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ОглавлениеSeptember 3, 2009
Bentham Literary Residency Program
P.O. Box 1572
Bentham, ME 04976
Dear Committee Members,
Over the past twenty-odd years I’ve recommended god only knows how many talented candidates for the Bentham January residency—that enviable literary oasis in the woods south of Skowhegan: the solitude, the pristine cabins, the artistic camaraderie, and those exquisite hand-delivered satchels of apples and cheese … Well, you can scratch all prior nominees and pretenders from your mailing lists, because none is as provocative or as promising as Darren Browles.
Mr. Browles is my advisee; he’s taken two of my workshops, and his novel-in-progress, a retelling of Melville’s Bartleby (but in which the eponymous character is hired to keep the books at a brothel, circa 1960, just outside Las Vegas), is both tender satire and blistering adaptation/homage. In brief: this tour de force is witty, incisive, original, brutally sophisticated, erotic. You don’t need me to summarize it—you’ll have received his two opening chapters. My agent, Ken Doyle, is apprised of the project and is gnashing his pearly incisors in the hope of receiving the completed manuscript soon. Any additional perks or funding you can provide for Browles during the residency will be appreciated; he’s likely to be wooed by editors all over New York.
A personal aside: I was very sorry to hear of Mike’s death. He was a terrific director, and I always enjoyed talking to him in the row of blue rocking chairs out on the porch during the occasions (too rare!) when I was able to escape my academic duties here in the Midwest and accept his invitations to Bentham. He’ll be terribly hard to replace. Whoever tries to step into them will find he wore sizeable, generous shoes.
In sadness but looking to the future,
Jason T. Fitger
Professor of Creative Writing and English
Department of English
Payne University
September 4, 2009
Theodore Boti, Chair
Department of English
Dear Ted,
Your memo of August 30 requests that we on the English faculty recommend some luckless colleague for the position of director of graduate studies. (You may have been surprised to find this position vacant upon your assumption of the chairship last month—if so, trust me, you will encounter many such surprises here.)
A quick aside, Ted: god knows what enticements were employed during the heat of summer to persuade you—a sociologist!—to accept the position of chair in a department not your own, an academic unit whose reputation for eccentricity and discord has inspired the upper echelon to punish us by withholding favors as if from a six-year-old at a birthday party: No raises or research funds for you, you ungovernable rascals! And no fudge before dinner! Perhaps, as the subject of a sociological study, you will find the problem of our dwindling status intriguing.
To the matter at hand: though English has traditionally been a largish department, you will find there are very few viable candidates capable of assuming the mantle of DGS. In fact, if I were a betting man, I’d wager that only 10 percent of the English instruction list will answer your call for nominations. Why? First, because more than a third of our faculty now consists of temporary (adjunct) instructors who creep into the building under cover of darkness to teach their graveyard shifts of freshman comp; they are not eligible to vote or to serve. Second, because the remaining two-thirds of the faculty, bearing the scars of disenfranchisement and long-term abuse, are busy tending to personal grudges like scraps of carrion on which they gnaw in the gloom of their offices. Long story short: your options aren’t pretty.
After subtracting the names of those who are on leave or close to retirement, and those already serving in the killing fields of administration, you will probably be forced to choose between Franklin Kentrell (NO: spend five consecutive minutes with him and you will understand why); Jennifer Brown-Wilson (a whipping girl for the theory faction—already terrorized, she will decline); Albert Tyne (under no circumstances should you enter his office without several days’ warning—more on this later); Donna Lovejoy (poor overworked creature—I hereby nominate her [anonymously please] with this letter); and me. You’ll soon find that I make myself unpleasant enough to be safe from nomination.
Enfin: Lovejoy will sag under this additional burden, but she will perform.
Ted, in your memo you referred briefly, also, to the need for faculty forbearance during what we were initially told would be the “remodeling” of the second floor for the benefit of our colleagues in the Economics Department.1 I’m not sure that you noticed, but the Econ faculty were, in early August, evacuated from the building—as if they’d been notified, sotto voce, of an oncoming plague. Not so the faculty in English. With the exception of a few individuals both fleet of foot and quick-witted enough to claim status as asthmatics, we have been Left Behind, almost biblically, expected to begin our classes and meet with students while bulldozers snarl at the door. Yesterday afternoon during my Multicultural American Literature class, I watched a wrecking ball swinging like a hypnotist’s watch just past the window. While I am relieved to know that the economists—delicate creatures!—have been safely installed in a wing of the new geology building where their physical comfort and aesthetic needs can be addressed, those of us who remain as castaways here in Willard Hall risk not only deafness but mutation: as of next week we have been instructed to keep our windows tightly closed due to “particulate matter”—but my office window (here’s the amusing part, Ted) no longer shuts. One theory here: the deanery is annoyed with our requests for parity and, weary of waiting for us to retire, has decided to kill us. Let the academic year begin!
