Douglas Bass has sketched out the opening scenes of a film based on Pictures from an Institution, Critical Mass' ongoing unsigned serial academic fiction project (chapters--or scenes--one through eight of which are available here). He writes:

The first scene I saw as the opening credits were rolling, was of Erwin and his wife Louise leaving a holiday party. Erwin is slightly deconstructed, and Louise is trying to talk him out of going to MLA this year, but knowing she will not succeed. It's not like Erwin has a paper to present, or a job to interview for, or people with whom to make alliances. He's just enjoying the feeling of not being a lemming in a sea of lemmings. He's just enjoying not having to mightily strive in a room of people who are mightily striving.

I crumpled that up in my mind's eye and started over. Now as the opening credits are rolling, we see Erwin going through all the pre-MLA preparations. It is my observation that as I get older, the length of my eyebrows has a significant impact on how old I look. If they're well-trimmed, I look younger and crisper; if they're out-of-control, I look older and more decrepit. I was thinking about that when I was thinking about Erwin R. Sackville getting his eyebrows waxed. Anyway, as the opening credits are rolling, Erwin is getting his nails trimmed, his hair (what's left of it) styled, his Prada suit tailored to perfection. The opening music is something light, happy and bouncy, something that conveys the sense of purposeful activity, but is yet at the same time frolicsome. Like that little bit from Rossini's The Thieving Magpie that got used in A Clockwork Orange, and then a million other places, or bits from L'Italiana in Algeri (The Italian Girl in Algiers) or The Barber of Seville by Rossini. Somehow there should be pictures as the opening credits are rolling of some of the main players getting ready for their trip to New Orleans.

Erwin R. Sackville's telescope was but the most recent item in a long series of fancy pieces of equipment acquired in the name of research. As the Franz Kafka Professor of Metamorphosis Studies, Erwin R. Sackville enjoyed considerable professional privileges, including a substantial annual allowance for "research-related expenses." Erwin R. Sackville availed himself of his allowance as fully as he knew how: each year, he spent it all, and each year he successfully petitioned the deans to increase his allotment to reflect the rising cost of scholarly living. Such a frequent buyer was he that he had his own university-issued acquisitions ID # (these were usually reserved for entire departments) and his own stack of yellow purchase orders (to these he signed the Planckton Hall business administrator's name with the signature flair of a born forger).

Such purchasing power was essential to a professor whose scholarly interests changed as frequently as did those of Erwin R. Sackville. Hired as a Kafka scholar, he had quickly transformed himself into a Marxist theorist. From there he had become, in rapid chameleonic succession, a deconstructionist, a feminist theorist, an African-Americanist, a Foucauldian critic, a queer theorist, a body critic, a material culture critic, and an ecocritic. Over the course of his career, Erwin R. Sackville had in fact metamorphosed so many times into so many things that the department created an entire subfield in his honor. Whereas Erwin R. Sackville had at various times been a world-class expert on gender and sexuality; green criticism; differance; jouissance; slave narratives; power and resistance; the politics of embodiment; and the materiality of such culturally significant items as oakum, dust, and bakelite; his true calling lay in the cracks between these specializations, in the swift and decisive conversion from one area of expertise to the next. No one knew better than Erwin R. Sackville how to reinvent himself academically, and nobody did it better, with more alacrity, cunning, and speed. For sheer force of methodological will Erwin R. Sackville was unmatched. Many people had many things to say about Erwin R. Sackville's studiously trendy approach to the life of the mind. But the insinuation that he did not live up to the title "Professor of Metamorphosis Studies" was not one of them.

Erwin R. Sackville's research acquisitions were as numerous and varied as his research interests. Over the years he had acquired a set of fiberglass skis (for researching the impact of winter sports on mountain ecology), custom-fitted leather pants (for researching the impact on animal rights activists of politically incorrect dressing), handmade hemp pants (for appeasing the animal rights activists, who set his leather ones on fire), and a state of the art stereo system (for conducting simultaneous inquiries into pop culture, the history of technology, and the political phenomenology of sound).

But Erwin R. Sackville's first love, when it came to research spending, was equipment that allowed him to *look.* He started with a pair of gold wire glasses by Armani, and gradually worked his way across the optical spectrum. He collected antique monacles and procured a satellite dish. He bought countless old daguerreotypes in worn velvet cases and a pair of Russian binoculars used during World War II. There were opera glasses, a Nikon camera, and an electron microscope; there were an opthalmoscope, a video camera, and kaleidoscopes from across the ages. Erwin R. Sackville justified these acquisitions by filling out purchase orders that announced their necessity to his ongoing inquiries into the male gaze.

Though Erwin R. Sackville had not yet officially declared himself to be a Lacanian analyst of oppressively eroticized looking, he was nearing the moment when he felt ready to do so. The optical equipment had helped him ease the phenomenally unpleasant process of reading Lacan. And during the many hours of respite required to recover from his brief forays into the convoluted world of mirror phases, eccentric selves, and linguistic unconsciousness, Erwin R. Sackville had used his growing collection of specular tools to observe his own scopophilic phallocentrism firsthand. Technologies of looking, Erwin R. Sackville had discovered, encouraged one to look. He tested this theory on the girl in the apartment across the way, purchasing with research funds a state of the art telescope to determine whether being able to look at her up close made him spend even more time looking at her than he already did.

Bass also writes that Chairman Stan thus far eludes him:

I'm having a hard time getting a fix on Chairman Stan in my mind. Not just what he might look like, but what kind of person he is. Is he just oblivious to some people's feelings, or is he really vicious and cruel underneath that thin veneer of jollity? And if he is, how did he ever get to be Chairman? And what's with all the Latin quotes? Does he think he's actually impressing anyone, or is he simply amusing himself? I could understand the latter.