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Dear Committee Members QUOTES

Dear Committee Members QUOTES

1 " Young would-be novelists and poets believe that art is eternal. Au contraire: we are in the business of ephemera, the era of floating islands of trash, and most of the things we feel deeply and inscribe on the page will disappear. "

― Julie Schumacher , Dear Committee Members

2 " Belatedly it occurs to me that some members of your HR committee, a few skeptical souls, may be clutching a double strand of worry beads and wondering aloud about the practicality or usefulness of a degree in English rather than, let’s say, computers. Be reassured: the literature student has learned to inquire, to question, to interpret, to critique, to compare, to research, to argue, to sift, to analyze, to shape, to express. His intellect can be put to broad use. The computer major, by contrast, is a technician—a plumber clutching a single, albeit shining, box of tools. "

― Julie Schumacher , Dear Committee Members

3 " The reading and writing of fiction both requires and instills empathy—the insertion of oneself into the life of another. "

― Julie Schumacher , Dear Committee Members

4 " I haven’t published a novel in six years; instead, I fill my departmental hours casting words of praise into the bureaucratic abyss. On multiple occasions, serving on awards committees, I was actually required to write LORs to myself. "

― Julie Schumacher , Dear Committee Members

5 " One theory here: the deanery is annoyed with our requests for parity and, weary of waiting for us to retire, has decided to kill us. Let the academic year begin! "

― Julie Schumacher , Dear Committee Members

6 " and we both know how beautiful the book will be, how clearly it will speak to something within us—some previously unarticulated thought or reflection that, once recognized, we will never want to be without again. "

― Julie Schumacher , Dear Committee Members

7 " October 16, 2009 Avengers Paintball, Inc. 1778 Industrial Blvd. Lakeville, MN 55044 Esteemed Avengers, This letter recommends Mr. Allen Trent for a position at your paintball emporium. Mr. Trent received a C– in my expository writing class last spring, which—given my newly streamlined and increasingly generous grading criteria—is quite the accomplishment. His final project consisted of a ten-page autobiographical essay on the topic of his own rageful impulses and his (often futile) attempts to control them. He cited his dentist and his roommate as primary sources. Consider this missive a testament to Mr. Trent’s preparedness for the work your place of business undoubtedly has in store. Hoping to maintain a distance of at least one hundred yards, Jason T. Fitger Professor of Creative Writing and English Payne University (“Teach ’til It Hurts”) "

― Julie Schumacher , Dear Committee Members

8 " (Currently, we count ourselves fortunate to have functional toilets. I don’t know what your living conditions are at Lattimore—tidy and sterile, I suspect—but here, given a construction project initiated on behalf of our Economics faculty, who Must Be Kept Comfortable at All Times, we are alternately frozen and nearly smoked, via pestilent fumes, out of our building. Between the construction dust and the radiators emitting erratic bursts of steam heat, the intrepid faculty members who have remained in their offices over the winter break are humid with sweat and dusted with ash and resemble two-legged cutlets dredged in flour.) "

― Julie Schumacher , Dear Committee Members

9 " In fact, if I were a betting man, I’d wager that only 10 percent of the English instruction list will answer your call for nominations. Why? First, because more than a third of our faculty now consists of temporary (adjunct) instructors who creep into the building under cover of darkness to teach their graveyard shifts of freshman comp; they are not eligible to vote or to serve. Second, because the remaining two-thirds of the faculty, bearing the scars of disenfranchisement and long-term abuse, are busy tending to personal grudges like scraps of carrion on which they gnaw in the gloom of their offices. "

― Julie Schumacher , Dear Committee Members

10 " But there are other faculty here on campus who are not disposed to see notable scholarship ignored; and let it be known that, in the darkened, blood-strewn caverns of our offices, we are hewing our textbooks and keyboards into spears. "

― Julie Schumacher , Dear Committee Members

11 " The poor misguided soul described me as generous, “a champion for the department and particularly its students”; he went on to say that my disagreeable nature was “at least 50 percent façade” and that “Fitger behaves like more of an ass than he actually is.” Janet described these comments as persuasive praise. "

― Julie Schumacher , Dear Committee Members

12 " but an idea had presented itself to him, knocking at his brain like a nighttime traveler, and instead of shutting the door in its face, Browles built it a fire, he drew a chair for it up to the hearth and spent half a decade trying to decipher and then convey what it struggled to tell him. He was patient and industrious and quietly determined. Buffeted by setbacks and rejection and his own limitations, he persevered. "

― Julie Schumacher , Dear Committee Members

13 " Thanks to Lawrence Jacobs, world’s most enthusiastic and supportive spouse, who read the first draft of this book and said, “I’m glad we have different last names. "

― Julie Schumacher , Dear Committee Members

14 " In the meantime, I hope you will not consign her to a windowless environment populated entirely by unsocialized clones who long ago abandoned the reading and discussion of literature in favor of creating ever more restrictive and meaningless ways in which humans are intended to make themselves known to one another. "

― Julie Schumacher , Dear Committee Members

15 " We argued for weeks about the existence and then the location of a particular semicolon, "

― Julie Schumacher , Dear Committee Members

16 " sociology has gone the way of poli-sci and econ, now firmly in the clutches of rabid number crunchers who have abandoned or forgotten the link between their abstruse theoretical musings and the presence of human beings on the planet’s surface; "

― Julie Schumacher , Dear Committee Members

17 " February 2, 2010—Groundhog Day Addistar Network, Inc. Bridget Maslow, HR bmaslow@addistar.com Dear Ms. Maslow: Though I prefer to send letters of recommendation via the U.S. Postal Service, now considered by many to be as quaint as muttonchop whiskers and the butter churn, I hereby accede to your request for an e-mail evaluation of Quentin Eshe, who has applied for the position of assistant communications coordinator at Addistar. "

― Julie Schumacher , Dear Committee Members

18 " you’ve clearly been charged with hiring a jack-of-all-trades. And Dr. Auden is that mythical creature you seek: fully qualified to teach British and American literature, women’s studies, composition, creative writing, intermediate parasailing, advanced sword swallowing, and subcategories and permutations of the above. "

― Julie Schumacher , Dear Committee Members

19 " I would outlaw literature exams entirely; I would also eschew the twin barbarities of 'attendance' and 'participation' as grading criteria, necessitated by workload increase. "

― Julie Schumacher , Dear Committee Members

20 " I shall wish her well and be the first to welcome her to "the writing life," which, despite its horrors, is possibly one of the few sorts of lives worth living at all. "

― Julie Schumacher , Dear Committee Members