Back in HASTAC's distant past, when I was its most prolific blogger, I reserved the right to write one blog a month that was completely unrelated to digitality, cognition, new media, or anything. Since we original HASTAC'ers have been joined by the marvelous HASTAC Scholars (they inspire me every day!), I've tried to be more disciplined. But today I have to stray from topic to review E. M. Broner's THE RED SQUAD, the most marvelous, original, feisty, political, comical, serious, delightful activist academic novel in memory. The novel is youthful, sprightly, fresh, and, according to Wikipedia, its author was born in 1927. Take that, everyone! THE RED SQUAD comes out in May. Order it now.

The main character and narrator, Anka, is now a professor at a university in Ohio. On her doorstep one day she finds a soggy manilla envelope and, inside, a Freedom of Information file detailing the years when she inhabited the Bullpen at an urban Detroit university, ABD, writing her dissertation, an adjunct instructor, teaching writing along with a bunch of other ABD's finding their way into the profession of English. The novel moves back and forth between then and now, and the years disappear in memory, in the freshness and specificity and totally un-nostalgic recall of life as a lowly, untenured, temporary writing prof. And also an incipient radical. Maybe even an incendiary, a revolutionary. The Vietnam War, Civil Rights, feminism, unionization . . . a turbulent time, and also a time of activism and belief that lowly writing instructors had a meaningful voice and an ability to change the world a little.

In the sections from the past, Then, Anka reports vividly, hilariously each day on the malapropisms of her student Mr. Berger ("It was a warm genital evening," Mr. Berger writes on an essay, his inspired illiteracy a foreshadowing of a future president known as "W") but Anka also refuses to let her life teaching evening writing classes to working class Detroit kids while finishing her dissertation get her down. Instead, she abolishes the official, departmental writing text and, instead, has the students interview their family and friends and write their own lives. From such lives, comes human promise, a lot of laughter, some sorrow, and, even more unexpected, poetry.

To say much more here will give away the plot of a spare novel whose terse and disciplined movements between past and present make you constantly wanting to read more, to turn the pages, to find out where this is going, how this will turn out. Like its Greek heroine, there is something epic in the novel's tight contours, in its mode of recapitulative telling, in its songs, in its muses. It's hard to understand how a book called THE RED SQUAD could be funny, but it is hilarious, Kalliope meets Patty Hearst meets . . . well, meets Esther Broner. Anyone who has had the privilege to meet Esther Broner knows that her politics are matched only by her wit and generosity of spirit.

I was lucky to meet Esther Broner during one of the earliest years of my professional career, when I was in one of those Bullpens, a new Ph.D. at a time that (untll this current job year) was the worst ever for an English Ph.D., and Esther would not allow me to give up. Three years of teaching as a visitor or an adjunct at various junior colleges and (I love this list) a mental institution, a prison, a Franciscan monastery, and at the Fermi National Accelerator Lab . . . There were times when it seemed hopeless. And E. M. Broner, that indomitable spirit, that relentless political activist, scoffed when I complained, when I was fearful, or when I doubted that I was entering the right profession. She was a fighter then and is a fighter now. She inspired me with her fire in the belly, her passion for life and for justice and her faith in the importance, always, of great writing. And also with her deep love and tireless ambition for those Detroit students who deserved her love. And they prospered, as we all did, because of it.

THE RED SQUAD comes out in May. I plan to buy dozens of copies and give them to former and future Ph.D. students. This, my friends, is why the humanities will never lose their value, why we will always need to read and to write well. This short novel is an epic. Those adjuncts in the Bullpen are The 300. Except [spoiler alert!] in THE RED SQUAD, we adjuncts triumph.

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