Cordially and with a hearty welcome to the madhouse,
Jay
September 9, 2009
Mary Alice Ingersol, Manager
Wexler Foods, Inc.
65409 Capitol Drive
Maplewood, MN 55109
Dear Ms. Ingersol,
This letter is intended to bolster the application to Wexler Foods of my former student John Leszczynski, who completed the Junior/Senior Creative Writing Workshop three months ago. Mr. Leszczynski received a final grade of B, primarily on the basis of an eleven-page short story about an inebriated man who tumbles into a cave and surfaces from an alcoholic stupor to find that a tentacled monster—a sort of fanged and copiously salivating octopus, if memory serves—is gnawing through the flesh of his lower legs, the monster’s spittle burbling ever closer to the victim’s groin. Though chaotic and improbable even within the fantasy/horror genre, the story was solidly constructed: dialogue consisted primarily of agonized groans and screaming; the chronology was relentlessly clear.
Mr. Leszczynski attended class faithfully, arriving on time, and rarely succumbed to the undergraduate impulse to check his cell phone for messages or relentlessly zip and unzip his backpack in the final minutes of class.
Whether punctuality and an enthusiasm for flesh-eating cephalopods are the main attributes of the ideal Wexler employee I have no idea, but Mr. Leszczynski is an affable young man, reliable in his habits, and reasonably bright.
You might start him off in produce, rather than seafood or meats.
Whimsically,
Jason T. Fitger, Professor of Creative Writing/English
Payne University
September 14, 2009
Ted Boti, Resident Sociologist and Chair
Department of English
Dear Ted:
You’ve asked me to write a letter seconding the nomination of Franklin Kentrell for Payne’s coveted Davidson Chair. I assume Kentrell is behind this request; no sane person would nominate a man whose only recent publications consist of personal genealogical material and who wears visible sock garters in class—all he lacks is a white tin basin to resemble a nineteenth-century barber.
But if you want me to endorse his nomination in order to keep him quiet and away from your office (you will find him as persistent and maddening as a fly), you may excerpt the following sentences and affix my name to them: “Professor Franklin Kentrell has a singular mind and a unique approach to the discipline. He is sui generis. The Davidson Chair has never seen his like before.”
A word on the call for official, written letters of recommendation, Ted: I hope for the sake of all concerned you will cut back on these as much as possible. The LOR has become a rampant absurdity, usurping the place of the quick consultation and the two-minute phone call—not to mention the teaching and research that faculty were supposedly hired to perform. I haven’t published a novel in six years; instead, I fill my departmental hours casting words of praise into the bureaucratic abyss. On multiple occasions, serving on awards committees, I was actually required to write LORs to myself.
Keeping my temper under wraps for the present,
Jay
P.S.: I couldn’t help but notice, following the departure of the economists, that our Tech Help office has been largely vacated as well, a single employee—the appropriately named Mr. Duffy Napp—left behind to respond to faculty requests for computer assistance. This surly somnambulist rarely deigns to answer the most basic of questions and treats with exhausted dismay any individual who is not a specialist in computer arcana. Might it be possible to exchange “the Napper” for someone more civil and less lethargic?
P.P.S.: Thank you for your attention to my office window, which now closes, but due to an impressive crack in the frame—presumably caused by the earsplitting construction on the second floor—rainwater is trickling merrily down the inside of the glass and, as I type these words, entering the rusted slats of the heater. You might want to send someone to take a look.
September 17, 2009
Bentham Literary Residency Program
P.O. Box 1572
Bentham, ME 04976
Dear Overworked Committee Members,
Ms. Vivian Zelles has asked me—three days before your application deadline—to recommend her to your January residency program at Bentham, and herewith I oblige.
Ms. Zelles is an apt and diligent writer, a second-year graduate student in comparative literature currently enrolled, as a sort of academic stowaway, in my fiction workshop. Her project, to date, consists of a series of short, linked narratives on the subject of childhood and family and female relationships, romantic and otherwise. The work is young and presumably autobiographical; still, one can discern a spark of energy here and there in the occasional quirks of the tone. Ms. Zelles is not among the top tier of students I generally prefer to send your way (e.g., Darren Browles—see my LOR of September 3), but in the coming year or two her work may mature.
Feel free to contact me for further information via phone or e-mail. And forgive the brevity of this letter: I do believe that student writing speaks for itself, and though the academic year has just started I fear I am already losing the never-ending battle to catch up with the recommendations requested of me. Suffice it to say that the LOR has usurped the place of my own work, now adorned with cobwebs and dust in a remote corner of my office.
