Lauren Rabaino
Click here to get a look into professor James Cushing’s DJ life at KCPR in a multimedia slideshow.
Let James Cushing bring out the wild animal in us all.
The Cal Poly English professor and lifelong Bob Dylan-obsessive has select passions and strong desires to impart what he knows to anyone he can. This includes the importance of the “wild animal instinct” of human beings.
“You need to discover it’s there and protect it. Give it space because it’s vulnerable, strong and potentially violent,” Cushing said. “You get a sense of it when you’re looking at a Picasso, like he was not human but a beast looking at human life.
“It’s like the way Bob Dylan sings these days; his voice is beyond shot. He sounds like a cornered animal.”
It’s been a good year for Cushing. In April he was invited by Prescott College to give a special presentation. He was also honored at the Foothill College Writers Conference in July for his published works.
“I think he’s extraordinary,” said Carl Wooton, a 14-year English lecturer. “We talk a lot about what we read, write and teach. He has an extraordinary range of knowledge in music, literature and art.”
English lecturer Claudia Royal added, “He’s an ebullient personality that never fails to surprise.”
Cushing teaches three classes at Cal Poly, including ENGL 333, British Literature in the Age of Romanticism and ENGL 388, Poetry Writing, which he deems significant for its psychologically and emotionally therapeutic values.
“As with visual art, somewhere around eighth grade (our artistic expression) drops away,” Cushing said. “Where there were drawings that cover the wall at age 10, at 14 there was a blank wall.”
“(In ENGL 388) we figured out how to bypass the things around that make people feel they have to forget that part of themselves. The only people drawing now are little kids, old people, prisoners and professionals.”
One of his favorite courses to teach is ENGL 251, Great Books I: The Ancient and Classical World. “It goes straight to the heart of the human experience,” he said. “It’s a privilege to teach that class.”
“I love to turn people who hadn’t read things like Aristophanes onto those things they hadn’t seen before,” Cushing said. “I love being in a room full of young people and letting them know that they have this great thing in their lives.”
Kristin Siekman, a nutrition junior, took ENGL 251 with Cushing in winter 2007.
“Great Books is one of the best classes I have had at Cal Poly, mostly because of Cushing,” she said. “Professor Cushing is the most eccentric teacher I have ever had.
“He’s so out there. we’d spend class discussing L-O-V-E in the sun on Dexter Lawn. With his crazy ties and hippo socks that are always showing, he definitely kept us paying attention.”
Cushing’s interest in literature began when he was about 4 years old and his mother gave him a book with thick cloth pages sewn together. “The first thing that got me interested was the thrill of being able to open up a book and read the words,” he said. “My earliest memories have to do with reading.”
“I distinctly remember the deckled edge of the pages, turning the pages and being amazed that the images would change,” he said.
Cushing has written two collections of poetry, “You and the Night and the Music” and “The Length of an Afternoon.” His poems are introspective and observational views that include references to food, literature and loved ones.
The force behind his infrequent urges to sit down and write, Cushing said, resists explanation and understanding.
“I know I have to work on a poem, partly inside my head and partly outside, when I start hearing a voice I recognize and don’t recognize at the same time,” he said.
“It’s a particular verbal impulse I fail to understand. It makes me say, ‘Let me describe to you what I’m feeling.'”
The editing process is lengthy, with multiple drafts being created before he feels his poem is ready to be sent out.
“I want it to be as surprising to read as it was surprising to arrive at,” Cushing said. “It can’t be predicted or forced, yet it can be welcomed and prompted.
“You can put yourself in situations where it’s likely to stimulate something. A slight amount of boredom can be helpful as well.”
After 19 years of teaching, Cushing still is pleased with his occupation and has no plans to retire anytime soon. “It’s working very well for me,” Cushing said.
“I’m fundamentally happy doing what I’m doing, only I want to keep doing what I’m doing better and better.”
Cushing lives in downtown San Luis Obispo and is content with his location in California. “It’s possible to lead a creative life on the Central Coast. It’s actually an area in which the arts are taken with a degree of seriousness.”
He does, however, recognize the need to “bug out” of San Luis Obispo before getting “Cal-Poly’d” out.
He was born in 1953 in Palo Alto but moved to New York when his salesman father was promoted there. An only child, he lived on the East Coast until he was 13, when he attended an all-boys Christian military academy. He later graduated from the University of California at Santa Cruz and earned his master’s degree and doctorate from UC Irvine.
The birth of his daughter Iris, now 24, was one of the greatest influences on his life.
“When she was born, there was this new thing to do in my life,” Cushing said. “I had to do two things: lead her gently into the civilized world while protecting her wild animal nature.”
The biggest problem Cushing feels that society faces today is excessive self-consciousness, referring as an example to customers at Fanny Wrappers, where his girlfriend Marion works.
“People pull out their cell phones and ask for reassurance,” he said. “California blue jays don’t worry. I think rats are disgusting, but they have a nobility about them because they retain their animal nature.”
Cushing has hardly been religious. “I’ve never trusted the religious because they seem to try to offer a coherent rational explanation about a nature that resists coherent rational explanation.”
He doesn’t feel his position holds him back, however. “I’m not a Rastafarian, but I can still enjoy Bob Marley’s music.”
He enjoys listening to music and spoken-word recordings such as that of “The Nonsense Verse of Edward Lear” and poems of Lewis Carroll.
Cushing has been on the radio for 26 years, starting with a stint on KPFK in Los Angeles and then KCBX in San Luis Obispo for 11 years before settling at KCPR and hosting a jazz show. Catch him on Thursdays from 8 to 10 p.m.
For a parting quote, Cushing roused a statement by American poet Randall Jarrell, who said, “A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.”
“It tends to draw pity instead of admiration,” Cushing said, “but there’s a lot of truth in it; one has to have a certain amount of calm/alert/openness.”