Chunks

This week featuring more from my abortive NaNoWriMo project.
This excerpt: in which Crispin encounters the literary establishment...

In my third semester, I decided to involve myself with the University’s literary magazine as a way of keeping my profile inconspicuously conspicuous: the magazine (title: Cumulus) was a fat, glossy thing that came out twice a year, with high production values and poor copy-editing and thoroughly unexceptional contents—typical of the sort of thing that usually results when adolescents are encouraged to express themselves, maaaaaaan: lots of mean-spirited free-verse diatribes decrying the lack of feeling and sensibility among the Common Herd; bitter denunciations of the empty values of capital-S Society; a smattering (or perhaps a splattering) of Vaseline-smeared softcore erotica; shock tactics; true confessions; expanded English 101 themes; in short, all the parent-hating diary tripe that any twentysomething can bang out at a rate of fifty thousand words a month. “a magazine of arts and ideas,” it proclaimed itself, in all lowercase, though it was usually low on either. Or both.

You may recognize the bitter voice of a veteran of academe in all of this.