This tale begins with a writer who's become entrenched in a teaching position at a less than reputable teaching school, teaching 3-week seminars, because he's been unable to reproduce the success of his first book. He's bitter, views his students as inferior, and believes none of them possesses a speck of talent. At the beginning of his latest teaching round, he sees what he knows will be one of his students: a brutish, arrogant, bully of a male who demands the attention of the other attending students. This seems to foreshadow whatever is to come.