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Pop life

1 March 2010 560 views No Comment BY Mark Stalcup

Steve Connelly’s life reads much like a novel.

The Indiana State University English professor rides unicycles for fun, and once was scouted as a shortstop by Major League Baseball.

He’s been among the vanguard of Pop Culture studies, trading letters with Kurt Vonnegut Jr. and famous cartoonists.

He withstood the glare of racist Southerners just after the Civil Rights Movement, travelling to New Orleans with his friend, Terre Haute’s Olympic gold medalist and long jump champ Greg Bell.

He’s been a strong promoter of the legacy of Eugene Debs, a Hoosier politician and union leader who ran for president five times in the early 20th Century,

And last fall, the popular Indiana State University English professor battled back against cancer, undergoing stem cell treatments for the second time this decade which returned him to campus, ready to teach again, in January.

“It has been a fascinating life,” he laughs, leaning back in the chair of his Root Hall office after class. “One of the lessons from the treatment, and maybe this seems almost Pollyannaish, is that life really is just fascinating. It was interesting to see the chemicals they used to treat me. It was interesting to talk with the doctors.”

Connelly’s faced multiple myeloma ¸— cancer of the plasma cells in bone marrow — twice since 2003, undergoing two bone marrow transplants facilitated by stem cell research.

“It’s kind of like an oil change,” he laughs with characteristic good cheer. “I’m told that every five to six years, I can look forward to another transplant.”

Unlike many bone marrow transplants that must rely on outside compatible donors, doctors drew Connelly’s cells from his own body.

“A lot of the criticism about stem cell research is very mistaken. Not all stem cells are drawn from embryos, which is what upsets many people. It’s a wide, wonderful field” where a person’s own cells can be used to regrow things like knee or heart tissue, he says.

The harvesting of his own stem cells from bone marrow allowed doctors to kill the cancerous growth, then grow new marrow.

“It’s not particularly a pleasant process, but aside from some of the unhappier side effects, it was an interesting one,” he says sanguinely.

That’s not meant to downgrade the pain he suffered, he adds. Sleep was challenging. The first time he faced the treatment, the nausea he suffered was intense, with months passing before he regained his appetite.

“My appetite came back much quicker this time.”

The steroids and human growth hormones he took to assist the process brought mood changes.

“My kids said that they could always tell whether I was on or off the steroids, because I would fly off the handle easier at things like the cable company, whereas normally I tend to be a very patient person.”

Recalling other symptoms he suffered, he still has to laugh – because the swelled ankles and mood swings he sustained which once brought him to tears while watching “Bend It Like Beckham” seemed all too familiar to his none-too-sympathetic nurses.

“A lot of the symptoms I had were very similar to what women go through during premenstrual syndrome. So my nurses were quite naturally not sympathetic at all. They said ‘It serves you right, because now you know what we go through’,” he recalls, laughing.

Despite all that, he considers himself lucky. Thanks to the caregiving of his wife, Pam, who stayed with him in a hospital apartment near the Indianapolis facility where he had the chemotherapy and marrow transplants done.

“The first 24 hours are the most important, because your immune system is so compromised.” His wife helped him through the worst of it, making sure he didn’t fall prey to infections during the period when his immune system recovered.

“I had to walk across the street to the hospital, but I didn’t have to stay there,” he says. “I didn’t have to stay there. I was lucky.”

An active, athletic life may have helped him recover faster.

An avid soccer fan who’s attended the World Cup, Connelly was also once scouted by the Atlanta Braves as a college standout at shortstop, and considers the highlight of his ball-playing career a double he scored off St. Louis Cardinals hurler Larry Jaston during college.

“He threw something like 100 miles an hour,” Connelly recalls, exhaling a deep breath in wonder. “I thought to myself that this was major league pitching, so maybe I could play a couple seasons in the minor leagues, and then I saw the level of talent those people had. It was amazing.”