Continuing to wish you well with the search for a new director,
Jason T. Fitger
Professor of Creative Writing and English
Payne University
September 22, 2009
Payne University Law School Admissions
c/o Janet Matthias (aka Janet Matthias-Fitger)
17 Pitlinger Hall
Dear Admissions Committee Members—and Janet:
This letter recommends Melanie deRueda for admission to the law school on the well-heeled side of this campus. I’ve known Ms. deRueda for eleven minutes, ten of which were spent in a fruitless attempt to explain to her that I write letters of recommendation only for students who have signed up for and completed one of my classes. This young woman is certainly tenacious, if that’s what you’re looking for. A transfer student, she appears to be suffering under the delusion that a recommendation from any random faculty member within our august institution will be the key to her application’s success.
Janet: I know your committees aren’t reading these blasted LORs—under the influence of our final martini in August you told me as much. (I wish I had an ex-wife like you in every department; over in the Fellowship Office, the formerly benevolent Carole continues to maintain an icy distance. I should think her decision to quit our relationship would have filled her with a cheerful burst of self-esteem, but she apparently views the end of our three years together in a different light.)
Ms. deRueda claims to be sending her transcripts and LSAT scores at the end of the week. God help you—this is your shot across the bow—should you admit her.
Still affectionately your one-time husband,
Jay
P.S.: I’ve heard a rumor that Eleanor—yes, that Eleanor, from the Seminar—is a finalist for the directorship at Bentham. You got back in touch with her despite her denouncements of me; do you have any intel?
P.P.S.: A correction: you got back in touch with Eleanor because she denounced me. I remember you quoting what she said when I published Transfer of Affection: that I was an egotist prone to repeating his most fatal mistakes. I’ll admit to the egotism—which is undeniable—but I’d like to think that, after fourteen years of marriage, you knew me better than Eleanor did. We were happy for some of those fourteen years, especially before Transfer; why shouldn’t I believe that you were right about me, too?
September 30, 2009
Field-Bantry College of Government and Public Affairs
Office of Graduate Admissions
447 Peck Hall
Whaylon, PA 19522
Dear Committee Members,
This letter recommends Ms. Stella Castle to your graduate institution in the field of public policy. And to begin this recommendation on the proper footing: no, I will not fill out the inane computerized form that is intended to precede or supplant this letter; ranking a student according to his or her placement among the “top 10 percent,” “top 2 percent,” or “top 0.000001 percent” is pointless and absurd. No faculty member will rank any student, no matter how severely lacking in ability or reason, below “top 10 percent.” This would be tantamount to describing the candidate in question as a witless beast. A human being and his or her caliber, intellect, character, and promise are not reducible to a check mark in a box. Faced with a reductionist formula such as yours, I despair for the future, consoling myself with the thought that I and others of my generation, with its archaic modes of discourse, won’t live to see the barren cyberworld the authors of your recommendation form are determined to create.
Ms. Castle was a student in my American Literature Survey a year ago. She is a serious-minded young woman whose analytical skills and arguments demonstrate a subtle acumen. More than once, in class, I saw her politely demolish another student’s interpretation of a work of literature by asking a series of seemingly innocent but progressively incisive questions. Perhaps oddly, I remember thinking of Ms. Castle as a highly articulate snake: sliding gracefully into an argument, speaking in lucid, sibilant phrases (she endows the letter S with the faintest suggestion of a whistle), and then striking to inject the requisite venom.
Ms. Castle wrote a final, exquisite essay on Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House—probably a lost tome as far as you policy wonks are concerned—on which she received a well-deserved A.
I recommend her to you very highly. She is excellent. She will not fit into any of your miniature boxes. I will now insert this letter in an envelope, maintaining a paper copy for safekeeping in a drawer by my desk, after which I will take a short stroll to the picturesque blue mailbox on the corner, opening its creaking rectangular metal mouth and dropping the envelope within.
Trusting the U.S. Postal Service to deliver this missive to you in a timely fashion, I am
J. Fitger
Professor and Upholder of the Ancient Flame
Payne University
October 5, 2009
Eleanor Acton, Director
Bentham Literary Residency Program
P.O. Box 1572
Bentham, ME 04976
Dear Eleanor,
Congratulations on the dictatorship (haha!) directorship! Well done! Who would have guessed, twenty-some years ago when we were living on pizza crust and challenging the poets to recitation games2 in the student lounge, that you’d be in charge of Bentham and I’d be sending you my best and my brightest? In any case, kudos. Toiling for decades through the murk of the corporate world and then the nonprofits must not have been easy, but I’m sure you’ve garnered some valuable expertise.
I’m appealing to you directly to recommend in emphatic terms an advisee and student, Darren Browles. I’m aware that your committees are beavering through mountains of applications for the January residencies, and while winter seems distant at this time of year (as I type this letter, shirtless undergrads are frolicking on the quad), I assume that decisions will be made under pressure, and soon. Hence this additional recommendation on behalf of Mr. Browles, who shuffled into my office this morning, dejected, to tell me he will be taking a leave of absence this spring for financial reasons. He should have had a teaching assistantship, but our graduate program has been put on the chopping block, all funds to be diverted to the technical fields.
