A 23-Year-Old's Diary Entries From Early October, 1974 | Thought Catalog

A 23-Year-Old's Diary Entries From Early October, 1974 | Thought Catalog

Thursday Afternoon in Union Square: Occupy Wall Street November 17th Day of Action Student Rally

At 3 p.m. today we were out in the cold at Union Square, at the Occupy Wall Street's Day of Action student protest rally, which included many non-student supporters as well. (Above is a view we took from the Barnes & Noble fourth floor window when we went into the store to use the restroom.)

Thursday Morning on the Upper East Side: Student Strike at Hunter College

Arriving on the Hunter College campus for our 11:10 a.m. class in American literature after our crosstown bus ride from Fordham University's Lincoln Center campus, where we'd taught composition starting at 8:30 a.m., we saw a group of Hunter students outside on strike.

Today's CUNY-wide student student activities were protesting budget cuts and tuition hikes and part of the Occupy Wall Street's November 17th Day of Action.

Our faculty union, the Professional Staff Congress, will be at Foley Square at 5 p.m. and asked members to "march with us to demand full funding of CUNY, a renewal of the NYS millionaires’ tax and an end to policies that that have enriched the 1% and impoverished the 99%."

Thursday Evening in Downtown Brooklyn: 29th Annual Literary Arts Festival at City Tech, featuring Willie Perdomo

This evening we went to very familiar Jay Street in downtown Brooklyn, to City Tech's 29th annual Literary Arts Festival.

This year, in addition to student awards and student performances and readings, the featured writer was the great Nuyorican poet and author Willie Perdomo.

In case you didn't know,

Willie Perdomo is the author of Where a Nickel Costs a Dime and Smoking Lovely, which received a PEN America Beyond Margins Award. He has also been published in The New York Times Magazine and Bomb and his children's book, Visiting Langston, received a Coretta Scott King Honor. He is a NYFA Arts Fellowship winner, Pushcart Prize nominee, a Urban Artists Initiative/NYC grant recipient and was recently a Woolrich Fellow in Creative Writing at Columbia University. He is currently Artist-in-Residence, Workspace, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. He is co-founder/publisher of Cypher Books.

You could tell how much the students could relate to what Willie said and enjoyed his funny, profound and daring poems. As Junot Diaz said, "Perdomo is the hurricane we all write home about. He is to the word what lightning is to the sky. . . what he knows about being of color, being between languages, being poor, being a man, being in trouble, could save your life."

Our favorite was his final poem, "Notes for a slow jam":

This is the poem
you always wanted
I've turned into
a fire -can crooner
to sing you this
slow jam
a farewell greeting
no sooner than the sun
set on our meeting
I had a song for you
but first
I had to sample
from the midnight
quiet storm
break up to make up and
make up to break up and
break up to wake up!
I was a three time loser
persistent fell in
heart over head
not even a chance
to carve the initials
of our romance
on the bark of a tree

There was nothing
no one left
to point at
and say
"its all because of you"
so I have an encounter session
with the bathroom mirror
the black crescents
that real makeup
under my eyes
couldnt cover
the cries
of walking down the street
falling of the park
of a broken heart binge
had to get high
so i buy a bag
to cure my love jones
and soothe my aching bones
I walked into a social club
and found the answer
boiling in the jukebox_
pick a song _
hip hoppin through life
I use to think that salsa
was just for the rice and beans
I was wrong
it' a remedy for those
strung-out love fiends
Would you think i was high
if i told you that Tito Rojas
was a greek playwright?
I'm saying that Euripides
sang salsa
for real
check it out
the tragic hero
is chillin on the corner
love epics and shit
spilling from his mouth
the chorus
is on the rooftop
giving echo to his pain
listen to the sound
of a heart breaking

aye aye aye
aye aye aye
y dicen que los hombres
nunca nunca nunca
deben lloran

and they say that
the men
should never never

cry

I look into mirror
one more time
before i chase you away
and just in case
you dont speak spanish
ileave you sinking
into some muddy waters

you cant spend what you ain't got
you can lose what you ain't never had

My pockets are empty
and i'm letting you go
without a fight
but before you go
heres the poem
you always wanted

Our cell phone pics in the dark auditorium were blurry to the point of making people faceless, so forgive us our cheap technology. We didn't catch the name of the MC, but the young man handled his duties with real grace, humor and aplomb. After Willie got off to huge applause, there were some performances by students: Chino did some rap rhymes and Lee sang a song, "I Wanna Be Your Spider-Man" that made certain females sitting near us a bit wild.

Then there was the awards ceremony from City Tech's wonderful English Department (okay, we know folks who work there and they are all terrific writers) starting with awards for the best research paper and for excellence in English to Zachariah and Stanislaw respectively.

After that were the awards for those writers who are featured in the new, fifth annual issue of City Tech Writer, "the only undergraduate journal across disciplines in Brooklyn." There were three or four winners in each category, and first-place winners like Natrelle for poetry ("Urban Epidemic") and Nick for fiction (a story set in Calcutta) read from their works.

Other winners included John for drama, Anthony for humor, Laran for New York City essay, and Carl Garcia got the leadership award. (We probably screwed up some of these students' first names and didn't always catch their last names, so if someone can give us corrections, we'd be grateful.)

Finally, the faculty winner, Bernadette (McComish?) read her poems "Slipstream" and "Take Me On," the latter a riff on the '80s a-ha song "Take On Me.".

Kudos to the chair of the City Tech Literary Arts Festival, Prof. Caroline Hellman, and everyone involved.

