Victor Geishel does it again. Rollicking good noir. Morgan, a visiting professor at a Midwestern university (Geishel assures his colleagues it certainly NOT the one where he teaches creative literature,) wakes up naked next to a young coed he bonked the night before. Problem is she's not waking up having been given some pills by her weed dealer that should really not have been taken with all that alcohol. Morgan's also teaching poetry to some grad students, one paper he is forced to read and grade is entitled, "The Fallible Quiescence of a Wrathful Jehovah." He despises his students, the Dean, the faculty, and especially Fred Jones who just gave the school lots of money and in return expects his ostensibly awful poetry to get published in their third-rate literary journal. But Fred Jones, it turns out, wants to help with relocating the dead girl.
And one Harold Jencks decides to impersonate a student his buddy just killed who was on his way to Eastern Oklahoma to study poetry. The school desperately needed some diversity. On a campus of 8,000 they had 5 black students, "Granted it had been hard to attract black students after the lynching."
There are some priceless quotes. During a faculty party, one professor starts a tirade on Finnegan's Wake: "You Irish folk have been skating on Joyce for too long. Finnegan's Wake is bullshit. Everyone knows it's bullshit. Joyce knew it was bullshit when he wrote it. Now get out of my face, you ridiculous little tit." This particular Joycean had "hitched himself to the James Joyce bandwagon and never looked back. He fully enjoyed the massive safety of James Joyce studies and relentlessly needled "fringe" scholarship as new wave, multicultural, carnival acts." But another professor gets so pissed at this comment that he hides in the bushes, waits till the prof rides by on his bicycle (in ridiculous spandex that "scrunched up his nuts," and throws a copy of Finnegan's Wake into his spokes, sending the rider head-over-heels into a concrete fountain. "I thought I'd killed him. I could have fucked up my whole life. I'm up for tenure next year. You can't get tenure if you kill a guy." "No, it's not like the old days." Morgan replied.
Or the conference they attend: The Thirteenth Annual International Interdisciplinary Conference of the Humanities and Fine Arts was something special. Scholars and writers from all fifty states and twenty-two countries stampeded like hyper-caffeinated lemmings to the host city, where they delivered mind-numbingly complex papers on obscure subjects in their desperate bids to rack up points toward tenure. Morgan had been to more than one panel where the panelists outnumbered the audience.. . .[He had to chose between:] Homosexual Transmogrification in Androgynous Eighties Techno-Pop or Pimple and Blemish Imagery in Victorian Fiction.
The story comes to a smashing conclusion at the college's annual poetry reading during a blinding blizzard where a graduate who has had poetry accepted by such luminous publications as Word Junkie, Gas-Hole, and Pea-Pickin' Potpourri " wove his poems like elaborate spells designed by some evil wizard to suck all that was interesting and beautiful out of life. . . .If his poems had been a meal, it would have been a plate of wet cardboard." Meanwhile, the Dean's silk panties "were so far up his ass, he had tears in his eyes."
I'm going to make it a point to read everything Geishel writes.