Eleanor: If Bentham could offer Browles a residency not only for the January term but through spring, I’m confident he can finish his manuscript, Accountant in a Bordello, and then his degree. As a prose stylist, Browles is a high-wire performer—but if he loses momentum … We’ve both been there, Eleanor: I have a desk half full of projects that, lacking time and attention, have succumbed to these small, pitiful deaths; and I’m sure your slender volume of stories (Janet bought two copies the week it came out) would have been followed by a novel, had your schedule allowed. The bottom line: I’m making a personal appeal, for the sake of our years together in the Seminar, that you arrange to float Browles financially at Bentham through winter and spring.
Anticipating a positive reply,
Jay
P.S.: I’m aware that you and Janet reestablished a correspondence during the period of our marriage’s dissolution and I hope any vitriol she might have expressed won’t compromise my professional relationship with you. (In case you’re waiting for me to acknowledge that I behaved like an ass, I hereby admit it; but Janet has forgiven me: we see each other twice a year on what was our wedding anniversary, in August, and on the date when we signed our divorce agreement, February 3.) There’s no changing the past; we can only stumble haphazardly forward. I appreciate any particular attention you can devote to Darren Browles.
October 8, 2009
Philip Hinckler, Dean
College of Arts and Sciences
1 MacNeil Hall
Dear Dean Hinckler,
I write in support of my colleague, Assistant Professor Lance West, regarding his nomination for the university’s Campiello Undergraduate Advising and Service Award. West is a solid junior scholar; more apropos of the current occasion, he has served for three of his four short years at Payne in administration, directing the undergraduate writing center and the much contested/maligned composition program. (No reasonable person outside a university would believe the teaching of composition to be controversial, but of course it is.) Professor West has an open-door policy and a rapport—one is almost tempted to call it a flair—with the incoming freshmen. He has worked hard, he has done what was asked of him, and—in the wake of the deliberate gutting of the liberal arts, English in particular, in favor of the technological sciences—he has held together the tattered scraps of the literature and writing programs, which the faceless gremlins in your office have condemned to indigence and ruin.
Furthermore, West is not yet jaded or cynical; a former Eagle Scout, he maintains a “team spirit” approach to the institution. Before construction forced us to seal ourselves into our offices like agoraphobic strangers in a cut-rate motel, I could frequently hear, across the hall and three doors down, in West’s office, the contented chatter of freshmen being persuaded that clarity of expression might be achievable as well as worthwhile.
Only by rewarding West and others of his happy ilk, and perhaps by killing off senior faculty, myself included, will it be possible for that elusive and almost mythical beast—collegiality—to prevail. (You may have thought that plunging us into receivership and imposing an outsider as our chair would serve to unite us, but Boti is sadly out of his element; he wanders the halls, bewildered, with a soiled bandanna affixed to his face3 like a madman descending into a dream.)
Other LORs cascading onto your desk like autumn leaves may suggest that the Campiello Award, associated with a modest financial settlement and a plaque on which the administration does its best to spell the awardee’s name correctly, should be given to a colleague more senior than West. This is shortsighted thinking. West is not yet entrenched, and because of the caliber of his scholarship and his regular presence at the requisite conferences, he is rapidly making a name for himself. If we don’t engage in an aggressive effort to retain him, other (more prestigious) institutions will poach. West is unprepossessing—but he is also a striver. Put a ladder in front of him and he will eagerly climb it. So much intellectual will and ambition! I confess: at this point of my career, that sort of enthusiasm fatigues me. The role that is left to me is to stand in the patronizing shadow of my younger and more aspiring colleagues and push. Up the chimney with you, and don’t get soot on your knickers along the way!
Those of you in the superior ranks of the Land of Red Tape would do well to watch your backs: if West hasn’t yet fled the institution, he’ll have one of your jobs in a few short years.
With the customary respect and a nod of deference,
Jason Fitger, Professor/Hazardous Materials Specialist
Willard Hall
October 16, 2009
Avengers Paintball, Inc.
1778 Industrial Blvd.
Lakeville, MN 55044
Esteemed Avengers,
This letter recommends Mr. Allen Trent for a position at your paintball emporium. Mr. Trent received a C– in my expository writing class last spring, which—given my newly streamlined and increasingly generous grading criteria—is quite the accomplishment. His final project consisted of a ten-page autobiographical essay on the topic of his own rageful impulses and his (often futile) attempts to control them. He cited his dentist and his roommate as primary sources.
Consider this missive a testament to Mr. Trent’s preparedness for the work your place of business undoubtedly has in store.
Hoping to maintain a distance of at least one hundred yards,
Jason T. Fitger
Professor of Creative Writing and English
Payne University (“Teach ’til It Hurts”)
October 17, 2009
(My all-inclusive calendar invites me to celebrate Diwali today)
Ken Doyle
Hautman and Doyle Literary Agency
141 West 27th Street
New York, NY 10001
Dear Ken—
Business first: I’m writing on behalf of a student—you remember students from our Seminar days, I’m sure—Darren Browles, who is currently putting the finishing touches on a powerhouse work of fiction: a debut novel, an excerpt from which, if I manage to knock some sense into his rocky skull, will be on your desk next week.
