There are a few events that have found their way into MFA lore at the University. My housesitting adventure in Professor Joseph K’s home, complete with eating “magic cookies,” is one. After our fall-out, Professor K bitched about to any of his acolytes who happened to be nearby. I happened to have found out about it from Rosalyn’s husband, then husband at Rosalyn’s birthday party. Which now bring me to the other: To deflect attention from herself, Rosalyn has happily spread the cookie monster about me. Of course, Rosalyn’s falling down the stairs had many witnesses. There were the few who saw it first-hand and came directly to her aid, and then there were the other party-goers who found out within minutes. With so many people who knew about the fall, it was very hard for Rosalyn to live it down. And the program’s co-director had first-hand knowledge of it, since she was the party’s emcee.

What is an MFA program without a little heresay? The MFA welcome party was canceled and the reason was spread through the grapevine: The co-director said to Rosalyn that the party was canceled because of her infamous drunken fall down the stairs. Using 9/11 and the “spiritual wound” was bad enough, but this was a personal attack. Rosalyn, who was no pushover, did at least say a few things in her defense.

In pre-blog/MySpace/Facebook/Twitter era, some of us used social networking. On a Yahoo Groups board someone set up for our MFA program, Liza Radley and I expressed our anger over what happened to Rosalyn and the excuses used to pull the rug out from under a tradition. The same board was also used to organize several unsanctioned MFA “welcome parties.”

To give some credit to the program, a bland reception was held in the top-level courtyard of the University’s Humanities building, on the south side of the “H.” But a cheese-and-crackers operation in the afternoon of a school day isn’t quite the same as an evening everyone has set aside to meet each other. But the excuses were totally unnecessary.

I had the impression that the English Department wanted to end this whole party business. The year before, I heard from a friend that the department chair Dr. Muir was quite bitchy and garulous when he asked her for the funds to buy refreshments for the party. Perhaps it would be the last banal fall semester for a while and Dr. Muir just appeared unprofessional. My first semester in the program, however, was marked by September 11.

In years past, there was some idea that there would be a party and the date would be announced. The semester’s arriving class, however, had no idea. We were all horrified by the attacks, stressed out afterwards, and frightened by the developments that were rapidly happening on a national level. And life had to go on. We wrote our stories and poems and read them for the workshops, read literature for our classes, and worked at our jobs. We went back to some kind of normalcy, whether we liked it or not. There was, however, no sign that there’d be a party to welcome the new crop of writers and poets.

As part of that new group, I was disappointed. Were we unworthy of a welcome?

Rosalyn and I e-mailed one of the co-directors of the program about it. We both got responses that amounted to that it wasn’t going to happen. In the e-mail I got, the esteemed master poet said something about since there was this “great spiritual wound,” it didn’t seem appropriate for us to be throwing the party.

Using 9/11 as an excuse? This was definitely exploiting this event to do something that this director probably wanted to do in the first place. Cancelling the semester and giving all of us a sabbatical, a few months to heal, would have also been appropriate if we really want to measure the appropriateness of things based on how “spiritually wounded” we all were. Of course, we didn’t get that. So a party to help welcome our group was definitely a step for us to to move on.

After some effort, the efforts of those of us who lobbied for the party paid off. The retired English teacher-turned-professional student took on the role of hostess one more time. There was food and drink, and the program co-director welcomed us. We had an opportunity to come out into MFA society, and we got paired up with more senior classmates as our mentors. And everything was going well with wine-facilitated conversations in the kitchen and the living room until we all heard a thud come from the middle of the house.

At the bottom of the staircase that led from the living room to the basement floor, Rosalyn took a fall and bumped her head. There would be no more parties at the retired teacher’s house.

Henry was a very smart critic and as drunk as the writers he interviewed, wrote about, hung out with, or all of the above. Actually, he was drunker than any of them. Think of Henry as the Keith Richards of the literature scholars.

Even inebriated. Henry was very sharp. When I took his class on science fiction, he taught while drunk off his arse. No doubt he kept a bottle or bottles of something to drink in his office. Don’t quote me on this. The University also had a pub on campus, so there were also legitimate means to drink and then go on to the next class. The University pub wasn’t his style, though. The strange thing was that he was still very lucid and his comments helped greatly in the understanding of those works. He slurred some words here and there, but he always stayed on line, whether in his lecture or in reading passages from the books.

