Castleman in the Academy

Charles Rammelkamp



     This was just how Minerva used to talk, he remembers, when they were in graduate school together, turning a compliment into self-promotion by a sort of mutual indulgence in congratulation—until he’d started to become ironic and spoiled it all, ridiculing everything she said, putting himself down at the same time; their marriage had only lasted a year, though they lived together a total of three, four if you included the year they lived in a group house together and gradually became lovers. Then she’d left him for another guy, a callow graduate student majoring in Philosophy.

     He met his current wife Jodie a few years later, not on the rebound from Minerva so much as still in her orbit, like a planet without any real direction that goes round and round in a circle because it has nowhere else to go, still half in love with the pleasant comfort of that long-lost graduate-student domesticity. What had appealed to him at first about Jodie, a secretary at the university, was her name.

     Castleman had joined the National Guard after college, afraid of being called up for duty in Vietnam, despite a high lottery number. Took the Dan Quayle way out, which later was to be thought of as cowardly rather than expedient. But Castleman felt no shame. He felt as if he’d been a part of the manly brotherhood, even if he didn’t go to Southeast Asia. Basic training was still the same. The privations, the authority, the abuse. He remembered the drill sergeant talking to the recruits about a character named “Jody.” Jody was sleeping with your girlfriend while you were in boot camp. Jody was fucking her while you were digging ditches. Your girlfriend was cheating on you with a slick ne’er do well named Jody while you were marching, saluting, and calling everybody with a stripe on his shoulder “Sir.” A marching song: “Jody was there when you left, you left, you left, right, left….”



short fiction
ISBN 1-59661-080-8
106 pages/$15

Roger Castleman describes: “Outside the sky began to darken, getting murkier, like a vegetable soup made from beef stock.” Inside Charles Rammelkamp’s series of connected short stories the reader is drawn into the murky veggie soup of Castleman’s mind and the realm of teaching freshman comp and creative writing, where human foibles are played out with a dose of humor and a fatalistic acceptance. Castleman is eerily like all of us, wanting to make his students happy, yet forever mindful of principles and the game to be played, a life to be led, poetry to be written. This endearingly honest portrayal, written with sensitivity and a lyrical prose style, draws one in deeply and leaves the reader wanting more. —Vicki Hendricks, Author of Cruel Poetry In his striking collection, Charles Rammelkamp draws a complex portrait of a man in mid-life crisis in the tradition of Barry Hannah, Leonard Michaels, and Thom Jones. Castleman is a character at once deeply flawed and sympathetic in whom the honest reader will see an accurate reflection of himself.
—John Fulton,
Author of The Animal Girl

Charles Rammelkamp’s eleven interconnected stories in Castleman in the Academy depict an insecure junior-college English instructor who suspects he’s a fraud, stuck in a profession he believes has no purpose for students trying to prepare for the “real world.” These stories present a sobering analysis of pedagogy in a materialistic culture. They are highly entertaining, insightful, and poignant. Rammelkamp is a very persuasive storyteller. You believe what he writes.
—Louis Daniel Brodsky,
Author of the short-fiction collections
Yellow Bricks and Rated Xmas

Castleman is that blend of inspired teacher and baffled adult, unable to control a writing class hell bent on outdoing each other’s sex scenes, willing to stoop to filling out his students’ teacher evaluations forms, and wondering “if his own life had a plot.” Don’t miss sitting in Castleman’s classroom; read this book.
—Pamela Painter
Author of Getting to Know the Weather and The Long and Short of It