[now] ex-wife, and the near universal condemnation, on campus, from readers who failed to understand the concept of satire.) But Ruefle seldom lifted an eyebrow. Like a waiter committing a lengthy order to memory, he would listen and nod, hands in his pockets, and then disappear, presumably heading home to work by himself, in his footie pajamas, uninterrupted by the demands or neuroses of his supervisor. He always got the work done.
I urge you to hire Alex Ruefle and to offer him a position commensurate with his multiple decades of education and his abilities—that is, a position well above, both in salary and rank, the one your college has posted.
Hoping the New Year inspires conscientious behavior in one and all, I remain Jason Fitger, Professor of Creative Writing and English Payne University
----
* I assume he listed me as a reference because of the retirement and demise, respectively, of his two thesis advisors: it took Ruefle fourteen years to earn the doctorate. During that time he became a fixture here at Payne, beginning his studies as a vigorous man and, after marrying and acquiring multiple children, staggering across the PhD finish line in late middle age.
January 7, 2010
Sellebritta Online
C. R. Young, Communications Coordinator Dear C. R. Young,
Ms. Tara Tappani knocked at my office door this morning and, with the air of a woman wearing diamonds and furs, entered the icy enclosure in which I work, perched at the edge of my red vinyl chair, and urged me to respond to your second e-mail request for a recommendation, as she dearly hopes to be hired as assistant editor of Sellebritta Online .
I demurred. Pressed, I reminded Ms. Tappani that, a year ago, I gave her a well-deserved F in my Intermediate Fiction class. She chuckled and put a manicured little paw on my forearm, as if the two of us were sharing a wonderful joke. “Don’t worry about that,” she assured me. “I just need a letter.”
So be it. Why did I give Ms. Tappani an F? For plagiarizing an entire short story, namely Irwin Shaw’s widely anthologized “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses.” It always startles me anew—though I have nabbed dozens of plagiarists—to realize that the student cheater is amazed at my powers of discernment, my uncanny ability to detect a difference in quality between his or her own work and, for example, Proust’s. Ihave caught students who faithfully reproduced (or cut and pasted, sometimes forgetting to remove the author’s name) the work of Hemingway, Cather, O’Connor (both Frank and Flannery), and Virginia Woolf. The Woolf copyist, wide-eyed with distress and admiration, told me she didn’t think I would catch her because Woolf, a European writer no longer among us, was “so obscure.”
Back to Ms. Tappani. There is a particular art to accusing a plagiarist, which necessitates first and foremost that I prop my office door open and keep a full box of tissues at hand. But in Ms. Tappani’s case the tissues weren’t needed. Having confronted her with the Irwin Shaw story prominently featured in several bound volumes on the flat of my desk, I sat back and waited. Visibly unperturbed, she sipped at the froth of a cappuccino. It seemed there was a reasonable explanation. She must have read Shaw’s story a few years before. Yes, that must have been it. She had read the story and clearly enjoyed it, to the extent that she had copied it, verbatim, into a notebook reserved for that purpose. Then, finding an assignment due for my class, she had paged through said notebook, stumbled across Shaw’s narrative, and forgotten that Shaw, rather than Tara Tappani, was its rightful author. A simple mix-up. She smiled.
I asked if she might show me the notebook into which she copied by hand the works of the masters. Ms. Tappani sighed. She wished that were possible, but only a week earlier she hadlost an entire satchel full of journals—including the notebook of literary classics rendered in her own curlicued
I urge you to hire Alex Ruefle and to offer him a position commensurate with his multiple decades of education and his abilities—that is, a position well above, both in salary and rank, the one your college has posted.
Hoping the New Year inspires conscientious behavior in one and all, I remain Jason Fitger, Professor of Creative Writing and English Payne University
----
* I assume he listed me as a reference because of the retirement and demise, respectively, of his two thesis advisors: it took Ruefle fourteen years to earn the doctorate. During that time he became a fixture here at Payne, beginning his studies as a vigorous man and, after marrying and acquiring multiple children, staggering across the PhD finish line in late middle age.
January 7, 2010
Sellebritta Online
C. R. Young, Communications Coordinator Dear C. R. Young,
Ms. Tara Tappani knocked at my office door this morning and, with the air of a woman wearing diamonds and furs, entered the icy enclosure in which I work, perched at the edge of my red vinyl chair, and urged me to respond to your second e-mail request for a recommendation, as she dearly hopes to be hired as assistant editor of Sellebritta Online .
I demurred. Pressed, I reminded Ms. Tappani that, a year ago, I gave her a well-deserved F in my Intermediate Fiction class. She chuckled and put a manicured little paw on my forearm, as if the two of us were sharing a wonderful joke. “Don’t worry about that,” she assured me. “I just need a letter.”
So be it. Why did I give Ms. Tappani an F? For plagiarizing an entire short story, namely Irwin Shaw’s widely anthologized “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses.” It always startles me anew—though I have nabbed dozens of plagiarists—to realize that the student cheater is amazed at my powers of discernment, my uncanny ability to detect a difference in quality between his or her own work and, for example, Proust’s. Ihave caught students who faithfully reproduced (or cut and pasted, sometimes forgetting to remove the author’s name) the work of Hemingway, Cather, O’Connor (both Frank and Flannery), and Virginia Woolf. The Woolf copyist, wide-eyed with distress and admiration, told me she didn’t think I would catch her because Woolf, a European writer no longer among us, was “so obscure.”
Back to Ms. Tappani. There is a particular art to accusing a plagiarist, which necessitates first and foremost that I prop my office door open and keep a full box of tissues at hand. But in Ms. Tappani’s case the tissues weren’t needed. Having confronted her with the Irwin Shaw story prominently featured in several bound volumes on the flat of my desk, I sat back and waited. Visibly unperturbed, she sipped at the froth of a cappuccino. It seemed there was a reasonable explanation. She must have read Shaw’s story a few years before. Yes, that must have been it. She had read the story and clearly enjoyed it, to the extent that she had copied it, verbatim, into a notebook reserved for that purpose. Then, finding an assignment due for my class, she had paged through said notebook, stumbled across Shaw’s narrative, and forgotten that Shaw, rather than Tara Tappani, was its rightful author. A simple mix-up. She smiled.
I asked if she might show me the notebook into which she copied by hand the works of the masters. Ms. Tappani sighed. She wished that were possible, but only a week earlier she hadlost an entire satchel full of journals—including the notebook of literary classics rendered in her own curlicued
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