Dear Readers,
You thought I’d forgotten about RevengeoftheNerddd.blogspot.com’s everyday Nerd of the Day (NOD) contest, didn’t you? Or, maybe you thought I was just kidding about making YOU, my readers, NODs.
Well, you were wrong, dear folks.
On this day, it is my honor to present to you RevengeoftheNerddd.blogspot.com’s first-ever everyday Nerd of the Day:
Richard Arlington Russell!!!
Our nerd stands above the rest for many reasons:
1) He’s a native of Ocean City, NJ. As much as everyone thinks otherwise, ask native NJ residents like myself and Rich how much NJ rocks and we’d say, A WHOLE-HELLUVA-A LOT.
2) NOD is as tall as Walt Whitman and does, literally, stand above the rest of us.
3) As you will see in the attached pic, NOD is just as fetching as Walt and I can think of nothing more endearing than a good-looking nerd.
4) If our nerd hadn’t been a nerd in his own right, these comparisons to Walt would’ve certainly made him a “nerd by association,” or a NBA.
5) Unlike Whitman, this nerd’s days aren’t spent loafing the woods or on the shores of Long Island (actually, I wonder how much actual “loafing” Walt did? I have to whip out my copy of Justin Kaplan’s National Book Award-winning biography on Walt soon to figure this out). Instead, NOD is an extremely busy grad student currently attending the University College of London. He is set to graduate later this year with a Masters Degree in English.
6) In addition to the BA our nerd holds from NYU and the above-mentioned Masters degree towards which he is working, NOD also has a Masters of Science in Teaching degree. That’s what I call a healthy arsenal of degrees. I mean, seriously, what is a nerd without a desire to continue learning and a love for academia? A lonely sole that has lost its way in this journey of life, that’s what.
7) Our nerd, when applying to graduate programs in the States and in the UK, was accepted into Oxford. He chose not to go. Seriously, how impressive is THAT!
8) NOD, like Whitman, taught for two years. Whitman taught out on Long Island and our nerd taught freshman high school English and Modern Fiction classes in the ubercompetitive school district of Allendale, NJ, which I like to call the East-coast’s-answer-to-the-OC, even though I have no empirical evidence supporting my claim. It should be noted that although Walt inspired whispers of a sex scandal involving a young student (I beg that we don’t judge WW by this brief transgression, which really can't be proven) while our NOD inspired a future generation of English nerds by being a passionate, dedicated and genius teacher—the kind of teacher every single person wishes he or she had.
9) Nerd of the Day succeeded yours truly as the EDLO’s (NYU’s English and Dramatic Literature Organization) indomitable leader from 2000-2001.
10) Among the HUNDREDS of poems, short stories, plays and screenplays that he has penned, is an epic poem, in which I (thinly disguised as the damsel in distress, Princess Forkinspoon), along with the many folks we knew at NYU appear as characters. The poem is long. I’ll be honest: I didn’t think any living person, albeit someone my age, could write an epic poem. It is excellent.
11) NOD had his play, The Tubist, produced at NYU.
12) He is the only person I know whose emails alone verge on literary masterpiece.
13) Everything that our nerd experiences becomes an endlessly entertaining email.
14) His interests include literature and literary theory, screenwriting, Postmodernism, film and cinema studies, women’s studies, popular culture, Buffy the Vampire Slayer* and James Joyce
15) *Once, shortly after we graduated from NYU, I asked our NOD, “Who was that friend of ours in college who LOVED Passions (Passions being that bizarre daytime soap)? to which he replied without a bit of hesitation, “Why, it was Spike.” For those of you who don’t know, Spike was Buffy’s arch-nemesis, turned shag boy-vampire-toy on the series.
16) NOD is a member of the Jane Austen Society of North America and the William Blake society
17) He’s just in love with dead poets, writers, and playwrights as I am and, like me, he often refers to them by their first names.
18) He believes in love letters and, not only writes them, but inspires others to write them as well.
19) He wrote me a love poem! Like, who in today’s day and age, expresses love for a friend in a poem? What an exceptional and nerdy person.
20) Our nerd took it upon himself to submit a formal application to become Revengeofthenerddd.blogspot.com’s Nerd of the Day, even before I decided to have this competition. That’s what I call NERDY!
