| OCR Text |
Show Acting Alone Page 424 and alot; actively telling his students to disregard any distinction that might otherwise be made between effect and affect. In his specially designed grammar units Sam exhorted his children to change tenses often for variety, and to dangle participles and modifiers amply before the reader's eye like succulent teen genitalia. Formal disinformation consisted in his urging them not to indent their paragraphs because it only made their left-hand margins look sloppy; and heartily recommending that they punch many holes in their neat left margins and string their essays together with the thickest, gaudiest dayglo yarn their hip moms could dig up out of the sewing basket, as it brightened a professor's otherwise dull and dour life to be presented with such cheery orlon padding. Logical and organizational disinformation abounded as well: your summary should come in the middle of your 500-word theme, just before the "hook"; and, this above all, no idea should ever enjoy a level of development beyond that of the average popular, non-political, non-religious bumpersticker or teeshirt motto, for we mustn't bore our audience. There'd been disinformation of a presumptively higher, more purely literary class as well: Edward Albee was so ashamed of himself after he wrote such decadent plays as Desire Under the Elms, that he decided to go hide in the desert and dry out by writing Desert Solitaire. And, too, Sam had provided his wide-eyed charges, so eager to learn, with any number of false-feinting tips and simple factual disinformation about writers and writers' tools and the writer's marketplace: IBM electronic typewriters work; you don't need an agent; you don't need to be a murderer or a suicide or a tennis star or a daughter of a classic cinema harlot to get something published; your book needn't be about cats or diets. You needn't betray your oldest friend and sell your soul to a silver- |
