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Show Anting Alone Page 261 with language served to justify these non-writers in their not writing. (But, his poems and stuff underneath there were plenty hideous - why'd they cover them up?) And, while he bucked up this dead amphetamine moron's flouted "artistic" impulses and surveyed the boards, Sam was laughing in his orange beard, deep inside. Because he himself had recently engaged in the most deliberate act of bad literary faith in Kansas history, the most flagrant act of talent prostitution ever encountered around here - even here among the English majors, who knew they'd never find jobs teaching, so wound up "screenwriting" for local TV stations and black-marketing undergrad termpapers for mail order houses that advertise in the back of Hustler magazine. And Sam had gotten his piece of whoredom published in the most respected quarterly in all of western Kansas. So far nobody had congratulated Sam. Nobody seemed to know or care, the self-centered bastards. Sam should have known better than to ask these grad students Dr. A.'s whereabouts. They were such egoists and solipsists that they wouldn't even have known it if Dr. A. was in Zurich accepting the Nobel Prize for his poetry, or in New York accepting a special Pulitzer Prize for editing such a brilliant, new-groundbreaking journal. Being graduate students, they never actually read a bona-fide newspaper. There was a newspaper, it's true, on the speed moron's desk, but not to be read. It was open to page two, the crossword puzzle, a major part of the intellectual activity engaged in here at the GTA communal office. Sam glanced as it were right through the page. The front-page ink was soaked through in a mirror image of itself. Sam always felt subliterate |