Julie Schumacher - Dear Committee Members

Still. Catfish Catering — all too familiar to those of us immured in the culinary universe of inexpensive university-sanctioned cuisine — is one of the most gruesome sources of provender on the planet. Oil (god only knows whether you’re using K-Y Jelly, lard, or some less well recognized lubricant) appears to be your primary ingredient regardless of the category of food. Last year at the banquet honoring the installation of our new provost, I made the mistake (yes, it was my error, I admit it) of consuming a modest portion of tilapia from the groaning board; I was ill for three days. Substances I would never knowingly introduce to my body had apparently proliferated within it and were then rapidly expelled in unspeakable gouts. I counted myself fortunate, at the end of a week of gastrointestinal crisis, to be able to walk.

Seth Padoman is a bright-eyed, well-intentioned young man: not the most accomplished among recent clusters (in class he was perhaps best known as the author of a sci-fi tale about a mutant clan of gun-wielding arachnids that assumed control of a cocaine factory in Mexico), but eager and ambitious. He deserves a future, and therefore I recommend him to you on the condition that you not allow him to consume any foodstuffs produced by your place of business.

Yours in digestive health,

J. T. Fitger

Professor, Department of English

Student Services/Fellowship Office

Carole “The Beneficent” Samarkind, Associate Director

14 Gilbert Hall

Carole:

Let this humble communiqué serve as my recommendation for Lee Rosenthal: the poor kid tells me he has applied for a spring semester job in your office. He can read and write; he’s not unsightly; and he doesn’t appear to be addicted to illegal substances prior to 3:00 p.m. Set him to work typing something. He finished the first half of my Junior/Senior Creative Writing Workshop with a B+ and is currently laboring away on a final short story — prescient soul — about a college graduate who lands a meaningless entry-level position in his father’s law firm, compromising his iconoclastic ideals and ambitions to make some cold hard cash.

Which reminds me: I heard what I sincerely hope was a scurrilous rumor to the effect that you are searching for work outside the velvet bonds of our institution. Be honest with me: Did Janet say something truly objectionable at the diversity committee meeting? (At an all-campus congress just before we divorced, she actually read aloud from Transfer of Affection , as if the novel itself were some sort of indictment. I admit to weaving with the threads of real life on my loom, in Transfer and especially in Stain ;* but the fictional, philandering George Fitzgerald in those books isn’t me [I only cheated on Janet once], and the fictional Nella, despite her rapaciousness, is not my ex-wife.)

To the point: Carole — it would be shortsighted and foolish for you to leave campus on my account. From this day forward, I won’t call your office more than once a week, and I promise never again to stop by unannounced with your favorite artichoke salad — which I ended up eating alone, by the way, on a cold metal bench on the quad, attracting the attention of itinerant polemicists and pamphleteers.

I will leave you in peace. And of course if I can’t persuade you to stay, I’d be willing to write you a recommendation …

Deep breath and new subject. Interview Rosenthal. Just ask him to keep his left arm covered, unless you want to be exposed to a fleshy panoply of R-rated tattoos.

With the usual professionalism and longing,

JF

* The Times called it “an insider’s seedy, salacious guide to the notorious Seminar”—which probably nudged the book toward a second printing.

Theodore Boti, Sociologist and Commander-in-Chief

Department of English

Dear Ted:

Via this LOR I hereby nominate Gwendolyn Hoch-Dunn for this semester’s English Undergraduate Thesis Award. Ms. Hoch-Dunn has a 3.9 GPA and is currently completing, under my supervision, a thirty-five-page monograph on Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth: specifically, an examination of romantic and economic trajectories in the novel. Hoch-Dunn is a superb student: she will graduate magna cum laude in spring, spend a year enlarging her personal horizon by teaching English abroad, and then succeed at whatever she chooses.

Perhaps you’ve familiarized yourself by now with the faculty’s areas of concentration and are wondering why Ms. Hoch-Dunn is laboring away on this particular project under my direction rather than Albert Tyne’s, given that Tyne is a Wharton specialist. The fact is that Tyne, never appealing in person, has become a lecherous eyesore avoided as a matter of course by all female (and most male) students, one of whom informed me back in September — you may want to check in on this, Ted, at your earliest convenience — that instead of visiting the urinals in the men’s room Tyne has been pissing into old wine bottles, then (thank god for small favors) replacing the corks and arranging his collection in a foul gold ring around the perimeter of his office. I don’t doubt the truth of this accusation: I haven’t seen Tyne in the men’s room for years. Not being paid an administrator’s exalted salary, I have no intention of violating the sanctum of his uriniferous lair in order to do anything corrective, and it occurs to me that this particular duty might appropriately fall to a sociologist …

Poor Ms. Hoch-Dunn. Her other advisory options, subtracting those who have entered phased retirement or sabbatical, those who always refuse student requests for assistance as a matter of course, and the clinically insane, were Donna Lovejoy (now circulating her CV like a blackjack dealer at every conference in order to extricate herself from our department), Sandra Atherman (as am I, she is laden like a burro with advisees every semester), and me. Lance West advises the rhetoricians (and having, inexplicably, been turned down for the Campiello Award, he will probably be gone by the end of this year). Technically, yes, Ms. Hoch-Dunn might have queried Zander Hesseldine, but he is currently interested only in postcolonial theory, whereas I am — the students understand this — not afraid or ashamed to be a dinosaur, a person who reads and teaches novels (not “texts”), and who instills whenever possible during class sessions a fast-fading (and, to the students, possibly retrograde or endearing) humanistic agenda, emphasizing literary inquiry into the human experience and the human condition. As far as period and subject matter, my tastes are eclectic, but I remain generally unmoved by floating houses and mythical grandmothers returned from the dead, which are — let’s be honest here — the contemporary equivalent of elves and unicorns.

Ms. Hoch-Dunn is, I believe, one of the best undergraduate students we have been fortunate enough to count among our majors in recent years. She is a bright spot amid the intellectual and moral decay of our department, a decay now physically manifested in our surroundings (the fax machine is broken again; a large chunk of the ceiling fell and crushed it while Gunnar was attempting to use it this morning) at the behest of the dean, the associate vice provost, and their brutal band of incompetent henchmen.

Give the award to Hoch-Dunn, and God save us all.

In dire camaraderie,

Jay

P.S.: I’m sure you read the campus newspaper’s article about our venerable colleagues in the Economics Department? Not only do their salaries make ours look like an eleven-year-old’s allowance; they will now be able to offer funding to every student admitted to the econ major. An idea here, Ted: Why don’t you inquire in the dean’s office if — once they close our department down for good — we might be rehired to clean, perhaps with cotton swabs dipped in olive oil, the gold leaf surely to be installed in the brand-new fiefdom on the Econ floor?