Just A Little Off The Top

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© 2004 R.C. Barajas

he room was roaring summer, so hot you'd never have guessed it was February outside and dipping into the 30s. Five, six, finally seven faces were seated in front of me, mostly looking at their shoes, rummaging in backpacks, or, in one case, leafing through a bathing suit catalogue. Catalogue girl giggled and flashed a page to her friend four seats down. On the wall, the standard-issue school clock gave us 5 minutes before class was to begin. I rearranged my stack of articles, still warm from the photocopier. Scalding air was blowing down on my head from a vent above, and I felt the first alarming signs of sleepiness, despite my discomfort in being the guest speaker for the evening.

Marymount University couldn't be called a top-tier institute of higher learning, though admittedly small and expensive and Catholic about sums up my composite knowledge of the place. My friend Kate, for whom I had agreed to "guest teach" is, however, a top-tier teacher, and I know at least one graduate of the school whom I would unhesitatingly classify as a top-tier person, so it all just proved my long-held theory that it's really up to the student whether they come out of a school well-educated or not. That was beside the point that night. The faces in front of me waited for my words to enlighten, to entertain, to teach. To keep them awake in the wretched heat.

I sipped at my water bottle, peeking glances at the clock, and tried to feel wise and professorial, hoping top-tier, experienced Kate would pick up the pieces if I tanked.

She had asked me to come to two of her undergraduate seminars on "Writing for the Social Sciences" and speak on the topic of being edited. I was to tell her students how it felt to have ones writing examined by experts - experts in the subtleties of narrative arc, poised phasing, scrupulous grammar. Yes, I thought, they should hear what it was like to watch as one's words were surgically dissected by the blue pen of death. They should be told about the relentless compacting of one's ego under the bitter jack-boot of disenfranchised, underpaid scholars until it resembles nothing so much as slug innards. They should know what it is to smile and nod as hours, days, weeks of work get excised - like cancerous tumors - leaving the bits oozing into the stained carpet of the editor's windowless office.

Or something to that effect. I was hoping to be uplifting.

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