I thoroughly endorse Professor Martina Ali’s bid for promotion to associate professor with tenure.
Cordially and with the usual succinctness,
Jay Fitger
* See Professor Jorg Masterson’s infamous class, Dis/guise and Dis/gust, to which students are invited to bring “rancid food and a costume or mask.”
November 11, 2009
Bentham Literary Residency Program
P.O. Box 1572
Bentham, ME 04976
Good Afternoon, Committee Members — with cc to Eleanor Acton, Director:
This is the third letter I have written on behalf of Mr. Darren Browles, who recently received from your office a computerized notice that, of his three required letters of recommendation, only two have been received. Why each application to Bentham necessitates three written LORs I leave to sages and philosophers to decipher. As for the letters in Mr. Browles’s case (your office has refused to identify their authors): let’s count them. One is mine, dated September 3 (with a follow-up/coda on October 5). Two is the letter from his foreign language advisor; I just wandered across the quad and spoke to Herr Zimmunt to secure his jawohl in regard to this endorsement. Letter # Three, Browles informs me, was originally to have come from Helena Stang, who led him on an e-mail goose chase for over a month until finally reporting, as if from her satin fainting couch, that she was “too busy.” He had no choice at that point but to turn to his administrative advisor, Martin Glenk, who (unbeknownst to poor Browles) wrests fleeting moments of joy from the opportunity to denigrate my students.
Armed with these bitter herbs of information, I undertook this morning the short but unhappy stroll past the men’s room (the toilets of which send their constant flushing sound through the vent in my office) to the literature wing of our department. Typically I am loath to poke about in that arm of the building, around the corner from the WELCOME TO ENGLI_H sign and the faded sofas on which, after hours, the undergraduates presumably enjoy one another’s favors. To be blunt: many of the literature faculty and I are no longer speaking, and a third of their number, due to a construction project in our hallowed hall, have moved their offices to remote outposts of campus, delighting in the knowledge that their colleagues will be unable to find them. Logically, one might suggest that I solicit the assistance of my department chair, but he is a professor of sociology, appointed by the university’s warlords to rule our asylum until the inmates exhibit greater pliability and calm.
In any event, I did ultimately locate the elusive Glenk, who, after wiping his nose on the back of his sleeve, refused to confirm or deny the existence of his LOR on Browles’s behalf. In case he sends or has sent a letter, allow me to provide some context for it: Glenk is a merciless and vengeful chucklehead — an Eliot scholar suffering from the delusion that he is a poet, though he hasn’t written a word of any significance for a dozen years.
Eleanor, I appeal to you: Darren Browles doesn’t need three LORs, and his “Bartleby” novel needn’t be subject to the sordid aspersions of a cretin like Glenk. Don’t let him be punished for my lack of popularity among my colleagues, present or past. (I include the word “past” to encompass any rivalry or unpleasantness between the two of us during the Seminar; our personal discord has no bearing on Browles, and I’d like to spare him the politicized trauma of our earlier years.)
Seeking to bury the hatchet or at least dull its blade,
Jay
P.S. (to Eleanor): Speaking of our Seminar years, I got a letter from Troy Larpenteur last week — resurfaced at last, somewhere in Ohio. His tone was cautiously upbeat, but I suspect he has been unwell for a very long time. He needs a recommendation, of course. Do you know if he’s been in touch with anyone else? Would Madelyne TV have kept track of him?
November 16, 2009
ITech Solutions
271 Riverview Way
Dubuque, Iowa 52003
Attention: Maxine Wells
Dear Ms. Wells,
I am overjoyed by the opportunity to recommend Mr. Duffy Napp to your firm. Mr. Napp currently serves as the sole remaining member of what used to be the “Tech Help team” in our Department of English, and he clearly suffers under the burden of our collective ignorance. Mr. Napp demonstrates all the winsome ebullience one expects these days from a young person more inclined to socialize with machines rather than human beings. His approach to problem solving is characterized by sullenness punctuated by occasional brief bouts of good judgment.
Whatever I can do to assist in your — or any other firm’s — hiring of Mr. Napp I will accomplish with resolution and zeal.
Hopefully, and with fingers crossed,
Jason T. Fitger
Professor of Creative Writing and English
November 20, 2009
Gar Canfield
Zentex Corporation
8591 Taylor Boulevard
Panama, Ohio 45807
Dear Mr. Canfield,
This letter very warmly endorses the application of Troy Larpenteur, who has informed me of his desire to secure a position as sales associate in the Zentex Corporation.
I have known Troy Larpenteur for twenty-three years: we attended graduate school together. Troy was widely acknowledged to be one of the most gifted and original writers to pass through the infamous Seminar under the tutelage of H. Reginald Hanf. (If you don’t know Hanf’s work: please head straight to the library or bookstore — I give you leave to put this letter aside and come back to it later — to find a copy of Testimony in Red, a finalist for the National Book Award, which, in the absence of cronyism among the judges that year, would have won.)
Though he appears not to have mentioned it on his résumé, Troy Larpenteur published a brilliant lyrical novella called Second Mind, which was showered with praise but underappreciated, as are many pathbreaking works; it is now out of print. Subsequently he labored for the better part of a decade on his magnum opus, a novel, which was lost along with his pregnant wife when the cabin lent to them by a friend, a cabin in which they were taking a long-awaited vacation, was struck by lightning during a storm. The randomness of his wife Navia’s death — the vacation had been urged upon them; Troy had driven to the store for supplies before the storm’s scheduled arrival; the car got a flat tire and Troy stumbled back down the flooded road to find the cabin in flames — defeated his belief in art and quelled his aspirations. He never returned to the novel. He moved to India, where Navia had spent her early childhood, and wiped himself off the grid for a dozen years.
You may be searching this letter for references to Troy’s “relevant experience.” (Troy asked me to limit myself in this recommendation to the qualities and attributes that will make him an asset to your firm.) Let me suggest that, no matter the variety of employment, there is nothing more relevant or crucial than an aptitude for original thought and imaginative expression. When I think back twenty-three years to the sight of Troy across from me at the Seminar table, his hair looking as if he had slept on the floor of the library by the vending machines (he usually had), his face alight with intelligence and anticipation, I believe the best years of my life will be the ones in which I had the privilege of hearing him read his work aloud to our group. Even HRH — Professor Hanf — fell silent when Troy slid his pages from the battered portmanteau in which he liked to keep his writing; we waited on tenterhooks, knowing that whatever Troy read would alter something within us, changing the way in which we understood language and its cumulative power, the way it made our lives feel capacious, infusing us each week during our three- or four-hour-long sessions with the sensation that we were at long last about to apprehend … what? Unlike many of his peers, myself included, Troy was free of egoism. He cared about his work, and others’ work, as opposed to “success.” He was, and remains, an intellectually nimble, brilliant, generous man.