García Lorca was strangely both close and far away for an American student in the early 1980s. More than 40 years had passed since he was assassinated by fascist thugs in his native Granada at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). The Spain that we Dartmouth students were visiting in those years was in the midst of a euphoric and somewhat giddy transition from dictatorship to democracy. In many ways the country bore little resemblance to the nation that four decades before had torn itself apart and martyred its greatest living poet and playwright. And yet, in other ways, that fratricidal Spain of the Civil War and franquismo—the period from 1939 to 1975 when dictator Gen. Francisco Franco ruled—was also eerily close to us.

Many Dartmouth students were in Spain in the winter of 1981, when a certain Colonel Tejero tried to ignite a military rebellion that would have undone the fragile democratic gains made by the country in the immediate post-Franco years, just as Franco had risen up to erase the progressive gains made by the Republic in the 1930s. For many of us Professor Russell was a living bridge to that distant, but proximate, tragic Spain.

We knew that Russell had known, and in some cases studied with, some of the great Spanish Republican intellectuals who found refuge in American colleges and universities after Franco’s victory: figures such as Pedro Salinas and Jorge Guillén, Américo Castro and Francisco García Lorca, Federico’s brother. And though we wouldn’t have been able to articulate it at that time in these terms, I think many of us sensed that Russell—like those great Spanish intellectuals in exile—saw the teaching of Spanish literature not as some kind of linguistic or academic exercise, but rather as a solemn—and even sacred—task: the task of keeping alive the texts and values of Spain’s liberal tradition during the long, dark night of Franco’s dictatorship. It has taken me 25 years in the profession and a lot of research to come to this provisional and partial explanation of the force and impact of Russell’s extraordinary teaching. But even without that knowledge, even as undergraduates, I think we somehow all sensed that we were participating in, and being entrusted with, the keeping of a flame.

What was that flame? What were those values we were being bequeathed and entrusted with? Certainly it wasn’t the names and dates of this or that author or the plot or setting of this or that novel. Even for those of us who became professional Hispanists, those things that we learned at Dartmouth would fade away like a dream at dawn. My best depiction of the flame is drawn from something that happened in the classroom almost 30 years ago, when that group of undergraduates, led by Russell, was exploring García Lorca’s poetry.

I remember that we came to the poem “Muerto de amor” (“Killed by love”), which stages a conversation between a mother and a small child on the subject of death. At one point in the dialogue the child blurts out:

Madre, cuando yo me muera,
Que se enteren los señores;
Pon telegramas azules
Que vayan del Sur al Norte.

Mother, when I die,
make sure the bigshots find out;
Send blue telegrams
That will go from the South to the North.

Russell read these verses aloud and waited for a long moment before posing the question: “Why does the child say ‘send blue telegrams?’ Why blue?”

You can imagine the wild and implausible responses thrown out by a group of earnest undergraduates eager to please the professor. To each response we hazarded, each more absurd than the previous one, Russell would respond with a firm and unusual Spanish “no!” Because blue is the color of sadness? No. Did Lorca know the blues? No. Is it a cryptic reference to Picasso’s Blue Period? No! After letting us exhaust our imaginations and our courage, Russell said, more or less: “The child tells his mother to send blue telegrams because in Spain in Lorca’s time, telegrams were blue.” Well, we all just looked at each other with an expression of surprise and disappointment. “He’s got to be kidding!” If we had known the word and expression back then, we all would have said, “Duh?!”

Russell let another pool of silence puddle up on that long oak table—I would later learn that managing silence is one of the toughest techniques in the art of teaching—before launching into an explanation that has stayed with me to this day. In García Lorca’s time telegrams in Spain were blue; everybody knew that. Only a child—or a stranger—would even notice the blueness of Spanish telegrams. For a jaded adult, telegrams are blue like the sky is blue—they are necessarily and essentially blue and, therefore, their blueness is unworthy of notice or mention. García Lorca’s great poetic achievement, here and throughout his work, Russell explained, was to capture the pristine gaze of a child who can still be struck by the strangeness of the ordinary. For the child and the stranger, telegrams are only accidentally or contingently blue—they could just as well be green or white or mauve. “The great modern poet,” Russell concluded, recreates the gaze of the child and, in so doing, jolts the reader out of complacency, out of the comfort of the given.” The child, the poet and the reader realize: Another color is possible.

