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Perfessers of Anguish

December, 2004

Nybass, the demon who controls dreams and visions. A buffoon and a charlatan.

....sometime am I
All wound with adders, who, with cloven tongues
Do hiss me into madness.
(Caliban, in The Tempest, II: II)

It seems that a lot of college students and college graduates can't write. And this is getting the corporate knickers in a twist. Here, for example, are excerpts from an article on just that topic.

What Corporate America Can't Build: A Sentence
by Sam Dillon
New York Times
Dcember 7, 2004

Bloomington, Ill. R. Craig Hogan, a former university professor who heads an online school for business writing here, received an anguished e-mail message recently from a prospective student.

"i need help," said the message, which was devoid of punctuation. "i am writing a essay on writing i work for this company and my boss want me to help improve the workers ting skills can yall help me with some information thank you".

Hundreds of inquiries from managers and executives seeking to improve their own or their workers' writing pop into Dr. Hogan's computer in-basket each month, he says, describing a number that has surged as e-mail has replaced the phone for much workplace communication. Millions of employees must write more frequently on the job than previously. And many are making a hash of it….

A recent survey of 120 American corporations… concluded that a third of employees in the nation's blue-chip companies wrote poorly and that businesses were spending as much as $3.1 billion annually on remedial training.

The problem shows up not only in e-mail but also in reports and other texts, the commission said.

"It's not that companies want to hire Tolstoy," said Susan Traiman, a director at the Business Roundtable, an association of leading chief executives whose corporations were surveyed in the study. "But they need people who can write clearly, and many employees and applicants fall short of that standard."

Some $2.9 billion of the $3.1 billion the National Commission on Writing estimates that corporations spend each year on remedial training goes to help current employees, with the rest spent on new hires...

An entire educational industry has developed to offer remedial writing instruction to adults, with hundreds of public and private universities, for-profit schools and freelance teachers offering evening classes as well as workshops, video and online courses in business and technical writing.

The Inquisitive Reader asks, “Hey, how come?”

Professor Plum can’t say for sure.

One slight possibility is that college students are NOT taught to write so that OTHER persons get it. Instead, they are taught to write so that their PERFESSERS in English Departments get it. And this means writing according to the canon of postmodernism--namely:

1. Write as if your scholarship covers everything from ancient history to physics--when in fact you're an ignoramus with nothing useful to say.

2. Focus entirely on yourself and two or three other similarly-demented literaquacks who get off on their squalid prose.

3. Make sure every sentence contains one of the following terms: authentic, lived, empower, critical, literacy, voice, intersection, spirit, genre, space, time, dimension, publics, discourse, perspective, narrative, politics of, exploit.

4. Disguise your privileged life and complete self-absorption behind a curtain of smarmy rhetoric that exploits the pain and degradation of real people in whose service you pretend to work, as you sip Chardonnay and discuss the praxis of discourse at the Faculty Club.

Professor Plum checked out this possibility by examining the websites of English Departments here...

http://www.lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/~matsuoka/Dept-Eng.html

After 20, they sounded the same, and so I quit.

Here are samples (quotations) of the heady work in English Departments. [Gratuitous insults are in bracketed italics.]

This one could be entitled, "I'm the apple of my eye."

My transformation into a "civic writer" [What do the quotation marks mean? There really is no such thing as a “civic writer”?] was swift and thorough, and, moreover, led me back to scholarship in composition studies, where a burgeoning service-learning movement [What on earth is a burgeoning movement? Something to do with a toddler in a diaper I suppose?] was beginning to gain momentum. I was particularly influenced by James J. Sosnoski and David B. Downing’s "A Multivalent Pedagogy for a Multicultural Time"… [Say that with a mouthful of crackers.] The authors acknowledge the complex ways in which conflicting allegiances and implicit, unrecognized agendas interact in a classroom organized around such principles; given the erratic and exhausting nature of my own service-learning efforts [Oh, yeah, all that HARD work perfessers do! From the office.], their ambivalence about creating alternative "intellectual spaces" [An alternative intellectual space?] for college writing was oddly reassuring. [Oddly reassuring. What is she talking about?] …Although writing process was not exactly irrelevant to such a classroom—it still happened—it was in a sense beside the point [As is your life.], and certainly seemed at odds with my growing conviction [Back to the burgeoning motif.] that the purpose for writing and the responsibilities of writers ought to precede and inform any further decisions about process and that this is what we should teach in college writing classes. "Process" no longer seemed like the most useful set of propositions to inform my professional ideals or direct my practices as a writing teacher. [Young Person, you are NOT a writing teacher.]

While process seemed to trap me in a series of ethical inconsistencies [Oh, no, the existential horror that is my life!], the notion of praxis [Oh, kill me, please!] has enabled me to reconceptualize both the purpose of writing instruction and the dynamic ways in which my roles as teacher, writer, and citizen overlap. [My Dear, your head overlaps your buttocks--or the other way around.]

Here’s a quotation from a different Perfesser of Anguish…

Study in critical literacy challenges us to address complex social problems (i.e., traditional school culture, poverty, child neglect and spouse abuse, homelessness, substance abuse, ESL population, among others) [The problems don’t challenge us; the study of critical literacy challenges us. What absurd drivel.] inherent in society rather than simply blame schools for failing. Developing contextual definitions of language [What would a contextual definition of language be? Clearly insane.] and literacy can provide a basis for meaningful teaching and learning to promote dynamic education and social healing. [Oh my Lord! Social healing! “When I get that feeling, I need social healing. Social healing, yeah, makes me feel so fine.” Oh, sorry. Somehow The Great Marvin Gaye got in there.]