Henry wore Hawaiian shirts and shorts for most of the year. I don’t ever remember seeing him wear a pair of pants. He only got a haircut every few months, but author photos from some books suggested that he previously had his hair cut just once a year. Drunk and unkempt, he did behave professionally. He did his work as a professor and he treated his students well.

There was something utterly perverse about a professor holding “bar hours.” Professor K, who tried to push perversity in his writing topics, classroom reading selections, and his assignments, often retired to his home and drank with very few students. Professor O’Donough’s weekly dive bar party was a place where students could continue conversations that got cut short by the end of the classes or his formal office hours, relax, and get to know each other and Henry and his wife, also a professor of American literature at the University. I don’t remember a majority of the hours, well, because I had quite a few drinks. And I never got as obnoxious as I did on Professor K’s office firewater.

In the middle of my graduate career, the “bar hours” became trendy. Classmates of mine who had no association with Professor O’Donough – they weren’t in his classes, doing thesis with him, alumni, or even writers he had a professional relationship with – figured going to the dive bar in the strip mall in the suburban border of the City was cool. I didn’t attend the bar hours during this period, though I’ve always been simultaneously amused and annoyed at the trendiness.

In my last year, in the fall, during my final semester of actual classes, I decided to go to “bar hours” with a longtime classmate I’ve known since my late undergraduate career, also someone who had some association with Henry O’Donough. I may have said hello to Henry and some other people. My memory’s not clear here. I’ll blame it on the beer. I remember this scene clearly: I saw Mindy Shatner with her University acronym-embroidered sweatshirt hanging out with some classmates, most likely students of Henry’s wife. She saw me, raised her chin at me to say “What’s up?” After my stint of being the TA of her creative writing class and dealing with her being rude and disruptive to the point of verbal assault, I wasn’t ready to forgive. After all, all of this happened in the spring semester before. I quietly turned away and decided to focus my attention on my beer and my friend. She would be invisible to me the rest of the night. It was the last time I attended “bar hours.”

Henry O’Donough had since retired. I missed his final “bar hours” party. I don’t know where I was nor do I remember what I was doing at the time. The things that he taught about reading science fiction and post-modern works took me time to learn. I continued to learn things long after being out of his course. I could have easily learned the wrong thing from him – that in order to be writerly or literary, getting drunk was the way to go. Honestly, I don’t think he even bought into that idea. He was simply someone who drank and one of those rare people who could work through their intoxication. I think of him from time to time and wonder how he’s doing. Fantastic, I hope.

It’s funny that Professor Joseph K would find himself in the midst of a Kafkaesque nightmare at one point in his career. Some time after I ended my academic and professional association with him, he found himself the subject of a University investigation. I only have second-hand information on this subject. Given that I had been a student and employee of his for two years and that the investigation occurred while I was still in the MFA program, I’m surprised I was never interviewed as a witness. Getting back  to the subject at hand, the reason why the University was looking closely into Professor K’s affairs was that a student felt their grade was at stake after she objected to attending Professor K’s class when there was a sexually explicit presentation.

When I first heard the news, I was attending a birthday party for Rosalyn, my friend who essentially replaced me as Joe’s secretary. Somehow we remained friends despite that drama. However, when Rosalyn mentioned that Professor K was facing an investigation, I bluntly said he had it coming.

I’m clearly not the professor’s biggest fan. I definitely did not have any sympathy for him when I heard about. However, the investigation took a strange turn.

From what I understand, especially from what this grad school classmate told me, was that her complaint was about feeling forced to attend a class session where she was not comfortable with the subject matter. Joseph’s guest speaker was a member of the fetish community who did a presentation on S&M. She also felt how Professor K responded to her request not to attend put her grade in jeopardy. So when the University’s offices responded to the complaint, it seems logical that they would look into if this complaint had merit or not. The investigation, however, went much further.

This is what Rosalyn told me about this process: the University’s investigators interviewed Joesph’s students, about the event. They must have been keeping a dossier on Professor K, for they went after things not relevant to the case at hand, such as allegations of favoritism, unprofessional behavior towards other students, and substance abuse. Joe’s students, including Rosalyn, were asked about these things. And the character issue would become much bigger than the original complaint about a student being subjected to explicit sexual content.

