Joe Bosco, Blogger - Page 9

But to no avail.

On originally presenting my story at Peking Duck, Burger had remarked to readers that he had "no way of knowing whether it's true or false, exaggerated or understated." My story had prompted Peking Duck, in under a day, to adopt a radically new policy. Peking Duck would henceforth be a most singular blog indeed. It would present only links leading to information that the blog operator "sincerely believed."

So it was unavoidable. Burger was obliged, regretfully, to expunge his link to my story. The story was unbelievable to him. Because he knew and trusted his friend, Joseph Bosco.

There's been a development in my Joe Bosco tale.

I've learned that at the university where Bosco was teaching during the
2002-3 academic year (China's Xiamen University), he left such an outsized
impression that the teacher who replaced him the following year was actually
driven to begin a novel last fall with the title, "Correcting Mr. Bosco."

The teacher's name is David Hill and he's on the urielw.com Mailing List. I learned of
his connection to Bosco when he responded to my original Bosco article above. He has permitted the use of his name.

David reports that Bosco's classroom teaching dwelt on the topic of OJ a
little more than some students might have wished. David also volunteers
unkind remarks about Bosco poetry that appeared in the school's literary
journal, as well as additional colorful comments which of course urielw.com
is too dignified to repeat (even if they did stir my shameful sense of
humor).

His novel has a pompous Bosco delivering an appallingly bad lecture before
an audience of admiring Chinese students who treat him like a celebrity.
Afterwards, David's fictional alter ego does what he's been wanting to do
the entire lecture: "I throttled him until he begged me to stop."

The modest author avers that his fiction "sucks," but if you're interested,
chances are good the author would provide a copy. His address over at
hotmail is transvan79 (indirectly indicated to avoid spam).

Anyway, Bosco seems to be quite an inspiring character, even more than I
realized at first.

As reported above, I'd never had any contact with Bosco when his florid denunciation appeared on the Peking Duck blog. Nor did we communicate subsequently — until a couple of days ago. By that point, word of this essay having inevitably reached him, Joe could no longer contain himself. A 950-word missive landed with a thud in my mailbox — opening, characteristically, with the words, "You silly little fool."

I was a fool, he wished to tell me, for imagining that he would "take umbrage at anything you write about me." My missiles had backfired. As a writer, he benefitted from any and all publicity:

Article Author: Uriel Wittenberg

Visit Uriel Wittenberg's author page — Uriel Wittenberg's Blog