A Spidry Situation
One of my writing courses at UNI was really terrible. It was overpacked, full of obnoxious grad students and pompous asses and preppy girls who wouldn't stop gossiping. In addition, the teacher was a pushover and soft-voiced and really could do nothing to control anything.
The only thing of value I learend was that the most pompous people in the English Department were without fail the worst writers. The only person out of the 25 whose work was better than mine was Claire Mayo, who wrote a piece called "Pink" that probably could have been published in 95% of the literary magazines in this country. And that's not me being arrogant; I submitted decent stories for that class, nothing impressive. It's me saying that everyone else's writing BLEW.
But the point is: I asked that professor for a grad school letter of recommendation. And she asked me if I'd mind being a witness—the university is going to can her or something for being a bad prof, and she's looking for people to point out that her classes were overfull and particularly hard to control and full of idiots. So I said, okay. And then she started talking more—asking me quesitons about people whose names I didn't recognize, and then today she talked about a pop bottle throwing incident, and the final meeting in Baker Auditorium, and I realized—I wasn't even in the class she's thinking of.
So my options: contact her and apologize for accidentally agreeing with her confused memories, or just ride it out and answer questions when UNI calls and hope they don't notice I wasn't even in the class. I think my class was just as fucked up, so I can effectively fake it. But if they look at the rosters, things'll get spidery.
That's a new adjective I just made up, by the way.
Spidery.
Let's make that "spidry."
The only thing of value I learend was that the most pompous people in the English Department were without fail the worst writers. The only person out of the 25 whose work was better than mine was Claire Mayo, who wrote a piece called "Pink" that probably could have been published in 95% of the literary magazines in this country. And that's not me being arrogant; I submitted decent stories for that class, nothing impressive. It's me saying that everyone else's writing BLEW.
But the point is: I asked that professor for a grad school letter of recommendation. And she asked me if I'd mind being a witness—the university is going to can her or something for being a bad prof, and she's looking for people to point out that her classes were overfull and particularly hard to control and full of idiots. So I said, okay. And then she started talking more—asking me quesitons about people whose names I didn't recognize, and then today she talked about a pop bottle throwing incident, and the final meeting in Baker Auditorium, and I realized—I wasn't even in the class she's thinking of.
So my options: contact her and apologize for accidentally agreeing with her confused memories, or just ride it out and answer questions when UNI calls and hope they don't notice I wasn't even in the class. I think my class was just as fucked up, so I can effectively fake it. But if they look at the rosters, things'll get spidery.
That's a new adjective I just made up, by the way.
Spidery.
Let's make that "spidry."
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