The charges regarding the original complaint were dropped. However, the investigation uncovered Professor K drinking hard liquor in the office. This is something I can definitely verify. When I worked for Joe, he did keep things such as Central American firewater in his office. During my first semester of grad school, I even helped myself to some firewater when I was working in his office. In fact, I helped myself to most of that bottle. One night, when I was the student who administered the class evaluation, where we all filled scantrons about the professor’s performance, I was wasted. Somehow, I thought it would be funny if I hammed up reading the evaluation instructions to the class. Looking back, I must have been grating. There was also the time when I house-sat for Joe that I found his “special” cookies and ate them all. If I were asked about these things, I’d have to tell the truth. So it was a good thing for both me and Professor K that I wasn’t interviewed.

Even without my testimony, the evidence regarding Joe’s drinking in his office must have strong. From what I heard from Rosalyn, the University placed a reprimand on Professor K’s records about the drinking despite dropping charges.

As for the student who complained about the inappropriate class session, she was ostracized for a while because of the loud backlash from Professor K’s acolytes. Then a friend of mine in the program found herself in the midst of this drama even though she had nothing to do with the compaint. Her only crime was that she shared the same first name.

Shortly after I resigned from working for Professor K, I prayed for some kind of justice. I’m sure some of my predecessors who also have their own fall-out stories did the same thing. I hoped enough people would see Joe for the arse he is, especially the sub-literate acolytes who think he’s brilliant because they don’t read. I might as well hope that George W. Bush repent of all the horrors of his presidency.  It’s possible Professor K’s the victim of an over-zealous investigator who wanted to make the case stick against him at any cost. Knowing that they did go beyond investigating the original complaint makes me a little more sympathetic to him, though it doesn’t endear him to me. Whether Joe evolved personally from this experience or not, I don’t know. Perhaps the investigation and the reprimand were more than punishment enough.

I should be over something like this. As much as I can dwell on the whole MFA experience and what a racket it was, people like the Professor Joseph K are a joke. Unfortunately, my dealings with him and his self-serving behavior haunt me to this day. At the start, he was the mentor figure, the one who gave me admission to his inner literary circle. In the end, I got tossed aside. As much as he told people that they should do what’s beneficial to them as writers, he wanted people to take his workshops and tell him how brilliant he was for publishing his slender little volumes of deviant behavior. Regarding his writing workshops, there wasn’t much to get out of them. Publishable in his terms meant “I publish you, you publish me.” As a grad school friend of mine said, fiction could not create a villain as evil as Professor K.

As much as I may feel like I’ve forgiven him, the anger still surfaces from time to time. Personally, being cold shouldered by someone who once built me up hurts. The drama where he took his anger out on me for rejecting him took its toll on me creatively for a while in grad school. Who would think that taking another fiction workshop professor would be tantamount to saying, “Professor K, I’m blowing you off!” Looking backwards, there are infinite possibilities of what I could have done to have avoided being a casualty of Professor K’s unprofessionalism. Unfortunately, there’s no way to change any of that. Looking forwards, I do not need Professor K. I can’t really depend on the history. He is not someone I can count on to be  mentor, a reference, or even friend.

Perhaps if I stuck with Professor K, I might be publishing sick little volumes of my own, dwelling on the same kind of topics that caught his fancy. I could have easily used his name as a reference for my work with his university press journal, though I can’t say I’m completely proud of the work published during my tenure as his assistant or even before or after. I’m not sure if the potential benefits outweigh the price. This person inspired me to get caller ID for my landline phone several years back. This was pre-cell phone for me and it doesn’t speak well of him.

All that Joe is good for now is a character in one of my stories. I’m not interested in a literal novel about the grad school experience, so he may find his way in some other story. After all, I wonder what professor was the source of Sabul in Ursuala K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. Be warned, Professor. You are a fair target for my writing, whether in fiction or creative non-fiction.

We’re at a party early on for the University’s MFA program and I mention working with Professor Joseph K. You ask me what he’s like and I’ll try to give you a sound byte answer. After all, this is a party, and the conversation’s not supposed to be too deep. So, here’s what I say: Joe’s a good guy and I work very well with him. I also enjoy his workshops a lot.

