Clash of the Titans

Is there anyway to kill someone that is already dead? I believe my Travel Writing professor is dead and has been buried in an unmarked 18th century grave. His spirit still haunts our English department. He's trying not to get back to the 18th century, but to supplant our present culture with it.

One reason that I have for not liking him is his insistence that he knows better than anyone what makes good writing in the pompous way that one would expect of a Yale or Harvard scholar. He thinks that I don't write succintly enough to be published, that my writing is too indulgent. He said that after I told him I don't write to model other people; I write the things I want to read because they have not yet been written. I write so that other people can pick up my literature and see, finally, themselves. Indulgence? I write indulgently because I am starving. I have to cook my own intellectual food. The only reason I bothered to take the class was to learn something about a kind of writing I hadn't seen much of before, and perhaps to appreciate someone else's style and try it on for size, but never to buy.

I won't take the Camille approach and say the way I write is my signature style and what is going to get me published, or I, too, would probably be eliminated. But I will say that negative examples don't work for me. I guess I am non-traditional in that way. If I write self-indulgently, it's because I have't eaten the treat of creativity in a while; if I build Notre Dame and Versailles as opposed to condominums and time shares, it's because I want to live there amongst the rambling rooms and bric-a-brack.

This is why one should never write when one is upset. Emotion is not succint.