PJ Media’s Roger Kimball offers readers an intriguing challenge.

Pick which academic biography is from a new piece of fiction and which one is real, but seems to be based on fantasy (hat tip to Instapundit)

The other day, I wrote about Harry Stein’s new comic novel Will Tripp: Pissed Off Attorney at Law. It’s an hilarious send-up of the rancid PC establishment that rules the roost at most American colleges and universities. It is, like David Lodge’s Small World or Randall Jarrell’s Pictures from an Institution, intended as a species of satire. But as I noted in an update to that piece, the absurdist realities of contemporary academia make it very difficult to distinguish reliably between satire and the reality being satirized. Give it a try: Which of the following biographical sketches is satire, which is business as usual?

1. Feminist the First is an “American writer, academic and social activist. Influential in the self-esteem movement in the 1980s. Grabler has penned a number of best sellers, including I Am My Own Father, Mother and Best Friend, Narcissism is Not a Four-Letter Word, and The Romance of Self Adoration. . . . In her recent academic work, she has helped popularize the once widely derided idea that all living things, including single-cell organisms and crops, experience violence as pain. Author of Pain and Anguish, considered the definitive text on the subject, she holds the Phillip J. Donohue Chair for Advanced Oppression Studies at Chester College.”

2. Feminist the Second is being honored for “her many years of dedication to furthering the causes of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (LGBTQ) communities. Since 1965, when she picketed the White House for Gay rights, and published an article in Sexology Magazine, [her] writings have inspired and fueled second wave feminism, women’s spirituality movements and lesbian activism. . . . Selected works include but are not limited to: A Simple Revolution, Edward the Dyke and Other Poems, Another Mother Tongue, Blood, Bread, and Roses: How Menstruation Created the World, and Love Belongs to Those Who Do the Feeling.”

Stumped? Really, you should read Harry’s novel to find out, but I won’t keep you in suspense. The author of The Romance of Self-Adoration is true-to-life but fictional while the “spiritualist” who wrote Blood, Bread, and Roses: How Menstruation Created the World is the real, so-to-speak, McCoy: Professor Judy Grahn, Ph.D. in “Integral Studies, California Institute of Integral Studies,” and “Executive Core Faculty Member” at Sofia University in (but of course) California.