Last night I dreamed that I was in conversation with two English professors (both male and middle-aged) from a college in New Orleans (query -- why New Orleans?). One of them said, "Rex is a very good baseball player. Thanks for recommending him." I said, "Yes, he's good, even though he has two prosthetic shoulders. But I didn't recommend him to you as a baseball player. I recommended him as a novelist. He writes detective stories." One of the professors said, "I like his stories, but he doesn't transcend the genre" ("transcend the genre" is an actual verbatim quote from the dream. I don't invent the dialogue; I only report the facts.) And then I said, and I think I remember this accurately, "if you want to read someone who 'transcends the genre,' you should read novels by Leonardo Sciascia." Once those words were out of my mouth, I started to feel foolish -- did I mention the name Sciascia because I was genuinely trying to add to the conversation, or was I just showing off? (I often bother myself with such questions in 'real life'.) While I was cross-examining myself, a young woman appeared on the "set." She was no one I recognized, but I can report that she was wearing a white blouse and a long, dark skirt. She held a gift-wrapped package and she opened it, pulling out a book. She said, "here's something that will transcend the genre." And then she shouted, "Transcend the Genre." "Transcend the Genre." Just at that moment I heard shooting and realized that a sniper was firing at at her. She took a bullet to the stomach and another to the head, and lay there at my feet, dead and bloody. It seemed like a good time to wake up, and I did so.
May 18. Marion Morrison, associate professor of English at the University of Iowa, who has contributed to this blague in the past, writes: "Dr. Metablog, or Vivian, or whatever you're calling yourself today, I'm embarrassed for you. That's the most mysognynistic dream I could imagine. As soon as true creativity arrives on the scene of your dream, in the form of a young, attractive and obviously creative woman, your unconscious killed her with a shot to the heart. Your dream admits no other interpretation."
May 19. Spike Schapiro writes: "Marion, that's a crock of you know what. The dream is not a bit 'mysogynistic' -- I presume you mean 'misogynistic'. It's about pretentiousness. The woman who shouts "transcend the genre" is an pretentious intellectual bully. She deserves to be obliterated -- incidentally, not with a bullet in the heart, as you claim, but in the head and stomach. You can't even get the facts right. But what can you expect from someone who thinks that Rider Haggard wrote a novel called King Solomon's Minds, which is what you called it in your pretentious little slice of literary you know what. Hey everyone, click on "in the past" in the preceding paragraph and check out what I'm saying. Marion, go back to the classroom where you can poison the brains of another generation of vulnerable children."
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