If I’ve dwelled so long on this anything-but-telegraphic account of a seemingly trivial anecdote about a telegram, it is only because for me it captures the core of Russell’s legacy. He taught us that the child, the poet, the stranger and the attentive student of literature all share an invaluable skill: that of being able to see things as if for the first time, of always perceiving the monochromatic status quo—the way things are—against the rainbow backdrop of the way things have been and, more importantly, the way things might someday be.

This double vision, I would come to learn, is not just some kind of luxury to be enjoyed only by leisured humanities students. The ability to constantly renew one’s perceptions, to taste the strangeness of one’s tongue, is at the core of creative, enlightened and tolerant citizenship. This double vision, honed by the study of foreign languages, travel and study abroad, and by sensitive reading of literature, is, in the end, the real legacy, the true flame that has been lovingly preserved and passed on with wisdom and passion by our mentor and friend, Bob Russell.

James D. Fernández is an associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese at NYU. From 1995 to 2007 he served as the director of NYU’s King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center. This piece is based on remarks he made at a 2008 dinner in honor of Professor Russell, who taught at Dartmouth from 1957 until his retirement in 1991.

Why did you want to write about Schuman?
There was a need to write this book because there was no major scholarly work that dealt with Schuman, and he was a major force in American music of the 20th century.

What was the most surprising thing about Schuman you discovered?
I was not anticipating finding as many connections between Schuman and Dartmouth as I found. There are folders of materials marked “Dartmouth College” among Schuman’s papers. He was the inaugural speaker for the Hopkins Center. He was on the board of overseers for the Hop, and he almost received a commission from the Hop for a work.

If someone doesn’t know Schuman’s work, what is the first piece to listen to?
Probably the Third Symphony from 1941—it was his breakthrough work. It has in it all of the features that one finds throughout his—we’ll use the fancy word here—oeuvre. It is a compendium of Schumanesque writing, and it’s a lot of fun.

Can you tell us more about the book’s title?
In 1944 Schuman was asked to provide incidental music for a Broadway production of William Shakespeare’s Henry VIII. The production was stillborn, but he wrote some pieces for it including a song, “Orpheus with his Lute,” which he later drew from to make other, larger compositions. As for Manhattan, Schuman was born there, and he’s among a handful of American composers about whom that can be said.

Other New Titles By Faculty

Remembering Fenway
To mark the 100th anniversary of Boston’s Fenway Park, sports writer and MALS professor Harvey Frommer dug deep. “I interviewed about 140 people: past Red Sox players and opponents, fans, media people, ballpark workers like the scoreboard operator and head grounds-keeper, team executives, a nun, a monsignor and a bishop,” he says. The decade-by-decade narrative includes several hundred archival images. (Stewart, Tabori & Chang)

Hunger: The Biology and Politics of Starvation
“Feeding everyone should be an easy task,” argue Dr. John Butterly, an associate professor of medicine, and Jack Shepherd, a professor in the environmental studies department. But it hasn’t worked out that way. One out of six people on earth suffer from chronic hunger despite advances in science and technology as well as humanitarian efforts. “If the last famine occurred in Europe in the mid-19th century, why is it occurring in the 21st?” ask the authors. “The reason—lack of political will.” Butterly and Shepherd end with a nine-point plan for political change. (Dartmouth College Press)

Graphic Subjects
Some of the most noteworthy graphic novels and comic books of recent years have been autobiographical. Michael A. Chaney, a professor of English and African and African-American studies, assembles 27 scholarly essays that examine the genre. Subjects include Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis and Alan Moore’s Watchmen. Chaney contributes an essay on Rupert Bazambanza’s Smile Through the Tears, a memoir of Rwanda’s 1994 genocide. (University of Wisconsin Press)