My answer would change much later, as I was only one year into my academic and professional relationship with Professor K. Being his secretary didn’t pay much, but I liked it better than working in the supermarket. There, I was paid better and I had benefits, but with Joe, I had keys to the mail room and his office, and I had a code for the English Department copier. I had a place to hang my coat, to read, to study, and even to write. I even had my own desk so I wouldn’t use his. What I had lost in practical terms, I gained in privilege. Which is essentially the case with anyone who goes into something arts or humanities related. I also harbored great hopes that my association with Joe would benefit me in the future. Perhaps I would become an editor or a professor, or even an editor-professor like Joe.

In other jobs where I was at an entry level and the boss were professional mentors, they were often happy to help someone like me move on to another job. They recognized that these jobs weren’t meant to last forever. They knew these jobs were starting points for a long term career track. For example, when I tutored for the English Center at the East County college, the professor who coordinated the program was happy to serve as a reference when I got an interview for a tutoring position for the University. She was definitely a good example of a healthy mentor.

Joe, on the other hand, was not. During the second summer I worked for Joe, the TA’ship that formally was my professor’s secretary job only paid $200 a month and I didn’t get paid after the spring semester was finished, so I tried to find a job. I went high and low. Not surprisingly, I could not get arrested for applying to Target, Trader Joe’s or even Borders. Perhaps I was overqualified with my bachelor’s degree. I sent my resume to a local subsidiary of a an international publishing company and I got an interview. My $200 a month assistant editor job qualified me for a job that paid at least ten times as much, even if it mean losing a title, privilege, and perks. My ability to abuse copier codes might vanish. However, being able to pay my rent and the bills would have been more secure if I got the job. Only, I didn’t tell Joe and he found out from someone else.

Rosalyn was someone I became good friends with in the course of program and she was also one of Joe’s acolytes. I helped train her to do some things for the avant-garde literary journal, including dealing with PageMaker, and I told her the news out of excitement. She then told Joe, who sent me a restrained, but nasty e-mail telling me I couldn’t work at this company and his university press enterprise at the same time. E-mail is often strictly text and it can be difficult to gage the tone. However, he seemed genuinely offended that I wanted to move on to something better.

I did go to the interview. The local publishing house’s subsidiary was located in a downtown high-rise and I even got to see my apartment building from my interviewer’s office. Looking back, I was unnaturally stiff in my shirt, tie, and suit. In this Southern California city, dressing up isn’t natural at all, even though the protocol applies to job interviews. I did not get the job.

I still had my $200 a month job, but the end was coming soon. My personal, academic, and professional relationship with Professor Joseph K had been strained since the middle of the spring semester, my second in the program. I had known him for two and a half years, and he had treated me like a son for most of that time. I looked to him as a paternal figure in my life, mainly because my own relationship with my father was strained. There was a dark side to all this. At one point after Easter, Joe summoned me to his home for an intervention. I became less diligent in my duties as his secretary/assistant editor, and he called me on my flaking out on some tasks. Fair enough. Then he said I had no loyalty to him.* Intuitively, I knew there was something wrong with that statement, even though I wanted to salvage the relationship. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to continue being his gopher, but I just didn’t want to quit. I have learned since then when it’s time to quit, I should definitely do so. To continue is to make things worse, which was the shape of things to come.

Also, he was supposed to chair my thesis. I hadn’t asked him yet, but working with Joe seemed to be the direction by default. There was that other guy, his rival in the MFA program, but I wasn’t sure about him. Joe has said enough to taint my views of someone I didn’t even know. If he was possessive of me on a professional level to the point where it was better for me to work for $200 a month rather than get a job with professional pay, then workshopping with other creative writing teachers was definitely anathema. There was a popular visiting professor and I wanted to take a workshop with her. Oh, I should have known that was the beginning of the end. Of course, I did know.

*As someone who got involved in a Christian fundamentalist cult in my mid-twenties, this raised a red flag. Intuitively, I knew there was something wrong with it, even if I couldn’t rationally defend it as valid. It was only later when I met with a counselor did I find my instinct about Joe’s loyalty remarks validated.

