> declined. Then he wrote a long and very negative evaluation of my
> performance in class which though "brilliant" ...had the effect of
> mau-mauing and disrupting his class. He went on to found a pomo historicist
> lit crit magazine and then, on to Harvard where he put together some "sexy"
> history of ideas program for them.
Yep, these are the same folks who tossed all my job apps/manuscripts into the trash and keep my Comp Lit friends from landing the appointments they deserve. Just as Wall Street is endlessly speculative with Other People's Money, the academariat -- the precise US equivalent of the nomenklatura, without the, how shall we say, theological backbone of its Soviet analogue -- is endlessly radical with OPI (other people's ideas). You can say anything, but heaven help you if you make the slightest gesture of putting an idea into practice or pitch in with a living wage campaign with the university janitors. Then you're consigned to the Gehenna of adjunctitude and underemployment.
My own revenge is to write better theory than those ratbastards can even begin to imagine and to freeware the stuff -- cut out University Inc, the publisher, all the hustlers standing between the text and its audience. It's the ultimate "fuck you" to them and their rathole of a system (Eminem says this much more poetically than I possibly can).
-- Dennis