My research interests include translating constructivist theory as this applies to the language arts and English classroom, investigating critical literacy as an avenue toward social healing, exploring the phenomenon of "teacher legends" [What phenomenon? Who ever HEARD of that bunk? These guys MAKE this stuff up! Otherwise, they have NOTHING to say.] through oral history research, [When I get that feeling, I need oral history healing. Oral history healing, yeah…”] and studying the artistry of intuition [Ahhhh! Completely psychotic!] in relation to composing.

Here’s another: An Associate Perfesser of Anguish. She never heard of a comma.

Literature, I believe, can change people's lives, make us more self-reflective and get us to examine our surroundings more too. [No kiddin’?] I love [This is relevant to us, HOW?] to take important factors like aging and gender and use them as filters [How do you use as a factor as a filter? What does it even MEAN?] through which to view literary texts, exploring how these factors shape texts [How does age shape a text? Whose age? What is she talking about?] and influence readers' responses to texts. I want students to discover how literary theories can open up a novel like Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale or an autobiography like Lorene Carey's Black Ice and how literature can change our ways of constructing reality. [Oh, here we go. It’s an epidemic of infected mind slop.]

Here’s a new book by an Anguish Perfesser. I can’t wait to read it.

The Female Complaint: the Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture, which focuses on the centrality of sentimental modes of address to subaltern public-sphere-building in the

U.S.

20th century, taking "women's culture" as its central case. [No doubt this will be very useful to ordinary women struggling to make a living and raise a family. How do you spell fake?]

Here’s another. A book entitled, Photographs of the Dead.

A study of the spiritual and psychological dimensions of photography, arguing that…we have become a profoundly photocentric culture: the "self" has become a snapshot, "history" a photo album, "truth" a camera or video recorder, and "power" a matter of who controls our images. Especially documents the ways in which the afterlife (of persons, of cultures) functions within the photo-ecology that we call "memory."
[The self has become snapshot? Power is a matter of who controls images? Images? Apparently, this nitwit never saw the business end of a .45 caliber pistol pointed at her face.]

This next one (a book) takes **First Place** in the Most Demented category. Surely this guy is kidding.

Sovereign Amity concerns matters of agency, bureaucracy, gender, consent, and sexuality in early modernity's appropriation of classical friendship principles. It pursues the uncanny relations between the friendship pair (as an experiment in "micro-polity") and the more systemic institutions of the "body politick" and monarchy. [Well, okay, now that you’ve explained it all…]

Many Anguish Perfessers are into "studies" of sexuality.

Well, you know what they say, “Those who can’t…”

I admit that I selected this next one. It's sooo beyond….well, I really don’t know what…. You decide, Dear Reader.

The Gendering of Men, 1600-1750, vol. one: The English Phallus, University of Wisconsin Press, June 2004 [The English phallus? This opens up, or unzips, as the case may be, a new “genre.” Comparative phallology. I can’t wait for the burgeoning research.]

Natcherly you can't stuff a phallus into ONE book! So, after a soothing cigarette and refreshing nap, here's the next volume...

The Gendering of Men, 1600-1750, vol two: Queer Articulations, forthcoming 2004/05 [No comment. Just plain No Bloody Comment.]

The same Anguish perfesser has other sexuality-related publications. [Who'da thunk?] I guess some folks never know when enough is enough.

"Gender and Modernity: Male Looks and the Performance of Public Pleasures." Monstrous Dreams of Reason, ed. Choudhury and Rosenthal, 2002

"The Fop, The Canting Queen, and the Deferral of Gender," Presenting Gender, ed. Mounsey, 2001

"M/S, or Making the Scene: An Erotics of Space," Queen: A Journal of Rhetoric and Power, 2000

"Performing 'Akimbo'," The Politics and Poetics of Camp, ed. Morris Meyer, Routledge, 1994

[Once in awhile--after a lengthy conversation with Mr. Jack Daniels or Senor Jose Quervo--Professor Plum’s performance goes akimbo. But--and follow me closely here--he does not publish articles on it. I guess some people have to turn their obsessions into a whole field.]

Male Anguish Perfessers are not alone in their sexual interests. This next perfesser tells us that her

….current project, "Sex Objects," explores the work of writers and artists who use sex to destabilize the distinction between art and everyday life… [Okay, so you can have sex; you can read about sex; and you can have sex BY reading about sex. This is a “project”? I wonder if she’ll get a grant from the National Endowment (endowment, get it?) for the Phallic Arts?]

Once more into the breach… Our next perfesser…

….is currently writing a novel called The Inferno about the hell of being a female poet. [Oh, I bet it’s real hell, especially compared to the easy life of all those women getting stoned, hanged, and mutilated every day in

Sudan

and so many other oases of privilege.]

Sorry, Dear Readers, but these creeps make my skin crawl. If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to spend a few minutes imagining the pleasing sound of a sock full of wet sand liberally applied to the occiput.

Notice the similarity to edudrivel? You think something loathesome and odious has taken over "higher" (Ha!) deaducation? Ya think?