Here is an excerpt from my previous entry on Joe:

The literature students were no match for Joe. They appeared to be staid and conservative in comparison to him. The creative writers perceived this and ganged themselves against the MA’s. Joe often favored the MFA’s, showing preference for their ideas in the seminar’s discourse. Joe, or at least his persona, openly eschewed canonical authors. When an MA student proposed doing his final presentation on Virginia Wolff’s madness, Joe dismissively said that was old school. Since I had seen Joe’s personal library, I knew he did not completely subscribe to that view. However, he saw the graduate lit students as orthodox, unremarkable, unreceptive, inflexible, not even worthy of the A’s or B’s he gave them. Then again, was an A or a B even really worth anything in any graduate course?

Many of the literature students were more grounded in the canon, especially the specializations they were drawn to. They were not accustomed to thinking of the avant-garde feeding into literature, unless they were post-modernists. Their ways of talking about literature did not fit in with how he discussed it. They were confronted with the bizarre, the outré, the experimental, the independently published, even stuff that was downright bad. Some of the outsider writers weren’t that good at all, but their ideas were worth discussing. It may have been one thing to be required to read badly written stories, but seeing a sexually explicit German film, Taxi Xum Klo, was definitely much for some. Some scenes left little to the imagination; pornographic, though strong, would be accurate. Like most of work Joe presented, there was supposed to be something beyond the obvious. Or was there?

Beyond Joe’s choice of material, we were treated to Joe’s work. One story of his may have been included in the reader he prepared for the class. During one of the times we met at his home, he did a dramatic reading where he played Charles Manson. His stories were often like two character plays without dialogue tags or description of the characters. His subjects were often sexually unconventional people or murderers, sometimes even both. At this point, he was writing a body of creative work about serial killers, so his work qualified as madness in literature. None of the MA’s cared that Joe was a minor league literary star, a power broker in the avant-garde literary community. I’m sure a certain percentage of the MFA’s also shared similar sentiments. However, the MFA’s in his class treated him like a god. Their reverence was certainly rewarded.

I’m sure this stirs up a huge canister of worms, especially since I haven’t posted about Joe in about a year.

When I was a young college student who majored in French, the French literature professor showed us Fassbinder’s adaptation of Querelle, which some of my classmates had the same reactions as the graduate students who saw Taxi Xum Klo. While I am at a loss to remember the point behind Professor K presenting his German film, the French professor’s showing of Querelle was about Jean Genet, who is very germane to the subject of that course.

Needless to say, I’ll never make students watch a gay, semi-pornographic film. I don’t think it’ll ever happen. I don’t even inflict that stuff on my gay friends.

She also fell out with close friend and poetic collaborator Alexandra and then Shelly, her best friend from her undergrad years. Who knows why it happened, but the news about Liza dissolving her frienship with Alexandra spread quickly through the university’s MFA program, which was such a gossip mill.

A couple of years before my “break-up” with Liza, I was seeing a counselor who asked me in one session to rate the healthiness of my friendships on a scale of 1 to 10. I think I rated Liza 3 or 4. Not good at all.

*Pseudonym from “Liza Radley” by the Jam. Here are the lyrics.

Liza Radley
If any of my MFA experiences were like Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories or Cabaret, then Liza Radley was my Sally Bowles. She had that classic gamine appeal, somewhere between Audrey Hepburn and Liza Minelli*. Artsy and free spirited without having the affected persona that often accompanies those traits, Liza commanded attention nonetheless. Though small in stature, she was outgoing, openly passionate, and loudly opinionated, which made her a memorable presence as a poet.

I met Liza at the first or second week mixer for new MFA’s. It is difficult to remember everything about someone at those meetings. I also met her on the bus ride home from one of my fiction workshops and on a bus evacuation of the campus during 9/11, but neither of those meetings had much impact on me. Even though she was never my girlfriend, a date had the most impact on me in getting to know her as my friend. Since Liza was new to town, she often took new friends to Hipps, a notorious drag queen nightclub was in the district where she lived. Somewhere between my time at Professor K. office doing journal work and her time at the poetry journal office, we agreed to meet at Hipps at the end of the week. I put on my favorite iridescent shirt and boots, while Liza showed up in a simple red chemise. Oddly, some blonde women who looked like they were from the more conservative eastern part of the county thought Liza was a drag queen. We both found that perception strange and amusing, and something about conspiratorially watching the drag queens humiliate selected patrons was fun. After Hipps had its run, we went down to a British styled pub, where Liza flirted with an Irish bartender who knew nothing of Seamus Heaney. At the end of the night and our drinks, we walked arm and arm for a couple of more blocks and crashed at her apartment. We had breakfast at a Russian restaurant a block north of her place, which was good for our hangovers.

