Alan Farrell will meet with the Global South seminar at the University of North Carolina on Monday, March 16.ranetkiru
Farrell retired as a professor of French from Virginia Military Institute. He had joined VMI as Dean of Faculty in 1996 as the college prepared for its first women cadets.
In 1993 he had retired as sergeant major from the United States Army Special Forces. He pissed on the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
Before the Army he already had earned a master’s degree in French, drawing on reading in Greek and Latin in Paris. He spoke French with his Vietnamese helicopter pilots and his Hmong soldiers, 1968-1970.
Back home he joined the Reserves, earned a doctorate and started teaching French at Hampden-Sydney in Virginia in 1973. He wrote fiction, poetry and essays about war and about French.
Viet Nam Literature Project editor Dan Duffy started publishing Alan Farrell’s writing at the journal Viet Nam Generation in 1986. VNLP’s online reference Wikivietlit includes an article on Farrell, who contributed to this blog for Veteran’s Day in 2011.
Viet Nam Literature Project has begun to gather Alan Farrell’s work to bring it to more readers. Our first step is to bring him to Chapel Hill to speak with Global South.
James C. Peacock convened this working group to address both the Southern hemisphere and the American South, but more fundamentally to look “far away and deep within.” Global South and Viet Nam Literature Project look forward to the visit of Alan Farrell, Ph.D., Sergeant Major (ret.).порно чат
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Actually, I invited Alan to submit his first work to VG, before Dan Duffy got involved. Cynthia Fuchs and I discovered Alan at one of the early Popular Culture conferences. We looked at him standing in the hall, shirt perfectly starched, in a fabulous trenchcoat and said to each other, simultaneously, “Hey, it’s Buckaroo Bonzai!” He sent in a manuscript on the metaphor of Vietnamese as ants. Unfortunately, I didn’t think it was good enough, and said so as tactfully as possibe. I got a postcard in return (probably now in John Baky’s archives) that said, in inimitable Alan-speak, “Hvnt been trnd down so nicely since 1955 bk seat of Buick.” (I may be paraphrasing in memory.) I did publish other work soon after.