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 terric 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 nd 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 nd this
position vacant upon your assumption of the chair-ship last
month—if so, trust me, you will encounter many such surprises
here.)
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 nd the
problem of our dwindling status intriguing.
To the matter at hand: though English has traditionally been a
largish department, you will nd 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 pretty.
After subtracting the names of those who are on leave or close to
retirement, and those already serving in the killing elds of
administration, you will probably be forced to choose between
Franklin Kentrell (NO: spend ve 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 oce 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
nd that I make myself unpleasant enough to be safe from
nomination.
En n: Lovejoy will sag under this additional burden, but she will
perform.
Ted, in your memo you referred briey, also, to the need for
faculty forbearance during what we were initially told would be
the “remodeling” of the second oor for the benet of our
colleagues in the Economics Department.* I’m not sure that you
noticed, but the Econ faculty were, in early August, evacuated
from the building—as if they’d been notied, sotto voce, of an
oncoming plague. Not so the faculty in English. With the
exception of a few individuals both eet 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 oce 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 nal 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 nd that a
tentacled monster—a sort of fanged and copiously salivating
octopus, if memory serves—is gnawing through the esh 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 nal minutes of class.
Whether punctuality and an enthusiasm for esh-eating
cephalopods are the main attributes of the ideal Wexler employee
I have no idea, but Mr. Leszczynski is an aable young man,
reliable in his habits, and reasonably bright.
You might start him o 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 nineteenthcentury
barber.
But if you want me to endorse his nomination in order to keephim quiet and away from your oce (you will nd him as
persistent and maddening as a y), you may excerpt the following
sentences and ax 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 ocial, 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 ll 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 oce has been largely vacated as
well, a single employee—the appropriately named Mr. Duy
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 oce window, which
now closes, but due to an impressive crack in the frame—
presumably caused by the earsplitting construction on the second
oor—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.
Zahi
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