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[EXCERPT]

LOVE IN A DEAD LANGUAGE

BY LEE SIEGEL

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

FICTION

372 PAGES

The academics who came to dinner
Two professors plan a dinner party, aiming for
the highest level of ennui.

Editor's Note:In the following excerpt from Lee Siegel's "Love in a Dead Language," Professor Leopold Roth and his wife Sophia turn a dinner party into a contest to see whose guests can be more boring. But it is also the occasion for Roth to bring Lalita, the undergraduate student he has fallen in love with and whome he plans to lure to a summer study program in India, into his home without raising his wife's suspicions. On his wife's "team" are Mr. and Mrs. Gupta, Lalita's parents, Lalita herself and Aphra Digby, Roth's son's middle aged femi-novelist girlfriend. The passage opens as Roth plans his "team" of stultifying academics -- which almost includes the peripheral character of author Lee Siegel himself. A note on the presentation of this exerpt: the novel is densely footnoted by Anang Saighal, Roth's graduate student, who, in acting as literary executor, tries to make sense of Roth's final, hopelessly eccentric manuscript. Because of the limitations of the hypertext medium, however, the footnotes appear as links to the appropriate highlighted words. One very long, very sexually explicit footnote which quotes from Aphra Digby's erotic fiction, has been excluded. In a previous footnote Saighal has noted that, unlike that Roth's characterization, Mr. Gupta's speach is far from a parody of Indian English but quite respectable.

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By Lee Siegel

June 7, 1999 | I had a simple but effective strategy for victory: I would invite only academics; my colleagues, I was confident, would be magnificently, stupendously, and exquisitely boring. I had the dream team. First were Dr. Paul Planter, chairman of my department, and his boring wife Pimika -- he'd be sure to recount every lurid detail of the most recent chairmen's meeting, and since Pimiko doesn't speak English and always just sits there smiling admiringly at her illustrious husband, I reckoned that, even without a Ph.D., she'd be pretty dull. Second was my esteemed colleague, Dr. Christopher Cross, gastropodologist extraordinaire, who would, undoubtedly, have lots to tell us about the anatomy, psychology, and social life of snails, about his fellowships and grants to do research on the habits, if not the wit and wisdom, of Helix hermaphrodites. And finally, I had just heard from Saighal that his former teacher, Professor Lee Siegel, was visiting from Hawaii to give some sort of lecture on "Jews of India' for the Hollywood Hadassah chapter.

Unfortunately Siegel explained that he couldn't make it, giving the lame excuse that he had to attend the Deepak Chopra lecture at the university that night. So I invited his protégé, my teaching assistant, Anang Saighal, a good pinch hitter, I figured, in that he'd probably talk about his dissertation, his comps, his committee -- all those excruciatingly wearisome things that graduate students think fit for conversation. And even if I didn't win, even if, against all odds, Saighal, Cross, or the Planters let me down by being mildly interesting, I was happy because that night I'd have Her in my home.

One of my team members was first to ring the doorbell.

Also Today Kamasutra U In Lee Siegel's outrageously inventive new novel, sex manual marries academic farce -- with orgasmic results.

"Sophia," I called out with pleasure, "Anang is here. And guess what! He's brought a chapter of his dissertation on medieval Sanskrit commentators. Fascinating, don't you think so, Soph? I'm anxious for our guests to hear all about it." 8

The Guptas were next. She stood behind Her mother, who stood, bearing an offering of karanji for us, behind Her father, who stood in front of me, his hands joined in the traditional Indian greeting as he beamed and boomed, "Dr. Ruth, illustrious professor of Indology! What a pleasure to have this sight of you!"

When I corrected him ("Roth, not Ruth!"), he smiled.

"May I call you Dr. Lee?"

"Leo, not Lee. My name is Leopold Roth. Leo like the Holy Roman Emperor, like Delibes, Buscaglia, and the astrological sign. Leopold like the king of Belgium, like Loeb and Leopold ..." I was stopped short by the realization that he wasn't listening to me. He was wearing a black dress suit and a Loma Linda Medical School tie. His women were clad in saris; Lalita's was purple silk embroidered with gold. 9

As they entered, I looked straight into Lalita's lovely eyes, as I did not dare to do in class, and offered to take Her shawl that I might lightly, tenderly touch Her shoulders. She insisted on keeping it.

"But you may take my wooly," Mrs. Gupta announced with a wobble of the head.

Dr. Gupta, who wanted to know if I had received his daughter's application for the study tour of India, kept winking at me as if we had made some sort of deal.

"Are You eager to go to India, Lalita?" I asked with a cordiality that was well tempered by professorial civility.

"No, not really, but my parents want me to," She answered frostily. "Do you have a phone I could use?"

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