7 NOVEMBER — YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
Each of the eight to ten prorectors at the Enfield Tennis Academy teaches one academic class per term, usually a once-a-week Saturday thing. This is mostly for certification reasons,[104] plus all but one of the prorectors are low-level touring professionals, with low-level professional tennis players in general being not exactly the most candent stars in the intellectual Orion. Because of all this, their classes tend to be not only electives but Academy jokes, and the E.T.A. Dean of Academic Affairs regards prorector-taught classes — e.g., in Fall Y.D.A.U., Corbett Thorp’s ‘Deviant Geometries,’ Aubrey deLint’s ‘Introduction to Athletic Spreadsheets,’ or the colon-mad Tex Watson’s ‘From Scarcity to Plenty: From Putrid Stuff Out of the Ground to the Atom in the Mirror: A Lay Look at Energy Resources from Anthracite to Annular Fusion,’ etc. — as not satisfying any sort of quadrivial requirement. But the older E.T.A.s, with more latitude credit- and elective-wise, still tend to clamor and jostle for spots in the prorectors’ seminars, not just because the classes can be passed by pretty much anybody who shows up and displays vital signs, but because most of the prorectors are (also like low-level tennis pros as a genus) kind of bats, and their classes are usually fascinating the way plane-crash footage is fascinating. E.g., although any closed room she’s in soon develops a mysterious and overpowering vitamin-B stink he can just barely stand, E.T.A. senior Ted Schacht has taken Mary Esther Thode’s perennially batsoid ‘The Personal Is the Political Is the Psy-chopathologicaclass="underline" the Politics of Contemporary Psychopathological Double-Binds’ all three times it’s been offered. M. E. Thode is regarded by the up-perclassmen as probably insane, by like clinical standards, although her coaching proficiency with the Girls’ 16’s is beyond dispute. A bit on the old side for an E.T.A. prorector, Thode had been a pupil of Coach G. Schtitt back at Schtitt’s infamous old crop-and-epaulette Harry Hopman program in Winter Park FL and then for a couple years at the new E.T.A. as a top and Show-bound if kind of rabidly political and not too tightly wrapped female junior. Later blacklisted off both the Virginia Slims and Family Circle professional distaff circuits after trying to organize the circuits’ more politically rabid and unwrapped players into a sort of radical post-feminist grange that would compete only in pro tournaments organized, subsidized, refereed, overseen, and even attended and cartridge-distributed exclusively to not only women or homosexual women, but only by, for, and to registered members of the infamously unpopular early-interdependence-era Female Objectification Prevention and Protest Phalanx,[105] given the shoe, she’d come, practically with a bandanna-tied stick over her shoulder, back to Coach Schtitt, who for historico-national reasons has always had a soft place inside for anyone who seems even marginally politically repressed. Last spring’s airless and B-redolent section of Thode’s psycho-political offering, ‘The Toothless Predator: Breast-Feeding as Sexual Assault,’ had been one of the most disorientingly fascinating experiences of Ted Schacht’s intellectual life so far, outside the dentist’s chair, whereas this fall’s focus on pathologic double-bind-type quandaries was turning out to be not quite as compelling but weirdly — almost intuitively — easy: E.g., from today’s:
The Personal Is the Political Is the Psychopathologicaclass="underline" The Politics of
Contemporary Psychopathological Double-Binds
Midterm Examination
Ms. THODE November 7, Yr. of D.A.U.
KEEP YOUR ANSWERS BRIEF AND GENDER NEUTRAL
ITEM
(la) You are an individual who, is pathologically kleptomaniacal. As a kleptomaniac, you are pathologically driven to steal, steal, steal. You must steal.
(Ib) But, you are also an individual who, is pathologically agoraphobic. As an agoraphobic, you cannot so much as step off your front step of the porch of your home, without undergoing palpitations, drenching sweats, and feelings of impending doom. As an agoraphobic, you are driven to pathologically stay home and not leave. You cannot leave home.
(Ic) But, from (la) you are pathologically driven to go out and steal, steal, steal. But, from (Ib) you are pathologically driven to not ever leave home. You live alone.
Meaning, there is no one else in your home to steal from. Meaning, you must go out, into the marketplace to satisfy your overwhelming compulsion to steal, steal, steal. But, such is your fear of the marketplace that you cannot under any circumstances, leave home. Whether your problem is true personal psychopathology, or merely marginalization by a political definition of’psychopathology,’ nevertheless, it is a Double-Bind.
(Id) Thus, respond to the question of, what do you do?
Schacht was just looping the d in mail fraud when Jim Troeltsch’s pseudo-radio program, backed by its eustacian-crumpling operatic soundtrack, came over 112 West House’s E.T.A.-intercom speaker up over the classroom clock. When no away-tournaments or meets were going on, WETA student-run ‘radio’ got to ‘broadcast’ E.T.A.-related news, sports and community affairs for ten or so minutes over the closed-circuit intercom every Tuesday and Saturday during the last P.M. class period, like 1435-I445h. Troeltsch, who’s dreamed of a tennis-broadcast career ever since it became clear (very early) that he would be in no way Show-bound — the Troeltsch who spends every last fin his folks send him on his staggering InterLace/SPN-pro-match-cartridge library, and spends almost every free second calling pro action with his room’s TP’s viewer’s volume down;[106] the kind of pathetic Troeltsch who shamelessly kiss-asses the InterLace/SPN sportscasters whenever he’s on the scene of an I/SPN-recorded jr. event,[107] pestering the sportscasters and offering to get them doughnuts and joe, etc.; the Troeltsch who already owns a whole rack of generic blue blazers and practices combing his hair so that it has that glassy toupee-like look of a real sportscaster — Troeltsch’s been doing the sports portion of WETA’s weekly broadcast ever since Schacht’s old man died of ulcerative colitis and Ted came up to join his old childhood doubles partner at the Academy in the fall of the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar, which had been four months after the late E.T.A. Headmaster’s felo de se, when the flags were still at half-mast and everybody’s bicep was banded in black cotton, which the mesomorphic Schacht got excused from because of biceps-size; Troeltsch’d already been doing WETA sports when he came, and he’s been undislodgeable from the post ever since.