Pomposity, Literary Fiction, and Trashy Romance Novels

***This is a revised version of this story***
I wrote this story with the intention for it to be a satire, social commentary on the literacy level of the contemporary college student and the resultant frustration of college professors. To that end I felt that the David character in this story needed to be more sympathetic. So, let me know what you think, is he more sympathetic? Is this an improvement? If not why?









When the vapid young woman came to turn in her story she had entered David’s office cradling the monstrosity lovingly against her ample bosom. David assumed that someone had paid a great deal of money to create that bosom. She leaned forward to place the little bastard on his desk and allowed her blouse to fall open enough to give David a good long look at the grotesque silicone lumps within. She gazed coyly up through her eyelashes to be sure she had his attention before straightening her spine and allowing her blouse to fall back into place. She believed that this action would increase her odds of getting an A. David believed this action was a good indication of how poorly written her story was likely to be. He breathed a disgusted sigh, and thanked her for turning her story in on time. As soon as she had finished swishing and wiggling her way out of his office, David breathed a second sigh, a sigh of relief. This would be the final story his class would workshop this semester.

David perceived himself as being a patient, intelligent, insightful man and believed he was doing the scholarly world a favor by attempting to enlighten his students about how to write respectable literary fiction. When she married him, David’s wife had perceived him as being an intelligent, insightful man, with a sparkling wit and a dry sense of humor. Now David’s wife perceived him as being short tempered, disillusioned, and tired. She had believed that their relationship would be filled with intellectual conversations, and wine tastings. The reality was more along the lines of her listening to David incessantly, bitching about ignorant students and pompous faculty members. When he married her, David had perceived his wife as being an intelligent, vivacious, and kind-hearted woman. He now perceived her to be a money-grubbing, irritable, man-hating hag. He had believed that their relationship would be filled with intellectual conversations, home cooked meals, and sexy nights. The reality was more along the lines of his listening to her incessantly bitching about money, cold take-out, and colder sheets.

Throughout his career as a creative writing professor, David had read more than his fair share of torturously long-winded and poorly constructed stories, each positively filled to overflowing with typos, misspelled words, wrong words, bad grammar, and wholly lacking in actual content, not to mention run-on sentences. He believed he had kept his tongue in check through every workshop for 23 years. His students believed that he had savagely attacked every story in every workshop for 23 years.

This most recent story outraged his senses more than anything he had ever seen in print before. It was 18 and a half pages long and contained not one genuine sentence. David assumed that the vapid young woman had been too lazy or too stupid, or perhaps both, to utilize her spell check. He assumed this because of the inclusion of typos and/or misspelled words that, as nearly as he could tell, approximately equaled the number of words that were spelled and utilized appropriately. Once he had finally waded through the typos, misspellings, and inappropriately used words, David was confronted with the ever present over usage of punctuation. Each page positively groaned under an eminence weight of commas, dashes – semicolons; colons: and exclamation points! As if all of this weren’t enough to enrage the most patient of men, the content of the “story” appeared to have taken a leave of absence. Perhaps a story this atrocious would not have enraged him quite so much if it had been turned in by a student in an introductory class, but this was the Senior Seminar. After 23 years David still couldn’t shake the persistent, though clearly unrealistic, expectation that students taking the Senior Seminar would have a basic grasp of spelling and grammar, be in possession of at least a moderately diverse vocabulary, and have a basic concept of how to put together some semblance of a readable story.

This most recent affront to all things literary was titled “True Love.” It consisted largely of a rather dull recounting of a love affair between a 17 year-old girl and her 19 year-old boyfriend. The story’s alleged conflict consisted of constant begging for sex by the boyfriend and persistent denial of sex by the girl. The resultant atrocity read something like this, “’But baby I loev you! If you loved me back you’d prove it, by makin’ love to me.’ ‘I do love you! But; you know I’m savin’ my virgenity for that special, prefect moment: when out 2 soles con become 1!’” Of course, the whole mess ended with the two starry eyed kids screwing under a full lunar eclipse while a vividly described, albeit horridly misspelled, meteor shower “light up teh skie over they’re writhing naked body’s!”

At the end of his first read through, David had marked out a few misspellings and grammatical nightmares, and was shuddering. By the third read through he had a bottle of scotch sitting next to the monstrosity and a half empty glass in his left hand. His right hand grasped a shaky pen with which he made brief, scribbled notations on the wretched sheets of paper. With each new notation David bit down on his lower lip and forced polite words out the tip of his pen, then took a sip from his glass. The scotch first burned then numbed the raw scrapes on his lip.

