"One of the Composition-specific articles in this genre of radical sixties pedagogy, one which I have never been able to forget since the day I first read it in the dimly-lit stacks of my university's library, was written in 1967 by a young graduate teaching assistant at the University of Oregon, Charles Deemer. His article, "English Composition as a Happening," did what many of these articles did, but did it in a formally compelling way (the article is a collage of brief sound-bite snippets, alternating between Deemer's own poetic reflections-as-manifesto and quotations from Sontag, McLuhan, Dewey, Goodman, and others), and Deemer's ideas seemed to catalyze my own discontent with what passed for Composition during the 1980s."
"Deemer's article, appearing in the November 1967 issue of College English, was written while he was a graduate teaching assistant at the University of Oregon. The article reads like a manifesto: interspersed with bits of text excerpted from radical works by McLuhan, Dewey, Russell, and others, are Deemer's own stirring rationale and method for reinventing writing instruction. Formally, as well as conceptually, it remains one of the best things in Composition's canon. He uses a Paul Goodman sample to set his context: education defined as "a kind of inept social engineering to mold, and weed out, for short-range extrinsic needs"; it's "in the bureaucratic death-grip ... of a uniformity of conception and method" (in Deemer 121). Such rhetoric returns us at once to this bracing era in educational reform, when entire histories of education were tossed out like a bag of stale chips."
"And Composition knew the value of all this, of course; but we've treated our early architects worse than de Chirico, relegating such sublime blueprints as Deemer's and Lutz's to musty stacks in the Library basement."
"And so I read Macrorie today as still delivering the news; I listen to his words the same way I listen to Bob Dylan or Miles Davis, as the still-hippest sounds. It's hard to understand the general indifference that meets his work (or Coles's, Deemer's, et al.) today."
"Ah, the Happenings. All dressed up in ice cream and candlelight, they had nowhere to go in Composition. Before we knew it, our goal went from participants in the electric drama reengaging their hearts to having students "appreciate the varieties and excellences of academic discourse" (Lindemann 311). Deemer gave up and went off to write plays."
"Macrorie's theory, Coles's classroom work, Deemer's and Lutz's materials . . . reading them is like sitting in a circle and listening to a patient elder gently guide us on the vision-quest, using parables and jokes and truths. It's so retro, it's become avant-garde."
"Charles Deemer's (un)original allegory has been a pleasure to cover. I salute the next remake of English Composition as a Happening, on and on through n-dimensions. A great era of the legend continues."