Dear Committee Members: A novel

by Julie Schumacher

  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. I have 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 had lost an entire satchel full of journals—including the notebook of literary classics rendered in her own curlicued style—on a city bus. I told her I admired her bravado and gave her the F.

  If Sellebritta Online is in need of an editor/copywriter who refuses to allow the demands of honesty or originality to delay her output, it will have found one in the unflappable Ms. Tara Tappani.

  Guilelessly yours,

  Jay Fitger

  Professor-at-Law

  Creative Writing/English, Payne University

  January 14, 2010

  Associate Vice Provost Samuel Millhouse

  Office of the Vice Provost for Academic Affairs

  Lefferts Hall

  Dear Associate VP Millhouse,

  I write this letter in support of my colleague Karolyi Pazmentalyi in the Department of Slavic Languages, which your office has seen fit to eliminate in its most recent purge. (I am not the only member of the faculty to note that several equally obscure departments, perhaps relieved to have been spared the knife for now, have been gathered together in small ethnic clumps, presumably in preparation for future pogroms.)

  Pazmentalyi unfortunately chose this difficult moment in the life of the university to publish the brilliant monograph on which he has been laboring, alone, for the better part of a decade, holed up in a corner of the library, his craggy profile visible in the fluorescent glare of the overheads when everyone else was uncorking a beverage at home. At any other time in the university’s history this pathbreaking and exhaustive work of scholarship would immediately elevate its author from the doldrums of associate professordom to the rank of full professor. But now that Slavic Languages is to be summarily flushed down the drainpipe of unprofitable programs and departments (what do we in the Midwest care about Russians, Poles, Serbs, Croatians, Bulgarians, and the denizens of other countries we can’t find on a globe or pronounce?), Pazmentalyi is suspended in limbo. He can’t be promoted within a department that’s being cut; therefore (the logic appears to be), why promote him at all? Why feature photos of bearded brontosauri on the university brag sheets when there are younger, more handsome whiz-bang faculty (perhaps … yes! in the Economics Department!) who will attract more financial interest, instead?

  Pazmentalyi, it should be noted, has been reluctant to press or appeal his case. He is the sort of old-fashioned, self-effacing scholar accustomed to hours of painstaking archival research—and, lacking a background as a cage fighter, he will probably take your office’s rejection seriously and abide by your suggestion that, forgoing a well-deserved promotion and a minuscule raise, he should lumber off to the newly incorporated “Languages Unit” and soak his head.

  But there are other faculty here on campus who are not disposed to see notable scholarship ignored; and let it be known that, in the darkened, blood-strewn caverns of our offices, we are hewing our textbooks and keyboards into spears.

  To wit: What would you ask of Pazmentalyi? The reason for denial of his promotion was “narrow scope of research/limited field.” Good lord: he’s a scholar of Slavic languages—fluent in nearly a dozen—do you want him to coach the volleyball team?* Pazmentalyi is not versatile or charming. He doesn’t tell jokes during class. And he won’t fight your refusal of his promotion because—brace yourself—he isn’t suited for any other job, and he knows it. Very few people read his work; fewer comprehend it. Your office’s stated desire for greater “scope” and “accessibility” (would you have Stephen Hawking go back to the nine times table?) will end up turning scholars like Pazmentalyi into TV hosts, forced to incorporate online dating options into seminars previously dedicated to European linguistics.

  Faculty acknowledge your need to save money: like most universities, Payne is rapidly pricing itself into oblivion, not by giving modest raises to nationally respected scholars, but by starving some departments while building heated yoga studios and indoor climbing walls in others. To afford the amenities inextricably tied to their education, students need wealthy financial backers or a mountain of loans—and so many on- and off-campus jobs they barely have time to go to class.

  Writing this letter has thoroughly depressed me, but it hasn’t made me less determined to see Pazmentalyi promoted. You want to sweep out his office and deport him to “Literature” or “Cultural Studies” or ask the Mortuary Science Department to find a place for him—so be it. But give him the measly sum he deserves and reward him for superbly performing the work he was hired to do.

  Irritated and restless, but not as fractious as I can be,

  Jay Fitger

  Professor/Agitator/Slum Dweller

  Willard Hall

  * * *

  * Admittedly, an absurd suggestion: I’m certain the volleyball coach earns three times the salary of a literature professor.

  January 20, 2010

  Aaron Young, Human Resources

  Kompu-Metricka, Inc.

  77 Laguna Avenue

  Bloomington, MN 55420

  Dear Mr. Young,

  Ms. Vanessa Cuddigan has asked me to submit a letter of reference to your poorly spelled organization on her behalf. While I have only praise for Ms. Cuddigan, who graduated two years ago with a major in English, I had expected her to ask that I recommend her for graduate school. Instead, having completed a stint with Teach for America, she is now apparently desirous of some sort of data-entry position with your firm—clearly a soul-squelching enterprise. I have asked her to explain herself but she is evasive, leading me to wonder if something unfortunate happened during the past two years to destroy her ambition.

