An Interview with Aaron Dinin, author of The Tales ( Press, October 2005)

Aaron Dinin runs, lifts weights, plays viola, and gives guided tours to prospective Duke Students. He also tents in Krzyzewskiville, the makeshift tent city that Duke students inhabit for weeks in order to get into Cameron Indoor Stadium for key basketball games. He loves taking English classes, and his first book, The Krzyzewskiville Tales, was accepted for publication before he graduated. Oh, and it’s loosely modeled on The Canterbury Tales. In other words, Dinin is a typical Duke student.

A few weeks before graduation, he talks about the Duke experience, Krzyzewskiville, his literary hero Walt Whitman, and his future in writing.

Q: You’ve tented in Krzyzewskiville and written a book about it. But I heard you weren’t at all into sports until you came to Duke. Didn’t you go to any football or basketball games in high school? A: I went to football games as part of the band. We had a huge marching band, and won the national championship. But otherwise, no sports in general. I was really good at warming the bench in Little League.

Q: So you came to Duke, and what happened? A: Well, I didn’t go to a game until my RA freshman year invited me to a game against . A lot of my friends from high school go there, so I said I’d go.

Q: You could get in? A: Yes, it wasn’t too bad against Georgia Tech. It wasn’t prime seats or anything; still I think for anyone’s first trip inside Cameron it doesn’t matter. Even the games that are considered bad games by the regular crowd . . . it’s always amazing, always exciting.

Q: Was there a flash of lightning? A: It was just a lot of fun. You scream as loud as you can and jump up and down. And that’s obviously something you don’t generally do in the rest of your life, but you do it in Cameron, and the person next to you doesn’t look at you funny, because they’re doing the same thing.

Q: Did you paint yourself blue or anything? A: No. I’ve never been one of those who paint.

Q: You’re not a painter. A: I probably shouldn’t say that.

Q: Did you go to other games that year? A: From then on, I went to a lot of games, and watched them on TV more. And I didn’t know the first thing about basketball, the rules: Fouls, foul shots, one and one versus a shooting foul? I knew nothing.

Q: But you learned. A: I learned.

Q: You tented Sophomore and Junior years? A: Yes. Sophomore year, I got roped into it by my friends. I was part of a tent where someone had dropped out. I tented for a month and a half, or two months. That year we had one of the worst line moni- tors ever—he had no idea what he was doing. And it was a really rough winter. There was an ice storm, no one else had power, and we were worried about where we were going to get our next caramel mac- chiato.

Q: You were a line monitor this year, so you didn’t have to tent, right? A: Yes.

Q: How did you get that job? A: Uh, connections. (Laughs.)

Q: What would be an egregious line monitor abuse of power, something that you would never have done? A: Something like telling what time the personal checks were going to be. There’s all sorts of sordid sto- ries of sexual favors in exchange for word on what the personal checks would be.

Q: As a line monitor, you presumably get to the front of the line to get into games? A: We’re not in front. We spend the whole two hours before the game letting people in, checking ids, making sure everyone’s in order, squooshing people so we could try to fit in as many people as possible.

Q: Is that an official term, squooshing? A: Crowd squeezers. That’s what I did this year, I was the main crowd squeezer. I walked around with a bullhorn in the stadium telling people to get closer to their neighbor. A lot of people tried to pick fights with me over that. Anyway, a section is roped off for line monitors, and we come in right before game time and sit there.

Q: Tenting happens for two games a year? A: Yes, generally it’s two. This year it was UNC and Wake Forest.

Q: It’s always UNC. How is the other team determined? A: It’s the other team that looks like it’s going to be a big-time match up. And Wake looked good for that.

Q: Give me a list of comforts that might be typically found in a tent in K-ville. A: A sleeping bag and your pillows, then maybe folding camping chairs in the tent or outside the tent. Battery powered lanterns. You can’t run any electrical cords into K-ville. Nowadays, people might have an internet cord they plug into the lamppost and just run it into the tent and whoever’s out there can use it. Of course K-ville is wireless now. So we don’t even need that if you have a wireless laptop. If there’s a lot of people waiting for a personal check, you might bring a TV. There are electric outlets by the side of Carr gym, but you can’t bring it into your tent. People have charcoal grills, gas stoves.

Q: What do your folks think about your tenting? A: My dad makes the odd comment about his $40,000 going somewhere useful.

Q: I think you have to expect that comment as part of the price. Do you do any sports now? A: I play golf, I do fly fishing, I’m in the basketball class in PE. I also run, and I do a lot of weightlifting. I didn’t do anything like this until I came to Duke. It’s one of the better habits I picked up in school. Plenty of worse ones negate it, I’m sure.

Q: Want to talk about it? A: Actually I’m not that bad of a kid.