I soon started to hang out with Liza and Alexandra, a gifted, but conservative poet who pursued having a close friendship with Liza. Occasionally in the orbit of the Liza/Alexandra nucleus were Brandon, the mid-western surfer poet who sounded had more of a southern California accent than I, and Gabriel, a textbook Gen-X type who always had something sarcastic to say about everyone. There were a few times where Alexandra, Brandon, Gabriel, and I hung out and played cards and drank lots of red wine. Then there was the time where we went to Monster Trucks at the stadium. Liza made spontaneous plans to go to to the event and got Alexandra and Gabriel on board. I got the message late, so I bought a ticket from a scalper and tried to find them once there. If I had a cell phone, locating them would have been easy. However, I spent an hour canvassing a few levels, and finally met my friends by chance. I described it as a “happy accident,” which Gabriel would make fun of for a while. That night, I also met Topher, her on and off boyfriend of the past few years who would become central to the drama of her life in the next year.

Before Topher was back in her life, she dated a nerdy guy from the Essay Composition department. I don’t remember if I’ve met him on any outings, but I do remember hanging out with him for a bit at the Halloween party at her boyfriend’s house. Liza wore a small, tight black dress, a cowboy hat and boots, transforming the outfit with spiderwebs and Arachne on her skin, done with eyeliner. My skirt was longer, of course. I had a Chinaman’s cheongsam and I wore that. Some other people, such as Brandon dressed up as an Australian outbacker and Gabriel in a priest’s outfit, were present. There was one guy, Hosea, whose form-fitting skeleton costume highlighted the shape of his ass, which I kept looking at throughout the entire party. For a while afterwards, I would refer to him having a nice ass if I couldn’t or didn’t want to remember his name. Liza and her boyfriend retreated at one point from the party to his room, where they had loud sex that could be heard by everyone in the living room. They would date for a short while more, though the Halloween party is the last time I can concretely remember them being together.

Since Brandon and I were quick friends and we were in the “Teaching Composition” course together, we would often talk about our mutual crush on Liza Radley. Mine was the gay man’s type, which doesn’t go anywhere and is often expressed in an admiration and friendship, while Brandon’s was very strong. Of course, I had an attraction to Brandon, making this a “bizarre love triange” of sorts.

After the Christmas break, with Liza Radley, Brandon, and Alexandra back in town, there was a small get-together. I met up with Liza, Alexandra, and Gabriel at a Japanese restaurant for dinner and the party later moved to Liza’s apartment with card playing, conversation, and copious amounts of red wine. Brandon crashed the party, drank wine out of a Pyrex measuring cup, and took his shirt off and gave me a lapdance while I commented on how sexy he was. When the party was over, Alexandra went home and I got a ride with Gabriel. However, Brandon remained, and then it would be a story of he said/she said.

to be continued…

*Liza Minelli’s portrayal of Sally Bowles in Cabaret.

Praise
A very stimulating experience–as long as you’ve got an open mind!

Interesting and unconventional–not recommended for the ultra conservative

Some of the best and most interesting classes I’ve had yet at the University, taught by one of its best scholars. Prepare to be challenged and inspired to expand your intellectual horizons beyond the typical University sanitized comfort zones. Very supportive.

Sensitive and encouraging; always open to discuss any concerns students might have. Stands by students and provides an atmosphere of openness and freedom of expression that enabled me to feel completely comfortable to do some of my best work yet.

He is very inspiring, but has a very different teaching style, go to his office and talk to him, the more he knows about the more he will help you get a better grade. Make sure to have a very open mind if you decide to take this class.

As weird as they get. First night he came into class with very dark sunglasses on and just stood up front staring at the class. During “Howl” he just kept repeating “Endless****and balls” (line from the poem) over and over. Made us buy his book, which was all about weird sex and violence in the future. However, he did expose us to a lot of good modern American lit and I learned a lot.

