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version seven. http://demongin.org |
Waiting by the River
The Best Revenge
Wednesday, 2008-04-02 | Careerism, Classic Gin, Philosophy, Politics
| Is It Sexual Harassment Yet? |
Once--a million years ago--I was a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed student of literature.
And, as is required of all students in all times and throughout the disciplines, I too endured what I consider to have been my 'fair share' of incompetent instructors.
Some were gifted in their trade and disinterested in attempting to pass the skills along. Others simply didn't have the presence of mind to convey anything instructional. It's difficult to hold a grudge against this sort of incompetence: there's a certain sort of creative who requires an academic network to thrive and the network in turn demands of him that he (attempt to) teach. What's he supposed to do? Tack his heart to his sleeve, declare that he has no interest in teaching and turn down the grant money and the stipends?
Others, however, are deserving of something more like 'scorn'. These are the sort of incompetent instructors who stick with you; when you move on with your life and you're done with their classes, they're the sort of person who sticks out in your mind as exactly the sort of person who you will henceforth strive never to resemble.
Of my incompetent instructors, one was recently brought back to my attention by a chance encounter. This woman, to whom I had not given a moment's meditation the better part of a decade, was on a radio program reading a sample of her latest work.
When she was first announced, I failed to recognize her name. But then, as she read, there was something in her halting and flinty gasp that I found impossibly irritating. And then it began, by degrees, to dawn on me that this was my old instructor and here she was, reading her work at some sort of gathering of her peers.
She is a writer, this woman--a novelist--and fancies herself a teacher and mentor of student writers. She is, of course, nothing of the sort. In reality, she is little more than a piss-pot dictator, who accepts tenure-pay to shrewishly hold her vindictive and capricious little court three times a week. Unless she has reformed a great deal in the last five years, I would wager that she continues to sit in her spot at the head of the class, carelessly heaping cliches for blame and for praise upon flatterers and problem-students in equal measure, breaking from this only to gossip vainly and tactlessly about other professors and members of her department.
This woman remains employed, furthermore, according to the administrative logic that, as a working writer with an agent and a publisher and the whole deal, her expertise is a great asset to graduate and undergraduate students alike.
The twist is that she is among the worst writers I have ever endured. Her prose is uneventful and plain, her characters lack anything resembling nuance, her diction is flavorless and monosyllabic, her plots are plodding and dull and the action of her stories comes to the reader so gradually that one is left with that very unique sense of annoyance that comes from having to listen politely while a laconic adolescent reluctantly and anachronistically explains the events of his day.
The best thing that you can say about a person like this former instructor of mine is that she's still working, still getting published and that she still sucks utterly and hopelessly.
There is a Hell. And it is a Hell on Earth.
Hell on Earth is salaried employment in the lower-middle of one's chosen field.