David’s notations were things like, “although the imagery here is vivid, it does not illuminate the story,” and, “this word does not fit the apparent meaning of this sentence,” and “there are a lot of similar scenes of dialog here. Perhaps just giving us one scene of the boyfriend begging for sex and your main character turning him down, then telling us that this was a common conversation, would help to move the story along.” The notations he wanted to make were things like, “Are you insane, or merely insipid?” and, “I don’t even know what the fuck this sentence is supposed to mean,” and, “if you can’t spell and don’t know the basic rules of grammar what the hell are you doing in my class, you dimwitted twat?”

On the day of the final workshop, more students than was usual showed up for class. That was odd because this was such a bad story; normally the worst stories brought fewer students to class. David assumed this was because most students didn’t want to seem cruel to the authors of those horrid stories. David, consistently late to the point of anality, arrived five minutes after the last student had tromped into the room, that final student having arrived five minutes late for class himself. David eased himself into his seat, tapped his papers on the table, rocked his chair back on two legs, and smirked around the room.

“Does anyone have any literary news to share with us today?” His left eyebrow twitched in unison with the upward twitch of his sneering lip. “No? Ah well, I suppose I can only hope, to one day, have a class filled with students whose fingers are held dutifully to the pulse of the literary world. Until then I suppose I shall be forced to keep you all abreast of the important ins and outs of the lit. world.”

David had found that a good seven minutes of boring news about musty authors, who practically no one had ever heard of, was a wonderful way to lull his captive audience/victims into a false sense of security. Then he could pounce on their banal attempts at writing and reduce them to abject misery, or as close to abject misery as the department head, Jim, would allow.

He thought Jim was a weasely little man, who students adored. For all his attempts at understanding this phenomenon, David simply could not fathom why students liked Jim so much. For that matter, he was also at a loss as to why Jim’s writing had seen so much more success than his own. In these perceptions David was incorrect. Jim’s writing had seen very little success while David’s had seen quite a bit, and although students didn’t fawn on David, they didn’t hate him whereas they despised Jim. In fact, most of Jim’s students considered him to be a sadistic asshole with a penchant for purposefully asking trick questions, particularly on exams. Jim perceived himself to be a rather nice fellow who simply wanted to stimulate a genuine ability in his students, to think for themselves. David’s wife perceived Jim as being an intelligent, insightful man, with a sparkling wit and a dry sense of humor. Jim had little perception of David, or David’s wife, and felt that he had more important things to do than run about formulating opinions of his fellow faculty members and their spouses.

After David’s seven, tediously dull, minutes of literary news, he glanced around the room. He appraised the glassy-eyed mouth-agape stares of his students, decided it was time, and announced, “So. ‘True Love.’ Who wants to get us started?”

A pompous young man, who was auditing David’s class for the third time, spoke up. David thought this young man needed to spend a bit more time on his hygiene and a good deal more time on his writing. In fact, David believed that the fellow in question was such a bad writer himself that he only continued to audit the class for the joy of shredding the hard work of writers more talented than himself. The pompous young man believed his constant auditing of David’s class was a good way to prepare himself for a life of teaching creative writing.

The pompous young man grinned around the room with gunk encrusted teeth, and launched into a long-winded speech about the conflict of the story. “The most glaring aspect of this story is, of course, the technical errors, but I’ll return to that later. First I want to discuss the conflict. There is a great deal of opportunity for conflict here, but it’s mostly opportunity for internal conflict, which is mirrored in the external conflict of the back and forth begging for sex and denial of sex. Rewriting this story with a specific focus on the girl’s internal struggle to decide whether or not to give up her virginity, which is representative of her girlhood, would create a more vivid and interesting story.” The pompous young fellow went on to read a passage from the fifth page, then read how he had rewritten that passage. He followed that up by saying, “From this, we can see how the conflict is moved forward more rapidly, in what had been a rather stale scene, without losing any of the vividly descriptive language that….”

At this point a rather loud young woman, who sat across the room, interrupted. “I don’t see how your constant rewriting of other people’s stories is helpful to this process. Frankly, you aren’t here for a grade so I think those of us who are would all appreciate it if you would shut up and let the rest of us speak.” She glared at the pompous young man, daring him to continue speaking. The pompous young man made a strangled noise of incoherent anger, which he made a weak and ineffective effort to cover by coughing, but he didn’t speak again, opting instead to stare sullenly at his outlandishly phony alligator skin boots. The boots were a putrid shade of lime green.

The rather loud young woman smiled at the vapid young woman and said, “Aside from the frequent technical errors, I thought this story did quite a good job of expressing the girl’s internal struggle of whether or not to relinquish her virginity. A girl’s virginity, by the way, is representative of her innocence, not her age. I particularly enjoyed the vivid imagery in this story. The descriptions of the settings for each scene, the character’s clothing, and especially the appearance of the girl were quite vivid. However, the best imagery was the depiction of the night sky overhead of the two characters as they made love.”

