Education
MFA Theatre, U of Iowa, 1985
PhD English, U of Rhode Island, 1979
MA English, U of Utah, 1975
BA English, U of Nevada, Reno, 1971
Biography
The end is nigh.
Forty years standing before students will come to an end on Thursday, May 16, when the old fart will stink up his last classroom. He will slink off south to Oceanside to resume his seasonal life, now suddenly year round, as stroker of ocean swims, composer of baseball ballads, and scribe of scurrilous scripts.
Somewhere, hidden in the demented depths of his bewildered brain, Bob may stumble upon a novel or a play he hasn't written but always meant to. The spark will be struck, neurons fired, ganglia awakened, synapses flooded with the liquids of memory and, if the Muses grace the moment with their presence, more words will spill from the old man's fetid brain.
Do we need more words? Hardly. But what else to do? "Me to play!" as Hamm says in Beckett's Endgame. My endgame will be no final chess move but a tourney of Scrabble words—words to keep me company long after the world has blown itself up or drowned in its own tears. "Words, words, words"--the first thing we learn, the last we forget, the mute companion of the literate.
I yearn to eat my words!
Representative Courses Taught
- ENGL 110 Detective Literature
- ENGL 463 Writing for the Stage
- ENGL 410 Shakespeare
- ENGL 110 Baseball Literature
- ENGL 310 Literary Theory
Scholarship
Keywords
Shakespeare, baseball poetry; detective fiction; the plays of Beckett, Albee & Pinter; writing pedagogy