This Story Has Legs; or, Implications In Flagrante

I could've titled this entry "I am become meme."  Maybe I should've.  "I am become urban legend" would've worked too.  Point is I didn't realize the response to this tale would be so overwhelming.  An amusing anecdote but little more.  Now I want to say things like "No more linking!  Do you want to break the Internet?"  If my logs are any indication, the previous post spoke to vampires, goths, Canadians, bikers, Georgia Tech fans, athletic frogs, feminists and denizens of the reality based community.   

The transformation of my morning into an urban legend has already begun.  Yesterday about seventy people from Cornell hit this site from their email server.  The way my morning's been passed around I suspect that in a few months I'll get an email from a friend outside the academy with the contents of my post and a subject line like "You HAVE to read this." 

Speaking of emails: Hundreds of people want to know whether I'm an actual academic who teaches at UCI.   Snopes can wipe its brow.  Google my name.  Ask yourself whether the Scott Eric Kaufman at UCI who wrote Wednesday's post may be the same Scott Eric Kaufman at UCI whose (admittedly obsolete) homepage pops up fourth and blurbs "Scott Eric Kaufman is in his 4th year in the Ph.D. program in English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine."  Now look at the next hit from ratemyprofessors.com and ask yourself whether the Scott Eric Kaufman at UCI who wrote Wednesday's post may be the same Scott Eric Kaufman at UCI a former student once wrote "rewards you with incredibly detailed feedback on articles and will help you work through your paper during office hours."  See!  Now you know that not only am an instructor at UCI but that I have office hours. 

Only one question remains: Is the Scott Eric Kaufman who teaches at UCI a liar?  Some have suggested I am.  (That's most recent, not necessarily the most representative example of this charge.)    I don't know how to respond other than to point to examples of begrudging honesty on my part.  Or you could verify other outlandish claims I've made . . . like time I said the Louisiana School for the Deaf is unfortunately acronymed.  You could see whether Southern California experienced a minor earthquake on Sunday, October 16th.  (It did.)  You could snopes this site top to bottom and you'll see that I'm a responsible scholar already jeopardizing his career by blogging under his own name.  Why would I want to further smudge my resume by lying?  Short of wheeling out my student; linking to my course roster, scanning the article she came to office hours to discuss; posting a handwriting sample to compare to my scrawlings on her article and the Albert Lyter's densinometric analysis of the ink's age and composition . . . short of all that I think the odds of definitively proving that this happened slim.   

Because I can't stomach writing a four-paragraph whinge: Today I learned that Zak Smith, whose work I've written about before, will witness the publication of his Pictures of Girls in January 2006.  Noah Cicero, however, is having difficulty getting his Burning Babies onto shelves despite the glowing recommendation from Harvey Pekar (of American Splendor fame) gracing its back cover.  Perhaps a few more advance orders of Burning Babies or a sudden surge in demand for The Human War might help him out.

Comments

[Rich Puchalsky]

I'd imagine that the entire experience might be a bit annoying. I mean, first of all, write lots of clever and thoughtful pieces, get little response; summarize humorous sex story, get universal attention. (And no, when I say "story", I'm not questioning its veracity; if you're going to write literary journalism, cultivate a devil-may-care attitude like a real journalist.) But there's nothing new about that. Second, the reactions on display in comments contain some funny material (Don's allegory: brilliant), but wouldn't Foucault have a field day with a good deal of it? It's the panopticon in reverse; many observers and one hapless example to draw disciplinary scorn. Somebody could get enough material for a quick, dismissive article about American culture just by counting the number of comments about this on all the linking blogs that involve the words "video" or "camera", much less the get-tough or punishment-fantasizing ones.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

I wrote this before it started making the rounds of conservative sites. America can be one big happy family. Actually, so far the most surprising reaction I've read was to Ann Althouse's post on it. Someone named "Harkonnendog said:

Er- this is just fuggin' disgusting. Those kids, at least the male, need to be tossed out of the school, for the disrespectful language alone, if sex in random teachers' offices is allowed, which it apparently is, given the teachers reaction.

And if that teacher is a man, double wtf. I mean that boy NEEDS a beatdown badly.

I replied the only way I could:

I'm not sure what it is about my reaction that makes you think students are allowed to have sex in random teacher's offices. I thought it signified the exact opposite. As for not beating down the guy, well, UCI has a strict "No Beating Down Students Even When They So Richly Deserve It" policy.

Oh, and since it's Friday night, I refuse, on principle, to consider what Foucault would have thought about it. He can have Saturday morning.

[Adam Roberts]

I think that the sudden ubiquity of the post has more to do with Scott-ish flair and less to do with the fact that, as Rich says, the post has SEX!SEX!SEX! in it. After all, it's not as if there's any lack of sexual reference online. In fact the ratio of sexstuff to nonsexstuff on the web is the same as the ratio of water to other chemicals in the human body. Or something like that. Had Scott just posted 'hey! saw some students having-all-the-sex in my office! Rad!' I don't believe he would have become a meme. [Brit-joke: "I am a meme. My body is my tool" ... I wouldn't expect anybody outside the UK or born after 1970 to get that particular cultural reference]. It was the way it was written; the deftly comic use of dramatic form etc., that made the post. Credit where it's due.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Yes, it was well-written, but many entries here are well-written. (And Scott's own protestations of veracity, which I believe, indicate that we can't really give him credit for writing the major elements of it). I don't think it was precisely the sex that made it so popular, either, I think it was the combination of sex, vicarious enjoyment of embarassment, and, for some people, the desire to participate in societal disapproval.

