86. August, Cal State Long Beach

August Coppola has died. His obituaries began, brutally, by listing his relations: Carmine Coppola (father, composer of The Godfather score), Francis Ford Coppola (director, arts entrepreneur). Talia Shire (sister, actor), Nicholas Cage (son, actor), Christopher Coppola (son, director, producer), Roman Coppola (nephew, director), and Sofia Coppola (nice, director, actor, writer). In his obituaries, August recedes in this crowd of celebrities and the nearly famous. The implication is that he never was as notable as they are, August Coppola was my teacher for most of three years. Although "teacher" is not exactly the right word.

Coppola taught Comparative Literature and headed the General Honors Program at Cal State Long Beach in the late 1960s. Long Beach was an educational factory, exactly the kind of industrialized producer of degrees that California's master plan for higher education intended for state colleges. It took the sons and daughters of aerospace and refinery workers and made them the first in their family to earn a college diploma, the first in their family to become reliably middle-class. They became school teachers, engineers, middle managers, dentists, lawyers, entrepreneurs, and government bureaucrats. I'm one.

Coppola was something else. He was a member of the intelligentsia, one of the avant garde at a time when both of those cultural tribes were beginning to be suspect. He was experimental in the way Dada and Surrealism had once been experimental, in the way Calder was and Pollock and the Beats had recently been, and at a time when authority in all its forms was imploding like a slow-motion film of an abandoned building being demolished. His effrontery would seem old-fashion now.

Other students could tell you better stories of August Coppola. I wasn't a very good student of his. I didn't have the fleetness of his thought.

By some measures, Coppola wasn't a successful academic. He spent his career at state schools; Long Beach was particularly a backwater then. He didn't write his era's defining work of literary criticism or set a new course for the discipline of Comparative Literature. His students, as far as I know, aren't passing on his intellectual heritage to a new generation of students.

Coppola did a great many interesting things in a great many different ways, in ways that were fairly radical once, although they did not result in an edifice of scholarship or a body of memorable art works. His purpose, it seems to me, was to do something else.

Coppola was an instigator, a flagrant intellectual. He was a popularizer of the visionaries, cranks, and poets of the previous generation who were just then passing into history. History, it turned out, did not treat all of them well. Some of the cranks were crazy. Some of the visionaries had nothing new to say. Some of the poets were bad.

Which is not to say that encountering them at working-class Long Beach State in the late 1960s was a mistake or that Coppola's "everything connects" style was mere exuberance. Coppola wasn't making a canon. He wasn't making disciples. He was making minds. In large measure, he made mine.

The image on this page was made by Flickr user Alejandro Cortes. It was used under a Creative Commons license.