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

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.

The celebration will consist of readings from Don’s published and unpublished writing.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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.