Remembering Paige Baty, I

Abstract

Remembering Paige Baty, I J. Peter Euben (bio) Correction: This article has been revised. See A Note from the Editors for an explanation. Click to view original article. I There are many reasons one should not presume to tell the story of a life but in the case of Paige Baty one reason is that she could have done it with more panache and intrigue than anyone else possibly could. It might not be an accurate story, but it would be fascinating. She often constructed scripts of her life that were larger than life: these were her standards and inducements, the way she envisioned futures, the true fictions that kept her enormous energy focused. I met Paige her first term in graduate school. She came to my office to introduce herself since she would be teaching for me the following term. She held out her hand and said, “Professor Euben, I am S. Paige Baty, your new T.A.” Her tone, at once mocking and respectful, direct and confident, but also teasing and wary, prefaced an intellectual and emotional complexity that would characterize her work and our friendship. When we first met I asked her to tell me something about her background that was not on her graduate application. For a minute she seemed uncertain, and then followed a three hour conversation of extraordinary range, reach and speed. Her ideas, at once bold and brilliant, went spinning off in myriad directions. The individual points were astonishing, the juxtapositions of them even more so. Joycean in its syntax, structure, work play and seriousness, her performance was literally breathtaking. She was a brilliant teaching assistant: enthusiastic, intense, provocative and knowledgeable. Her self-display and flamboyance were always in the service of texts and ideas. It was not just her deeply original reading of a wide variety of works that inspired students, but the way she communicated to them that intellectual pursuits provide the pleasures and depths worthy of passion and of a life. Her first term teaching for me she staged Machiavelli’s Mandragola. She organized the students, added lines where she thought they might miss the point, coached them (and me, whom she offered to cast as Lucrezia or Siro), and brought the whole thing off with what I was coming to recognize as her distinctive flair. I know the literature on Mandragola well, but Paige said more arresting things in her fifteen-minute analysis of the play than anything I had read. Paige’s work in graduate seminars was unsurpassed. She wove complex, often colorful, tapestries of ideas, challenging others and herself to see through points, to allow the texts to move them outside the academic conventions that were supposedly invented to illuminate them but in fact left them bland and distant. What is not always obvious is how much Paige’s work in American cultural studies is grounded in deep if sometimes idiosyncratic readings of the canonical texts. She was as good on Gorgias or Prince as she was on conspiracy theory. Her love of conversation and her capacity to engage in it for hours and hours is legendary. For the first four years of her graduate education (which is when I saw her most), we would meet for a drink at five and talk about her work, politics, gossip, movies (which she loved), television (which she loved even more), books and ideas. Hundreds of ideas. Hours later, I would be comatose: she would be just beginning. I was repeatedly impressed, not just by her distinctive intelligence but by her fierce independence, impatience with clichés and utter indifference to locally reigning ideologies. Paige could be a difficult and demanding friend. But not during these years. Then, she was concerned, attentive and loyal, full of warmth and charm, and of course very funny, sometimes intentionally. She leaves behind a considerable body of work. And now it is all we have left. J. Peter Euben J. Peter Euben teaches at UC, Santa Cruz. His most recent book is Corrupting Youth (Princeton, 1997). He is the book review editor for the journal Political Theory. Copyright © 1997 J. Peter Euben and The Johns Hopkins University Press