The Tools : Seven ingredients. Seven days. 300 words. The Task : One story. More than 20 professors were given
By Nicola C. Perlman
Nov 29, 2006
The Tools :
Seven ingredients. Seven days. 300 words.
The Task :
One story.
More than 20 professors were given the chance for endless glory and eternal life in The Crimson’s weekend magazine. Only 2 were up for the challenge
The Ingredients:
1. 8 pm in Sanders Theater.
2. A Harvard orchestra is about to begin a concert.
3. To the left is an attractive Harvard student.
4. To the right is an infamous professor with a dog in her purse.
5. The MC has fallen asleep.
6. A Camus-esque fly is flying in lazy circles in front of the first row of seats.
7. First snowfall of the year.
The Competitors
IVAN GASKELL, Senior Lecturer on History and Margaret S. Winthrop Curator of Paintings, Sculpture, and Decorative Arts in the Harvard University Art Museums
SVEN BIRKERTS, Briggs Copeland Lecturer on English and American Literature and Language
IVAN GASKELL'S ENTRY
Dear Dean K***,
I write in response to your request for information regarding the incident that befell Professor L***. All seemed peaceful at 8 p.m. in Sanders Theater the night before Commencement. The house was packed, but I noticed Professor L***. A Camus-esque fly was making lazy circles in front of the first row of seats beneath the balcony where he sat. Many of those present had been celebrating, and some were the worse for wear, including a young man at the end of Professor L***’s row whom I took to be the MC and who had fallen asleep. I glanced up at the front row of the balcony. To the left I saw an attractive Harvard student, and to the right an infamous teaching fellow whose purse was perched on the railing. Her seat was immediately above Professor L***, and I could not help but recall her recent failure in the general examination by a committee he had chaired. To my surprise, the purse seemed to twitch. The orchestra was about to begin, the soprano poised. The first chords sounded, but instead of an ethereal voice, a dreadful scream pierced the air. Professor L*** was struggling with a hairy white form, a small dog clinging to his head. It was clawing at his face. Those around eventually pulled the animal off, though it still seemed to be chewing something gelatinous while the professor, writhing on the floor, held his hands to his bloodied face. Looking up, I saw the teaching fellow smile. Her purse looked empty. As she rose she called a curt command: “Snow!” The terrier dropped the eyeball and scurried to the exit as the teaching fellow, too, left the hall. The first snow fall of the year had proved disastrous for Professor L***.
Sincerely,
&c. &c.
SVEN BIRKERTS'S ENTRY
FANTASIA IN A----------------
To the omni-theatrical eye of the circum-ambient fly, even one preserved beyond its season by the warm fuffing of the basement radiators, there is no difference between what a vigilant, if bored, audience member might distinguish as a decidedly attractive male student and an esteemed female Professor of Aesthetics (the attractiveness of the former self-evident, the exalted status of the latter self-assumed), whereas there is considerable and vivid promise extended by the protrusion of a soft sail, a furred white triangle—what that same observer would with private amusement (and a mental note to repeat at the first available social occasion) remark as the dog-eared appearance of a dog’s ear—from the lap-held purse of the same esteemed professor, who herself is just now remarking how much the first tuning exertions of an orchestra—seeking A—recall the agitation of a fly rising midsummer to the occasion of a pane of clear glass, but who has also not failed to notice that the bright star of her Monday seminar, the young man from Edinburgh—Alasdair?—is just a knight’s move away, one up two over, distractedly fanning something from his hair, alas putting just enough flounce into the motion to give a woman second-thoughts, administering a cool corrective, sometimes called a douche, to a fantasy that she had only moments ago begun to entertain, namely that she and Alasdair would find themselves exiting the concert at the same moment, hitting the night chill, the light snow drifting counterclockwise through the lamps in front of Sanders, and that he would first laugh to see the fresh ecstasy of Linus—tiny clustered prints in the white—and then recognize her, Oh!, which would prompt one or the other to start the to-and-fro of pleasantries that might very well lead to mention of coffee, no, strike that, a drink nearby, but she’ll be damned if that half-somnolent insect didn’t provoke the hand that in a few flip-flap motions scotched that fantasia altogether.
Who has taken the ingredients and concocted a delicious treat? Whose flavours just don’t sit write? Email your vote to fm@thecrimson.com, and next week, the verdict will be revealed. Get out the red pen...
