A few years ago, the UMBC Honors College asked faculty to think about the ten texts
or places that had had the greatest impact on their own intellectual development. I found the exercise interesting.
Will I be sorry that I'm making this public?

In no particular order.

The end of winter in Vermont

I haven't retained much from childhood (I was a late bloomer), but the smell of the earth thawing out of winter is something that still holds meanings for me that I struggle to articulate. This is something that the people around me know nothing of.

 

Romanesque architecture and sculpture

I discovered this in a boring high school art course. My interest was rekindled when I first went to France as a college student. It has never waned. Solidity combined with fantasy, plus a good dose of real mystery and spirituality.

 

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

A very dangerous book. I spent my teenage years in a stupor of fundamentalist puritanical repression (not that there's anything wrong with that). However, with its frank rejoicing in the body and the physical universe, this work was one of those that jolted me out of this phase of my development.

 

The built environment of Paris

As a college student, I spent my first year in Paris. It was a revelation. My first long-term urban experience and my first intense, around-the-clock intellectual shock. I have seen cities and civilization differently ever since.

 

The works of Roman Jakobson

The linguist who did everything well and who refused to remain within the usual boundaries of the discipline. No one else in linguistics has appealed to me as much both as linguist and as a person. I was lucky enough to meet him thanks to my advisor at Cornell.

 

Hector Berlioz, Les Troyens

A quirky, fascinating work by a man who is still something of an outsider. Antiquity as Romantic myth. I continue to be puzzled and fascinated by the balance of Classicism and Romanticism that Berlioz got just right in this work.

 

Jean Giono, Que ma joie demeure

Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Voyage au bout de la nuit

Two vastly different works that I read one after the other, right after college, while I was teaching English in a school in Lorraine, one for a course, the other on the recommendation of a friend. They have stuck with me over the years. I think it was Giono's odd combination of pantheism and pain that appealed to me. Céline’s language thrilled me, and his world of horror and darkness was something that I recognized distinctly.

 

Microsoft Excel

A more recent discovery. Excel stands for me as the symbol of empowering technology. It taught me to do things I hadn't dreamed I could do.

 

Shirley Brice Heath, Ways with Words

A book in the ethnography of communication that one never exhausts. Wise, profound, and beautifully written, it has colored all of my subsequent thinking about language.