Professor X by In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: Confessions of an Accidental Academic Read Free Book Online

before, we think. Why am I even bothering? Some other monkey at some other typewriter has churned all of this stuff out before. Even as I write this now, I can’t shake the feeling that, sitting in some dusty back room of the Strand Book Store, there sits a yellowing copy of some other In the Basement of the Ivory Tower, all of my thoughts and words out there already, already written by somebody else.
    I was practically panting with excitement. Had an adjunct ever had a heart attack on the first night of class? I had forgotten how much I loved thinking about writing, and never before had I had the opportunity to do so at such length. Everything I thought poured out of me, all of my writing worries, my frustrations, my writing demons, coupled with all that I had learned after spending thousands of hours at the keyboard, thousands at the typewriter, thousands hanging over legal pads. God, I thought, I’d written for so long I’d written through multiple ages of technology. And there was more. Already I was filling up with more stuff about writing. Yes, yes—I would have to tell them about balance, about preambles that are too long and rushed conclusions; I would have to tell them about my wife’s trick—how she, as the first step in evaluating a page of my writing, would look at the literal shape of it, eyeing it from halfway across the room so that she couldn’t actually read the text but could see the paragraphs as mere shapes, like the outlines of continents on a map.
    I stepped out into the corridor for a breath of air. I needed to compose myself. First night of class: I noted that most of the other adjuncts had already dismissed their students for the evening. One other teacher, at the far end of the hall, was still going. His rasp was indistinct. I heard not his words but just the rising and falling of his voice, which had a querulous quality to it as he explained some lengthy proposition. A corridor of classrooms at night is a lonely but exciting place. I had to swallow down a rising gorge of exhilaration. I coughed to cover my excitement. A writing cliché to avoid: I felt wondrously alive. Not necessarily particularly happy, but surgically opened, splayed, scalped, vivisected, and mounted. I was my own raw self. This was me, take it or leave it. I felt like I’d been confessing at a meeting, Alcoholics Anonymous, or any of the other sorts of assemblages that take place in empty school buildings.
    I stepped back into my classroom.
    â€œAnd now,” I told the class, “we write.”
    The students, all business, took out notebooks and loose-leaf and folders and pens. Someone piped up with a question: would they be keeping a writing journal? They knew more about what was supposed to go on than I did. Had some of them taken the class before? I would learn in time that, yes, they certainly had. I told them that I didn’t believe in journals. When you have that much writing lying around, you don’t want to waste it, and so you try to shoehorn that writing into whatever projects happen to come up, and it seldom fits.
    â€œWe have to do a base-level writing exercise,” I said. “I have to get a feeling of where everybody is.” They nodded. They understood they had to participate in such tedious formalities. “Write me an introduction and then three good body paragraphs. Here’s the topic: I’m exactly the same person that I was five years ago. Or, if you don’t like that one, I’m a completely different person than I was five years ago.”
    A hand rose: do you want a conclusion?
    â€œNo,” I said, briskly and with great authority. I had already learned, as a professor, to speak ex cathedra. Never had I given the idea of conclusions any thought, but instantly I apprehended the boundaries of the matter. “Conclusions are childish. Let the reader draw them. You shouldn’t have to tell us.”
    The woman with the tattoos and