Students aren’t the only ones who daydream. The droning prof at the front of class is often the last thing on the minds of jaded students. Anything and everything, from chicken fingers to weekend plans, is capable of winning the battle for your attention on a Friday afternoon. But these musings start and stop with the pupil, right? It seems there’s no room for daydreaming in the life of a college professor, so what if you caught your teacher neglecting his own lesson plans to tap out a catchy Caribbean beat with his make-shift, number-two drumsticks? What if, on that never-ending Friday afternoon class, you bolted out of your chair as soon as the professor said “go,” only to watch him slip out just before you?
L. Collier Hyams has just revealed the answer to one of mankind’s most burning questions: what does a Scotsman wear beneath his kilt to warm the space above his ruddy knees?
“A long shirt.”
This answer is less titillating than expected; the image of Scottish freedom fighter William Wallace neatly tucking-in his tunic before doing battle is a rather disappointing one.
Hyams clarifies his statement; if one is going for an authentic highland experience, they should go without skivvies (release a sigh of relief for Wallace’s manhood). But, “If its 100 degrees in South Carolina and you’re walking around, sometimes you have to make exceptions.”
The plot thickens.
Hyams, Georgetown professor of digital art by day, is a kilt-wearing, bagpipe-playing, Ghanayan-drum-beating, bass guitar-crafting, reggae-ballad-singing son-of-a-gun by night—as well as on the weekends at Scottish festivals across the country—hence references to South Carolina heat and the discomforts of woolen man-skirts. His band, 50 Man Machine, a reggae-Celtic-rock fusion group which counts a D.J. from the Barbados and Patti LaBelle’s bass player in its numbers, is a realization of Hyams’ eclectic artistic aesthetic and his yen for cultural fusion.
A self-described “foreign service brat,” Hyams grew up in Africa, Thailand and Germany, and though the scenery of his childhood shifted, music remained a constant. He learned the guitar at home, though his first drum instructor was the master teacher from the Ga tribe in Ghana. Revelations like this fall naturally from Hyams’ goateed lips.
Sitting in what he describes as his “wee, little girls bathroom” of an office on the 2nd floor of Walsh, Hyams looks how you’d expect a musician/artist/bagpipe enthusiast to look. The professor channels 90s grunge and art-school chic, dressed in a black leather jacket, corduroy cargo pants and a tiger-graphic t-shirt. The cramped space houses three computers, shelves full of binders and four or five pictures of Hyams and his wife on their wedding day at his family’s ancestral church in Laggan, Scotland. The bride wears a flowing gown with a train. The groom is dressed in a shorter, plaid number with knee-high socks.
Their’s is a classic love story. Boy meets girl (who is a Highland dance instructor). Girl rebuffs boy. Girl and boy meet again and again on the Scottish festival circuit. They fall in love. The couple is expecting their first child in February and plan on having another piper in the family.
Prior to domestic bliss and Georgetown professorship, Hyams was living the dream of an artist in New York City, playing gigs and working on his “Blendo” art. He and his Blendo compatriots focused on creating works in whatever medium they felt expressed their artistic purpose best. Their movement faced numerous hurdles, even within the art world.
“I would do computer art in the late 80s and they wouldn’t know what to do with it,” he said.
Along with sculpture and digital art, Hyams and art school classmates experimented with other media and created a comic book called “Mo’Fo” in what he called, “an attempt to take high art and present it in an everyday venue.”
The blending of beauty and utility is behind Hyams work in hand-crafting guitars. From his “hole in the basement” workshop, the artist creates instruments as only a musician can, tending to each detail, from the wood chosen to reflect the customer’s personal aesthetic, to the height-conscious structure of each piece (a lot of his customers are what Hyams terms “big black bass players”). He says that each instrument can take anywhere from three to six months to create at an average cost of $2,000.
The guitar that he strums in his Georgetown office is a curious fusion of acoustic and electric, with a transparent plastic cover on the back-side revealing the inner workings of the instrument. Three woods—Canary from South America, Rosewood and Walnut from his parents’ backyard—have been polished to a glossy shine and seamlessly fuse to form the body of the guitar, which Hyams cradles as he talks.
The triumvirate of wood is telling of the artist’s dueling interests and scattered background. Many of his songs and works hearken to the notion of belonging.
“I’ve always had this need for other cultures,” Hyams mused, going on to say that during his days playing in New York, he was always the “only white spot in a bunch of Caribbean guys.”
In a short digital animation by Hyams depicting Ikea mannequins and Thai dolls grooving to 50 Man Machine’s reggae beats, a kind of autobiography is acted out. Wooden and metal figures move through and interact in three separate worlds to a song that Hyams said is “about finding where you belong.”
“I need a psychiatrist for that one,” he laughed as the images of the dolls fade from the screen.
For now, Hyams appears to be content with his music and art for therapy, with plenty of festivals and kilt-appropriate occasions to keep him busy.
And for the physical hunger that not even true art can sustain? Haggis, perhaps?
