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About the Author
Gina Barreca is a professor of English and feminist theory at the University of Connecticut. Her books include They Used to Call Me Snow White, but I Drifted; Perfect Husbands and Other Fairy Tales; Babes in Boyland; and, with Gene Weingarten of The Washington Post, I'm With Stupid. She's written or edited other books on vice, Victorians and sex, American humor, the erotics of instruction, The Sopranos, women's humor, and Italian-American literature. She will blog about teaching, sex, humor, money, publishing, ambition, books, marriage, envy (professional and personal), politics (professional and personal), aging, and cartoons.
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Bob ZemskyRecent Posts
Sex and Teachers | Comment [8]
The Professor's First Wife | Comment [18]
The Unsettling Idea of Settling | Comment [12]
Good Company: About Feminism and Various Sorts of Women | Comment [3]
Ranting About Feminism: Not That I'm Bitter (Part I) | Comment [38]
Featured Articles By the Author
Murder Mystery VIII: Never Trust a Small Man
Kicker’s room showed evidence of his recent distress: papers everywhere, crumpled, torn, some ripped from library books with the Satis Library imprint still recognizable. There was also evidence of his physical fury. A broken lamp. A mirror cracked. The windows were wide open and the sill was bashed as if with a bat or a hammer — the wood was splintered and cracked. His room on frat row was a set from a bad psycho film, a slasher B-movie.
His brothers knew enough to leave him alone: Kicker’s moods were the talk of the house. A couple of months ago, when the steak he’d bought for dinner had been eaten by Noddy Michaels, Kicker literally broke down Noddy’s door and dragged the larger football player into the kitchen only to shove his head into the garbage can where the remains of the steak festered. Noddy didn’t say a word to Kicker. He was terrified of him. After that, Noddy went around saying that Kicker’s colors weren’t Pine green and white, they were black and blue. Noddy said it with a very humble smile. “That guy coulda killed me,” Noddy said, nodding his head like a bobblehead doll.
Mann once said in a lecture that you should never trust a small man because a small man will kill you. Everybody, including Kicker, who was five-foot-seven, laughed.
But not even Noddy suspected that Kicker had killed his favorite professor. Nobody could have suspected that Carroll Prescott III would kill his hero.
But they had no knowledge of their last few conversations, if that polite term could be applied to the vicious, bitter exchanges between student and teacher, ones that occupied Kicker’s heart and mind for the last several weeks. They couldn’t t have been aware of Kicker’s horror or of his disgust when he found out that Mann’s favorite writers, the writers Mann asked him particularly to write about, the writers Mann said Kicker would most enjoy, were gays, were those very creatures Kicker spent his life trying to avoid.
Whitman and Melville, he discovered, were to Kicker’s mind the half-human inhabitants of a shadow world, the sort of people Mann seemed to hate as much as Kicker hated them, judging from Mann’s remarks in lectures and classes. And Mann suggested that he, Kicker, might like to work on these authors. The very phrase made the student spit. When Kicker read about Whitman and Melville in Mann’s own book, not to mention when he read further in biographies, Kicker suddenly started to hate Mann for insinuating that Kicker would go for this sort of thing.
He thought about it for days. What was the old guy trying to pull? Bastard. What did he think Kicker was? He asked Mann why he liked these writers when they were like that. At first Mann seemed to take it all lightly. These men were simply great writers, he said, waving Kicker away as if he were unimportant.
Mann dismissed Kicker, misreading his questions and misinterpreting his reactions, misreading the boy as he had religiously misread text after text throughout his academic career: unchallenged and unchallenging due to his own lack of insight. For once his misreading was fatal.
Posted at 09:24:39 PM on May 12, 2008 | All postings by Gina BarrecaComments
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Next: Murder Mystery IX: Telltale Hearts
Rather old-fashioned, isn’t it?
— Dimitri · May 13, 05:03 AM · #
It’s the old blurred boundaries issue. The student/teacher relationship became muddied because the teacher overstepped his role. Kicker (love the name) had a right to be angry, although of course he had no right to kill or to be a narrow minded hateful homophobe.
— nancy · May 13, 09:48 AM · #
Hmmm. Could this be a variation on The Human Stain, gone g/r/ay rather than black?
P.S. The “r”, like Mann’s heart, is in “slashers” – in part because placing an “r” between parentheses or brackets on this blog yields a ®!
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · May 13, 10:03 AM · #
hmmm
And why is our Kicker quite so frenzied about this… and quite so determined to prove his testosterone level…?
— bta · May 13, 11:51 AM · #
“Our” Kicker? Have we become fond of this kid? I don’t think so.
— Not MP · May 14, 12:53 PM · #
Melville gay? Damn. Who would have thought it? I am seeing Moby Dick in a whole new context now. Geez.
— Hannah · May 14, 10:38 PM · #