ACADEMIC PROBATION

In the arcane world of university presses there's little to no advantage in having an original thought. Every day another lushly illustrated meticulously documented study is published which does little more than rearrange the intellectual furniture. When it comes to a radical reassessment of conventional scholarship, you've got a better chance of seeing print had you written a yoga manual.

After futilely submitting my completed manuscript, Faun Roberts, The Forgotten Founder of Modernism to no less than thirty publishing houses I have decided to edit my book in an attempt to cater to more commercial tastes.
 

A Senate of Screams, Faun Roberts, 1921

The deeply heretical proposition that an unknown LGBTQ woman of extraordinary talent was one of the principal progenitors of 20th century painting was apparently too much for the self-appointed sentinels of scholarship to bare. That a woman had a hand in shaping art history seemed too unlikely to the austere doyens of conventional academia. How, they wondered, could a lesbian with no less of an appetite for deviance than the pallet skipping Picasso or the omnivorously opiated Cocteau lure such rare beauty from desperate, self-destructive dissipation?

Orestia Shestov, 2009

So I'm taking matters into my own hands and I can assure you they'll be a lot more than fifty shades of lechery in this new and improved edition. At this point I have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Serious high-mindedness has been dying a slow death for at least a generation and I might as well wake up and smell the fiber optics. When professors blithely boast of binge watching Breaking Bad, you know that Oprah has buried Oxford by any measure of power and significance.

My new working title:

Fondling Faun and the Forbidden Pleasures of Early 20th Century Painting.

Yes, I know it needs work ...