my apartment with a bottle of Wild Turkey and spent five or six hours politely insisting that, as the honorable person he knew me to be, I was going to let that bit go—a considerable sacrifice that didn’t lessen Eleanor’s rage.
3. Eleanor goaded and disliked me even before she slept with me. She used to call me Jay the Obtuse, *2 and when Reg noticed the animosity between us he began subtly to urge me to see her as the prototype for George Fitzgerald’s libidinous antagonist, Esther, in Stain .
Enough. Moving on. Here’s what I’m asking, TV: let Browles unwind at Caxton for a month or two, longer if that’s feasible on your end. Offer him solitude, and let him be shielded from the shit and the failures to come. I vouch for him completely (alter ego, you ask?), and I promise he won’t set off firecrackers under a fellow resident’s cabin. You could probably include him in some of the therapeutic sessions; I’m sure he’d benefit, as would anyone—myself included, god knows.
Apologies for the rant and the nostalgic detour. Like Scrooge, less than a week before the clamor of Christmas, I’m makingthis last-minute request with every scrap of human warmth I’ve got left to muster. I’m the tide propelling a shipwrecked man to your doorstep. Please take Browles on. I guarantee he’d be amenable to periodic tasks around the compound—groundskeeping and whatnot—if that would be useful.
With admiration, and wishing you a peaceful holiday, I remain
Your friend,
January 4, 2010
Kathleen Quam
Associate Chair, Comp/Rhetoric Lattimore Community College
16 Fountain Place
Lattimore, IL 60491
Dear Professor Quam, Alex Ruefle has prevailed upon me to support his teaching application to your department, which I gather is hiring adjunct faculty members exclusively, bypassing the tenure track with its attendant health benefits, job security, and salaries on which a human being might reasonably live. Perhaps your institution should cut to the chase and put its entire curriculum online, thereby sparing Ruefle the need to move to Lattimore, wherever that is. You could prop him up in a broom closet in his apartment, poke him with the butt end of a mop when you need him to cough up a lecture on Caribbean fiction or the passive voice, and then charge your students a thousand dollars each to correct the essays their classmates have downloaded from a website. Such is the future of education.
How do I know Alex? During the early years of his doctoral studies in English at Payne, he was assigned to me as an RA; this was back in the precrisis era, a dulcet time in our university’shistory when faculty were allotted luxuries such as research support, access to a working copy machine, and paper and pen. (Currently, we count ourselves fortunate to have functional toilets. I don’t know what your living conditions are at Lattimore—tidy and sterile, I suspect—but here, given a construction project initiated on behalf of our Economics faculty, who Must Be Kept Comfortable at All Times, we are alternately frozen and nearly smoked, via pestilent fumes, out of our building. Between the construction dust and the radiators emitting erratic bursts of steam heat, the intrepid faculty members who have remained in their offices over the winter break are humid with sweat and dusted with ash and resemble two-legged cutlets dredged in flour.) In any case, Alex. I leave to others the task of evaluating his thesis * and will limit myself to discussing his performance as my RA, which was more than adequate. Ruefle is highly capable, efficient, and independent. I confess that some of the assignments I gave him might have been easy to misinterpret, based as they were on episodes of my own life and experience. (At that time I still indulged in sweet dreams of success, blissfully ignorant of the relentless downward drift of my career, mynovel-in-progress, when published, to be greeted by a sphinxlike silence in the press, the wrath of my
3. Eleanor goaded and disliked me even before she slept with me. She used to call me Jay the Obtuse, *2 and when Reg noticed the animosity between us he began subtly to urge me to see her as the prototype for George Fitzgerald’s libidinous antagonist, Esther, in Stain .
Enough. Moving on. Here’s what I’m asking, TV: let Browles unwind at Caxton for a month or two, longer if that’s feasible on your end. Offer him solitude, and let him be shielded from the shit and the failures to come. I vouch for him completely (alter ego, you ask?), and I promise he won’t set off firecrackers under a fellow resident’s cabin. You could probably include him in some of the therapeutic sessions; I’m sure he’d benefit, as would anyone—myself included, god knows.
Apologies for the rant and the nostalgic detour. Like Scrooge, less than a week before the clamor of Christmas, I’m makingthis last-minute request with every scrap of human warmth I’ve got left to muster. I’m the tide propelling a shipwrecked man to your doorstep. Please take Browles on. I guarantee he’d be amenable to periodic tasks around the compound—groundskeeping and whatnot—if that would be useful.
With admiration, and wishing you a peaceful holiday, I remain
Your friend,
January 4, 2010
Kathleen Quam
Associate Chair, Comp/Rhetoric Lattimore Community College
16 Fountain Place
Lattimore, IL 60491
Dear Professor Quam, Alex Ruefle has prevailed upon me to support his teaching application to your department, which I gather is hiring adjunct faculty members exclusively, bypassing the tenure track with its attendant health benefits, job security, and salaries on which a human being might reasonably live. Perhaps your institution should cut to the chase and put its entire curriculum online, thereby sparing Ruefle the need to move to Lattimore, wherever that is. You could prop him up in a broom closet in his apartment, poke him with the butt end of a mop when you need him to cough up a lecture on Caribbean fiction or the passive voice, and then charge your students a thousand dollars each to correct the essays their classmates have downloaded from a website. Such is the future of education.
How do I know Alex? During the early years of his doctoral studies in English at Payne, he was assigned to me as an RA; this was back in the precrisis era, a dulcet time in our university’shistory when faculty were allotted luxuries such as research support, access to a working copy machine, and paper and pen. (Currently, we count ourselves fortunate to have functional toilets. I don’t know what your living conditions are at Lattimore—tidy and sterile, I suspect—but here, given a construction project initiated on behalf of our Economics faculty, who Must Be Kept Comfortable at All Times, we are alternately frozen and nearly smoked, via pestilent fumes, out of our building. Between the construction dust and the radiators emitting erratic bursts of steam heat, the intrepid faculty members who have remained in their offices over the winter break are humid with sweat and dusted with ash and resemble two-legged cutlets dredged in flour.) In any case, Alex. I leave to others the task of evaluating his thesis * and will limit myself to discussing his performance as my RA, which was more than adequate. Ruefle is highly capable, efficient, and independent. I confess that some of the assignments I gave him might have been easy to misinterpret, based as they were on episodes of my own life and experience. (At that time I still indulged in sweet dreams of success, blissfully ignorant of the relentless downward drift of my career, mynovel-in-progress, when published, to be greeted by a sphinxlike silence in the press, the wrath of my
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