Blaise Cronin
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PRAISE FOR BLOOMINGTON GAZE
‘Packed with the wit and humor of Bloomington Days and Bloomington Daze, Bloomington Gaze also flays some of the academy’s most sacred cows.’
Kenneth R. R. Gros Louis, University Chancellor and Trustee Professor, Indiana University.
‘Blaise Cronin’s witty, irreverent and amusing third book on the life of a university town in Middle America is not just another volume about town and gown in the USA. It is a book that guides the reader to the heart of the matter. Like the scalpel of a gifted surgeon, Cronin’s eloquent prose cuts open the surface to reveal the incongruous contradictions of academic life. Eventually, the reader cannot help but smile and ponder at the same time in the face of the ironic observations of an elegant writer who possesses the rare ability of a great story teller: that of depicting details while painting an entire fresco. At the end, we realize that the tragic-comic aspects that comprise the intricate texture of town and gown are not so different, after all, than life itself. Bloomington Gaze is that uncommon book that speaks to any intelligent reader, regardless of one’s own cultural background: it invites rereading for both pure pleasure as well as for its intellectual rigor.’
Andrea Ciccarelli, Professor of Italian, Indiana University, and co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Italian Novel.
Blaise Cronin was born and raised in Ireland. Trinity College Dublin and the Queen’s University of Belfast graciously granted him the degrees necessary to avoid working for a living. He came to Middle America via London (England) and Glasgow (Scotland). In one sense, he has never looked aback; in another, he has never stopped looking back.
Small town, big egos…pornographically big, some of them. Bombast for lunch and bluster for supper. We strut and declaim when strolling and easy conversation would be well advised. Egos that bruise midnight blue from half-imagined slights; tempers that flare faster than the supporting nostrils. A superficially civilized yet combative world of mind games, where MacArthurs and Guggenheims separate the men from the boys. The super smug sit astride their chrome-rich Harley-Davidsons, parked pretentiously on their web pages. Here NSF, NIH and NEH are the acronyms that spell success, our riposte to the red and purple rosettes that caparison the marrows, pies and foals at the Monroe County Fair.
If only those bulging filing cabinets in Kirkwood Hall could speak, what tales they’d tell: of internecine rivalries and faculty feuds worthy of Medici Florence; of dashed tenure dreams and dodgy promotions; of process irregularities and administrative howlers; of incidents of sexual harassment, imagined and real; of offers, counter-offers and plausibly deniable sweetheart deals. This is the gritty reality of our grand enterprise. We—I more than most—have feet of clay and our dusty footprints are all over the personnel records gathered up in this and every other dean’s office. Welcome back, again, to the Bloomington sub-division of the ‘groves of academe’ where, to continue with Mary McCarthy’s words, the ‘Palladian façade of appearances and observances’ is maintained as diligently as our obstreperous academic egos will allow.