Art in the Era of Alexander the Great
Art historian Ada Cohen examines works produced in Macedonia during the reigns of Philip II, his son Alexander the Great and their immediate successors. Cohen focuses on three masculine themes—warfare, hunting and abduction of women. Cohen’s text is structured around paintings and mosaics, both secular and funerary, from northern Greek sites. (Cambridge University Press)

The Wobbling Pivot
Pamela Crossley, a historian of modern China and an expert on the Qing dynasty, offers this history of China since 1800. Crossley’s book differs from the many existing books on the subject because, in the words of the author, it is a “narrative of scope and color sufficient to engage the reader of any level of knowledge about China, combined with thematic orientation that I hope will interest specialists in the field.” (Wiley-Blackwell)

Evelyn’s Dartmouth connection began with her work as a research associate for her husband, Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson. She and “Stef” developed a polar and subpolar library—including material on Stef’s ancestral Iceland—of international repute in New York City during the 1930s and 1940s. At the same time Stef was lecturing and consulting at the College in the Northern studies program. The Stefansson Collection, along with Evelyn and Stef, moved permanently to Hanover in 1951 with Evelyn as the Stefansson librarian and Stef continuing to teach and consult. After Stef’s death in 1962 she moved to Washington, D.C., where she became increasingly dismayed at the treatment the collection was receiving, with some parts ignored and others discarded. It took many years of work on the part of the College and the library to restore good relations with Evelyn. In the last decade, however, she generously provided financial support for the Stefansson Fellows program in the Institute of Arctic Studies and the Stefansson Collection as well.

In recent years Evelyn renewed her interest in Iceland. When married to Stef and managing the Stefansson library, she had more than a passing knowledge of the Icelandic language. She later admitted that she had lost most of what she knew but was quite willing, at the age of 85, to relearn this ancient Norse language.

The Icelandic government developed an Arctic research center in Akureyri in the late 1990s and named it, with her permission, the Stefansson Arctic Institute. A year later the institute opened an exhibition titled “The Friendly Arctic,” using the title of one of Stef’s major publications on that polar region. I remember watching Evelyn dancing late into the night at the art museum with a long-lost Icelandic cousin of Stef’s who was still living on the family homestead from which Stef’s parents had emigrated in the 19th century.

In 2001 Iceland president Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson invested Evelyn with the Order of the Falcon in recognition of her interest in and support of research in the polar regions. The next year “The Friendly Arctic” exhibition was opened at the Montshire Museum in Norwich, Vermont, with both President Grímsson and Evelyn speaking. The relationship between Evelyn and Iceland continued to flourish for the rest of her life.

Evelyn was indeed a well-known patron of the arts in Washington and invitations to her Georgetown home—the one with the Chagall mosaic in the garden—were much sought after. I once remarked that the Raoul Dufy hanging in the hallway was a fine print. “Philip,” she replied, “that is not a reproduction.” It may have been at that same luncheon where I picked up a copy of the then-new book The Majesty of the Law (2003) by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. It was warmly inscribed to Evelyn. “Yes,” she commented, “Sandra and Ruth [Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg] often come here for musical evenings.” Not for a moment did Evelyn think that this was out of the ordinary.

Her circle of friends was wide. Late in her remarkable life she began to host her own birthday party at her summer home, Ultima Thule (Latin for “farthest north”), in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Among the guests on occasion were Nobel laureate Saul Bellow, the town librarian, jazz legend George Shearing, a farmer-neighbor, former U.S. Rep. Patricia Schroeder and Chauncey Loomis of Dartmouth’s English department. Each party was informal but structured. After drinks for the 100 or so guests there would be an hour of chamber music followed by dinner. She surprised her guests on her 90th birthday by having a cake in the shape of a polar bear and presenting each of the women in attendance with a silver polar bear pin. On her 95th birthday Evelyn flew the Pacifica Quartet in from Illinois. This group was a favorite of hers, not least because one of the violinists was Icelandic. The quartet first played Mendelssohn’s Capriccio in E Minor and then Schubert’s Quintet in C Major. The second cello for the Schubert was Yo-Yo Ma.