Connelly’s daughter Kathy also contributed to his recuperation, helping him research and assemble music for different playlists on his iPod and investigating a study by the University of Rochester which suggests song may have healing or at least pain-relieving properties.

“The iPod and my family were the two most important things in getting me through,” he suggests, smiling. “During the long hours where I’d be waiting for chemotherapy, or the nights I couldn’t sleep, the music was wonderful.”

He assembled several different playlists — one for chemotherapy, another for sleep, for example — with an eclectic array of sounds.

Classical music — “the usual stuff you’d expect, Brahms, Bach, Handel, Mendelssohn, Mozart, Strauss and Vivaldi” helped him rest, aided by Celtic instrumentals and artists like Van Morrison, Phil Coulter and Hothouse Flowers which helped take his mind off the pain.

“I don’t know if it’s been proven music helps with healing, but it does help with pain. That may just be because it’s a distraction.”

As a longtime music aficionado who frequently begins his class by asking students to listen to selected pieces of a diverse array of music then comment upon them, the chance to assemble playlists designed to evoke an array of moods helped him through the treatment process.

“There are so many artists I love, but there are very few musicians I will go see live anymore, as these old ears are getting more and more sensitive,” though he attends any time British guitarist Richard Thompson plays shows in nearby Bloomington.

Words also helped him through the cancer treatment. An avid reader, Connelly estimates that he finished about 70 books during his care and recuperation last fall. He’s also fathered an author — Sean Connelly, whose Bloomington-based first novel “I-69 Does Not Stop” was based upon the real-life environmentalists and developers over the proposed highway.

Old literary friends like Vonnegut, James Joyce and William Butler Yeats were welcome companions during the professor’s recuperation, along with the works of Terry Pratchett, which he devoured.

“There was something about things I knew well which made them easier to read,” he said. “Absorbing new ideas became more difficult.”

That holistic help in healing was fitting, given his longtime love of music and his exploration of how pop culture affects society on multiple fronts over three decades teaching the English Department’s Pop Culture courses.

“When it began, we were interested in attracting more students,” he says.

During those three decades, students have flocked to the often-overflowing classes, where seats are always surpassed by demand. Some expect an easy class as they rush to add the course. Instead, they encounter a wide-ranging study of modern life that challenges their perceptions, even as they sometimes challenge the professor’s own.

“There’s always a few students who show you a new side every semester,” Connelly admits, smiling. “It used to be that I could ask students who their favorite artist was, and count on about half of them agreeing on one. These days, I’m lucky if I can find five who like the same singer …These days, kids don’t have enough shared experiences to like the same things. There are just so many choices out there.”

In many ways, he suggests, the new accessibility technology’s brought is wonderful. He teaches Irish Literature courses, but faced a $400 annual subscription to the Irish Times when he began three decades ago.

These days he reads it quicker — and far less expensively — on Kindle. Likewise, the record stores he once scoured for special-order music has given way to Pandora, where he can cross-reference music he loves with suggestions for other artists.

Even YouTube helps, letting him locate Irish tribal street musicians he saw during one of his 14 trips there.

“They had something like 10 video clips of them on there, footage people had filmed on the street,” he notes, amazed.

Over time, the pop culture course curriculum has changed to reflect the rapidly adapting society, given the recombinant state of pop culture and its tendency to merge influences.

“Things are a lot harder to categorize, which is becoming more and more of a trend in pop culture,” he believes.

As an example, the “teen vampires in love” story “Twilight” by Stephanie Meyer’s now assigned where Connelly once included Harlequin Romances in his reading list.

“The ‘Harry Potter’ novels paved the way for many bestsellers, and (Meyer’s) definitely one. I can’t imagine the tremendous success that she’s had with what is essentially an adolescent romance novel without it,” he says. “That’s one of the good qualities about the things we sometimes criticize as simplistic: They can become a gateway for millions of kids who, for example, read ‘Harry Potter’ then move on to more complicated, challenging things.”

A longstanding battle between “high art” such as classical music and Shakespeare and “low art” such as comic books and rock music, has also become a moot point, he suggests.

