I had a system for writing papers in college: 1 page = 1 hour. It takes a half hour or twenty minutes per page to spew out all your thoughts, and 30-40 minutes to edit. “Editing” meant proofreading it once. No need to go overboard with those secondary drafts. These were undergrad college papers, not high criticism I was hoping to have reviewed by the Pulitzer committee.
My English Lit III professor was one of the many Humanities and Literature department faculty members who drew me away from my original major at Bard College: Film. I wanted, more than anything else, to impress this woman. I was interviewed by the Bard Free Press and was quoted insisting that I would marry the professor one day. In retrospect, her seeing that in print might have tipped her off to the fact that my ideas weren’t always grounded in reality.
I felt a tingling on my cheeks as she passed back our 8-page midterm papers on George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda. Sitting at the wide wooden table, I watched her serenely slide each stack of stapled paper to my fellow students. I watched several of my peers sheepishly collect their papers and grimace at the notes. My first paper on Wordsworth received an ‘A.’ The only note appeared on the last page and pontificated on how hard it is to “relate the sonic values of a poem” while writing about the language in an academic essay. Less a critique and more an observation. She was simply sharing her thoughts! It is hard to mimic the sonic implications of words when people are reading those words silently. My writing was near-perfect save for the fact I couldn’t quite express the mouthfeel of Wordsworth’s poetry while analyzing it. That first paper was enough for this professor to ask me to walk her to her office so I could talk about my goals, my high school education, my life up to that point. We walked in the orange glow of the evening sun past boisterous students excitedly marching in big groups to the cafeteria for dinner.
In that first office meeting, I felt like she was trying to adopt me. I never in my life had someone show such a keen interest in my mind. Until then, my teachers had a vague sense that I was going to squander whatever potential they saw in me. It felt like they were preemptively disappointed. This professor wanted to talk to me. She liked hearing my thoughts, and we had a great rapport in those office meetings. It didn’t hurt that she was a gorgeous 20-something woman with thick black curly hair, a slight lisp that made me look at her lips whenever she was speaking, and she wrote poetry about her bike seat inadvertently making her come when she rode it. I know I wasn’t the only person on campus who found her ethereally sexy because a male faculty member came up to me in the cafeteria holding the student newspaper in his hand, pointed at my quote, and said “she’s a force of nature” which is a smart adult’s way of saying “this lady fucks” or “I wish I could say more but I’d get fired.” I was smitten and ready to give up my film degree if it meant visiting this office every week to stare at her Velma glasses and the bright orange baubles she wore around her neck that called attention to where the neckline on her sweaters ended.
Read the rest here.