Diminutive in stature only, Evelyn played second to no one.

Philip N. Cronenwett, a longtime friend of Evelyn Stefansson Nef, is Dartmouth Special Collections librarian emeritus. He now consults on bookish matters.

Kim’s First Day

A different kind of College tour took place on July 1, one that did not feature an undergrad walking backward while talking to prospectives. Instead President Jim Kim started his new job by venturing around campus to meet and greet staff, faculty and students and to check out his new domain. His first official address as Dartmouth’s 17th president came before a crowd of staffers at the Top of the Hop. “What we’re doing here on a day-to-day basis is going to change the world,” he declared. During the next two days Kim shared a similar vision with faculty, students, athletics and development staff as he toured the professional schools and hospital. “I’m thrilled to see how great it all is up close,” he said. Kim also joined a community gathering on the Green, where free ice cream took the edge off threatening skies.

Margaret Williamson, professor of classics and comparative literature, however, concedes the secretary may have been on to something: “I think it is the case that there is not enough translation done and not enough awareness of what translation is,” she says. She points out that this lack of awareness is inevitable with speakers of any large, dominant language, and reasserts the importance of translation. “No one language expresses all the meanings and points of view in the world,” says Williamson. “Translation is a way of enabling you to get a perspective on the particular way you see the world and the different ways others see the world. And I think that’s important at a personal, cultural and political level.”

When, at the start of last spring’s final class of “Translation: Theory and Practice,” Williamson asks her students to pick a statement that captures the essence of what they have learned, students come up with a variety of aphorisms—philosophical, enigmatic and poetic—that raise questions about the essence of language and communication:

“The whole planet speaks through translation.”

“Translation is a language between languages.”

“Translation is the language of planets and monsters.”

“Nothing is translatable.”

“Everything is translatable.”

When one student reads the statement, “Contrary to what U.S. military strategy would suggest, Arabic is translatable,” the discussion moves from existential concerns to politics.

“If you come into a country it’s up to you to try to understand the language,” says one student. Another suggests the misperception that Arabic is untranslatable may have contributed to America’s impasse in Iraq, and everyone seems to agree the ability to translate is crucial in reaching intercultural and international understanding. Williamson suggests another statement: “Can we then say that war is the point at which translation ceases?” she asks.

The question reflects the course’s goals of sensitizing students to issues of cultural identity and making them aware that different languages may express different worldviews.

Williamson takes turns teaching “Translation” with its originator, Monika Otter, a professor of medieval English literature who created the course in 2000. Enrollment tends to be high, but Williamson caps the course at 19 so she can spend sufficient time guiding each student. To enroll in the course students must demonstrate at least intermediate proficiency in a foreign language. This means most students are upperclassmen, though one of the students in this class is a freshman who grew up speaking Japanese. The 19 students in the course are comfortable with at least 12 languages: besides Japanese and English students are steeped in ancient Greek, modern Greek, Latin, Italian, French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Korean and Chinese.

It would be 13 languages if Williamson’s native language were included: She is originally from England, so her native tongue is British English. It’s a source of amusement when she has to ask the students how to translate her British diction into American English, but it is also a serious translation issue. “There is not one English,” says Williamson. Depending on the purpose of the translation, translators need to decide whether to translate into standard British English, standard American English or any other dialect of English. Williamson herself is a classicist, specializing in ancient Greek, so she needs to consult with faculty from other language departments to guide students whose languages she doesn’t know.

As hard as it is to decide into what language to translate a text, it becomes even more difficult when translating across cultures that do not share the same basic concepts, such as ancient Greek and modern English. These are some of the issues students must grapple with. They also discuss the dilemmas that arise when a translator has to make editorial decisions about the word of God (Williamson spends one week of the class on Bible translations) and the question of whether a translator should be faithful to the spirit or the letter of a text.

