| OCR Text |
Show Acting Alone Page 150 of Chicago. Professors on graduate committees also justify their existence by laying hold of creatures smaller and less fortunate than they and slowly, with relish, stripping those creatures of any meager protective covering they might've been able to accumulate, gouging out their most private vitals all over blue desk blotters - Axelrad took this quiet, nearly private moment to fly in imagination back to Chicago and to spill out the guts of his deep hatred of the whole anthropology department. Yes, the sudden forced move to the sleazier new "anthro bldg," after their original Oxfordesque castle had been co-opted by the fascists, had taken a constipating effect on the flow of ideas in the anthropology department. The awful new pastel and linoleum and fluorescent offices, all cramped, probably made his bearded committee members feel like fuzzy dusty brown dead rabbitskins pinned for observation to slick white cards under glass. In any case, on one afternoon a few months back, after two and a half years of slowly butchering the emotional meat right off the bones of Axelrad's psyche, his committee had finally, magnanimously offered him one of the first of the new fieldwork grants, or "student sabbaticals" for the Masters program. Given their ration of red meat, their pound of flesh, they'd proved human after all. He had approached them, at Mr. Cicerone's suggestion, and handed them a prospectus for a semi-secret ethnography/thesis that he supposedly intended to write about a certain modern-day hunter/gatherer commune of cultural revolutionaries secretly ensconced high in the Colorado mountains. The prospectus spoke something vague about examining the "reversion to feral |
