduate school, which was full of wonderful things, although no one really wants to see their love of musicals emphasized or the words, "Andrew Lloyd Webber" in such a document.

He was partly an absent-minded professor, partly an on-campus political activist, and overall a kind and caring man. With his diverse interests, Dr. Richard Tobias was most certainly a Major Generalist. I can see, especially now, how much he influenced me in that regard. Much love to you, Tob. I'm so glad I knew you.


UPDATE! 5/1/2011
The English Department at Pitt has further eulogized Professor Tobias. Be sure to read more:

Dean of the Universe
The English Department Remembers Richard Tobias
and
Our Mutual Friend by Jeff Aziz

On vacation

Vacation is...that time to go away for a while. I'll be gone for a week. Future posts may include an assessment of the thematic content of Michel Gondry's music videos, and an essay on cultural monogamy (which isn't going to be about sex, at least not directly). Talk at you later!

I heart musicals everywhere!

Especially when they occur in a public place. GShap brought Food Court Musical to my attention:



(The spilled condiment reference called to mind the line, "I got the mustard out" from Buffy: The Musical).

I was aware of Improv Everywhere's No Pants 2k6 public performance (which they reprised for No Pants 2k8), but hadn't see their not-so-impromptu musical, which was rehearsed the night before. The mall and Hot Dog on a Stick were also in on it.

Leatherheads

And now for my latest obsession. Every morning for the past two weeks, I've passed by this poster in the subway. I quickly snapped this photo lest I be caught in the embarrassment of the act.


I can't stop staring at it. It fills my mind. I think about it constantly. Anyone else notice that these men are about as intimidating as The Little Rascals?


But back to the poster itself. This poster is my only exposure to this film. From this picture alone, I can't seem to get over this rampant display of flaccid masculinity. What's with George Clooney's fake black eye? Isn't he getting a little old for this juvenalia? How is Jim from The Office anything other than a jokester? Why am I not shocked that there's a token black man and a token fat man? What kind of a title is "Leatherheads" anyway? (I get that this is about the early years of football where men did, in fact, wear leather helmets, but that title is just Neanderthal. And these helmets make them look like they have cute floppy dog ears.) These men are tough lite.

Such a poster begs the question: does dirt maketh a man? Does sports maketh a man? I suppose the other end of the spectrum is Rambo, which is a steroid-sized caricature that also fails to do masculinity justice in its own way. Maybe what's intriguing to me is the ambiguity implied by this image. Are we supposed to find these men frightening or lame?

I find no definative indicators of how this image is to be read, or rather, my sense of what's "masculine" and what's puerile cancel each other out leaving a black hole. So, I can only bring to bear my outside understanding of these actors along with my preconceptions about gender. Since I can't figure out what we're meant to take away from this picture, I suppose it's quite a successful ad--it's definitely lodged in my not-so-leather head.

iFoam vs. iPhone

It's a rare user interface that becomes so culturally recognizable that it gets parodied. Check out this birthday card I saw at Bed, Bath and Beyond that imagines an alternate use for the iPhone:

The interior:

Note: photos of iFoam taken with iPhone.

The Eyes Have It

Allergies, that is. This is my worst time of year, and my eyeballs are red, sore and ready to fall out of my head. Does anyone out there have any recommendations for treating springtime eye allergies? It's almost too much to bear.

I stopped wearing contact lenses ages ago due to eye allergies, but I'd love to get back into them again. (I refuse to have lasik surgery, so that's not an option.) Anyone have any experience with severe eye allergies and contact lens wearing? What brand/type of contacts do you wear? Would you recommend them?

Please help!

Euthanasia as a right

This week, there have been several articles about a French woman, Chantal Sebire, who legally sought assisted suicide due to severe pain and trauma caused by inoperative and incurable cancerous tumors in her face. She was denied by the French courts. Two days after the ruling, she has died.

The first time I saw her picture--a close-up--I was horrified by my own revulsion. But more than just that, I was intensely moved and felt the deepest compassion for her pain and agony, not only from her physical pain that was all too apparent from the distortion of her bulging eyes, but from the alienation she must feel from others. Chantal herself said that children fled from her in horror. She was tired of the pain, both physical and mental. She should have legally been given the honor of being allowed to live, and die, as she chose.

Euthanasia should be made legal. We put our pets to sleep when we recognize their quality of life has irretrievably declined. Everyone, if sound in mind, deserves the right to die with dignity if they so choose.

How can anyone argue that it is immoral to seek a dignified death when we live in a country that thinks nothing of killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis in a fabricated war fought in the name of democracy and non-existent weapons of mass destruction? How is it that capital punishment continues to be executed? The hypocrisy runs far deeper than Eliot Spitzer's forays into prostitution.

And we're kidding ourselves if we think that a subtle form of euthanasia doesn't already exist in this country. Doctors intentionally place terminally ill patients on increasingly higher doses of morphine and other painkillers to speed their death along as an act of mercy. This was done for my grandfather who passed away from a disfiguring and grotesquely painful bone cancer in his arm. Of course, he should have had a say in that matter, but I'm here to tell you that this goes on in hospitals all across the country, every day, and no one says a word. Let's take what is hidden and make it legal.

It is my body. It is my choice. And when the time comes, it should be your choice, too.