Keep Your Boots On, It's Still Not Spring

Well, unless spring has winter storm warnings full of ice, snow, and sleet.

Yesterday I fell asleep on my sofa after dinner. I meant to keep plugging on my current sock and use-up-old-stash projects when I sat down. Instead, I read a bit and then I felt cold and my feet hurt so I curled up under the blanket. The next thing I knew, the noise of H coming home from work woke me.

I am reading Dear Committee Members by Julie Schumacher. It's a book of recommendation letters (an "epistolary novel" I'm told) allegedly written by a middle-aged English professor at a second-tier American university on behalf of students, colleagues, and friends. This professor fills his letters with asides referencing his relationship with the intended recipient, unflattering details about the people he is supposed to be recommending, complaints about working conditions in his office, and melodramatic sobbing about how poorly regarded the English department is on his campus. I'm reading it because H read it last year and laughed his head off. I don't like it. I was hoping for humor, but I'm simply disgusted with Professor Fitger. I find him conceited and whiny. I want him to get over his divorce, his lack of book sales, and his enmity of the Economics department and do something productive.

The letters I do like are the ones in which he rails against the increasingly impersonal, online recommendation format (maybe because I've had to complete those awful tables of check boxes, too). I also enjoy the occasionally clever phrasing he uses, for example, when describing a student he has known for "eleven minutes."

I think the plight of the underappreciated English professor is nothing new in books. Writers write what they know (so I've heard, anyway), and I guess many of them are English professors struggling with feelings of inadequacy. If I had any belief that I could write a novel I would be tempted to write one about a university where the exalted English professors regularly proclaim their undeniably accurate understanding of politics at near-campus watering-holes, preach 19th century British literature to classes of adoring fans, and spend breaks traveling to sunny villas with suitcases packed with bottles of wine. They sometimes deign to marvel at scientific news then proudly state their pure white ignorance of science and math. Maybe I'm just jealous.