Caught in the creative act indeed

I guess if you're gonna fail, fail big: http://gawker.com/5651154/columbia-writing-professor-sends-worlds-haughtiest-email-to-former-students

That's not the fail part though. This is: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/seth-abramson/columbia-fiction-professo_b_746769.html

I had the opportunity to meet Professor H. soon after she joined USC. I found her to be incredibly, utterly arrogant. I was so off-put I wrote about it in my Rain Man journal and henceforth had nothing to do with her vaunted "Caught in the Creative Act" guest lecture series or anything else at the University of South Carolina English Department. That was several years ago.

I did see her give a eulogy for Joseph Bruccoli though. She was friends with him, and Bruccoli himself had been close with James Dickey (whose teaching position Hospital had inherited at USC). So it's not hard to see continuity with the showbiz/adman conception of literary self-promotion. Henry Hart called his authoritative biography of Dickey The World as a Lie. It's great when it sells, but I'm not buying.

Frederick Ingram
B.A. English, USC, 1992