  Should you hire Ms. Cuddigan you will find her thoroughly impressive. She is extremely bright, her insights are fresh, and she has a talent for synthesizing heterogeneous ideas into compelling interpretations of the assigned material. Were she applying to graduate school as I have repeatedly urged her to do, I would take the time here to describe her thesis, a sterling examination of the concept of sec
recy in the work of two contemporary novelists, Louise Erdrich and Jonathan Safran Foer, but she has made her Faustian bargain and pinned her newly constricted hopes on Kompu-Metricka, so I will limit myself to recommending her on the basis of her brilliant analytical imagination, her invariable originality of approach, her open-mindedness, and her impeccable character.

  You or any other employer will be very fortunate to hire a person such as Ms. Cuddigan, who may one day rise to leadership in your organization, at which point I trust it will adopt a more reasonable spelling. In the meantime, I hope you will not consign her to a windowless environment populated entirely by unsocialized clones who long ago abandoned the reading and discussion of literature in favor of creating ever more restrictive and meaningless ways in which humans are intended to make themselves known to one another.

  Keeping the torch aloft, I remain

  Jay Fitger

  Professor of Creative Writing and English

  Author (i.e., books)

  January 21, 2010

  Janet Matthias-Fitger

  Law School Admissions

  17 Pitlinger Hall

  Janet:

  Sending this in haste and perturbation, and hoping this letter finds you cheerfully disposed toward your onetime spouse … I have a graduate student, I believe I told you about him—his name is Browles and he needs a job that will cover his spring tuition. I had hoped to tuck him away for a productive month or two at Bentham, but Eleanor slammed the door in his face, then compounded the insult by offering a six-month residency to one of his classmates, a tepid memoir writer named Vivian Zelles. (Please tell me you haven’t corresponded with Eleanor about this; have you?)

  I appeal not to your long-lost affection for me but your sense of fairness: your law school professors are sitting on tuffets of money over there in Pitlinger, what with old attorneys dying and, graveside, signing over their estates to ensure that every lowly assistant professor gets a research account and a stack of gold bars; here in Willard, on the other hand, the penurious and despondent—with Browles as exemplar—are shuffling back and forth on a stage set from the end of the world.

  Janet: Did you know that Madelyne TV died? I just had a letter returned to me from her office, stamped DECEASED. I saw her ten or twelve years ago at a conference in Denver and she looked just the same: that crop of wild hair, the fingers happily cluttered with thick silver rings. I remember her twirling those rings around her fingers at the Seminar table while we waited for HRH’s pronouncements, our collective anxiety manifesting itself in the revolutions of those silver bands. It’s impossible to think of someone as sparkling as Madelyne ailing and dying; at least she made a valuable life outside academia: working with PTSD sufferers must have been a relief, a step in the direction of clearheaded sanity. Poor sweet lovely TV.

  Perhaps your ex-wifely radar has discerned my fatigue. Sometimes when the year grinds to its end and the new term begins I feel I’m living the life of a fruit fly—the endless ephemeral cycle, each new semester a “fresh start” that leads to the same moribund conclusions. I suppose MTV’s death has hit me hard—and with Troy reappearing (I wish I knew how to help him) and Eleanor wielding the guillotine at Bentham … Well, the timing stings.

  In regard to funding for Browles—there’s more at stake in this case than support for one student. If he can finish this accursed book and sell it, I can use his success to argue for the continuance—or reinstatement—of our graduate program. Unfortunately, Browles doesn’t look the part of the poster child: he can be maddeningly inert, and I just found out that, entirely disregarding my advice, he allowed his registration to lapse. Still, should funding arrive in the guise of a law professor requiring a graduate assistant, I’m sure Carole will manage the reregistration. (After a setback involving an artichoke salad, she’s agreed to speak to me again on a limited basis—but only at work between the hours of one-thirty and four.) In case you’re worried that, as my protégé, Browles might be writing a novel about Payne or about recognizable people on campus—I assure you, he has better material. Find him a job and he’ll work his butt off, and I’ll maintain a grateful but dignified distance so that no one in Pitlinger will associate your orotund ex-husband with the new RA.