People enjoyed some food and talked at the reception in the gym after we all left Kiltgore Auditorium.

We're always impressed with the creative drive and talent of CUNY undergraduate students, including not least the ones we've been lucky enough to teach, off and on, since 1978.

John W. Kneller, RIP

We were sorry to learn in an obituary notice in the New York Times today of the death of John W. Kneller, who was the president of Brooklyn College during the turbulent decade of the 1970s.

Dr. Kneller, a French scholar who'd previously served as president of Oberlin, came to BC pretty much when we did, forty years ago this fall - we attended his formal investiture - and served during our whole undergraduate and graduate career there.

We got to know him pretty well. Somewhere is a pic of us together with Stella Albo, at a summer 1970 party to commemorate the first day care center at Brooklyn College, which Stella and others fought for on behalf of the growing number of students who were parents.

Our student government friend Gary Hayden was on the search committee that recommended Dr. Kneller's appointment. He told the New York Times on August 13, 1969, that Dr. Kneller "just stood out" among the 100 candidates that were considered for the job. "Suddenly we knew this was it," Gary is quoted as saying. adding that Dr. Kneller was "very, very good on issues that were relevant to college life."

Mostly we met Dr. Kneller when we were protesting something or other, often some of his own actions that we students thought were wrong-headed. When we both first arrived at BC, the new President was interviewed by the editor-in-chief of the day student government newspaper The Ol' Spigot, Paul Schickler, who titled his column "Nervous Knelly," because Dr. Kneller struck him as someone afraid to take definite stands. Among us students, and perhaps the wider academic community, he had the reputation of being wishy-washy if well-meaning.

On the Tuesday after the Kent State killings in May 1970, a sympathetic Dr. Kneller joined us in protest at a memorial service, but his support seemed less than an adequate response to us, and later that afternoon, we students took over his office and commandeered the college during the nationwide student strike that ended the semester abruptly at City University of New York and across the U.S.

A New York Times article from May 10, 1970, noted:

At Brooklyn College, 100 students continued to remain in the office of the president, John W. Kneller, in Boylan Hall, where they have been since the beginning of a student strike last Tuesday.

John W. Kneller, the president of Brooklyn College, issued a statement last night "terminating all classes for the remainder of the semester." College buildings will remain open, he said, to provide student and faculty groups with office space so that they can work for peace.

We remember other occasions when we were across the table and on opposite sides from President Kneller, like the time SO FED UP (we can't recall what the acronym stood for), the first activist group of what we then called 'handicapped' students sat in in his office, demanding access ramps on college buildings.

At firt Dr. Kneller seemed unreasonable in his opposition to such accommodations, but in the end we knew that if we pressured him enough, he'd give in. He did, and of course access for the disabled was, nearly twenty years later, mandated by the federal Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

A New York Times article on October 26, 1974, about the protests over the choosing of a chairman for the new Puerto Rican Studies Department is illustrated with a photo of students, some of whom are seen carrying signs that say PAPA KNELLER MUST GO. The article says that student supporters of Prof. Maria Sanchez, who had been passed over for the position despite being recommended by a faculty/student search committee, "a group of students occupied the office of the president, John W. Kneller, last Friday demanding her appointment."

It was a difficult time to be a college president, the 1970s, and by the end of the decade and his tenure at Brooklyn College, the faculty council (we served for two years as a student representative on the faculty council's curriculum committee and so attended more contentious meetings than we would have liked) had passed a "no confidence" resolution regarding Dr. Kneller's administration, and he was eventually replaced by a more hard-line but much less well-liked college president.

After his resignation, Dr. Kneller, in an interview with the New York Times on December 3, 1978, acknowledged shortcomings in his administration, but said many of its problems were caused by vindictive faculty members who were unable to obtain special favors:

"We've proven by the record of our students and the record of our faculty that we were able to perform our function in the City of New York and maintain our excellence under the most adverse conditions," he said, referring to the city's fiscal crisis and its devastating impact on the City University. . .

"We've had our successes but we've also had our failures". . . Turning to his accomplishments, Dr. Kneller pointed to the fine reputation of many departments, including art, chemistry, psychology and the School of Performing Arts, as well as the creation of new ones, such as women's studies, computer science and Puerto Rican studies.

He noted with pride that Brooklyn College students had among the highest acceptance rates to medical school and law school and that they had achieved the highest score in the nation on the Dental Admission Test last spring.

Looking ahead, Dr. Kneller approached his return to teaching with enthusiasm. "I think it's a marvelous opportunity, and it's the way I'd like to spend the rest of my career."

"It's never been a question of whether I'd leave the presidency, but when."

Jack Kneller was basically a nice guy. We were invited to his house on Marlborough Road on a few occasions. He was a great father to his daughter, an acquaintance of ours, and he loved horses and was a great rider.

He was a kindly, friendly man who had a long and distinguished career as professor of French literature, first at Oberlin College and then at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center. He served as associate editor of Yale French Studies and editor-in-chief of The French Review. He wrote seminal criticism of the authors Gérard de Nerval and Henri Peyre, but for us, Dr. Kneller's insights into Marcel Proust's masterpiece In Search of Lost Time were particularly brilliant.

We asked Borough President Marty Markowitz for a comment and he wrote us:

I graduated Brooklyn College in 1970 and Dr Kneller's service began in 1969. My memories of him while I was President of Evening Student government took place on campus during the height of the anti Vietnam and Black Empowerment movement. His passing saddens all of us.

Dr. Kneller dedicated a decade of his life to Brooklyn College, and he and his family were great supporters of the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens and other Brooklyn cultural institutions. We will miss him.