The poet Galway Kinnell, a guest lecturer, spoke about poetry translation and argued that many poems are mangled by translators who, in an attempt to stay true to the original form, create forced, awkward rhymes. Students must solve such conundrums in their own course assignments, which include the translations of a poem, joke, dialogue and narrative.

The course culminates in a larger translation project that requires the students to write an analysis of the difficulties they faced in the translating and the language choices they have made. The students seem to compete in finding the most demanding and unconventional projects: a letter from Cicero translated into a present-day e-mail, a translation of Virgil into the idiom of a modern novel, and three alternative translations of the Greek philosopher Parmenides—one in metric verse, one in free verse and another in prose. Other challenges include subtitling a video recording of La Traviata in English (with the added difficulty of matching subtitles to the timing of the video frame) and translating the poetry of Ana Merino, who teaches in the Spanish department. The final project of graduate student Tom Wisniewski, Adv’09, a translation from the Italian novel A Strange Day for Alexander Dumas by Rita Charbonier, has led to a contract from Random House.

One of the lessons students take away is that translation is always imperfect. Things that can be said in one language cannot be exactly transferred into another language. “Sometimes saying that something is not translatable is the best gesture you can make toward mutual comprehension,” says Williamson. “Sometimes the gap in understanding is the most important thing to understand.”

When guest lecturer Larry Polansky, from the music department, visits the class, he brings in videos of poetry in a completely different kind of language: American Sign Language (ASL), which he started learning five years ago. The soundless poetry looks almost like a dance. One of the poems describes the stubborn return of dandelions not successfully eradicated as weeds. In one scene the late deaf poet Clayton Valli moves his hands in rhythmic fluidity to show puffballs releasing their seeds. Polansky explains this is a political poem in which the dandelions signify deaf culture, but he declines to give a precise translation: English words can’t convey the visual beauty of ASL poetry, and besides, some members of the deaf community oppose translation into English because they feel it marginalizes ASL.

In this age of globalization the languages of less-powerful communities are under constant threat of being swallowed by more dominant ones. A practical-minded person might say that communication would be much easier if various languages were replaced by a global one, rendering translation unnecessary, but Williamson resists the idea of a universal language. “It would involve a flattening of meaning,” she says. “It would edit out all the particular, all the local.”

Alex Lambrow ’10, a comparative literature major whose final project is a translation of Franz Kafka’s The Trial, says his preoccupation with different languages has given him a more sophisticated perspective on himself. “I now understand that my own language, English, has certain embedded concepts that don’t always fit with concepts in other languages,” he says. “That has made me question the way I think.”

Alison Herdeg ’11, a Spanish and math double-major (“just two different languages,” she says about the seeming disconnect between the subjects), says the course has made her realize that everything is translation, even the communication between speakers of one language. “Every single word I say has all my life’s connotations to it,” she says. “So even if, according to the dictionary, a word has a certain meaning, it has a different connotation for someone else.”

Judith Hertog lives in Norwich, Vermont.

“It” doesn’t look like much more than a bag of dirt, but “it” may very well be a crucial strand in the energy future of the United States and the world. “It,” in this case, is “celloluse,” here in the form of a bag of ground-up wood chips, but it could be a bag of ground-up corn stalks, switch grass or any of the other forms of the cellulose that makes up the majority of plant life and the majority of biomass on the planet. The trick is to profitably turn “it” into ethanol, put that ethanol in our cars and go back to driving around the country with fewer worries about terrorism, global warming or nefarious Big Oil activity in faraway places.

It’s not an easy trick, and Lynd hasn’t done it yet. Humans have known how to turn the seed of a plant—such as corn kernels—into whiskey and its cousin, ethanol, for millennia. And humans have been turning it into record quantities of auto fuel in the last few years: Ethanol production capacity in the United States now stands at 10 billion gallons per year. (U.S. auto fuel consumption runs well over 170 billion gallons per year.) But ligno-cellulose, inedible to humans, has evolved to resist attack by naturally occurring enzymes and microorganisms. This, Lynd says, is the central problem, which he refers to as “the recalcitrance of cellulosic biomass.” To profitably break down that cellulose into easily usable sugars would immediately introduce the world to an enormous new energy supply.