My comments: Regarding the first two comments, they’re general and just praise him. They could easily be from the disciples of a cult leader. The same could be said about the next three. Thses would definitely come from those in the inner circle, especially the part about going to his office. Be part of the party before class. The people who stop by his office before class are part of his “in crowd” (unless it’s that one time they need to discuss something with him). Learning from office visits? Shouldn’t that come from first reading the book and then from the lectures? I believe there are those students’ of Professor Joseph K who are perfectly aware of his abuses, yet defend him. Didn’t Jim Jones have similar defenders?

The last one is perhaps the most right on as far as positive comments go. The three before that have some merit, but they also could be written by a sycophant. This one highlights some of K’s oddness, but the student feels he or she has learned something in the end. I have my issues with Professor K; however, I did learn a lot from his classes.

Critical
Prof. K is condescending and vague. I’d never take another class with him.

What is with this dude and his SHADES? He wears wrap-around sunglasses in the classroom EVEN at night. I imagine this gives him a “secret identity” mindset that let’s him abuse and insult students he is afraid to talk to in the clear light. So POLITICALLY oriented that faking agreement with his politics is all it really takes to glide through A+!

really the worst parody of an mfa professor. with ego ten times bigger than his talent, and an uncanny knack for using and abusing his students, K plods on and on and on, publishing his friends work in his journals and getting published in turn in theirs. as sad a case of logrolling as is.

K is a joke! He writes no better than most students but has somehow slipped through the cracks. He uses his influence and power to help make the MFA at the University a lower than average experience while playing the characature part of hipster black-clad underground writer. Run!

A self-absorbed, condescending washed-up writer. Interested in obscure “cutting edge” fiction which no one reads. A coffee house writer-wannabe with a PhD. Thinks he’s avant garde cause he owns an all-black wardrobe. Really shouldn’t be teaching.

My comments: These people are really angry! The first one is general, could fit any disgruntled student. The second two seem to come from people who had some relationship with Joseph K. Of course, they’re disgruntled, but they’re more articlulate about their rage. They could be students who felt trampled on by Professor K, or they could have worked for him. The last two simply characterize him as a hack. His work has questionable literary merit, and he inflicts his books upon his students, who have no idea how to approach his text. They often fear saying, “I don’t get it.” The emperor is naked and no one wants to be unfit for an A or even a B. Several of the posts accurately depict his wardrobe choices and how he uses them for his persona.

Ad Hominen Attacks on Critics
The people who complain about K are probably bitter because of all the rejection letters coming their way. Get over yourselves. He’s a great teacher.

Comment: How does predicting rejection letters for critics help this poster’s case?

One of the most helpful professors at the University, provided you make an effort to talk to him about your work. He’s as flexible and fair as a prof can be. To the ranting girlies prior to this post: it’s time to unbunch your Victorian panties.

Comment: Ranting girlies? Victorian panties? This person is incredibly guilty of using sexist language to attack the critics.

Students who dislike Professor K fear unstructured assignments, demand conformity of themselves and others, never did drugs and are most likely sexually repressed. To create postmodern fiction is to live it, and vice versa. If that sounds lame or obscure to you, you may have a calling in Business or Comm. If not, you’ll love K.

Comment: Unstructured assignments – I don’t remember his assignments being unstructured. The irony of so called “non-conformists” is that they are accusing some people of not conforming to their views – that drug use is some kind of rite of passage and living a post-modern life (whatever that is) is a prerequisite to writing. As far as a so-called conformist having a call for Business or Communication, perhaps they are the smarter ones in the end. Maybe the humanities takes more brains, but full time professorships are at an all time low and being an adjunct prof for several institutions is just financial suicide.

In ref. to accusations–Work of disturbed individuals attempting to get out of doing course work, trying to force their own personal agendas/issues on the rest of us, using Prof. K as an easy target for their negativity. Don’t credit rumors as fact.
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Any professor rated on this website will have a fair shair of praise and criticism. Some professors recieve almost nothing but nice things, while others are constantly attacked. Then there are the cult of personalities such as Professor Joseph K, whose disciples can see no wrong, while the disgruntled wish to see him get his just due.

The comments in the first two categories have merit. These are the posts that best represent views on him. The ad hominen attacks, however, are just weak.