Loudermilk is a figure of numbness, bravura, and excess, a fabulist who has appeared late enough in modernity and the history of democracy to be less at odds with the civilizing influence than, for example, Sade. Loudermilk has flirted with student government. He’s not, on the whole, terribly opposed to institutions. Loudermilk enjoys a good court battle and a nice contract. He likes to play with serious, bureaucratic stuff—and email. He’s friendly with administrators.

Indeed, Loudermilk’s self-generated status as a fake poet and fake person, with a name that seems like a joke, could be explained by the need to have easy access to sex and cash. However, if we take a closer look at Loudermilk, this explanation hardly seems sufficient. First, we know that Loudermilk is already rich; second, his carnal successes and apparent familiarity with socially acceptable forms of violence are unavoidably his own. Thus, Loudermilk’s wish to exist as a proxy for Harry’s writing, for Harry’s “voice,” cannot be explained with recourse to the well-known story about vice and the satisfaction of worldly needs. I emphasize this point because Loudermilk does so very much to make us believe that this is what he is up to. He makes us dream—fantasize, even—that he is taking advantage of Harry’s writing in order to “get” something, in order to obtain some freedom that he could not otherwise access.

But Loudermilk doesn’t need Harry to obtain pleasure or even power. Rather, Loudermilk does what he does because he can do it. He does what he does because the stakes of his chosen school are so bathetically low. He does what he does because of the existence of institutional structures that produce the illusion of self-expression, along with the related illusions of self-determination and liberty. Loudermilk does what he does in a society in which there is, allegedly, no “natural” audience for poetry—in which poetry and its audience must, necessarily, be invented by the institution. Loudermilk decides to participate in this game of invention on his own terms. If the institution wants to render Loudermilk’s self-expression false, a gesture accomplished merely in order to obtain a fellowship, then so be it! Loudermilk will go one step further: he will be already false, already a pastiche, already a construction.

Loudermilk, c’est moi.