Roughly speaking, Lynd has been working on the problem for 30 years, since he was an undergraduate at Bates College in the late 1970s. Working on a farm one summer during the energy crisis of the 1970s, he noticed how hot the inside of a compost pile could get. Like Newton’s apple, that hot pile led Lynd to a senior thesis on converting biomass into ethanol, to three advanced degrees (including master’s and doctoral degrees in engineering from Thayer) and, eventually, his own company, Mascoma.

It would be hard to dispute that Lynd is among the top experts worldwide in the field. He has testified before the Senate Agriculture Committee on the role biofuels will play in national energy consumption, and in 2007 he was the inaugural winner of the $100,000 Lemelson-MIT Award for Sustainability. He is currently part of the Global Sustainability Project being organized by the Natural Resources Defense Council, with which he works closely.

His approach, and that of Mascoma, which he co-founded in 2005 and where he serves as chief scientific officer (he also holds a minority stake), is to engineer a microorganism that will both break down the fibers that make cellulose so recalcitrant and turn the resulting sugars into ethanol. The scientific shorthand for the goal is “consolidated biomass processing.” Such a catalyst is, as various reports and articles have noted, the holy grail of biofuels. It would be a total solution—biomass in, fuel out.

In May Mascoma announced the development of a strain of yeast that produces higher-than-ever quantities of cellulase, or enzymes that consume cellulose; the successful cellular production of ethanol without adding any more cellulase (prior processes had required “restocking”); and two advances in the development of thermophilic bacteria, a strain of microbe that converts cellulose into ethanol.

“I truly believe,” says Lynd, “that we’re finally at the ‘This is gonna work’ stage.”

Lee Rybeck Lynd, 51, has been teaching at Thayer since 1987. He is an adjunct professor of biology and carries a full load of courses, including ENGS 161: “Metabolic Engineering” and ENGG 261: “Biomass Energy Systems.” He has sandy, wavy hair, and almost every published story about him—and there have been a few, especially during the run-up in oil prices, when alternative energy lived on the front pages—is obliged to mention that, though he doesn’t mind a dress shirt, he favors sandals without socks.

It’s a 10-minute commute from Lynd’s office at Dartmouth to the headquarters of Mascoma, located at the end of a road winding up the mountain behind the Hanover Co-op in the Centerra corporate park, a complex of high-tech offices. Seeded with $100 million in venture backing from green-tech capitalists such as Vinod Khosla, who made a fortune as a cofounder of Sun Microsystems, and up to $50 million committed by the Department of Energy (Dartmouth also took an equity stake in the company as part of a sponsored research agreement, says Lynd), Mascoma has about 70 employees on two floors. With the business growing, they are planning to move into a new building this fall.

Overall, the look of the Mascoma operation is a blend of Dr. Who and the Dartmouth Outing Club, with staffers dressed for hikes, but wearing safety glasses and moving among the clunky machinery of the laboratory.

A quick tour begins in the cooler, with the Hefty bags of wood chips. Next is the molecular biology lab, where airtight acrylic cabinets, the interior accessed by gloves mounted in holes, hold culturing samples of anaerobic microbes that work in oxygen-free environments. These microbes are the catalyst enzymes designed and patented by Mascoma.

“Mascoma is trying to directly address recalcitrance,” says Lynd. “Other companies are investing in converting the sugars. We are one of a minority of companies emphasizing recalcitrance. And we’re making the biggest bet on consolidated biomass processing.”

In the fermentation lab the best of these all-in-one microbes are working in vats filled with water and wood chips, breaking down the cellulose and converting the harvested sugars. In the analytical lab staffers work to figure out what, in the end, the microbes hath wrought and how well. “At the end,” says Lynd, “we ask, ‘What have we done? How much cellulose did we treat?’ ”

Mascoma is one of several firms working to find or engineer a profitable way to turn cellulose into fuel. Verenium, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, scours ponds, streams and the stomachs of grass-eating animals to find naturally occurring microbes. Colorado-based Gevo is engineering catalysts as well, but with the aim of creating butanol, a cousin of ethanol.