[Darleen]

IMHO, it was a combination of Scott's writing and the unexpected reaction of the couple to being caught in flagrante delicto . If the couple had hustled into clothes and left blushing and mumbling apologies, the story would have engendered a few chuckles, little more. The chutzpah of the attempt at making Scott the person who should be embarrassed is the stuff of belly laughs.

PS I don't think Don's allegory quite works since the girl was weeping because of Scott's interruption, not because of her chosen partner.

/my 2 cents

[Frederick]

Sorry if I questioned your honesty, Scott. I'll take your word for it that this bizarre incident happened. It just seemed implausible to me that (a) your office had apparently been unlocked; (b) the students' indignant reaction when plainly they, not you, were the ones doing something inappropriate (no doubt you agree); and (c) you apparently didn't report the horny little bastards to the school authorities.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Frederick, don't worry about that. If it hadn't happened to me, I wouldn't have believed it either. At the beginning of the other thread, I mentioned that my office has become something of the department's storage room . . . and that since the quarter started it's become increasingly cluttered. So if you don't look at the path I've cleared to my desk--by moving all the boxes, books, capsized desks, chairs and bookshelves--you'd think it was uninhabited. And if the person who deposited said &c. in my office forgot to lock the door behind him or her . . . well, you see where I'm headed. I didn't provide all the details initially because, well, because the story's funnier outside explanatory contexts. But they should have seen my name on the door, my books on the shelves, my essays on the desk beside those of my students, the trash full of used coffee cups and everything else which indicated that this wasn't an unoccupied office. As for not reporting them, I wouldn't know how or to whom, plus I felt terrible for the woman who, it seemed to me, had been assured by her paramour that there was no way they'd get caught. Plus I had a student there and more on the way and didn't want to make a scene. I know, I know, I'm everything that's wrong with America . . .

Adam, I don't catch the reference but I appreciate the sentiment, since as a teacher of literary journalism I like to think that I distill detail with the best of 'em . . . or at least the adequate. For example, I didn't include her caterwauling throughout because that would've obscured the hilarity of his anger. But because I have a commitment to the truth, I did mention it at the end, thereby allowing the reader to infer its continual presence without ruining the comedic effect.

Rich, I don't think you're wrong on any counts. The fact that this was the third most linked site last week according to Blogpulse attests to the general, un-Scott-specific appeal of this post. I think it captured a moment, and you know what, if it doesn't win the Koufax Award for funniest post of the year, I'll be mildly upset but grateful that you and all my other fair-weather readers nominated me.

Darleen, you speak the truth. To be honest, I wish they had just up and left and not provided me with the anecdote of a lifetime. I first wrote this up about forty-five minutes after it happened (i.e. when I finished meeting with my student) and then, when my hyper-caffeinated self sat down in staff meeting, blurted out the whole affair. Because this was a literary journalism staff meeting, I was grilled on the details and my presentation of them by professionals. (The Big Kahuna in the meeting being Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Barry Siegel.) When I got home I put it on the blog because I knew that if I didn't, my student (who, like all my students, has posting privileges on my courseblog) would have. But I didn't anticipate this kind of attention. As Rich pointed out, I've often written about academic oddities . . . so maybe I should've realized that this had broader appeal. I suppose I should've.

But to wrap this up for the folks at Snopes who emailed this morning, that is an accurate account of what happened . . . so long as you leave out her tears, which the more popular this post becomes, the more I feel like an ass for ignoring.

[Adam Roberts]

Koufax award? What does that involve? Pantechnicons of cash, I hope.

Adam, I don't catch the reference but I appreciate the sentiment ... No, the reference is unusually obscure. I could have mentioned alternative carpark, but that would have been even more baffling. (I really must leave the 1980s behind, and move into the broad sunlit uplands of the 21st century). The sentiment, however, endures.

[Steven Taylor]

As an alum of UCI, let me just say that the whole situation gives new meaning to "Zot!"

(Sorry, I couldn't resist).

[Kevin Andre Elliott]

Wow, 70 hits from Cornell's email server! I have a feeling some of my students saw the post at my site and went wild with it.

I must admit that I find it odd that this story took off like it did. I found if funny because I'm a grad student. At Cornell, we often leave our offices open while we get coffee or smoke or whatever. It's not that strange to me that the office might be open. It's something that I related to, and knowing that many of my readers are fellow grad students, I figured they would find it amusing too. The reactions of the students amused me more than the sex part. Most graduate instructors have dealt with similar indignant reactions from students under different circumstances, I'm sure.

Assuming that the Cornell hits are at least partly my fault, I do have to wonder why they didn't follow the links to all the other excellent posts here that I've linked to. Oh yeah. 18 year olds are sex-obsessed!

[Rich Puchalsky]

strider (from "My Morning" thread): "The only thing that could have made that more funny is if you'd had a camera on you. "Hey! Are you taking PICTURES????" "What, I can't take pictures in my private office?""

I know that it completely unfair to pick on this one comment out of many, but since it's after I already wrote about this, I might as well. Can someone who knows Foucault's material well fill me in about the Foucouldian implications of this?