Julie Schumacher’s The Shakespeare Requirement is a spot-on spoof of academia and its many indignities and absurdities. I most enjoyed Schumacher’s passing but poignant satire of the gratuitous, labor-multiplying technology that has come to dominate professors’ lives. At Payne University, where the book is set, one vexation of this sort is the finicky P-Cal scheduling system, which never seems to work for the protagonist, Jason Fitger, who is chair of the English Department. At one point, when Fitger is trying to track down his nemesis, Econ chair Roland Gladwell, the latter’s secretary, rather than simply telling Fitger where Gladwell is, refers him to P-Cal. As is usually the case, Fitger’s only recourse is sarcasm:
“Here we are…two human beings, inches apart, and yet what you’re telling me is that I need to go back downstairs to my own office, to my computer – except that I don’t have a working computer – and spend thirty minutes searching for a website that will allow me to send a message that you could simply write down with a pencil on a piece of paper, right there on your desk. Do you find that strange?” (p. 64)
Of course, it’s not strange, or rather, it’s not unusual, and our only recourse, like Fitger’s, is sarcasm, or satire, of which this book is a fine primer.
Yellow Crane in the Rain 