Poll: Which, out of the lecturers or the students of English Honours 2008, fail most drastically at maintaining a standard of academic decorum?
Contender One: The Lecturers
"Everything is always fine in Kentucky."
"Twins are, generally speaking, rather creepy. Oh, don't give me those looks, you know it's true."
"Macbeth suffers from diabolical pigheadedness."
The best way to begin a class ever, brightly: "For those who want to pursue the topic of incest..."
"Lancelot Andrews was a classicist, as was fairly inevitable given his name."
"It was very desert-like. There were a lot of deserts."
"Derrida is positively CUDDLY."
"I'm colour-blind, you see. It got me out of serving in Vietnam, but it does mean that driving in the rain is a bit of a problem, because I can't tell which traffic light is which."
"If you're going to claim to be French in an essay, do at least be French. It makes life easier."
"Cannibalism represents a bit of a failure, socially. I mean, it's just bad manners."
"He's like a sort of Haley Joel Osmet sort, by which I mean you don't want to punch him in the face."
"Is cyan an actual colour, or is my printer becoming oddly inventive?"
"I demand more evidence of De Man's lovability!"
"So your point is that whacking her husband over the head makes her less of a dill?"
"Why are there always inexplicable woods?"
"Some theorise that he wrote it earlier than it was published. [pause] Let me rephrase that."
"Solomon had many wives. He was what we would call a busy man."
Contender Two: Students
Thus far this semester, the student contingent has:
- Dared various members to seamlessly insert 'Fetishism', 'Satan', 'Zoology', 'Goldfish' and 'The Middle Eastern Situation' into presentations on material utterly unconcerned with any of them, offering cupcakes as prizes
- Plotted (and failed) to hold a Crazy Hat Day with completely straight faces, so as to confuse the lecturers
- Decided, admittedly at a pub at about 1am, to start a spontaneous chorus of 'Manamanah- doo doo doo doo doo!' in class
- Become prone to yelling 'I LOVE MOM, BUT I CAN'T HAVE MOM' in terrible American accents at one another in public places
- Allocated everybody titles, ranging from 'Class Goth (Romans Beware)' to 'Provincial Oaf' to 'Token Married White Kiwi Female' (useless, as there are two) to 'Literary Gigolo'
- Hijacked perfectly normal classes into discussing, at length, divorce, tattooing, recalcitrant children, the US election, and prostitution.
I think we might win.
I try. I really do. I go to university, time and time again, intent on actually getting some work done and believing myself to be part of a great and glorious enterprise with genuine import upon the world. And then I spend ten minutes of a lesson watching a lecturer enthusiastically egging a fellow student (an Olympic fencer) to jump over a chair in the corridor, twenty minutes arguing with another lecturer about whether clocks can smite people, and most of the week giggling hysterically. No sense of gravity can possibly survive it.
"Beware of Milton and his f-words. He is a VERY ANGRY MAN."
'Mary Wood-Allen explained that her sex manuals were supposed to promote innocence.' (Presumably, though the text fails to mention this, Mary then had it explained to her that she was perhaps going about things in the wrong way.)
"There is no literary pretention about making jokes about blocked toilets."
'And thus, just as children tend towards becoming a kind of uniformly formless cuddle-bunny....' (I am expected to read these sentences in thesis research and not burst out laughing. I cannot possibly work under these conditions.)
"Oh, yes, the Puritans ripped out a few organs. ...Not in people, stop looking at me like that."
Lecturer, a quite distinguished elderly gentleman: "Well, I think the metaphor should be interpreted the original way. So THERE."
'[He believes that] God fouled things up by not making men self-reproductive, like vegetables.' (It would admittedly make life much easier.)
Lecturer: "You couldn't expect very much from the Welsh. They never have any idea." (... He's English.)
"This thing called civilisation can just go drown itself."
Lecturer: "As arguments go, I think it's rather cute." (I have a feeling that in academic circles, 'rather cute' ranks just below 'charmingly simplistic' in the 'polite ways to term one's loathing' list.)
'Sex is boring.' -Michel Foucault, quoted, somewhat startlingly, at the beginning of an essay about history. Perhaps the author was having a bad day.
"Well, writers have to be amusing. Otherwise they'd just all kill themselves."
"He was trying to understand it rather than just have sex with it."
