Thanks to Christoph Irmscher who sent this today:

An update on Don’s papers and books: We have sorted through Don’s vast library, which the family kindly left to the English Department. While the English Department will create its own library in Ballantine Hall devoted to his memory, the many, many first editions and signed copies in his library ( with moving dedications from bell hooks to Edmund White) are now at the Lilly Library, which has also independently acquired Don’s manuscripts, especially the invaluable journals he has left.

It will take a considerable amount of time to process and catalogue all these materials, of course, since there are just so many of them. But the good news is that everything will be publicly available at some point in the future. Thanks are due to Breon Mitchell, Director of the Lilly Library, who was involved in all the negotiations and spent days at the office of the the family’s representatives reading Don’s manuscripts ; Joel Silver, the Lilly’s Associate Director and Curator of Books; and Cherry Williams, the Lilly’s Curator of Manuscripts–as well as Alita Hornick and Alex Teschmacher, who helped me go through the books, and, of course, Ross Gay, who brought many of the boxes over to the Department in the first place.

It’s heartening to know that Don’s literary legacy will now be preserved at one of the finest Rare Books and Manuscripts libraries in the world. It’s also one of the most accessible ones: the Lilly’s collections are open to everyone, with or without a research agenda. Anyone with an ID can walk in and ask to see Don’s manuscripts once they’ve been treated conservatorially and catalogued. I will keep the users of this site updated when new information becomes available.

Christoph

A Marine veteran charged with stabbing Indiana University professor to death in his kitchen last December appeared in court Monday afternoon for a hearing that lasted just minutes.

Special Judge Vi Taliaferro presided over the pretrial hearing, during which nothing happened —except that a new hearing was set for 1:30 p.m. Aug. 16.

It’s a strange thing to just go on with life, as one has to. Although this site may not always have constant activity, Don remains on our minds and in our hearts. We did get a comment about a memorial service on April 29 in Shippensburg, but it had been designated as spam, and I wasn’t able to find it / publish it in time. If anyone there would like to email us or post about the service we’d love to see it.

Next week, Wed. May 5, there will be a Celebration of Don Belton’s Life in Literature. This event, organized by Don’s students and Christoph Irmscher, will be held in the Slocum Room of the LILLY LIBRARY, from 7-8 on the IU Bloomington campus.

The celebration will consist of readings from Don’s published and unpublished writing.  A reception will follow.

A public reading of Don’s work has been tentatively scheduled for Wednesday, May 5th, from 6:00-9:00 p.m.  The reading is currently scheduled to take place on the IU campus in the Lilly Library.

The administrators of this site will post again to confirm the date and time of this reading as soon as they receive confirmation.  More details to follow.

We wanted to alert you to the availability of some documents and websites of possible interest:

Most important, the resolution entered into the minutes of the Bloomington Faculty Council is available online:

http://www.indiana.edu/~bfc/docs/circulars/09-10/B11-2010.pdf

In addition, the following materials (rather dated at this point, but worth archiving here) appeared in the immediate weeks following Don’s death.  Those of us in Bloomington will likely want to keep these (mostly national) news organizations aware of the trial proceedings as they develop.

GLAAD blog:

http://glaadblog.org/2010/01/04/indiana-university-english-professor-don-belton-stabbed-and-killed-vigil-held-in-his-honor/

Democracy Now (clip):

http://www.democracynow.org/2010/1/4/headlines

NPR:

http://topics.npr.org/article/0bTs73FazQgPg

Midwest Marines:

http://midwestmarines.posterous.com/?tag=donbelton

We spoke with Prosecutor Bob Miller today to find out more about the pre-trial conference happening at the Monroe County Courthouse on Monday, March 1.

It is scheduled for 1 pm and is open to the public. Anyone attending should ask a bailiff which courtroom it is in.

A pretrial conference is “just a status conference,” according to Miller. “It’s unlikely that anything of import will transpire.”

Miller said the prosecutor’s office is still collecting evidence, going over the coroner’s report, and scheduling depositions, etc. “It’s still very early in the process,” he said.

Monday’s pretrial conference is simply ” a report to the court that we’re making progress,”
after which another conference will be set for about 6 weeks later.

Miller estimates that the entire conference will take no more than 5 minutes.

Yesterday, Don’s family and friends were to have held a planned memorial service for Don.  I assume, and hope, that everything went off as expected, and that it was a memorable event.  If any of this site’s readers were able to attend and would like to share their impressions here, we would welcome news of that event, and any other information about upcoming events that celebrate Don’s life and work.

I want to add as a personal note that, yesterday, one of my current students, who was also one of Don’s former students, came by my office hours.  We were chatting about other things when the conversation turned to Don.  This particular student is having a difficult go of things this semester, in large part because she deeply misses Don, who was (no surprise) an important mentor for her, who encouraged her work and, as she put it, changed her life forever by being one of her favorite instructors.

At one point, this student wondered aloud whether or not Don considered her “just another student.”  This immediately struck me as impossible.  Did Don consider any of us “just another” anything?  I have to say that I really don’t think so, and I don’t think I am idealizing Don’s memory by saying so.  I don’t know that I would say it about many people, but it does seem to me that Don probably did celebrate his students, each and every one, a little more than most.   His absence on this campus continues to be felt.

I.U. English Department graduate student, Caroline Diggins, will be reading from Don’s essay “Voodoo for Charles” at the Black History Month Art Fair, Wed. Feb 10^th 2010 from 6:30-8:30 p.m. in the Indiana University Neal-Marshall Black Cultural Center Grand Hall.  The theme for this event is “Expressions of the Soul.”  For more information, contact the center at omsld@indiana.edu

In the coming weeks, we know that many of us will be reading Don’s work for the first time, or returning to our favorite of his pieces, or those we remember having liked but perhaps haven’t read lately.  A commenter wrote in to say that a group of people in San Francisco were gathering to read and discuss Don’s work together.  Another has issued a call for papers for a conference panel, to be devoted to Don’s work at next year’s MLA conference in Los Angeles.  Here in Bloomington, a public reading of Don’s work is planned for later in the semester.  This weekend, the Bloomington Pride Film Festival was dedicated to Don.

His picture appears in the Festival program, and yesterday afternoon (Saturday), a panel discussion convened, after a screening of the film “Out in the Silence,” so that we might come together as a community to consider how and why different GLBTQI people inhabit, thrive, survive, and die in small towns.

Things on this site have slowed down a bit, but I know that for many of us, Don is constantly in our passing, and more concentrated, thoughts.  I write to encourage you to share your thoughts of Don in the coming weeks, those that will bring both the memorial service in Philadelphia (see previous post) and Michael Griffin’s trial.  If you find yourself reading Don’s work and have thoughts to share, we invite you to share them here.  If you have thoughts about the way in which Don’s life and death resonate in larger conversations, other stories and circumstances, this might be a place to share those.

It is our hope that the site continues to be a place for vibrant conversation, even as the immediate shock, outrage, and grief over Don’s death begins to shade into some other complex set of feelings, attitudes, and emotions.  I know many of us still want to talk about Don, and remember him. But this site might also be a place for those of us who never met Don to meet him now–through his work.

If any of you have links to Don’s work or other materials available–either by Don or about Don’s literary legacy and life–I urge you to post them here (I have heard of an interview in which Don is a participant but haven’t been able to locate it).

With thanks to everyone who has already visited this site.