Istvan Bio 9 (ROUND 2)
Let's workshop this author bio
M. A. Istvan Jr., despite a down-to-earth deportment that covers well both his advanced education and artistic output, finds it a struggle not to isolate due to how his Assbanger’s Syndrome manifests itself: stumbling verbosity, extreme attention to detail, and hypersensitivity. Such symptoms, coupled with his underclass roots (which cannot help but radiate an unwelcome odor in higher society), have understandably led to discrimination (especially in academic settings, where now the chief duty of a professor is never to make anyone uncomfortable). The sudden transitions that mark his writing and speech, however, make for interesting poetry. His obsessive focus, moreover, allows him to probe abstract concepts like God and Free Will. His sensitivity, which he would never wish away (however much turmoil it red-carpets into his life), opens him to art-worthy phenomena concealed for the neurotypical.
The ceiling Istvan finds above him seems less garden-variety glass than liquor-store bulletproof. Search committees (of relative silver spoons) inevitably cut him from the shortlist after in-person interviews. From his mannerisms and speech patterns (hand jazz accompanying tangled rushes of words), perhaps they register a vague sense that he grew up in a creek-bathing place of constant cortisol, of Ring-Ding dinners under flickering fluorescence that yellowed the already-nicotined wallpaper, bubbled and peeling—a place where having his last name meant being thrown first into special education by default and second into squad cars to be heckled and then dropped in gang territories far from home). Nevertheless, he now gets off—twisted as it is to say, but we all have to make do—on seeing these scarved interviewers, these self-identified “progressives” (with their tatted arm sleeves and big-bore piercings and word weapons like “problematic” and “safe space” and “ableism”), squirm to maintain their aura of smug tranquility as they try to cover themselves from his gaze—a gaze in which perhaps they could almost see him at ten, all alone with that single-point focus of bitter escapism, throwing rocks at crack whores from a rooftop).
This piece is unpublished
Photo: twitter.com/ekibrahim_/status/1253869472915566596