Apology to a music professor

The Awl has a hilarious “Public Apology” column today by Dave Bry, about his guilt over an assignment for a History of Jazz college course 19 years ago.

Dear visiting music professor who taught History of Jazz at Connecticut College spring semester 1990:

I’m sorry for comparing Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue to Bob Seger’s “Turn the Page.”

I can only imagine what your reaction was. You there, grading papers, sitting in your office, or at home in your apartment in New Haven—you were visiting from Yale. Maybe as part of a sort of exchange? A professor from my school was up there, teaching your regular students at the time? Man, you got the short end of that one, huh? I picture you reading the little blue test booklet I’d turned in, gnashing your teeth and going red in the face, then ripping the beret off your head and throwing it across the room. (You never wore a beret in class, but I assume you put you one on as soon as you got home, right?)

Elsewhere in the piece he admits that even though this first assignment was ungraded, he failed the class because he stopped going to the lectures but was “too lazy and stupid to get myself to the registrar’s office and drop the course.” He also offers this pithy statement:

Comparing Kind of Blue to “Turn the Page” is sort of like looking at “Guernica” and saying it reminds you of The Horse Whisperer. Y’know, because of the horse.