Accountant in a Bordello is a shattering reinterpretation of Bartleby: the main character, tight-lipped introvert Herman Crown, is an accountant at one of the biggest legal whorehouses in the state of Nevada, spending his days tallying expenses, passing up opportunities at wealth and advancement, eschewing friendships, and generally maintaining, amidst the titillating hubbub of his surroundings, a dispassionate isolation, an existential solitude. The prose—at one moment profoundly spare, the next moment rococo—is entirely his own; Ken, it’s like nothing you’ve ever seen. I urged him to send you the entire manuscript (which, admittedly, should be trimmed, at five-hundred-plus pages), but Browles is cautious and will probably submit only the first several chapters. As his advisor, even I haven’t read the book straight through—Browles hands me a chunk, scuttles back to his hidey-hole to revise, then reappears with another. Ken: take him on. This is a book that—after a little light housework—should garner multiple bids at auction. And a healthy advance will allow Browles to trim and to work with a top-notch editor on the final version.
On the personal side: I’m sorry about the tone of the conversation we had last year. Transfer of Affection didn’t sell the way either of us had hoped (where did that pinhead in the Inquirer get off calling it an “embarrassment for both author and reviewer”?), but that was a blip, not a moratorium—and for you to hand the excerpt of my novel in progress to your assistant … Well, never mind. Water under the bridge and all that; I’m sure the twelve-year-old you assigned the task of evaluating my work did her utmost. In any case, I hope you won’t let the memory of any previous quibbles prevent you from recognizing a phenomenon like Browles, who, I believe, will soon be enjoying some literary solitude at Bentham.
You’ve heard that Eleanor A. is now Bentham’s director? Do you remember her throwing an apple core at me across the Seminar table in HRH’s class? She was ill-disposed toward me even before I wrote and published Stain. Here’s hoping her directorial skills are better than her throwing arm.
Nostalgically,
Jay
October 20, 2009
Confidential Reference for LTZ39JN7 Jervana Natal
1. How long and in what capacity have you known the applicant?
Ms. Natal is a senior due to graduate in May of this coming year. I have known her for
Confidential Reference for LTZ39JN7 Jervana Natal
1. How long and in what capacity have you known the applicant?
I have known Ms. Natal for approximately eight weeks. She is a senior due to graduate in
Confidential Reference for LTZ39JN7 Jervana Natal
You have requested technological assistance regarding the submission of the above-named reference. Please describe the problem you are experiencing.
The problem I am experiencing is that every time I hit the fucking return key or try to indent a
Confidential Reference for LTZ39JN7 Jervana Natal
the fucking return key or try to indent or god forbid fit a coherent sentence into your fucking
October 23, 2009
Student Services/Fellowship Office
14 Gilbert Hall
Attn: The Gentle Carole Samarkind, Associate Director
Dear Carole:
This letter’s purpose is to provide the usual gratuitous language recommending a student, one Gunnar Lang, for a work-study fellowship. Lang—a sophomore with a mop of blond dreadlocks erupting from the top of his head like the yellow coils of an excess brain—tells me that he has applied, unsuccessfully, for this same golden opportunity three times and that this is his final attempt to satisfy our university’s endless requests for redundant documentation. He needs a minimum of eight to ten hours of work-study per week—preferably in the library rather than the slops of food service. Deny him the fellowship and he will undoubtedly turn his hand to something more lucrative, probably hawking illegal substances between the athletic facilities and the Pizza Barn.
I’ll go ahead and point out the obvious: Lang’s GPA is a respectable 3.4; he’s on track, academically, despite a shift from psychology to English; and a ten-minute conversation with the subject himself reveals that he has bona fide thoughts and knows how to apportion them into relatively grammatical sentences. You should do yourself a favor and invent a reason to meet him. He’s charming in a saucy, loose-limbed way, and his hair—his parents did right to name him Gunnar—is a phenomenon unto itself that I suspect you’ll enjoy.
There: Lang has my stamp of approval and imprimatur. Now let me say how appreciative I am of the cordial professionalism you’ve reestablished between us. I’m sure you know how profoundly I regret that boneheaded e-mail in August, and of course I don’t blame you for cutting things off (though I wish you’d told me you’d be reclaiming the coffee machine, which was a gift, after all; I’m reminded of its absence every day by a circle of grime on the Formica).
Side note: I saw that you and Janet are both serving on the diversity committee.4 Might that be … awkward? I do hope you won’t sit next to each other. Even six years after our divorce, Janet considers herself an expert on the subject of my many foibles, and she is often eager to share her questionable wisdom with others. Fair warning here, Carole: though smooth-spoken and polished, Janet is as cunning as a wolverine.