Lecturer, earnestly: "When you have children, you'll understand the relief when a baby comes out and it's all normal."
"Do not use this book as a pick-up line."
'Alas! She Resists!' - A seemingly totally irrelevant annotation beside a passage on Lewis Carroll. Bad days all around, it seems.
Listen. I'm writing a novel, pondering the structure of another novel entirely (which I may yet dump the first novel for, fickle being that I am), researching a thesis without the aid of a supervisor (since mine has apparently decided that I am too brilliant to need any assistance at all), keeping ahead of coursework, plotting two presentations and a conference paper, and cooking my own dinner. If you're expecting anything wittier or more coherent than a collection of quotations from the shining lights employed by my English Department, you are barking up the wrong blog.
"I've just had an epiphany. Tears are watery!"
"As I was rereading it, I was going 'I CAN'T STAND IT'. Perhaps, however, that is just me."
"I was going to go back to the village this year. But there was a cyclone. So I didn't."
"Most of the preachers trying to 'convert' the Aborigines only spoke German. So THAT went as well as can be expected."
"I'll rub this [his own interpretation of a medieval spelling] off the board, in case some medievalist comes in and bites me."
"Really you can just look at the poem's imagery as a stir-fry."
"I read my own marginalia and go, 'God I was smart then.'"
"The character is a little bigot and then he grows up to be a politician. We will consider all snide remarks to have already been made, please."
[First-year wanders in and asks for directions] "Well, dear, this is N408, and you want N401. So I think you'll find it is SEVEN rooms in THAT direction. Yes, a university education does have its advantages, doesn't it?"
"There is nothing creepier than a nursery rhyme and a lisping girl singing along. No, really."
[Snottily] "Well, I don't know much, but I think it was Darwin's fault."
"He also uses alliteration, just to be more annoying."
[Explaining the process of land acquisition in colonial Queensland] "They moved up North and it was like claimclaimclaimclaimclaim."
"They're all such non-smart people!"
"THERE WERE NO SHIPWRECKS IN EDEN!"
"Help! My Sunday schooling has worn off!"
[About a protagonist in a novel]- "Well, I think that's particularly relevant to- what's his face? You know. The dude."
"I had a student from Canada once. I fell out of touch with her, and then she called me. Back in 2000. She said that she was in a Canadian water-polo team, and please could they stay at my house if they got into the Olympics."
"What? You mean you don't KNOW your obscure medieval lexicon?!"
And my favourite, of all time: "This is a book to spread theory on. And then eat."
We students, of course, are occasionally not much better. (If 'better' is indeed the word.)
Student A: It reminds me of those slasher movies in the 90's- Hawthorne puts me behind the hockey mask as I go through the house, and then inserts heavy breathing.
Student B: That's a pretty negative position.
Student A: ...Not necessarily.
Student [who, I may remind you, is an Honours candidate with three years of uni behind her]: You listen to this character and you're just like, 'shut UP! Stop WHINING! GOD!'
"You don't have a Bible? Call yourself an academic!"
It is now official. My entertainment in this particularly hellish year will come not from TV, newspapers or the colourful self-combustion of my stressed colleagues, but from my lecturers, who appear to be campaigning quite solidly for either a Perrier Award, a raise, or a drastically increased amount of medication.
"I would have read the text I set for this week, but I didn't. Life is short."
[Looking through her own scribbled notes] "... What in hellfire did I mean by this?"
Student: Wasn't it in 1690 or sometime around then?
Lecturer: Oh, now you're just showing off.
"I can't even watch Robin Hood on Channel 2 any more! It's rubbish! And not even good rubbish!"
"And then, of course, there is his obsession with angelology, which is the study of angels. He busies himself at one point with insisting that angels are made out of condensed air and yet are still able to have digestive systems."
Student, overenthused: I would bear Rushdie's CHILD if I could.
Lecturer, sympathetic: Have you told him this?
[Arguing against the theory that Milton was disgusted by sex]- "Listen. This man had six children, which seems to prove to me that he wasn't 'repelled by sexual intercourse' on more than one occasion!"
"It's a dream scenario- to make your past set itself on fire!"
"Johnson considered all of Milton's pastoral poems utterly ridiculous, on the pragmatic grounds that Milton himself had never once owned a flock of sheep."
