Chapters (60)
- Cover
- Title Page
- Personae
- I: Early Days
- One. Control
- Two. Doubt
- Three. Fate
- Four. Same
- Five. Fine Arts
- Six. In Loco Parentis
- Seven. Settling
- Eight. Neighbors
- Nine. Prospects
- Ten. The Lucky
- Eleven. Instruction
- Twelve. Same
- Thirteen. This Is a Pipe
- Fourteen. This Is Not a Pipe
- Fifteen. The Reason
- Sixteen. That Person
- Seventeen. Predictably
- II: Writing Teacher
- Eighteen. Early Poems
- Nineteen. Motivation
- Twenty. Allegory
- Twenty-One. Grief
- Twenty-Two. A Portrait
- Twenty-Three. Veils
- Twenty-Four. Soft Power
- Twenty-Five. Lists
- Twenty-Six. A Break
- Twenty-Seven. Elsewhere
- Twenty-Eight. Custom
- Twenty-Nine. Parity
- Thirty. Fortune
- III: Volta
- Thirty-One. Images
- Thirty-Two. A Very Interesting Young Man
- Thirty-Three. Letters
- Thirty-Four. We Prefer to See Ourselves Living
- Thirty-Five. Love
- Thirty-Six. The Iceberg
- IV: Your Best Reader
- Thirty-Seven. A Novelist
- Thirty-Eight. In Advance of the Broken Arm
- Thirty-Nine. Their Penultimate Encounter
- Forty. Détente
- Forty-One. Worlds
- Forty-Two. Recognition
- Forty-Three. Persistence
- Forty-Four. And Then
- Forty-Five. Mingling
- Forty-Six. You
- Forty-Seven. Persona
- Forty-Eight. Est et Non
- Forty-Nine. The Author
- Epilogue
- Afterword: The Libertine
- Acknowledgments
- About the Authors
The kid with the cross on his forehead is staring at the ground so hard he may burn a hole into it. Beans likes him, if this is possible, even less than he likes Troy Loudermilk. Why someone like Loudermilk would put up with a specimen like that is a curious case. Probably has something to do with needing to seem plausibly human while you walk around looking like a boxer-briefs commercial.
Troy Loudermilk is saluting Marta. “Bye!” he says, grinning moronically. He bears his submerged wieners away.
Marta watches Loudermilk go. “That is a very great poet, or so I believe.” Marta eyes Beans. “We’ll have to see if he can live up to his potential.”
Beans forces himself to smile, he hopes enigmatically. “Anyway, about the manuscript,” Beans recommences, “what you were saying was so—” But he stops.
Marta has glided off. Beans is incensed to see her standing now in the company of Troy Loudermilk, Loudermilk’s presumably foot-long schlong, and Loudermilk’s bizarre minion, the last of the trio having already succeeded in smearing the entire lower half of his face in Heinz.
Beans watches Marta nod, watches her rest her shapely hand on Loudermilk’s shoulder and leave it there. More than anything else, Anton Beans hates the lucky. Not only do they absorb all the top prizes in life’s insipid games, but they have the habit of doing very little work in the process. Anton Beans abhors the lucky. They are the cherry on the top of humanity’s miscreation.
Beans turns to the cooler, roots furiously for a seltzer.
Eleven. Instruction
Eleven
Instruction
Clare Elwil has made the decision not to attend any of the Seminars’ much-touted seminars, classes on the theory of composition that have allegedly defined the American literary landscape for decades now. She pretends to herself that she is apathetic—that she has no head for ahistorical formalism, the wages of New Critical disinterest in all but professional politics, the cult of style, etc., the Seminars’ celebrated and overweening interest in mechanics—but the real problem is the other students. Because she herself cannot write, she has little concern for the writing of others, and all the others ever seem to want to talk about is their own writing. By way of substitute, Clare will double-count a graduate course she took in college. She has been apprised by administrators that this is not merely possible but even usual. “You want,” they say, “time to write.” She will just need to come in and touch pen to form.