Julie Schumacher - Dear Committee Members

It was striking to realize that we were getting divorced at least in part because of something that had happened in a classroom two decades before — and even more striking, once the papers were signed, to admit to myself that, as vehement and strident as Janet was (and still is), I missed her. I have missed her terribly every day and have told her so (proclaiming my continued affection inadvertently once, in a public e-mail), but she claims she is healthier without me and remains unmoved.

Tolentino and DaFoy will send you their packets of prose next week. I was happy to hear that you got a nice arrangement for Troy at Folkstone. A bright spot in the fecund gloom of spring …

Drearily,

JTF

Student Services/Fellowship Office

Carole “The Charitable” Samarkind, Associate Director

14 Gilbert Hall

Carole—

You probably heard that I’ve been thoroughly scolded* for the LOR I wrote as a part of your application to Shepardville; once again, I’m sorry, I’m putting my ankles and wrists in the stocks and sending you a bushel of overripe tomatoes by campus post — you will find me publicly repenting of my sins on the quad. Does it alleviate your anger at all when I try to explain that my motives were good? If you’d applied to a school that deserved you, I would have written something more appropriately laudatory and banal.

Carole, I do hope you’ll forgive me because I am in desperate need of a favor. I have one remaining graduate student, Darren Browles, the last of his kind, whose funding possibilities have gone up in flames. Rather than tucking his tail between his legs and leaving campus, he’s been living on borrowed cigarettes and the castoffs from business school catered lunches; I suspect he sleeps and showers at the gym.

I recommended Browles to Bentham (Eleanor), which spurned him, and to Ken Doyle, my agent, who is so busy making millions off a comp lit student whose book I placed in his hairy hands that he can’t devote even a few modest hours to this more demanding (i.e., less profitable) project. I even wrote to Zander Hesseldine and his kinky coterie about a summer RAship, but I got no response; they are probably busy packing their bags for Camp Foucault.

Worst of all — I hesitate to confess it — I sent a portion of Browles’s manuscript-in-progress to my former advisor (I’ve told you about HRH) and it turns out he’s babbling nonsense in a nursing home, having managed to emerge from the miasma of senescence long enough to spout the twisted and mistaken idea that he and not Browles is composing a novel based on Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener”. Yes, I know, confidentiality! But in a moment of infirmity or nostalgia I was searching for wisdom and for the benefit of HRH’s connections … The possibility of Browles’s success appears to be receding over a distant horizon, but if he could get some summer funding and finally complete the damned book, he might still have a shot.

You have your fingers on the pulse of student finance over there in Gilbert; may I send Browles over? He’s not in terrific shape right now, frankly — I’ll give him a talking to about getting a haircut and changing his clothes — but when he doesn’t feel the world is out to destroy him, he presents fairly well. I would so appreciate it, Carole. In the absence of other hidden pockets of funding, perhaps you could hire him to work in the office?

With a bow and an audible scraping noise,

Jay

* Janet was fully inflated with umbrage on your behalf, and I understand she wrote you a letter supplanting mine. Rest assured: despite the discomfitures of last fall, you can trust her. Yes, she’s prickly, but she is also principled and well connected, and if you’re determined to escape this World of Payne, she’s well equipped to help you do so.

Dean Philip Hinckler

College of Arts and Sciences

1 MacNeil Hall

Dear Dean Hinckler,

I have been tapped, once again and for reasons that defy human understanding, to write a letter — during the final crisis-ridden week of the semester — on behalf of my colleague Franklin Kentrell, who has nominated himself for chair of the university curriculum committee. Given your own recent, crucial work on the selection of dirges for the all-campus picnic, you may not have had time to grasp or appreciate the nature of Kentrell’s contributions. He is, to put it mildly, insane. If you must allow him to self-nominate his way into a position of authority, please god let it be the faculty senate. There, his eccentricities, though they may thrive and increase, will at least be harmless. The faculty senate, our own Tower of Babel, has not reached a decision of any import for a dozen years.

By the by: word on the street is that our sociological friend, Ted Boti, despite various carrots dangled before him, will soon refuse to continue as chair. Rumors about his health have been circulating; through the pebbled glass of his office door, where one can observe him scratching the psoriatic tufts of hair on his head, he looks troubled and wan. A recommendation: next time you enlist someone from an outside department to step in and rule us, you should choose from the smaller and more disadvantaged units — Indigenous Studies or Hindi/Urdu, or some similarly besieged program, one of whose members, like a teenage virgin leaping into the bubbling mouth of a volcano, will sacrifice him- or herself in exchange for a chance that the larger community be allowed to survive.

As for Kentrell: he is one of the reasons no one wants to come near us. My suggestion to you: invent a committee for him — something Kafkaesque that requires years of fusty administrative investigation — and tell him that the difficult work he’ll be putting in, until retirement, will free him from all other service, forever, amen.

Confident that my colleagues will join me in welcoming Kentrell’s involvement in this distant and hypothetical realm, I remain

Yours in tender servitude,

Jay Fitger

USDA Forest Service

c/o Thomas Schaffler

Mailstop 1111

1400 Independence Avenue SW

Washington, DC 20250-1111

Dear Thomas Schaffler,

Simone Barnes, due to receive her BA in English in a matter of days (already the seniors can be found preparing for the upcoming pomp and ceremony by playing drinking games on the quad), has applied to your office in the hope of becoming an assistant wildlife observation specialist. Though I know almost nothing of the natural world — a blackbird and a robin are the same as far as I am concerned — it has fallen to me to recommend her.

Ms. Barnes has breathily informed me that should she be successful in this particular objective, she will immediately become “the happiest person on earth”—and on this basis alone I feel impelled to urge you to hire her.

I assume that sitting still for hours on a wooden platform, a pair of binoculars at the ready should anything ornithological raise its feathered head, would require steadiness, tranquility, and a meditative nature. Ms. Barnes — based on her performance in my Junior/Senior Creative Writing Workshop — manifests all three of these traits. A person of few words, she spent a good deal of her class time gazing languidly out the window. When called on, however, she demonstrated a reasonable familiarity with the subject at hand. She received a B+ as her final grade.

In case it’s relevant, Ms. Barnes’s final project was a whimsical piece of fiction about a young woman who lands a coveted job as an assistant wildlife observation specialist for the Forest Service. One day a beautiful young man ascends the platform on which she perches and, with no words exchanged (Ms. Barnes prefers narrative to dialogue), makes swooping love to her before transforming himself into a hawk and plunging, airborne, into the tree canopy, lustrous and green. The story conflated aspects of Rapunzel and Icarus and Leda’s passionate swan — but confusions like these, given time and a healthy book list, can usually be alleviated, if not outright cured.