"I do wish these books I put on the curriculum weren't so long and the writing so small."
"The father is a non-conformist. And then he blows up."
"Everybody got the chapter? Good. We're all on the same page, as they say in my counselling sessions."
"Well, I mean, most people can't stand Puritans. Totally understandable really."
[Mocking Edmund Spenser, for whom he has very little love]- "Oh, you know, seduce- in a gentlemanly chaste manner of course- a virgin maid, and then tea, and perhaps a little croquet, and oh yes, just a sonnet or two tossed off before dinner, just appear to me, quite, and then off to dance a quadrille with the Queen! What? Publishing? Oh, NO, old boy! C-O-M-M-O-N!"
"Undeniably he is the hairiest poet that ever wrote."
We, of course, occasionally don't help matters very much. Thus, this-
Lecturer: Astaroth... Astaroth. Unfamiliar reference. Does anybody know... it's a pagan god... where does it come from?
Student, brightly: Bedknobs and Broomsticks!
Despite the glamorous elements which come with writing a novel- creative freedom, indulging a passion at great self-indulgent length, getting all the girls at the coffee shop hot under the collar with your turtleneck-beret combination- there is one major downside. (This is not including writer's block, which is less a 'downside' than 'like being stuck in the middle of childbirth, without the fun, or the mercies of epidurals'.)
The major downside is this incredibly frequent double-header:
a) "So what's your opus about, hey?"
b) "How's the novel going? Finished yet?"
If anybody asks me either of these, ever again, I am quite likely to decapitate them, pickle the head, and carry it around attached to my satchel by its hair to warn off anybody else. The additional problem of being unpublished, blue-haired, and generally in possession of an air of artistic eagerness means that both a) and b) are asked rather indulgently. 'Oh, you want to be a writer, dear? How adorable! Do tell us more- quickly, while this adorable delusion of yours lasts.'
In the absence of decent, modernised laws about enlightened uses of decapitation, however, I will do the next best thing- develop a cheat sheet. Print it out! Give it to your friends! Stay the hell away from my scythe!
What My New Novel Is About, The Cliff Notes
Themes: Fate, ambition, lies, drunkenness, shame, academia, jealousy, things lost on trains, nationalism, mid-life crises, ethics, violinists falling into rivers, art, faith, family, guilt, and other things, including shepherd's pie. (It's said to be the sign of a terrible writer to work from the themes rather than the story, but one good thing about writing theory is that nobody agrees on anything.)
Plot (Basic): Set in three different countries- a man lies on the spur of the moment, and, surprisingly, there are consequences.
Plot (Detailed): Unless you're my editor, wait a while, and buy the damn thing.
Characters: Currently include an elderly lesbian having a mental breakdown, an emotionally disconnected immigrant, a man who may or may not be named Klaus, and an academic who compares postmodernism to haggis. Others.
Tone: Sarcastic, surreal, sweeping, sensuous, self-important, stark, and any other 's' words I can bring to mind without necessarily admitting that I haven't really hit on one yet.
How My New Novel Is Going
Fine, thanks.
No, really, that's all you're getting out of me. You want hysterics, ask me how my THESIS is going. Then again, you might get a garbled answer about the application of American exceptionalist thinking to Schroeder in 'Peanuts', so maybe you don't really want to do that either. Um.
The fact that, after exactly one day of university Honours in Literature, I have
a) barely enough room on my desk amongst the books to place a spare pencil, and
b) multiple examples of lecturer inanity
-should really tell me something about the year ahead, shouldn't it?
"You may be thinking 'Why is there a Rogers Room? Why do we have a room specifically for Rogers? Or Rogering?' ...I'm sorry. I haven't taught for a while."
"It's like Robinson Crusoe- these children in the attic, you know, they find a bedspring, and they're like 'Oh! This can be reappropriated into something'- something they need, like, like a DVD."
"I do agree. I got to the end of it [a text on her own syllabus] and went 'Eh?'"
"This unit is a study of the historical Neville.... no, wait, that's not right. NOVEL."
"And they'd be like, 'Our conceptual forces are more powerful than yours, and if you don't think so, we'll kill you!'"
"It's a practise in conceiving of time and space as paradigmic thingoes."