21) Finally, I don’t think that anyone but our NOD can demonstrate why it is that he’s been chosen to be our first Nerd of the Day. So, here is what he wrote in his application for the position (which is also his statement of purpose that went out to grad programs):
Elizabeth e-mails me to say, “I think I believe in astrology now. I want you to visit this web site and have your birth chart generated,” and so ok, ok –– and after entering information such as name, time of birth, date of birth, sex, and so on, a five page so-called description of who I am appears. And then I remember that I don’t believe in astrology. (I’m sorry, Elizabeth, but I don’t.) But still, there is something beautifully intimate about the line that reads, “Richard Russell is eccentric, intelligent and lucid. Complex love life. He is happy in his imaginary world and thus is happy nowhere…” –– because I take “his imaginary world” to mean the world of literature and of writing. And how could the real world ever hope to compete with that symbolic dreamscape?
In my Honors Modern Fiction class at Northern Highlands Regional High School (Allendale, NJ), we read Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying in January. I like to wait until everything is a little colder and more desperate before starting upon my favorite book in the course. My high school students, bright as they are, are, in general, either turned off by Faulkner’s polyphonic prose or forced to merely feign interest on account of my much-professed admiration for the work. There are few students who will defend Addie Bundren in discussion, most finding her selfish, manipulating, and, as one student wrote in a recent paper, “noxious.” Maybe the students who sympathize with her most are also those who understand her well enough to know that for Addie, who thought language was so inadequate, that Addie would not want some prolix declaration of support. So the closest I have come to “rescuing” Addie, during my now three years teaching HMF, is a student’s journal entry admission that he cried after reading the last line of the book: when Anse replaces Addie with the new Mrs. Bundren. And I cried a little too, at his words this time and not Faulkner’s.
I try to explain to my students Addie’s philosophy. “Isn’t it true,” I state, “that, what Addie says of love –– if love exists, then there is no reason for us to have a word for it: that the word love would just be ‘a shape to fill a lack’ as she declares? Wouldn’t it be the same for something like happiness –– that if we truly were happy we wouldn’t need to provide the term?” And now, as I reflect upon Addie and my students and that line from the birth chart, I’m struck by the possibility that I am content nowhere in life because I am most content in literature and in language: I am more happy in the word happy than I should ever be in a state of happiness.
And so graduate school: my students first suggested the notion to me. “Mr. Russell, you’re way too smart for high school. You would make an amazing college professor.” I know the classroom is where I want to spend my waking life, and a college professorship is the next step I am looking to take: because one can really only do so much within the confines of a high school curriculum, after all. I continue to realize that my life isn’t that of your typical Bergen County resident. Lunching at the Applebee’s in Paramus on a recent Saturday afternoon, the restaurant packed with shoppers talking about their cars or their clothes, my friend Amanda and I were having a heated tête-à -tête concerning Beowulf. One of our colleagues (the new Honors British Literature teacher) had never read Beowulf before and, as Amanda informed me, was planning on taking it out of the curriculum for next year. “But,” I said, “but –– it’s Beowulf! It’s British Literature! She has an obligation to her students. Her students (and, in fact, most people) outside of school are not going to pick up Beowulf on their own –– ” and then after pausing a moment to consider this, I conceded, “Well, I mean, –– I read it on my own. But that was only because Seamus Heaney had written a new translation.” Amanda smiled and gently mentioned, “You do realize that you’re not most people, Rich. You do realize that you’re not normal, right?”
“What makes you say that?” I asked, still upset over the prospect of a Brit Lit sans Beowulf. “Is it because I spent last Friday night watching three different film versions of Jane Eyre –– or because I just joined JASNA [The Jane Austen Society of North America]?”
Amanda smiled. “So what are you going to study?”
“Well, though a teacher of modern fiction, I am still a student of twentieth century authors myself. That beautiful synthesis of expectation and despair that prevailed during the first half of the twentieth century –– how would I give that up? But as a focus, I should like to explore British novelists between the wars [World War I, World War II]. In many ways, that period seems symptomatic of our current American circumstance –– waiting for the next turn of the gyre, as it were.”
For in addition to a love of literature and a desire to pursue teaching at the college level, I want to enter graduate school for the same reason Jude Fawley wished to go to Christminster: to be a scholar. I want to return as a full-time student, having now occupied the other side of the teacher’s desk, and work towards my doctorate and a chance to serve the University. I can think of no place I would be as happy.
Le sigh.
Let's tip our hats and our hearts to Rich Russell!