  With the usual regrets and reminiscences,

  J

  P.S.: Our annual lunch on February 3 at Cava, yes? I’m finished with class at 12:30 …

  January 25, 2010

  Gropp’s Liquor Lounge and Winemart

  “35 Years of High Spirits”

  Dan Stimmson, Proprietor

  609 Faygre Avenue

  Saint Paul, MN 55101

  Dear Mr. Stimmson,

  This letter recommends to you my student, Steve Geng, who has applied to Gropp’s Liquor Lounge and Winemart in the pursuit of a part-time position. Mr. Geng is a senior here at the university, an English/Spanish double major who finagled his way into an independent study (typically I manage to dodge such requests)—namely, the creation of a mini-anthology of short hallucinatory narratives, each of which begins with a young male speaker (coincidentally named Steve Geng) who has ingested a controlled substance. I believe narrative #1 relies on Adderall, numero dos on mushrooms, and #3 on gin.

  Comely and articulate, Mr. Geng is prone to dreamy non sequiturs that have endeared him to his peers. I predict that young women will flock to your store in the hopes of hearing him decipher the labels on Chilean and Argentinean wine.

  Salud!

  Jay Fitger, Professor, Payne University

  January 29, 2010

  Ken Doyle, Hautman and Doyle Literary Agency

  141 West 27th Street

  New York, NY 10001

  Dear Ken,

  You must have heard by now the sad news about MTV: a heart attack, instantaneous—she was fifty-six. Janet and I will raise a glass in her memory at our “divorce anniversary” lunch next week; I wish MTV and I had kept more closely in touch.

  In other unnerving Seminar alumni news I’ve heard from Troy: the poor bastard is back in the U.S. after a decade in India and is scouring the private sector for jobs. The letter I got from him was short and cryptic; it made me envision him living in a canvas tent and washing his underwear in a stream. His only address seems to be a P.O. box. I didn’t tell him about MTV, being loath to notify a person with Troy’s history about anyone’s demise … Has he written to you? The idea of a writer with Troy’s luminous gifts selling widgets—I find it painful. My intuition tells me he wouldn’t have reestablished contact unless he was writing. Put that in your agent’s pipe and smoke it.

  Which reminds me: the purpose of this letter is actually to recommend to you a student, Vivian Zelles, who read something favorable about you in Publishers Weekly and, having learned that you and I were Seminar friends, has waged an implacable daily campaign in my office, insisting that I query you about her work. Zelles is a comparative literature student currently finishing a coming-of-age story purportedly narrated by the first genetically engineered human-feline cross (specifically, a human/cheetah). She began the novel as a memoir, writing about growing up in an immigrant family in California. I found the project to be a bit quiet (that is, dull), which may have led to the manuscript’s current confabulation—a pseudo autobiography in which the speaker portrays herself as a fifteen-year-old girl/cheetah amalgam. Ms. Zelles informs me that the human/animal blend mirrors the false distinction between fiction and fact and points to the necessity of the hybrid form. Whatever the hell she wants to call it—a mem-vel, a novoir—the new incarnation of the book is effectively startling, especially the scene in which the protagonist devours and then remorsefully regurgitates her little brother. It’s possible, I suppose, that an independent publisher (how many are left, still clinging to their ragged life rafts?) might be intrigued by the project. To that end, the indefatigable Ms. Zelles will be sending, under separate cover next week, an excerpt. See what you think.

  Meanwhile I gather—twelve weeks on—you’re still mulling Browles
’s sample? Eleanor spurned him at Bentham (twisting the knife in the wound by admitting Ms. Zelles), after which I asked Janet to arrange for some money to be funneled toward Browles via an RAship at the law school, but to no avail. Ken—take his sample out of the fucking envelope and read it. Browles doesn’t need a big advance; he needs an editor with a functional brain and some vision. (And please refrain from selling the book to the narcoleptics who published Save Me for Later: Georgianne is barely sentient, and Simon has forgotten, it seems, how to answer his phone.)

  And of course, let me know if you have any interest in Vivian Zelles, whose tabby-infused concoction will cross your desk soon.

  Eager, as always, to hear from you,

  Jay

  P.S.: I need to lodge a belated complaint against the poet—Randolph Marlin—whom I invited to campus in December on your say-so; he was even more of an egomaniac than I expected. Where do poets—with their readership in the low double figures—get off exhibiting that kind of flagrant self-regard? He quizzed the undergrads about his work and then faulted their answers. He wanted to know which of his poems they’d committed to memory. Good god: it was all I could do to restrain myself from saying that my own objective was to try to forget his wretched, soporific lines as completely as possible. I tried to get him drunk at the reception so as to humiliate him for the students’ benefit (believe me, they would have been grateful), but he poured four or five glasses of expensive scotch (my tab, of course) down his gullet as if emptying wash water into a drain.

  Next time you hand-select a member of your menagerie for a campus visit, make sure she or he is housebroken.

  February 2, 2010—Groundhog Day

  Addistar Network, Inc.

  Bridget Maslow, HR

  bmaslow@addistar.com