“It depends on where it’s from,” Hyams said with skepticism.
Given his eclectic tastes, just throw on a little Tabasco, deep fry with rice and serve it up on the dry heat of some African plain, and he may just take a fancy to it.
Retired English Professor Paul Betz gently held a tattered, stained scrap of paper in his hands. A faded, unintelligible script adorns its otherwise blank face and, were the page not fully laminated, you wouldn’t think twice about tossing it in the garbage. But one man’s “trash” is another man’s treasure, and for Betz, this sheet of paper might as well be made of solid gold. The paper, which even Betz admits looks like “a little scrap of wastepaper,” is actually a manuscript page containing an unpublished poem by the famous English Romantic poet William Wordsworth.
Betz read the script, beginning, “While we advanced oft turning a pleased look up to the height and breadth of that steep crag from which the convent rises.”
The scrap of paper was discovered twelve years ago by Quaritch, an antiquarian book firm in London. They didn’t think twice before calling Betz to sell it to him. By that time, Betz, who began studying Wordsworth while a college student in the 50’s, had long been established as a preeminent Wordsworth scholar and collector. Today, he holds the largest private collection of Wordsworth manuscripts, letters and books in the world.
If this sounds impressive, consider that Betz had to add a 1,000-square-foot library, complete with a steel core and fire doors, onto his house to hold his collection, which ranges far beyond just Wordsworth. This was fifteen years ago.
“Already, there’s really not enough space,” Betz, who retired last month after 42 years of teaching, said.
Betz resembles Santa Claus with white hair, a white beard and wire-framed glasses. He grew up on a tree nursery in southeastern Pennsylvania, the eldest of seven children.
“When I was a child I used to wander about in the area of the Pennypack Creek and other woods and hills,” he said. “That was a very Wordsworthian kind of background.”
After attending LaSalle College, Betz went to Cornell, at the time, the center of Wordsworth research in the U.S. It was there, while pursuing a master’s degree and eventually a Ph.D, that he first discovered his passion for collecting rare books and manuscripts.
Betz is married to Dorothy Betz, a professor in the French Department, who Betz admits is “less enthusiastic than I am” about his passion.
In 1966, after a year of teaching at Georgetown, Betz made his first trip to Wordsworth’s hometown of Glasmere in the United Kingdom’s Lake District. Since then, Betz has returned dozens of times to Glasmere to study at the Wordsworth Museum and to see Dove Cottage, Wordsworth’s home. Both are run by the Wordsworth Trust.
“It was still early enough so that there were a significant number of interesting things in the hands of little antiquarian book dealers in the Lake District,” Betz said.
Oxford University Professor Stephen Gill, also a renowned Wordsworth scholar, remembered visiting these bookshops with Betz to look for rare books.
“Even then, he was very knowledgeable,” Gill said. “He realized he had an eye and a nose for that sort of thing and was very serious about it.”
Betz continued to research Wordsworth and gradually built his collection more with a discerning eye and a willingness to explore oft-overlooked sources than with his Georgetown salary.
“He has not just bought the famous books, but the ancillary secondary unusual material, which is what scholars and researchers and biographers really want to see,” Mark Samuels Lasner, Senior Research Fellow at the University of Delaware library and rare book collector, said.
“Sometimes important aspects of the whole picture are present in the writings or the minor letters of very minor figures who barely knew the great men,” Betz said.
Purchasing Wordsworth’s original letters, manuscripts and books wasn’t cheap. For Betz, though, money has never been important. The library addition put him deeply in debt, and he’s still paying off his second mortgage.
“What Paul has is a passion,” Wordsworth Trust President Pamela Woof said. “Any great collector has to have a passion. He has to be so passionate that he will risk, in fact, quite large sums, really large sums, because these things don’t come cheap.
“He’s had to struggle,” Woof, who first met Betz when he began traveling to the Lake District in the 60’s, added. “I don’t think it’s come easily because he’s not Bill Gates or anything. But he has acquired a most wonderful collection through his passion, and when he talks about it and shows it to people, the love and the enthusiasm comes right through.”
“I guess I’d say [it’s] the centerpiece of his life—his scholarship, his teaching, his research and his collection,” University Librarian Artemis Kirk said, pausing. “And his wife.”
As a Wordsworth academic, Betz isn’t alone in his zeal for collecting. A large portion of Wordsworth scholars end up seeking out Wordsworth’s materials and creating collections like Betz, according to Joan Winterkorn, Head of Valuations for Quaritch.
“As a group, they’ve always been interested in the real material,” she said. “It’s not enough that they see it in libraries. They need to have it themselves.”
Betz’s collection isn’t limited to items pertaining to the Wordsworth circle. He also entertains other interests of his own, like literary fraud, as well as purchasing books belonging to Graham Greene for the Georgetown Library.
“He collects things, first editions, manuscript copies, typed copies … that aren’t specifically within his deepest interest in collecting to give to the Georgetown Library, which is quite remarkable and extremely generous,” Kirk said.