In the best of scenarios full-scale production of cellulosic ethanol is just a few years away. This, of course, has been a dream of energy scientists for years, but “a few years away” is looking closer than ever. Mascoma has built a $30 million ethanol plant in Rome, New York, on the site of an old Air Force base. (Half the cost was footed by the State of New York.) Mascoma is also partnering in the 2010 construction of a second facility in Kinross, Michigan, on the site of a former paper mill. “Paper waste,” says Lynd, “is ideal for ethanol.”

The competition, of course, is also building plants. Verenium’s operation in Louisiana, in the early stages of operation, is experimenting with turning the woody parts of sugarcane into fuel. If cellulosic ethanol ever takes off, the
likely scenario would be as many as 100 such plants scattered around the country, turning local produce and waste into fuel for cars, providing perhaps a third of our overall fuel-for-transportation needs.

Money is the obstacle, as in so many pursuits. To make ethanol competitive, both the costs of the raw material and the costs of the enzymes to convert it have to come way down. Comparing a finished gallon of ethanol to a finished gallon of oil, the cost of raw material for the ethanol hovers around 75 cents a gallon. The cost of the enzymes alone, as it stands, doubles that figure. And then there is processing, transportation, marketing and all the other fixed costs that go into the price at the pump of a gallon of gas, pushing the end price of ethanol over $4 a gallon.

Doubters worry that there just isn’t enough land to grow enough biofuel. They cite studies that show that even if all available cropland were given over to fuel production we still might not be able to make enough fuel to replace the 20 million barrels of oil the United States uses every day, but Lynd points out that biofuel doesn’t have to be the only answer, just one good answer in a series of answers.

Lynd is not particularly modest about his ambitions for Mascoma or for his role in the movement of the United States to sustainable fuel use. “I’m trying to play a visionary role,” he says, sitting out in the sun in front of the Mascoma offices. “That’s probably because I come from a long line of social reformers. My father founded Freedom Schools in Mississippi during the Civil Rights Movement. My mother was a draft counselor during Vietnam.”

Not surprisingly, he has a vision for Dartmouth, too. He would love to see a school more in the mode of a large institution with a busy research department. In his view such exposure to the real world would energize undergraduates, who would see what they are learning about advancing in practice. This is, of course, in direct opposition to the “it is a small College, and yet there are those who love it” folks who think “research” is a dirty word.

In this and other matters Lynd seems congenitally hopeful and optimistic, as anyone working on biofuels in the 1980s and 1990s must have been. Or perhaps it is the rush of the feeling that one’s time has finally come.

“We are knocking on a huge door,” says Lynd.

Bryant Urstadt is a contributing editor.

Aside from courses in chemistry and German, which I needed to fulfill the language requirement, there was the pesky matter of the also-required English 1A.

When I stepped into that class as a somewhat naive 17-year-old from the industrial heartland of Ohio, I never expected for a moment to encounter a professor whose passion for literature, particularly American literature and the writers who made it, would stay with me—and literally change my life.

James Cox always entered the classroom in Dartmouth Hall toting a tattered brown leather bag the size of a small suitcase. From it he pulled out only the book to be discussed in class—never any accompanying notes, just the book itself. This was unnerving; I’d expected to see him scatter across his desktop reams of yellow legal paper, lots of supporting documents and critical reference material. Wasn’t that what being a scholar was all about? But his style was interrogative. He quickly engaged the students in my class with sharp, probing questions about issues of race in Faulkner’s Light in August and existential choices in Hemingway’s Collected Stories. Hunched over his desk, elbows forward, with an occasional finger crooked in the air, Cox commanded our attention—and respect—with his booming Southern drawl, but he made it known that he wanted to hear what we had to say. He wanted us to react, at some gut level, to the assigned reading, drawing—if we dared—from the booty of our own limited experiences.

