ONLINE:
Josh Sharp’s “Rhapsody in Blue M&Ms”:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdPfX9g7vXs
gramorama.blogspot.com
More photos from Athas' album:
alumni.unc.edu/athas-photos
him the finale in the annual “
Gram-o-Rama” performance, and the audience of
200 or more is howling at “Rhapsody in
Blue M&Ms,” a vocal expression of a little
boy’s full range of bedtime procrastination
set to the rhythms of the music.
Outside the window, others may be
trudging to math class and geology lab. Athas
tries one more time to explain the barely
controlled madness that’s going on inside:
“Socrates carried on all his arguments
outdoors, out loud, didn’t believe in writing it down. If Plato hadn’t listened to it
and written it down, you would not have
what Socrates was using, which was logic,
which Aristotle refined into rules and stuff
and wrote ’em down. And Socrates
believed what you said was the real thing,
not what you wrote.”
She adds, to her interviewer, “I’m well
aware that you aren’t getting sound bites.”
Within months, tall condos will offer a
view of the knoll near the train tracks
where the old shack stood. These days
some folks assume that every other person
they pass on the street is harboring radical
ideas. Now the town kids have much to
distract them from the college library.
She has given up her beloved old bicycle
and now crosses by car between “Cahhbro”
(the Boston inflection still remarkably intact)
and Ephesus, the two of them her own
Eden of intellectual curiosity, her base camp
in the ongoing skirmish with the rules.
“She’s a marvel, she’s a unique influence
on my life,” Elizabeth Moose said. “And I
know better than to say ‘very unique.’”
Down to one course now, Athas will
teach intermediate fiction writing again in
the fall. Gingher will have to explain again
who the curious visitor is in 47W. Maybe
she’ll say, “She sees people as stories, and
she’s dying to know what’s the next chapter in that story. So she’ll grab hold of you
and start turning the pages.”
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DAVID E. BROWN ’ 75 is the Review’s
senior associate editor. The Review
featured “Gram-o-Rama” in March/April
in an article by Katherine Evans ’09 titled
“Stylistics: Grammar as Performance Art.”
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