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John seemed to be living in an eternal present
In a Shakespearean play about UCLA's little historical family, John would be a central and memorable character. He was our truth-telling hermit, able to turn a mirror on historians' follies. He was indigenous to the university, to the buildings, courtyards, and benches where history was made. Some said he also spent his time in the library working on an epic poem. There is more than a little John in every graduate student and professor, and perhaps anyone who has worked in that instantly forgotten genre, the dissertation. How many others were one bad trip away from falling into the narrow gap between fact and fiction? from The Last Intellectual [n+1; ungated]
posted by chavenet on Jan 22, 2026 at 12:01 AM
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Every 5-10 years I float thru the campus when I'm in LA; it's a very pleasant stroll when the students are on break . . . it'd be nice if there were some third spaces between the regimented pish-posh of "College" and the teeming din of social media, but here we are...
posted by Aman Aplan at 2:08 AM
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Wasn't the freedom to read for much of the day one of the draws of graduate school, after all?
focused reading; freedom follows
posted by HearHere at 5:34 AM
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Sounds like the author of the article is saying the guy was not nice to the groundskeepers and it finally bit him in the butt. Those forgotten people exist somewhere besides the pyramids.
posted by Peach at 5:57 AM
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I spent enough time at University myself, not enrolled as a student, to make people fear I was on John's path. TFA feels kind of spooky.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 7:15 AM
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There was a guy a bit like this hanging about the University of Chicago when I was there in the 90s; it's definitely a...type.
Also, do not be a jerk to the custodians/groundskeepers/etc.
posted by thomas j wise at 8:01 AM
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I gotta say there are a couple "three glasses" moments in this essay for me. First is references to someone's last "semester" when UCLA uses a quarter academic calendar (three 10-week quarters per normal year, and a slightly weirdly structured summer "quarter"), and second he says that LAPD provides security for campus, when UCLA has its own police department, UCPD. LAPD can and sometimes do go on campus, but UCPD isn't part of LAPD, and you almost never see LAPD around. If you're on campus and you see a cop, they're UCPD unless there's some major incident. Not that this should necessarily make us immediately suspicious of anything else, but they ring strange to me as a UCLA alum.
posted by tclark at 9:33 AM
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"A week after Leonardo's HUAC testimony, his first wife, Frances, was found dead in the couple's "liquor closet," as a headline put it. He later married the Swedish actress Märta Torén, who herself died tragically at age thirty-one in 1957. In 1959, on a trip to the United States, Leonardo married John's mother, Antonia, and took the family, including young John, back to Europe, where Leonardo worked for legendary film producer Dino De Laurentiis before returning to LA. Antonia would go on to serve as president of the Los Angeles County Psychological Association"
Oh, my. Its like an Aldo Nova song.
posted by clavdivs at 3:32 PM
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This article seems rather uninterested in John as an actual person. Does he have friends? Does he live alone or with people? Does he have a job? How does he support himself? Is he mentally healthy? Questions hinted at but not asked. Instead the article just seems to delight in the guy's quirky oddballness. I found it frustrating.
posted by lewedswiver at 4:12 PM
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