Back to business. Please get the work-study fellowship for Lang and put him in the library, or even here in the department. He needs to acquaint himself with the nineteenth century before I let him loose in Donna Lovejoy’s class.
Missing you (and missing my coffee),
J.
October 28, 2009
Payne University Medical School5
Admissions Office
375 Newton Hall
Dear Committee Members,
This letter recommends Vivian Zelles for admission to Payne University’s medical school. Ms. Zelles is an excellent student, as will be obvious from her scores and transcripts. The recipient of an undergraduate double degree in biochemistry and music (enhanced by a minor in English), she is currently pursuing a master’s in comparative literature while simultaneously composing a book-length novel/memoir, a coy mishmash of forms. She is a member of that rare breed whose feet are planted as firmly in the arts as in the sciences.
I have known Ms. Zelles for approximately nine months, in the context of two creative writing workshops. She is a fastidious and methodical stylist: one imagines her setting each word in place with a jeweler’s loupe. Her ultimate plan, in applying to med school, may be to join the ranks of physician-writers who, not content to leave the pursuit of literary success to the starving artist, complement their million-dollar medical salaries with Random House contracts. (Move over, Gawande and Hosseini!)
I recommend Ms. Zelles to you with all the usual accolades these letters are expected to provide.
Yours on the underfunded wing of the campus,
Jay Fitger, Professor of Creative Writing and English
Author
Provocateur
October 29, 2009
Janet Matthias … Fitger
Payne University Law School—Admissions
17 Pitlinger Hall
Dear Law School Admissions Committee/Janet:
This letter recommends Vivian Zelles to your esteemed body. Ms. Zelles is an excellent student as will be obvious from her scores and transcripts. She is applying for a residency at Bentham and to Payne’s medical school as well as the law school; whether this diffuse approach indicates a wide range of interests or some sort of chemical imbalance or illness, I haven’t a clue.
I have known Ms. Zelles for approximately nine months. She sat in on my undergraduate workshop last spring—boggling the minds of the younger students with irrelevant theoretical asides—and is currently enrolled in what may be the last graduate-level fiction class ever taught at Payne. (I’m sure you read my screed last month in the campus rag.) Her work is meticulous but not very interesting. Moment of truth: personally, I don’t care for Ms. Zelles, who may be ideally suited to law school. She is obviously brilliant, but I find her off-putting and a bit of a cipher. She has a mind like a bric-a-brac storehouse of facts: a surplus of content put to questionable use.
Janet: Your phone has been going straight to voice mail. Are you out of town? Please call. Eleanor has been stonewalling an advisee I’ve recommended to Bentham, and I wonder if she’s talked to you. Good god, it’s been twenty-two years since the Seminar. Yes, Reg admired my work. Yes, he helped me publish Stain and threw His Royal Weight behind the book. I didn’t ask him to prefer my writing to yours or Troy’s or Eleanor’s or Ken’s or even MTV’s. (Who’d have thunk MTV would marry a vet and turn into a shrink?) But Eleanor is still carving voodoo dolls in my likeness. Are we going to spend the rest of our days in the shadow of H. Reginald Hanf and the Seminar, those few (admittedly powerful) years ever dogging our steps?
Fretfully, your former spouse,
Jay
P.S.: Thank you for not requiring that recommenders submit their letters via an online form. Though technically capable of e-mail, I remain leery, given the fiasco of my “reply all” message in August. (Carole says she is no longer angry, but—given that she requisitioned the coffee machine she bought for my birthday—it appears that her forgiveness is not yet complete.) Call me a Luddite, but I intend to resist for as long as possible the use of robotic fill-in-the-blank quantifiers for the intellectual attributes of human beings.
October 30, 2009
Theodore Boti, CEO
Department of English
Dear Ted,
This letter endorses the work-study application of Gunnar Lang, sophomore, who after months of heroic effort has been duly vetted by the Student Services/Fellowship staff, his one-page résumé grinding its weary way through the system and arriving at last for review in our department with six pounds of red tape clinging to its hem. One wonders which would be more difficult: to secure a minimum-wage job as an English Department undergraduate gofer or to obtain a passport and security clearance through the Middle East. If we give Lang ten hours a week to run errands and let us know when the copier is broken (it is broken at present; perhaps Lang could be persuaded to shave his head and don a monk’s brown sackcloth and work as a scribe), he might have hope of making progress toward his degree.
