class, and it was taught by the kind of man who pops to mind once you mouth the word “professor,” particularly in a Western setting. Harvard-trained Russell Fraser was in his 60s, smoked a pipe, and wore a three-piece tweed suit. The tobacco stained his teeth and flavored his breath, and his suit was rumpled from being worn too often without relief. But he was a published Shakespeare scholar, and he kept us on our toes with provocative questions like, “What’s the difference between parataxis and hypotaxis?” (I got that one) and “Do you think they used a real cannon in the Globe production of Henry VIII ?” (missed that). From Dr. Fraser came a word that I still use today to test whether a dictionary will be adequate enough for my needs: “adscititious,” meaning, “not integral or intrinsic.” Like Ventura and Ramas, Fraser pushed us to the limit. Our final exams were deceptively simple, but murder to answer; he gave us a totally obscure passage from Shakespeare, then asked: “Is this early or late Shakespeare, and why?” And if Lorli Villanueva stoked my artistic fires in high school, there was Nick Delbanco in grad school. Where Professor Fraser was the kind of creature you expected to vanish into or to emerge from the wood paneling of an ancient library, Nick looked like he belonged behind the wheel of something like an Alfa Romeo. A prolific novelist and director of Michigan’s writing program, Nick came to class in a fashionably cut jacket, a scarf and boots, and he carried his papers in a worn brown satchel that you knew he didn’t pick up at the thrift shop. He spoke in a cultivated baritone with a distantly foreign accent that suggested expensive schooling. To Nick, “room” was “rheum.” The rumor spread among his students that he had once been the boyfriend of Carly Simon, and that “You’re So Vain” was written with him in mind.
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