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Show Acting Alone Page 382 standards. He gathered, from his library research and from a leisurely long-distance conversation with his friend and soulmate Scott Meredith, that it was not at all unusual for agents or their myrmidons actually to use their vacation time to visit creative writing programs in search of tomorrow's "Garp" Irvings, to troll for fresh talent among the various "communities of writers" across the nation. These empty actions evidently were intended to salve these agents' vestigial artistic consciences, since none of them had any intentions of ever working with any but well-established, highly commercialized authors who could draw down a guaranteed bundle in movie and television contracts. Spending their vacation time in backwater English departments feigning interest in the subliterate droppings of braindamaged hippies, instead of living it up in Las Vegas or Lake Tahoe or Atlantic City, allowed these agents to return to New York City at the appointed time and to continue methodically destroying the literacy of the English speaking world with more or less intact duodena. Many of the professors at the Edwine boy's university - one remarkable man in particular - had had dealings with such conscience-stricken agents before, and were no dummies in this regard; yet, presumably due to some aura of deep, natural honesty he possessed, none had any trouble whatever accepting the Elder for what he claimed to be: a bona fide New York authors' representative passing through this godforsaken prairie on his way home from gargantuan made-for-TV-movie hagglings out in Burbank. He stated explicitly - in order to get their ire up so they would show him their best material - that he was in a hurry, only had part of an afternoon to waste here at pitiful Kansas State University, because he was eager to get |