Mandatory Training

D.J. Reddall is dead.

I know it's not polite to say as much, but I have felt relief before, and what I am feeling now is familiar. Our brief acquaintance wasn't a "burden," exactly, but my wife asked me over breakfast if I've lost weight. I think my wife was flirting with me for the first time since--well, the point is that she was.

So on the whole, I'm coping with my grief pretty well. There has been a bit of controversy, though. Lots of "exciting, provocative discourse" about the "late, obscure writer" who so "tragically lost his life" thanks to an altercation with assailants described as "aggressive, disgruntled undergraduates."

No one wrote a word about him while he was breathing.

In fact, I hear his teaching evaluations showed that he was a "polarizing" instructor. Euphemisms. He was never big, and he was shrinking.

I've had a look at his "work." You can find it online for free, which explains why he was always worried about money. After his "research presentation" about six weeks ago, he told me that contract laborers are allowed to fraternize with full timers because freely dispensing smug condescension to one's inferiors is one of the benefits of full time employment. He may have had something there, but he ought to have kept his politics to himself.

He wrote plenty of poetry. Insipid, saccharine and pretentious are some of his greatest hits. Sesquipedalian verbiage abounds. He solemnly rehearsed Emerson's bromide, "To be great is to be misunderstood," when I asked him what the hell was going on in some of the haikus and ekphrastics. Tell that to the accused, pleading with executioners who do not understand the only language she speaks.

He probably jumped. Sure, those kids were big and angry, but he could have used verbal mind tricks to distract them until he managed to board the fucking train. He could be annoying. Loudly. I'm not sure he could hear very well, though I've seldom heard of people going deaf because of M.S. He was certainly gunning for a position with the Ministry of Silly Walks. It was awkward, watching him lurch about. Perhaps they did shove him, after all. Perhaps he just tripped.

There's a pretty decent, short piece about Dante and betrayal. When he stopped trying to force boring lectures to dress up as fascinating stories, he could certainly make an argument, and he did love to read. "You have to write terribly for a while, if you want to learn to write well," he said to me with the kind of pedantic, affected gravitas that would have made me push him if a train had been coming. I offered him a clumsy toast when he said that, then remembered that he'd spoiled the fun. He told me he'd needed a drink for years, but was too much of a coward to have one. "It might make things worse instead of making them more bearable," was what he said. You see what I mean. They probably shoved him into silence, and smiled, as if that car alarm down the block at three in the morning had finally shut up.

Some of the horror fiction is worth a look, if you're not busy training an LLM to replace you. "The Retreat" is whiny, academic satire until the third act starts mowing down insufferable egg heads, but it's got a fashionable ending. There's something about a vampire, too, which I was afraid would be abstinence pornography for latter day saints. Happily, it begins, but doesn't end, at twilight.

That's the one some earnest people have emailed me about. A few want an interview with someone who "taught with the late author." He wasn't really published, apart from a handful of incomprehensible articles that refused to take no for an editor's answer. I'm sure those journals are fighting for their lives.

"I stopped trying to get it exactly right, and started enjoying it," was all I could get out of him--this was our one and only encounter apart from hallway gossip and nods at meetings, mind you--when I asked about a rumor that he was dabbling in "literary writing." Our department secretary would be comfortable to rat out brave dissidents to the regime. She told me she checked out his stuff, sniffing around for anything weird or inappropriate enough to generate an email to HR.

She liked one of his stories and a couple of poems, but she's a sucker for anything that makes her feel clever for having taken introductory classics. Why he kept teaching The Odyssey I can't imagine. Most of the "digital natives" on campus won't read anything longer than their break between classes. "Mandatory training for the human soul," was the only line I scribbled from his talk. Humanistic idealism? Crypto-fascism? I guess the second will get more clicks, if I go through with an interview. Is droning to the press considered "service," in our collective agreement?

She told me he'd won a few "contests," with actual cash involved, though not much. I hoped that meant he'd stop complaining about the cost of coffee on campus.

Now, I guess he has.