Blaise Cronin
Frat boys who think Mario Lanza is an Italian sports car; journalists who consider “Man arrested for blowing mucus from nose at an officer” a news story... Welcome to Bloomington: a world of grey cells and limestone, catfish and cheerleaders, binge drinking and bigots, Ockham’s razor and buzz cuts. This is the tiny college town where Alfred Kinsey catalogued gall wasps before stinging a nation into belated sexual awareness. If you’re gay or Greek, love opera or hoops, Bloomington is heaven on earth; we have as many same-sex couples as sorority sisters, as many divas as athletes. Welcome to my home, a quixotic mix of small-town life and larger than life campus, squirreled away in the flatlands of Middle America, where torpor is sometimes mistaken for nirvanic serenity, irony for insult and “ethnographic dazzle” for deep differences.
Blaise Cronin was born and raised in Ireland. Trinity College Dublin and the Queen’s University of Belfast graciously granted him the degrees necessary to avoid working for a living. He came to Middle America via London (England) and Glasgow (Scotland). In one sense, he has never looked back; in another, he has never stopped looking back.
Bloomington is a quixotic mix of small-town life and larger-than-life campus, squirreled away in the flatlands of the mid-West. On the surface it is indistinguishable from all those other academic oases, Ann Arbor, Austin, Chapel Hill, where testosterone and youthful ambition are released in abundance yet mercifully out of parental sight. To the passing eye college towns have much in common; to the passing European eye they seem indistinguishable. I turned a blind eye to Bloomington’s understated charms for years; still do when I’m of a mind. This is not a town that struts her stuff or favors gaudy; she’s very much an acquired taste, a slow seducer. But she sometimes gets her man. Sometimes the man is a celebrated architect; I. M. Pei designed the university’s angular Art Museum, a Wunderkammer in the wild.
How many times have you heard the phrase, “There’s something about...”? Well, there is something about Bloomington, its smugness and parochialism notwithstanding, and this book is about that something. Much of that something is, of course, Indiana University (IU). Bloomington desperately needs IU, and IU wouldn’t be IU without Bloomington. And, as I’ve come to learn, too, there’s something very special about Old IU—“Hail to Old IU” is Indiana’s official Alma Mater song—something that doggedly resists reductionism and the plow of official histories. Neither a panegyric nor pictorial record will suffice, hence this svelte volume of vignettes.
I could tell you that IU has a much trumpeted music school, but that doesn’t explain how a culture of music suffused both campus and town over the decades, creating a set of moods and magical moments—a special sensibility, no less—that Ann Arbor, Austin (pace the producers of Austin City Limits) and the rest can never hope to match. On campus, clocks chime cheerfully, bells toll on the hour and the carillons ring from on high. I echo the sentiment of Roland Barthes: “For me the noise of Time is not sad.”
Bloomington soothes the soul, yet saps the spirit like no other place I know. Here torpor is mistaken for nirvanic serenity. I perk up as I crest into the town back from wherever. Twenty-four hours later and the ennui count begins to rise. I once visited West Berlin before the Wall came tumbling down, and I recall vividly the sense of being free to move about yet somehow feeling corralled as if by an invisible dog fence. Bloomington is my West Berlin. I am at once at home, yet naggingly deracinated. I know I can leave, but, really, I can’t. I’m in an open prison and, if not exactly heureux comme Dieu en France, almost liking life in this liminal zone.
A New Yorker profile of George Gershwin described his recurrent epistolary references to loneliness as being “like a blues line moaning under a jaunty melody.” Life in Bloomington is just that. These pages—penned at snatched moments over the years—are a self-indulgent attempt to explain why. But it is not really about me, a Brit abroad; it’s about Bloomington and Middle America and what makes them what they are; more specifically, it’s about the personality and persistence of a rather special university—the gown in the title—one that is much more than the sum of its many fascinating and occasionally infuriating parts; one that on a good day exemplifies the finest traditions of American higher education. And, I should point out in the interests of full disclosure, one that is, as I write, my beneficent employer.