Q: Oh well. A: I didn’t even drink until I was 21. Q: Really? I’m impressed. You’re an English major? A: Yes.

Q: Any other majors or minors? A: No, but I’ve taken twice the number of classes required for an English major. I’ve actually taken over 20 and you need 10.

Q: So you’re a double English major. A: If that’s possible, but I don’t think they would do that.

Q: Are your 20 classes primarily writing or literature? A: Most are literature classes. I’ve taken five or seven writing. Mostly I’ve taken standard literature: Chaucer, Shakespeare.

Q: Talk me through your work in the archives with Walt Whitman. A: It all began in a class on Whitman, sophomore year, and we had to come up with a research project. Mine ended up being numerical annotations in the margins of Whitman’s manuscripts. He’s an incredibly messy manuscript writer; he’ll write on scraps of paper, magazine cutouts, sideways and upside down. Sometimes he has these notations in the margins where you can see him doing math. He’s actually calcu- lating something. No one’s ever studied them before.

So that’s how it all began, the math in the margins. Now I’m taking it one step further—actually about 50 steps further. In the past, people haven’t used manuscripts to teach poetry. It’s not easy to show them to students because they’re in an archive hidden away and not easy to access. Now because of the Internet and digital imaging, we can put these manuscripts online. There’s a Walt Whitman Archive online where you can find images of all these manuscripts. So now we can use them in teaching.The only problem is that there’s a huge gap in the pedagogy: how do you use those manuscripts? My project is trying to de- velop a vocabulary and a set of standard tools for using manuscripts in classrooms.

Q: I heard you started your book to fulfill a class assignment. A: It was a class called “Dictionaries and their Makers” that initiated “Crazie Talk” (the glossary that ends the book). When we were given the assignment to create a glossary, I happened to be tenting, so it just made sense to write a K-ville glossary. The idea for doing the book came when word about my glossary started leaking out, and alumni started emailing me, asking to see my “history of Krzyzewskiville.” The Chaucer idea was one of my first ideas for a format, but I decided against it because I thought it might be too hard. This was before I thought about doing a book. However, after doing the first bits of research, I knew that the only way to tell the story of K-ville was to do so through storytellers, and with that deci- sion, the Chaucer model came back to me as the primary option. I never worked on the book for a class. Actually, I just took an independent study in which I worked on the book fairly independently, although it was officially mentored by Professor Marianna Torgovnick.

Q: You played viola in a string quartet at Duke? A: Yes, for three years. We were part of the chamber music program and got credit for it. We were coached by members of the Ciompi Quartet.

Q: Do you plan to keep playing? A: I hope so. It depends on where I go next. I haven’t played viola much this year; I had too much stuff going on. It’s such a nice thing, a relaxing thing. I’m sure I’ll get back to it next year when I have my own place and don’t have to worry about my roommates. Q: And the Blue Devil Guides? You’ve done that for how many years? A: I started my sophomore year, so three years. At the end of my sophomore year, they created a position for training and development. I did that for two more years. I guess people really liked my tours.

Q: This is for prospective students and their parents, right? What do you tell them? A: Well, I’m a firm believer in that everywhere you go you’re going to make a home for yourself. You’re going to make yourself happy. So what’s the benefit of going to one school over another? A school like Duke has everything: in the afternoon, you can be sitting over in Engineering in this brand new multimil- lion dollar building doing groundbreaking research and then at night you can paint yourself blue and go scream as loud as you can at one of the best basketball programs in the sport.

Q: What are you writing next? A: My next big project is a book I’m working on called Terminus. Terminus is the original name of At- lanta—Atlanta used to be called Terminus. It’s a kind of interesting dichotomy. They say when you die, if you go to hell you have a layover in Atlanta. So what used to be Terminus, the end of the rail line, where everything ended, is now the terminal. Right? Because when you think of Atlanta you think of Hartsfield Airport—ugh, I’ve got to fly through Atlanta. Everyone has do it at some point

Q: Once was enough for me. A: So it’s kind of this jumping point now, but it used to be the end. It’s an interesting dichotomy, and I play with that. And I take the character, this grad student or history researcher, researching the history of Atlanta, researching Terminus, and he’s diagnosed with terminal cancer. And you have this third play on terminal where now terminal is the jumping point and it’s the ending point. That’s the basic outline. That’ll be my next project. That’s the book I’m shopping around.

Q: Who are your literary heroes? Who’d you like to be mentioned in the same breath as? A: Certainly Whitman. . . . I never thought too much about that.

The Krzyzewskiville Tales by Aaron Dinin 296 pages, 20 b&w illustrations hardcover, 0-8223-3633-2, $21.95

Publicity Contact: Laura Sell, Publicity, 919-687-3639 or [email protected]