Registering
Point and Shoot, Florida (YU)--Finally, it came time to register for classes,
and Heap and Brenda went out to the campus, to find Dr. Wauchope, whom they had come
to study under, and assumed would be their faculty advisor.
Dr. Wauchope
was retiring, and not taking on any new students to advise. Heap and Brenda would
have to find someone else.
The person they got was unhappy in academia and
would leave, a little after they did, because he didn't like to use students as pawns
in the turf wars faculty members were obliged to engage in, to maintain their own
position.
In the other book Heap was typing, HEAP, about working as a custodian,
he wrote, "Why isn't any job free of office politics, right on down to
vomit-mopper in a detox ward?"
That's the wrong question.
Since
no job is free of office politics, why not learn to get used to it, adapt, quit kicking
at the traces. Why expect the next job to be different from the last job. Writer
different from graduate student, say.
Accept reality. Deal with the world
you are in, not the world as you'd like it to be, or the world as you think it should
be.
Wake up. Quit living in a dream world.
For that matter, quit
trying to figure out what happened at Tulane. What went wrong.
Move on.
Heap called a book TAKING STOCK, CATCHING UP, MOVING FORWARD.
You don't start
from where you are, you continue from where you are, and wherever you are, you have
all this baggage, that needs to be jettisoned.
Coulda, shoulda, woulda...didn't,
can't, won't: the same, the same, the same, the same. So what? Heap didn't give
a shit.
That was progress.
Heap was content with what he had.
That was a breakthrough.
The campus lay between St. Charles Avenue and Freret.
Well, the library, and the cafeteria, were across Freret. Is that right?
The Anthropology Department was between St. Charles and Freret. I know they were
cramped for space. If you're cramped for space, mission creep has you doing things
that weren't in your original purpose. Your original charter.
You have gotten
big and unwieldy. Too many people are involved. There needs to be a winnowing,
a purge, a culling out. A correction.
A revitalization. Heap studied revitalization
movements in college.
The trumpet shall sound! Nixon was elected. That
was it, for higher education.
That was it for a gracious life of genteel
poverty, manners, consideration.
The gloves were off. No more Mr. Nice Guy.
This was Realpolitik.