Julie Schumacher - Dear Committee Members

2. In the context of the hiring freeze — purportedly imposed on all departments but inflicted mainly on English and the Lilliputian units — and in light of our diminution via recent retirements, we can’t afford to sacrifice even one teaching colleague to the funeral pyre of administration. You want undergraduates who can write, think, and read? Stop pretending that writing can be taught across the curriculum by geologists and physicists who wouldn’t recognize a dependent clause if it bit them on the ass.

3. Boti’s a sociologist. And yes, sociology has gone the way of poli-sci and econ, now firmly in the clutches of rabid number crunchers who have abandoned or forgotten the link between their abstruse theoretical musings and the presence of human beings on the planet’s surface; still, Boti was a student once, drawn during some primeval past to the study of human communities and social organizations, and as such he is likely to possess an albeit long-buried interest in the operation of a collective. If nothing else, he may get an academic paper out of the experience (though who’d want to read it?).

4. Boti loves protocol and detail. Your office loves protocol and detail. Nuff said.

5. Finally and perhaps most important: despite himself, Boti lately evinces an incipient understanding of the dilemmas of our woebegone department, and this dawning knowledge may eventually lead him to advocate for its health and well-being. Witness, for example, his mild amazement when informed that English has shrunk in the past eight years by more than 20 percent. See the wrinkle in his snowy brow upon learning that our student fellowships have been slashed, our graduate programs defunded, our classroom sizes increased, our faculty research and travel funds canceled, the student literary journal paid for by donations collected on street corners in aluminum cans, and on and on. You may have intended his installation as outside chair as a punitive wake-up call for our department, but I am not sure the arrangement has resulted as planned.

In an unguarded moment, Boti expressed surprise at what he termed our faculty’s “docile disengagement.” I informed him that we are like oxen accustomed to the yoke: our hides thick from insult and whippings, we have forgotten how to do anything other than trudge dully along.

Even more: Having spent his tenure-seeking years in the gleaming spaceship of Atwell Hall, Boti — like a wealthy traveler touring the slums — is suitably horrified by the state of our building, with its intermittent water supply, semioperational light fixtures, mephitic odors, and corridors foggy with toxins. Yesterday, on the metal bookshelf in my office, I came across a cluster of insects — a beetle, two moths, a centipede, and several bluebottle flies — writhing together like dirgeful companions in their final death throes, presumably poisoned by vapors from the second floor. But never mind: I am sure our foreshortened life spans will be made worthwhile on the day when the economists, in their jewel-encrusted palanquins, are reinstalled in their palazzo over our heads. (Climbing the stairs and peering into their future home yesterday, I found that the double doors leading to their sanctuary are equipped with locks — presumably to prevent riffraff and English faculty from getting in.)

Enfin: With mixed feelings (but what feelings aren’t mixed, when one is a professor of the humanities?), I put my shoulder to the wheel for Boti: give him two more years.

As for the rumor that, Boti unwilling (I assume you are tempting him with previously undiscovered funds), I might be counted among the eligible candidates to serve in his place — I consider it both ludicrous and unsound. Why? Because the upper echelons of the administration justifiably detest me; because my colleagues view me as a cantankerous pariah; and because, given my stance on several university-wide issues, I would consider the position a significant ethical and even spiritual compromise — and I say that as an agnostic. Ergo: Assuming that the rumor isn’t a joke expressly devised for my humiliation, you may color me

Flattered but uninterested,

Jay

* I recall your witticism at the provost’s reception last year: that as much as you detested my LORs, you found them more engaging than any of my novels, which you dismissed as “ponderous.”

Ted Boti, Chair

Dear Ted,

You have asked me — for the third time this year — to submit a letter of recommendation for Franklin Kentrell, applicant/supplicant for the Citrella Service Award.

You requested that I leave out “all extraneous information,” limiting myself to statements associated with my endorsement of Kentrell’s (self-)nomination.

Thank you for this opportunity to express so thoroughly my feelings on this crucial subject.

Elliptically,

Jay

P.S.: I assume you’re demurring on the reappointment for chair in order to bargain for something. Might the Overlords be persuaded to fork over the faculty lines they promised to give us three years ago?

Ken Doyle

Hautman and Doyle Literary Agency

and Hemorrhoid Excision Center

141 West 27th Street

New York, NY 10001

Dear Ken,

Do you know what you’ve unleashed, making a six-figure sale for Vivian Zelles? Every student novelist I’ve ever known — along with a few I’ve never met — is tracking me down to remind me of the halfhearted praise I once bestowed on his or her work. The ones who still live here in town are dropping by with their cherubic infants and jars of homemade jam. Some of them, I suspect, haven’t written so much as a greeting card for years, but the news of Vivian’s sale is like blood in the water, and now, fins sparkling, into the shallows they come.

I’m sure the bold and the brash will contact you directly, but if you’re curious about who’s been vetted, the only two I can safely vouch for at this moment are Eileen Tolentino and Carlos DaFoy. I won’t bother to describe their work — you obviously make your own decisions — except to say that Tolentino’s prose will be more palatable if you can get her to quit with the obsessive renditions of bodily functions; and DaFoy (a restless, bearded man with the tics and gesticulations of a hopping spider) ought to admit to himself that he’s a writer of historical romance and start collecting his checks. You’ll see if there’s anything you can do for them. As for the others: I don’t like homemade jam.

Ken, in your e-mail from last week you asked how Browles was doing. I assumed the question was pro forma (or a further opportunity for you to rub salt in the wound) — until yesterday evening when Janet called to tell me what I now conclude you already knew: that HRH gave an interview. His first in nine years. Not to The New York Times , thank god, or The Paris Review , but to Avenue A , an online journal, circulation five thousand. “I think you should read it,” Janet said. She sent me the link.

“Still Writing After All These Years: A Conversation with H. Reginald Hanf.” And what is Hanf, who has given almost no interviews in the past forty years, writing? A Melville novel . “ ‘I am interested in the conflation of contemporary and classic works,’ Hanf says. ‘And in the problem of “Bartleby” in particular.’ ” Is he fucking kidding? He lifted that phrase from Browles’s proposal. I don’t know if Browles reads Avenue A —I haven’t seen him or spoken to him in the last few weeks — but some jackass will probably send him the link. Good god, Ken: HRH isn’t going to write a “Bartleby” novel; a perusal of the interview immediately suggests that he’s living on pabulum and stewed prunes, but because somebody showed up with a tape recorder (probably the day after he got the excerpt I sent him), he started regurgitating passages from Browles’s book like a witless parrot. But Browles doesn’t know that . He’ll imagine Reg to be the potentate of old, the predictor of literary fortunes, and reading that interview is going to crush him. Do you remember HRH telling Janet that her writing was “sterile” and unproductive? She would kill me for telling you this, Ken, but that comment haunted her for years — it was like a venomous seed planted inside her, to the extent that when she couldn’t get pregnant (she wanted children; I recognized myself as a poor candidate to be anyone’s father), she felt he’d cursed her or created a weakness in her by issuing his verdict aloud. Years later when she found out about my affair (brief, unsatisfying, pointless), she was angry not only because of the betrayal but because of what she called my collusion with Reg. She claimed I had never disputed his diagnosis in regard to her work, that I was Reg’s acolyte, his garden gnome, eager to believe in his pronouncements because of his preference for Stain , and in exchange for his favoritism — inspired mainly by prurience, she said — I was willing to sit back and see my friends and my classmates dismissed and degraded, ignored. She said I had bought into the idea, instilled in her by HRH, that she was a lesser writer than I was, and that she would never write anything good.