My name is Professor Henry Davison. I have been a professor of English for twelve years at Grover Cleveland University here in Ohio. And it’s time to face facts: Everyone is so damn sensitive these days. It’s like nobody remembers that it’s the job of a teacher to mold and motivate his pupils. And this is what I do, the only way I know how. It doesn’t matter if they’re a mousy Freshman woman or a haggard, but still very beautiful grad student, it is my job to try and sleep with my co-eds to inspire their first great novel about middle-aged men.
I am a disciple of the greats: Bukowski, Updike, Wallace. And I am here to tell you there are only two acceptable things to write about in the whole of literature. One is office culture, which I usually tell my male grad students to write about for their first novel. And the other is the sexual liberation and coming of age of forty-year-old men, which I find only a young woman’s perspective can achieve with my careful tutelage.
It’s worked for me, you know. I still remember writing my first novel: Lessons Learned on Bitterbuck Terrace. It’s the story of a young man, just barely thirty-nine, being reintroduced to his love of life by a naïve, but beautiful twenty-two-year old, who helps him gather the strength to leave his mean wife when she tries to make him give up his semi-professional curling league. That’s pure autobiography. It was barely cheating. She gave me an ultimatum. Her or curling. I could’ve gone Olympic if it hadn’t been for my sciatica.
Do my attempts go over well? No. Mostly no. Do I get slapped in the face? A lot. If it was nickels, I’d have at least a dollar the amount of times someone’s hit me. It’s the vicious cycle of being a creative. No one ever understands me. I’m just a young, gleeful, forty-plus-year-old adonis, here to inspire art.
And I know what you’re asking me: Professor, how can you possibly be this cavalier about all this? Doesn’t the nanny state of academia discourage these attempts? Well, you’d be right — in a wrong sort of a way — but let me ask you this: Have you ever tried to fire someone with tenure? You might as well go swim in the desert. But it doesn’t make the slaps hurt less, that’s for sure.