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Show Anting Alone Page 200 R's; and he put lots of bizarre west coast words into his little experimental prosepoems. He "penned" little "poetic vignettes" about his paltry little acts of adultery, then passed them around the department to be discussed. One at a time, one per semester, he and Professor A would pick their own and each other's droppings apart word by word in bitchy little literary tea parties, then submit them to the quarterlies in xerox form, lying about multiple submissions. Guardians of the Language, Custodians of Our Authors' Immortality, he and Professor A read exclusively Barth novels, and read them backwards, because, "It takes a real writer to maintain the energy clear through to the bitter end." Yes, professorial types, these guys - : who misuse the word litany as often as most people swallow excess saliva; who, to prove once and for all their hipness, read the nasty limericks in GRAVITY'S RAINBOW out loud in class, and almost get fired because some homely unpopular female reports them for being sexist; but they can't be fired because they've earned tenure by publishing serious articles on "Raymond Chandler as Knight-Errant" in the South Dakota Review, or articles in the APR with lots of misused quotation marks, analyzing the syntax of Ashbery's poetry, and parenthetically complimenting Ashbery for "having abandoned sense" in his poetry - (after you've refined your work to the point where you are able to "abandon sense, you'll never again make a fool of yourself by committing yourself to any recognizably foolish concepts in print). And, when they get a picture of themselves printed in one of these publications, they drag their favorite grad students into their offices, slap the picture backhanded, and shout, at the top of their east coast lungs, "Man! That picture has gotten me |