Betz plans to bequeath his collection, at least partially, to the libraries at Cornell, Georgetown and to the Wordsworth Trust.
“I’m not interested in selling them,” Betz said. “I really believe in them to the extent that I want to give them away. I want them to be where scholars can use them.”
Future students of Wordsworth will be able to enjoy the immense wealth of knowledge in Betz’s collection and hopefully share in the delight he took from it.
“Every time you labor over a word and then suddenly you’re able to read it, that’s a kind of eureka moment,” Betz said. “But the really big [one is when] you suddenly realize that that scrap of paper that you got from Quaritch is probably Wordsworth’s last attempt to write his great epic poem many years after most people think he gave it up. That’s a big eureka.”
*
Professor John Brough, a tastefully dressed, measured man with a neatly trimmed white beard, looks like the kind of man whose idea of a good time is a scotch on the rocks and the evening news after a quiet dinner.
One brief glance inside his Arlington house, though, is enough to permanently dispel that notion.
Brough’s house is saturated with modern art. So many paintings, photographs and prints hang on the walls that it seems like one more might bring the whole house crashing down under their collective weight. Then there are the sculptures—from the life-sized man crouching in the middle of Brough’s study to the curvaceous, off-white marble statue made from Dahlgreen Chapel’s old altar in the dining room.
“Everybody likes it,” Brough’s wife Dede said of the marble statue. “It’s so sensuous.”
Brough, who’s been teaching philosophy at Georgetown since 1966, and his wife, a local realtor, stumbled on art collecting almost accidentally in 1980. After buying a decorative sculpture to go above their fireplace, Brough bought a second sculpture that wasn’t for decoration and caught the collecting bug.
“It’s just a delight to live with [art],” Brough said. “Collectors always say that, but it’s true. You know, you say hello to them. I pat the [Juan] Muñoz [the sculpture of the crouching man] on the head when I go into my study.”
On Wednesday, Brough and his wife methodically made their way through the house, stopping briefly to explain each piece of art. The tour took almost an hour.
Their dining room is dominated by a Roy Lichtenstein pop-art print of a woman with blue hair, her hand raised to her forehead in distress, her breasts just peaking out above the bottom of the picture.
Mrs. Brough related how once she had suggested to her husband that they purchase another nude work.
“He said to me, we can’t buy that; we [already] have so many nudes!” she said. “I don’t really even notice that they’re nudes. I never thought of [the] Lichtenstein [print] as being a nude.”
“Though it’s not very nudey-nude,” Brough added.
Brough knew the name of nearly all the works and the artists, though when a name slipped his memory, Mrs. Brough was ready to chime in. Their easy-going banter is unsurprising, considering the two first met in eighth grade, dated on-and-off in college and married right after graduating.
“We never buy anything unless we agree on it,” Brough said. “I like a lot more things than Dede likes, which is good. I mean, she saves us time and again from buying the wrong thing.”
On the ground floor of their house, three roughly 7’x7’ panels resting on cinderblocks portray a bar packed with over 100 people in vibrant detail, empty beer bottles weighing down the red-checked table clothes, neon signs lighting up the wall, a naked stripper posing on the center platform for all to see.
Brough pointed out the religious symbols in the painting, explaining that a priest used to own it before selling it back to the artist, a D.C. native named Fred Folsom, who asked Brough to store it for him.
Folsom painted Brough into another of his works, a scene of the same bar, which Brough habitually stores in the closet.
“We first started buying local artists,” Mrs. Brough said. “We were spending a fair share of money. We decided, in fairness, to our children that we would try to buy something that had some innate value that could be sold. So that’s when we started going to New York.”
“There’s always been a complaint on the part of Washington artists that collectors would basically wind up going to New York,” Brough said. “And that was true in our case.”
“And we didn’t want it to be that way,” she said.
“But something happened and you just wind up doing that,” he said.
As the two went around the house, Brough occasionally straightened the crooked paintings or photos that they passed. Numerous other works on display are instantly recognizable to the most casual art aficionado, from the Warhol soup can print upstairs to the enormous Chuck Close portrait downstairs, along with dozens more that any art dealer would be able to identify. After 27 years of buying art, the Broughs have built up a nice collection.
“Certainly just looking at art and appreciating it in museums and so forth is a much purer activity than collecting,” Brough admitted. “Once you start collecting, you see something and you think, boy, I’d like that. I’d like to have that.”
The resourceful student might seek advice or some preemptive gem upon entering a new course with a new professor. Most of these suggestions come from word-of-mouth or the ever-helpful ratemyprofessors.com. But how do you rate the merits of an English Professor who is passionate enough to put his house on the line to pursue the peripheral works of a master British poet? How do you assign a grade to a teacher who is man enough to wear a kilt? It may seem like there is no place your professor would rather be on a Friday afternoon than right there with you, a last stubborn obstacle before a weekend of revelry. But with jam sessions looming, libraries unexplored and art shows on the horizon, who’s to say who the real party-poopers are?