By the by: I noticed in your departmental plan (I presume I’m the only person who has actually read the plan—you may as well have addressed it to me) that you intend to schedule two faculty meetings this year for the purpose of revising the department constitution. Two quick considerations here, Ted:
1. I wonder, during a time of fiscal, curricular, and architectural crisis, whether our top priority should be the pointless updating of a document no one will read;
2. Fair warning: As a body we tried, in a plenary/horror session when Sarah Lempert was chair, to revise the momentous founding document on which our department depends. We argued for weeks about the existence and then the location of a particular semicolon, two senior members of the faculty—true, one of them retired and left for rehab that same semester—abandoning the penultimate meeting in tears. (If you’d like to see it, I’ve been keeping a log of department meetings ranked according to level of trauma, with a 1 indicating mild contentiousness, a 3 signifying uncontrolled shouting, and a 5 leading to at least one nervous breakdown and/or immediate referral to the crisis center run by the Office of Mental Health.) I guarantee you: mention the word “constitution” and you’ll have a 911 situation on your hands.
Thinking positively, and at your service as always.
Jay
P.S.: At the upcoming Assembly of Department Chairs meeting I hope you will raise the issue of hires for English and the defunding of our creative writing MA. The idea of graduate writing being defunded because of expense … Ted, faculty in Hutchinson Hall are decorating their million-dollar labs with hadron colliders, while we’re told there’s no money for a functioning chalkboard and a table and chairs. If Donna Lovejoy is up to it (I understand she went home yesterday with a work-related lung infection), you may want to bring her to the meeting with you: she witnessed last year’s auto-da-fé and, given the recent sprinkler system malfunction in her office, will probably bring to the proceedings a sharpened perspective.
November 3, 2009
Anna Huston, Director
Annie’s Nannies Child and Play Center
370 Shadow Pond Way
Cortland, MO 63459
Dear Ms. Huston,
I apologize for the delay in sending this recommendation. For more than two decades I have maintained an orderly record-keeping system regarding each and every one of my students, but I apparently misfiled the information on Shayla Newcome and had to get out the dowsing rod to find her. In response to your query: Ms. Newcome was my student six years ago. Having located the appropriate slim green record book in the lower left drawer of my desk, I note that she received a B in my Intermediate Fiction Writing class, having completed, if I am deciphering my own handwritten notes correctly, a short story intended to be a fictionalization of the pope’s childhood. Whether this indicates that Ms. Newcome is or is not to be entrusted with the precious lives of small children, I have no idea. At least she did not—as many of my undergraduates seem to enjoy doing—submit a vivid and celebratory depiction of murder and mayhem, complete with flesh-eating robots, werewolves, resurrections from the crypt, or some combination of the above. Students’ lives have been cheapened in ways of which they remain blissfully clueless, because of so much TV.
The only other information I can offer you about Ms. Newcome is that during the semester she was enrolled in my class she was having a difficult time. Students don’t generally confide in me regarding their personal crises (I am not known for being particularly approachable or cuddly), but Ms. Newcome did, and I remember that in the interstices of our conversation she chewed at the lime-green polish—an unfortunate color—on her fingernails. A few weeks later I asked if her situation had improved and she said it had not, but she was “learning to accommodate.” I found that impressive, and remembering Ms. Newcome now—though my file drawer contains thousands of lives6 for which I often find myself feeling accountable—I realize I am well disposed in her favor; in fact, I thoroughly urge you to offer her a job.
Why? Because, as a student of literature and creative writing, Ms. Newcome honed crucial traits that will be of use to you: imagination, patience, resourcefulness, and empathy. The reading and writing of fiction both requires and instills empathy—the insertion of oneself into the life of another.
I believe Ms. Newcome eminently capable of the work for which she has applied.
With good wishes for your tiny charges,
Jay Fitger, Professor of Creative Writing and English
Payne University
November 6, 2009
Office of the Vice Provost for Academic Affairs
Lefferts Hall
Attention: Associate VP Samuel Millhouse
Dear Associate Vice Provost Millhouse,
The purpose of this letter is to bolster the promotion and tenure case of Professor Martina Ali here at our esteemed institution of higher learning. I am not a member of Professor Ali’s Film Studies Program, but the Honorable Pooh-Bahs in your office have decreed that P&T dossiers be encumbered with no fewer than six missives of support, and Professor Ali is one of only three faculty members in her own modest department. Such is the wisdom that prevails at Payne.
I’ll get around to my evaluation of Professor Ali. But I have a few other things on my mind also, and it would be foolish of me, I think—it would be remiss—if I didn’t take this opportunity to address a few of them. After all, how often does a lowly professor of creative writing and English have the ear of the associate VP? Perhaps I should intercalate my own laundry list of items throughout my evaluation of Martina—she does stellar research—threading them into the fabric of this letter like stinging nettles. We’ll see how things go.
First—Professor Ali’s monograph on warfare in European film: While some members of her discipline have adopted an almost psychedelic approach to their choice of material, delivering conference papers and fashioning entire semester-long courses on the topic of toothpaste commercials or videos of tumbleweeds bounding along by the side of a road,7 Professor Ali is invested in significance. Her work combines rigorous historical research, film scholarship, and psychoanalytic theory—and her goal is enlightenment, not obfuscation. She has justifiably won the Longfreth Prize (twice!), the panel of judges likening her scholarship to the work of Alperovitz and Harms, pioneers in the field.
