Dear Professor:

I was please to receive my research paper back after 25 years; one of your great qualities as a teacher was how quickly you were able to return items to students.

I hope you will be pleased to know I am now a professor myself. I showed the paper to some students here (an example of REAL scholarship, I told them) and it has become the talk around the department. Many of the students have never actually seen an authentic typewritten paper before; they were in awe as I explained life in the dark ages of text production--the difficulties of working a temperamental IBM Selectric for professors who refused to accept papers with more than one typo per page.

The paper has also become something of an archeological sensation. The graphic design students are now fighting over each other to study the "authentic" imperfections in the typeface and see if they can reproduce them in font designs. They keep coming back to my office to check their attempts against the "original". I am compelled to keep the paper under lock and key for fear it will be stolen.

I sense students and even the upstart younger faculty are treating me with a renewed deference and respect.

News must have gotten around because this morning the dean stopped by my office and uncharacteristically paid me a compliment. I showed him the paper and after looking it over for a few seconds he admitted he had harbored some doubts that I had ever written anything scholarly. Then he muttered something about an apology. I didn't say anything, I just wanted to bask in the moment.

Later I decided to take my paper with me to the student union. I wanted more people to see me with it while I had a cup of coffee. I just sat there with it on the table in front of me, in full view of everyone, and imagined all the muffled conversations in the room were hushed praise for me and my paper. I know they weren't really talking about me, but it didn't matter, it made me feel good. I don't think of this as delusionary behavior; just a very advanced form of daydreaming. And I should thank you, since I first learned the technique while taking your class.

I decided to actually read a few passages and it was only a moment later that a sinking feeling hit me. I realized that the paper was good. Very good. In fact, it was far better than anything I have written or published in the last ten years.

I've decided not to tell the dean or anyone else about that, and I would appreciate it if we kept that just between us, at least for the time being. I'm enjoying all the attention too much.

Anyway, I just wanted to say "thank you."

Your Former Student,

Roy Sonnema

P.S: By the way, you forgot to grade the paper. Should I return it to you so you can think about it a little longer?

Dear Ray,

I should have known that your paper on Dutch Vanitas images was a premonition of things to come. Vanitas really seems to have become your métier. Vanitas becomes you. I only regret that you find me to blame for your entry onto that path of reverie. Alas. Smoke dreams, as they used to say.

Be that as it may, I remember you as one of my best students, though in reading over your letter, I see that you still have that annoying habit of splitting infinitives. I take the blame, of course. As your art history teacher I should have taught you to split hairs instead.

I certainly identify with the degree of interest your paper elicited. In my own youth we didn't even have typewriters. (When I got old enough, I did buy my own royal blue Selectric, but I gave that away to the Art Museum at Princeton University. They were closing down the scriptorium in an effort to enter the modern age.)

Without typewriters, let me tell you of the tribulations we suffered to prepare our documents. With chisel and mallet we engraved our slabs. If we made a typo (though we didn't call them that then) we had to throw out the entire piece and start all over again -- from "scratch," as we used to say. Curiously, our word for "typo" also had four letters. Once I was caught chiseling Sans Serif and was expelled for a fortnight. That's what I got for experimentation -- castigated and punished for pride of epigraphy. A prohibition against this sin would have appeared as one of the Ten Commandments had God access to e-mail. Cruel days in the academy.

Be careful not to fall into the trap of consuming yourself with the technology. I did, and now know better. We thought we were creating new forms of communication. Sans Serif, and attributes like bold and italic, all engraved on our immemorial steles. Did you every wonder where the phrase "cutting edge" came from? My friend invented it. My own patent on the double-M dash has only recently expired, but it is now trademarked. We held conventions (symposia, we called them) --™ lugging these huge stones around, often on our backs, cutting ludicrous figures. People thought us strange, obsessed, obsessive and shunned us, at once wary of our expertise and jealous of our accomplishments. Needlessly fearful, they yet warned others to take care in our presence, and invented nasty epithets and unkind digs. I hesitate to relay it now, but they actually told others to "beware of those geeks bearing glyphs." Thank God for computers.

I apologize for not giving you a grade on that paper. But what am I to do now? Let's say I would have given you an "A" twenty-five years ago. With so much grade inflation in the meantime, what would correspond? If I gave you a minus-D (assuming that we can posit negative letters as we do with numbers), what would people think? With this document as famous as it now is, people would shy away and neglect to give you the accolades you rightly deserve; panegyrics will be abandoned half-written, and sycophants will withdraw and begin to cluster around the likes of  Sister Wendy.

I do not think it should be returned to me. We don't trust the post office anymore; they have joined the enemy; and, clearly an armed guard is out of the question these days -- though, I'd appreciate the gesture.

Well, I wish you luck in your career, and beg of you to keep your eye out for suitable submissions to the Publish and Perish Journal -- the final resting place of career-ending scholarship.

For better or worse, your former teacher,

Robert

P.S. Remember that student who asked me to give him a "B" so he could get into dental school -- the one I told that getting me to raise his grade was like pulling teeth? Well, I bumped into him a few years back. He now works for the big studios, and was a technical advisor on the set of Marathon Man. I'm proud of my students.

P.P.S. You owe me a 0.02¢ royalty for your double-M dash, and don't forget to include the ™ next time.