Word: cobb
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...Cobb College is a rich New Hampshire institution, well stocked with preposterous pedants, campus lagos, academic racketeers and addled eggheads. As such, it is the latest member of the poison ivy league founded by Mary McCarthy (Groves of Academe), Vladimir Nabokov (Pnin) and Randall Jarrell (Pictures from an Institution). It may or may not be patterned on Wesleyan University's Institute of Advanced Studies, where Novelist Pamela Hansford Johnson spent some time with her husband Sir Charles Snow as visiting British fellows...
...surprisingly, her hero, Matthew Pryar (Eton and Oxford), contributes some British one-upmanship to the stock drama of poet and pedant. He finds that all is alien corn on the Cobb campus, is daunted to learn that the faculty does not drink and dines on unspiced food at 6:30 p.m. Pryar is one among seven visiting fellows. Each of them is a distinguished specialist in some recondite field, or rather is a monomaniac locked inside an ever-narrowing preoccupation -Andean Spiolus, patristic hagiography among the Slavs, Emily Dickinson or whatever. These learned freaks (the Slavonic specialist is a midget...
...seven named Dorothy Merlin. How can he be released from servitude to this distant termagant and become director of the Institute of Visiting Fellows? This is the question the plot turns on, and it looks like a Snow family specialty -academic power politics. However, all the characters at Cobb behave even more oddly than called for by the requirements of campus comedy...
...Bottom? A clue to Novelist Johnson's intentions is the title, which is given in the epigraph as from M.N.D., Act II. If the clue is followed up, it will be found that Pryar and all the characters at Cobb comprise the cast of a Midsummer Night's Dream in modern academic dress with Cobb's Boosie House as Theseus' Palace and the New Hampshire forests as "a wood near Athens...
...bludgeon with a thin, whippy handle and the biggest business end (8.6 inches around) that baseball rules will allow. Wagner wears a golf glove on his left hand,* grips the bat in unorthodox fashion-with his hands split two inches apart, à la Ty Cobb. "When my bat meets the ball," he says, "that old pill really takes off." Except in Chavez Ravine. For some mysterious reason, Slugger Wagner has yet to hit a homer in his own home park...