I met a former English teacher in a pretentious little fern bar. She was a beautiful redhead, but I had never really liked her because she had been a notoriously hard grader. Nevertheless, we ended up talking, and when she learned I was getting a Ph.D. in English, she invited me home. After mentioning that I was "greedy for knowledge," I found myself blindfolded and tied to a large column in her loft. She stood in front of me, reading out of dusty tomes, with nothing on but a black negligee and black garters. She would read a passage from Shakespeare, and if I could identify it, she would suck my cock for a little while. If I could not, she would spank my thighs with a ruler. If I missed two in a row, she'd shove a pencil up my ass. At about midnight, I scored three points in a row on Midsummer Night's Dream and was rewarded when I came into her luscious red lips and all over her face. I was finally untied and let out of class.

Weeks of this torrid literary love affair continued, and I found myself cramming and slamming for my Ph.D. orals. I would be able to fuck her from behind if I could name the mistresses of Catullus, Petrarch and Baudelaire; I could fuck her in the ass if I could name the various secret editions that Georges Bataille's Story of the Eye went through in Paris before he was able to publish it under his own name.

One day, to introduce a little reciprocity, we reversed the roles and I tied her up. I asked her if she could tell me how Hegel's theory of comedy differed from Bergson's. She could not, and I tickled her with a feather until she pissed all over herself. I asked her if she could tell me whether Robespierre and the Marquis de Sade had ever met. To my delight, she was woefully ignorant about French literature, and so, to make the punishment fit the crime, I spanked her ass with a bare hand until she cried for mercy. Remembering all those Cs she had given me in composition class, I went on for about twenty minutes.

Finally I asked her if she could name three writers whose last names were animals. Hesitantly, she named Virginia Woolf, and then Charles Lamb, and was stumped as she searched for a third. Finally, when she desperately came up with Walter de la Mare, I decided there had been enough pedantry between us, and slid my little stiffy up inside her, signaling the end of another satisfying session.

The lesson I learned: getting a Ph.D. is no picnic, but it's easier if you're hungry.

MICHAEL -- I've already contributed two pieces, so maybe too much is too much, but couldn't resist. By the way, once when I got back from Finland I had to take a bus over the Columbia River to Washington (from Portland, Oregon) in order to get my driver's license renewed. While asking for directions from a guy in the street, he said, oh that's easy, you just go across the "big ass bridge" that you see right over there (he pointed). Do you think you could change the title of your journal to "Big Ass Bridges"? Somehow being still fresh from five years in Finland that phrase just seemed so completely absurd and so completely wonderful.