A sexually ambiguous young man, who always sat in the back corner of the room, and rarely offered anything that David considered to be a valuable insight, spoke up. “I agree that the imagery here is both vivid and enjoyable. I think the settings, that are described in such detail here, are a metaphor for the girl’s self-image.” The sexually ambiguous young man grinned smugly at the pompous young man.

Annoyed by the ignorant comments of his students, David interjected, “I think we can all agree that the imagery in this story is quite vivid. Unfortunately, vivid though it may be, this imagery does not illuminate the story or move it forward. What we have here is an example of a repetitious argument between a teen boy and a teen girl, whose names we are never even given, over whether or not they are going to have sex. This is something of a common theme in teen life and not a particularly interesting premise for a literary short story. Once again we have a story that is plot driven rather than character and conflict driven.” David rushed on before any of his students could inject further ignorant comments into the conversation. “The fact that this story is fraught with technical errors is a good indicator that the author is not paying close attention to her own story and therefore leaves readers uninterested in actually reading her story.” At this David tipped his chair back a bit further, touched the tip of his tongue to his upper lip, raised his eyebrows, and stared first at the furthest right-hand corner of the ceiling, out of the corner of his eyes, and then at the furthest left-hand corner of the ceiling, out of the other corner of his eyes. David believed that this combination of movements and facial expressions communicated both wisdom and deep insight to his students. Most of his students believed that this combination of movements and facial expressions communicated some kind of mental defect.

The rather loud young woman frowned at David. “I disagree with your assessment of this story. I thought that a simple clean up of the technical errors would result in an excellent story and a rather insightful glimpse into the heart and mind of a conflicted young girl on the verge of becoming a woman. Stories like these are important. They help young girls and young women recognize that they aren’t alone in these feelings and they offer young men much needed insight into how young women think and feel. I would consider this to be an important piece of literary fiction.”

The rest of the students, with the exception of the pompous young man who was still staring at his hideous boots, nodded their heads and murmured agreement with this sentiment. David looked around his classroom as his students nodded and congratulated the vapid young woman on a job well done. He watched the vapid young woman’s lips twitch and turn up at the ends, and her eyes crinkle at the corners. His teeth began to grit and grind painfully, his chest constricted, and there was a roaring in his ears.

Air gusted into David’s lungs, and before he could stop himself he slammed all four legs of his chair onto the floor, slapped his desktop and bellowed at the class, “Are you all completely stupid? Can’t any of you see how thoroughly insipid this trite piece of pointless garbage is? What the hell kind of world is it we’re living in if a student who can’t even type a coherent sentence in a word program, which by the way will correct most spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors, can get into college? Never mind for a moment the fact that this ignorant, insipid, silicone injected, brain dead, daddy’s girl, twat was able to get into college, any brat with a wealthy parent can buy themselves a college education, but even brain dead twats can now get into Creative Writing Senior Seminars without having the slightest idea of how to write a coherent sentence. Most of you are destined to work in fast food or writing trashy romance novels filled with words like ‘quivering love mound’ after you graduate, if you even manage to graduate.” David ran out of steam and noticed, with a great deal of satisfaction, that every student in the room looked shocked and horrified and the vapid young woman’s face was streaked black with tears and smeared mascara. Incidentally the words “quivering love mound” had been bouncing around in David’s mind since he was 13, when he had read one of his mother’s trashy romance novels.

That afternoon he submitted failing grades for each of his students. Then he packed up all of his belongings, emptied his checking and savings accounts, cashed in his retirement fund and his life insurance policy, and bought a one-way ticket to Ecuador. He did not inform anyone that he was leaving.

Upon discovering that he was gone, David’s wife assumed that he had run off with some grad student and was livid that he had taken all the money with him. She filed divorce papers and began a romance with Jim, which ultimately led her to believe that he was a pompous windbag who did little more than bitch petulantly about ignorant students. After a few months she moved to San Francisco where she lived out her days hopping from one lesbian fling to another, teaching angry feminist literature to third-world immigrants, and marching in gay pride parades.

David moved to a small village in central Ecuador. He purchased a tiny building, in which he opened a rather seedy bar, and began drinking himself stupid on a daily basis. He started introducing himself as Oscar, and telling those people whom he deemed worthy of speaking to, that he was a retired inventor. He claimed to have made a fortune off, infomercial generated sales, of a magnetic handle for old pots and pans whose original handles had broken off. He further claimed to have lost that fortune to the poorly conceived invention of a new type of electronic vending machine that had a nasty tendency to malfunction and fire candy bars and soda cans out at dangerous velocities. He gave up writing altogether, and eventually drank himself to death.