“Now, there’s only mass culture,” he observes, rejecting the argument proponents of high art often seemed to suggest their enjoyment diminished because some enjoyed different tastes.

Further, he’s known artists whose own work transcended their medium’s previously accepted constraints.

Accomplished comics artist Dave Sim’s 300-issue run on “Cerebus,” the longest-running comic consistently drawn and written by a single creative team of Sim and the single-named Gerhard, ended as Connelly faced his first treatments in 2003.

Due to his hospital stay, the professor missed renewing his subscription. Writing Sim to request the issues and “phone book” of collected works he missed, Connelly was pleasantly surprised when the author wrote him back, sending not only the books, but a cartoon wishing him a fast recovery.

A poster illustrated by Sim during a Bloomington visit still hangs on Connelly’s office wall in a place of honor.

“That really impressed me as to what kind of person he was, that a comics artist could attain such a level of fame and still connect on a personal level.”

Connelly, whose youth coincided with comics’ greatest popularity and controversy, sees how they’ve grown and matured.

He’s incorporated works such as Art Spiegelman’s “Maus,” into his class, a graphic novel whose comic book conceits depicting human beings as anthromorphic animals is used to deadly serious ends.

Spiegelman uses the work, depicting Jews as mice and Nazis as cats, to depict the horrors his family suffered during the Holocaust, as well as the author’s own troubled relationship with his father, a concentration camp survivor.

“When ‘Maus’ came out, bookstores had no idea where to shelve it. Was it a graphic novel, or was it history, or was it biography? The answer was, all of the above, and that’s becoming more and more of a trend in pop culture.”

The work, long included in his Pop Culture class, has resonance locally, reflecting upon Terre Haute’s C.A.N.D.L.E.S. Holocaust Museum and survivor Eva Kor.

“(Spieglman) deals with the whole problem of ‘Do you ever really get over that?’ Eva Kor embraced the idea that we should never forget, but we need to forgive,” Connelly observes, an ideal he finds compatible with the beliefs of Terre Haute politician Eugene V. Debs, a hero of his.

“As Vonnegut says, all that Debs really did was restate the Beatitudes, and so it’s difficult to see why so many people had a problem with him, when he just said things like take care of the poor, have sympathy for others, and try to live together.”

Connelly’s even seen the effects of both hatred and healing firsthand.

It came through his friendship with Greg Bell, an Olympic long jump champion, and a trek their two families took through the American South in 1971. The two became neighbors. Connelly’s white. Bell is black. And the angry glares of prejudice some Southerners shot their way during the trip their families took together still lingers and stings, nearly 40 years on.

“It wasn’t long after the Civil Rights Movement, and it was just an awful experience,” he remembers. He recalls a rural Mississippi diner: “The only other black faces there were the cooks and the janitors. You could just feel a palpable hatred from some of the other people there for this white family and black family sitting together. Not everyone in the South acted that way, however,” he notes, remembering kindnesses shown in New Orleans and elsewhere.

Remembering those days, he’s heartened by the election of Barack Obama.

“No matter who you’re for, or which side you come down on, or whatever you may think of him, what he represents – the idealism, that so much can change in this country in so short a time – really is amazing.”

And it’s a change he believes pop culture may have helped bring, along with the relief he felt during his cancer treatment.

“You could argue, really, that popular culture and mass culture did more to diminish racism than most anything, including high culture, ever did, things like the TV show ‘I Spy’ which featured Bill Cosby and Robert Culp, a black man and a white man working together,” he opines. “That’s what popular culture can do, bring us together and change the way we think.”

Then, recalling the unicycle he learned to ride — and sometimes still does — he adds another observation: “I think it’s just a legacy of the 1960s, which in some ways was a good time, and others bad, but those of us who were around were told ‘why not try everything?’ You could learn to ride a unicycle. You could juggle. You could do everything and anything you wanted to try, and didn’t have to want to join the circus to do it.”

He pauses, then grins.

“Variety’s great.”