Ali is publishing in some of her discipline’s top venues. Comparative Film and Culture in particular—a highly selective, peer-reviewed journal—is a scholarly coup.
Given her publications, her increasingly national reputation, and her teaching record (eleven advisees!), Ali is a shoo-in. We both know that. I hope her department chair musters the reams of paperwork needed to satisfy your army of bean counters in Lefferts Hall. A divagation here: Have you entered Willard Hall lately? In case, over there among the functional radiators and other amenities in Lefferts, you’ve forgotten that English faculty members are living in a construction zone, allow me to give you a virtual tour. The front and back doors of our building are blocked—sealed and crisscrossed with yellow tape as if to indicate a crime scene—so you must enter through the basement. But don’t use the elevator, a nightmarish herk-and-jerk contraption known to hijack its occupants and leave them stranded midfloor. You can’t access the second (Econ) floor in any case: a silken banner advises you to PARDON OUR MESS!—a euphemistic reference to the fact that workers equipped with respirators are spilling toxins onto our heads in the servants’ quarters, where, once you overlook the chipped and ancient linoleum and the cracks in the wallboard, you will find a sign that welcomes visitors, eloquently, to the Department of ENGLI_H.
Professor Ali’s teaching record is, without doubt, superb. The only smudge on it results from the fact that some clueless sadist assigned her an introductory lecture course during her first two semesters on campus (which would have been an occasion for spectacular failure for most junior faculty—but Professor Ali’s evaluations were well above par).
A note here—excuse the indelicacy—on the men’s room in Willard: a subtle but incessant dripping from a pipe in the ceiling (perhaps from the Jacuzzi or bidet being installed for our Economics colleagues) is gradually transforming this previously charming depot into a fetid cavern. The tile floor is often slick with liquids and, because desperate citizens have propped the door open, odors now regularly waft out into the hall. I might as well set my desk next to the urinals.
In sum, Ali’s is an open-and-shut case, yet another occasion for faculty members to set their work aside in order to cobble together encomiums and tributes like train cars chugging in an endless loop through campus. If faculty were able—even encouraged—to dedicate the same amount of time to our research and writing, we might stop sinking like a stone in the national rankings and have a chance to be a reasonably respectable school.
Finally, as for your recent memo on financial prudence: Good lord, man. We know about the funding crunch, we aren’t idiots; but we also know that your fiscal fix is being applied selectively. For those in the sciences and social sciences, sacrifice will come in the form of fewer varieties of pâté on the lunch trays. For English: seven defections/retirements in three years and not one replaced; two graduate programs no longer permitted to accept new students; and a Captain Queeg–like sociologist at the helm. The junior faculty in our department will surely abandon their posts at the first opportunity, while the elder statesmen—I speak here for myself—may exact a more punishing revenge by refusing to retire.
I thoroughly endorse Professor Martina Ali’s bid for promotion to associate professor with tenure.
Cordially and with the usual succinctness,
Jay Fitger
November 11, 2009
Bentham Literary Residency Program
P.O. Box 1572
Bentham, ME 04976
Good Afternoon, Committee Members—with cc to Eleanor Acton, Director:
This is the third letter I have written on behalf of Mr. Darren Browles, who recently received from your office a computerized notice that, of his three required letters of recommendation, only two have been received. Why each application to Bentham necessitates three written LORs I leave to sages and philosophers to decipher. As for the letters in Mr. Browles’s case (your office has refused to identify their authors): let’s count them. One is mine, dated September 3 (with a follow-up/coda on October 5). Two is the letter from his foreign language advisor; I just wandered across the quad and spoke to Herr Zimmunt to secure his jawohl in regard to this endorsement. Letter # Three, Browles informs me, was originally to have come from Helena Stang, who led him on an e-mail goose chase for over a month until finally reporting, as if from her satin fainting couch, that she was “too busy.” He had no choice at that point but to turn to his administrative advisor, Martin Glenk, who (unbeknownst to poor Browles) wrests fleeting moments of joy from the opportunity to denigrate my students.
Armed with these bitter herbs of information, I undertook this morning the short but unhappy stroll past the men’s room (the toilets of which send their constant flushing sound through the vent in my office) to the literature wing of our department. Typically I am loath to poke about in that arm of the building, around the corner from the WELCOME TO ENGLI_H sign and the faded sofas on which, after hours, the undergraduates presumably enjoy one another’s favors. To be blunt: many of the literature faculty and I are no longer speaking, and a third of their number, due to a construction project in our hallowed hall, have moved their offices to remote outposts of campus, delighting in the knowledge that their colleagues will be unable to find them. Logically, one might suggest that I solicit the assistance of my department chair, but he is a professor of sociology, appointed by the university’s warlords to rule our asylum until the inmates exhibit greater pliability and calm.
