Lawrence and Louisiana

Tell me what you think about my sense of an underlying connection we have with D.H. Lawrence -- due not just to his age (that he was in his mid-twenties when he wrote Sons and Lovers -- my sense the same age of some of you) but, more importantly, his rough-and-tumble working class upbringing, including a hard-drinking father contemptuous of anything "girlie" and his immersion in a dirty, dangerous work of extracting fuel from the earth (coal-mining versus oil). There is also the connection between the pastoral surroundings that lie in close proximity to the heavy industry, our bayous and remote wetlands and Lawrence's Willey Farm.

Eastwood was (and is) a small, undistinguished town, not too far from regional center of Nottingham; pictured to the left is two-room apartment where Lawrence was born (now a small museum). For me, it's all like having a world-class writer or artist growing up in Berwick, which may well have happened, or is happening right now, and (Why not?) right here at Nicholls. (While all the well-bred attended Oxford and Cambridge Universities -- the British version of our Harvard and Yale) Lawrence attended a basically a teacher-training institute in Nottingham.