of which express the requisite theater-of-the-absurd language about pedagogy and the euphoria of learning. Suffering creature! By all means, yes, yes! I endorse her bid for the mentorship: may the bump in salary allow her to avoid scurvy by adding fruit to her diet once a week.
While we’re on the important topic of health: there must be something you can do, Ted, about the thick coils of tubing that,as of yesterday, emerged from a sizeable hole in the wall outside my office. Resembling the heads of a modern-day Hydra, these tubes periodically cough up flocculent curds of unidentifiable gray material, as if issuing a warning to those who remain in Willard Hall.
Sometimes in my daydreams, Ted, I envision our building in a cutaway view as if it were a painting by Hieronymus Bosch: the economists placidly robed in the uppermost quadrant, nearest to God, and beneath them, on the lower floors, close to the churning wrath of the boiler, the condemned in a bloodstained, pulsing version of Hell.
I’m sure Ms. McCoy will be an apt and responsible mentor.
Extracting pleasure from the task as always, Jay
March 19, 2010
Reverend W. T. Dap, Admissions Emanuel Lutheran Seminary
Corcoran, SD 57106
Dear Reverend Dap,
Dennis White has asked me to write a letter recommending him to the Emanuel Lutheran Seminary (Master of Divinity Program), and I am happy to grant his modest request. Four years ago Mr. White enrolled as a dewy-eyed freshman in one of my introductory literature courses (Cross-cultural Readings in English, or some such dumping ground of a title); he returned several years later for another dose of instruction, this time in the Junior/Senior Creative Writing Workshop—a particularly memorable collection of students given their shared enthusiasm for all things monstrous and demonic, nearly every story turned in for discussion involving vampires, werewolves, victims tumbling into sepulchres, and other excuses for bloodletting. I leave it to professionals in your line of work to pass judgment on this maudlin reveling in violence. A cry for help of some sort? A lack of faith—given the daily onslaught of news about melting ice caps, hunger, joblessness, war—in the validity or existence of a future? Now in my middle fifties, an irrelevant codger, I find it discomfiting to see this generation dancing to the music of apocalypse and carrying their psychic burdens in front of them like infants in arms.
Mr. White concentrated in his fiction not on poltergeists and phantoms but on the potential for evil within. In his final story, the intriguingly yclept main character, Davin Dark, falls into a trance during which he kills his younger brother, then wakes to the horrid evidence of what he has done. Despite a problem with modifiers, the story was genuinely disturbing, and I found myself recalling its eerie details whenever Mr. White—a handsome, smooth-browed young man—raised his hand in class. And now you ask whether Mr. White is a compelling candidate for the seminary; whether a person whose literary subconscious is an autoclave aboil with fratricide and vice is fit to serve as the moral shepherd of anyone’s flock.
In weighing in on this question I have to confess to my own status as a nonbeliever. Episcopalian * as a child, I wandered listlessly away from the fold in college. Years later, my wife (we are now divorced; I cheated on her, but that’s a story for another time) entertained cozy connubial visions of the two of us joining a congregation of Unitarians. Unfortunately, to my spiritually untutored mind, the contemplation of the infinite and the cultivation of virtue required the dignity of flowing robes and incense—whereas the Universalists eschewed pageantry and tradition so completely they mightas well have met for worship at a rodeo. As for me, the closest I have come to exaltation has been here at the university, with a book in my hand. Literature has served me faithfully (no pun intended) as an ersatz
While we’re on the important topic of health: there must be something you can do, Ted, about the thick coils of tubing that,as of yesterday, emerged from a sizeable hole in the wall outside my office. Resembling the heads of a modern-day Hydra, these tubes periodically cough up flocculent curds of unidentifiable gray material, as if issuing a warning to those who remain in Willard Hall.
Sometimes in my daydreams, Ted, I envision our building in a cutaway view as if it were a painting by Hieronymus Bosch: the economists placidly robed in the uppermost quadrant, nearest to God, and beneath them, on the lower floors, close to the churning wrath of the boiler, the condemned in a bloodstained, pulsing version of Hell.
I’m sure Ms. McCoy will be an apt and responsible mentor.
Extracting pleasure from the task as always, Jay
March 19, 2010
Reverend W. T. Dap, Admissions Emanuel Lutheran Seminary
Corcoran, SD 57106
Dear Reverend Dap,
Dennis White has asked me to write a letter recommending him to the Emanuel Lutheran Seminary (Master of Divinity Program), and I am happy to grant his modest request. Four years ago Mr. White enrolled as a dewy-eyed freshman in one of my introductory literature courses (Cross-cultural Readings in English, or some such dumping ground of a title); he returned several years later for another dose of instruction, this time in the Junior/Senior Creative Writing Workshop—a particularly memorable collection of students given their shared enthusiasm for all things monstrous and demonic, nearly every story turned in for discussion involving vampires, werewolves, victims tumbling into sepulchres, and other excuses for bloodletting. I leave it to professionals in your line of work to pass judgment on this maudlin reveling in violence. A cry for help of some sort? A lack of faith—given the daily onslaught of news about melting ice caps, hunger, joblessness, war—in the validity or existence of a future? Now in my middle fifties, an irrelevant codger, I find it discomfiting to see this generation dancing to the music of apocalypse and carrying their psychic burdens in front of them like infants in arms.
Mr. White concentrated in his fiction not on poltergeists and phantoms but on the potential for evil within. In his final story, the intriguingly yclept main character, Davin Dark, falls into a trance during which he kills his younger brother, then wakes to the horrid evidence of what he has done. Despite a problem with modifiers, the story was genuinely disturbing, and I found myself recalling its eerie details whenever Mr. White—a handsome, smooth-browed young man—raised his hand in class. And now you ask whether Mr. White is a compelling candidate for the seminary; whether a person whose literary subconscious is an autoclave aboil with fratricide and vice is fit to serve as the moral shepherd of anyone’s flock.
In weighing in on this question I have to confess to my own status as a nonbeliever. Episcopalian * as a child, I wandered listlessly away from the fold in college. Years later, my wife (we are now divorced; I cheated on her, but that’s a story for another time) entertained cozy connubial visions of the two of us joining a congregation of Unitarians. Unfortunately, to my spiritually untutored mind, the contemplation of the infinite and the cultivation of virtue required the dignity of flowing robes and incense—whereas the Universalists eschewed pageantry and tradition so completely they mightas well have met for worship at a rodeo. As for me, the closest I have come to exaltation has been here at the university, with a book in my hand. Literature has served me faithfully (no pun intended) as an ersatz
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