In class I noticed how Professor Cox liked to flip through the pages of a book, thumbing them casually as if somehow to feel the words kaleidoscopically on paper. A book, especially one written by a great American writer—Hawthorne, Melville, Twain among his favorites—was, to his eyes, a totemic object, a sacred work of historical and cultural importance that demanded involvement and response on the part of the reader. Yet such sacred works were not always to be taken with complete seriousness. In fact, what I remember most from those classes with Professor Cox was the humor that he employed with such dexterity in talking about literature. His was not a sardonic or wry kind of wit, but a humor that came right up from the gut. He got us to laugh about something we all knew yet had suppressed—for example, the true symbolism of Melville’s Moby Dick and Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, the sexual connotations and unspoken truths of the American experience.

It is probably no exaggeration to say that as freshmen most of us in his class were terrible writers, yet the man never ripped up our essays with heavy marginal comments or even assigned us didactically a specific literary topic. We were to read a book and simply write something about it, anything really, whatever we wanted. Our class papers could take any form we desired: a cogent essay, an autobiographical riff, a critical review. It was that freedom to react to a work of literature in any way we wanted—to trust our own instincts and observations about the world around us—that sealed the deal for me to become, eventually, a writer and not a doctor.

By the time I had taken my second Cox course he had vaulted to superstar status. His English 78 course, “American Literature of the 20th Century,” was overflowing with hundreds of students, not just English majors. It had become a lecture course, not the seminar I’d taken as a freshman, and it rocked the house. When he got up on the podium, still without notes or with simply a few bulleted items on a yellow sheet of paper, Cox roared with anecdotes, observations and a bevy of insights into the works of Dreiser, Lardner, Anderson, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Salinger and Nabokov. As before, he had the students in class rolling on the floor with laughter. Others joined me in attending these lectures just for the entertainment they provided.

Black humor reached its artful climax when Cox read aloud from the last page of Lolita in which Humbert Humbert offers his version of profound advice to Dolores Haze (Lolita) and her new husband, Richard: “While the blood still throbs through my writing hand, you are still as much part blessed matter as I am, and I can still talk to you from here to Alaska. Be true to your Dick. Do not let other fellows touch you. Do not talk to strangers. I hope you will love your baby. I hope it will be a boy….” As with Melville, we were in the belly of the whale, exploring its innards, deep in the guts of the American experience.

On receiving the Hubbell Award given by the American literature section of the Modern Language Association in 1997, Cox told the audience his “luck began early,” when he was born in 1925, “the year that saw publication of In Our Time, The Great Gatsby and An American Tragedy.” He went on to express his gratitude for the financial independence afforded him by the G.I. Bill after his service in the Navy.

He had “drifted into an English major,” he said, which is probably what happened to many of us at Dartmouth during the 1960s as late bloomers in search of enlightenment. Cox recalled that in the summer of 1952 he landed in Leslie Fiedler’s “Myth in American Fiction and Verse” course at the University of Indiana and chose American literature as his field. Cox earned his Ph.D. from Indiana in 1955. His career at Dartmouth continued until his retirement in 1990.

Living now on the Virginia farm where he was raised, Cox reads more voraciously than ever, inspiring me to carry on, in my own small way, the tradition of American literature that he introduced me to so effortlessly. Cox also continues to write. His work on Mark Twain, including a new edition of Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor (University of Missouri Press, 2002), emphasizes how and why Twain remains an important writer in the American canon of fiction.

As is clear from the long neglect suffered by Melville (until the Harvard scholar F.O. Matthiessen issued The American Renaissance in 1941, a book deemed by Cox to be the most influential of his academic life) and the fact that all of Faulkner’s novels had fallen perilously out of print before he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949, to write fiction is to cast your fate to the wind. To read fiction, however, as we learned in Cox’s freshman English class, is a choice that returns a rich harvest of pleasure and excitement for a lifetime.

Tom Maremaa is a software engineer in Cupertino, California. His most recent novel is Metal Heads (Kunati Books, 2009).