"The Honours text is Form & Style, by Slave and Peril." "Sorry, by who?" "Slade and Perrin. Ahem."
I also had a wonderful conversation with the Head of Honours which went, partially, like this:
Me- So, um, any news on a thesis advisor for me yet?
Head Honours Honcho (HHH)- I sent you an email with his name this morning. Have you checked your email recently?
Surely it is pretty self-evident that had I checked my email, received the information, and noted the name, I would not be at HHH's door asking blatantly unnecessary questions. Does he think that English students are permanently engaged by the Imp of the Perverse? Has he fixed me in his mind as somebody who taunts him for information in his little room for the hell of it? No, sir, I did see the email; I just thought I'd come and hear it in person, since text is an unstable and rhetorical medium, and by 'Your thesis advisor is Professor XYZ' you may well have meant 'I have a strong craving for bananas'. Also because I get a real kick out of being stared at long-sufferingly over your glasses.
Siiiiiiiigh.
Simple thesis ideas I could, if I were slightly less stubborn, adopt:
Thomas Mann's use of the colour green
Nabokov's use of irony, in great quantities, about everything, including strawberries
Whether people want to kill Salman Rushdie because The Satanic Verses is offensive, or just because Midnight's Children is so appallingly wink-wink-colonial-cutesy that somebody deserves to suffer for it
Virginia Woolf: sounded depressed occasionally, how weird is that
Punctuation in Henry James (there's lots of it)
Virgil: people copied his stuff quite often
Shakespeare and virtually any theme you care to name- parrots, jealousy, letters, flatulence
The influence of Gunther Grass's German heritage on his works
Do left-handed writers write better books?
Wordsworth and Coleridge: insufferable nonces together
Puns in Marx Brothers movies
Metaphors in somebody or other's poetry, doesn't really matter
Sporting slogans: their rhyme and rhythm ('Just Do It'- a parable of self-disgust?)
Literary examples of badgers
Thesis idea I probably will, because I am not slightly less stubborn, be stuck with:
(deep breath) The character of the child prodigy as a conduit for national exceptionalism in post-colonial literature. Say THAT ten times fast.
Question I must inevitably ask:
Who gains from this, exactly?
"If you dream of a dark-haired woman with blue eyes and a pug nose, you will definitely withdraw from a race in which you easily had a chance of victory."
10,00 Dreams Interpreted, Gustavus Hindman Miller (1996), read by me this morning in mild amazement
So if you're dreaming of me on Valentines Day, sorry- apparently my presence in your subconscious means Danger Will Robinson: Abject Failure Imminent. Which is more flattering to me than it is insulting, really.
"No, we are not expecting any large and suspicious packages from the Department Of Defence this week. Mark it 'not known at this address'. No, I doubt it will explode." -My father in Abu Dhabi, reassuring me that the strangely heavy manila envelope marked with 'Defence' labels which turned up in our letterbox addressed to somebody else was not in fact our problem. You can't blame me for wanting to check.
"Well, it is a sort of sedentary, carpet slippers, self-inspecting, nose-picking, arse-scratching kind of job, just you in your study, and there is absolutely no way around that." -Martin Amis, in a newspaper article aimed at jolting starry-eyed creative writing undergraduates into some vague semblance of reality.
"Neutral Bay! That's a neutral venue!" -The end result of a long and agonised discussion about how everybody specifies 'neutral venues' to break up with people, but never actually suggests what one might be.
"Jamie Hyneman earned a degree in Russian language and literature. A variety of careers fill his resume, including scuba diver, head of a sailing/diving charter business in the Caribbean, wilderness survival expert, boat captain, linguist, pet shop owner, animal wrangler, machinist, concrete inspector, film and television visual affects expert, and chef. He is a holder of several patents, and is now a cohost of Mythbusters on Discovery." -From Wikipedia and Discovery.com. There are no words for how much I want to be this man when I grow up. He is virtually an exponent of The Most Awesome Life Ever Invented.
"By relaxing the posterior part of the neck, the centre of vigilance, one can restore communications with the intentines, the centre of emotions." -Vogue Australia, demonstrating that the Beautiful & Bored People can also be completely batshit insane.
"Hypothetically speaking, what if I were, uh, madly in love with you?" -The best title for a website ever, and a sentence I may possibly steal as the title of my first book.
"Why couldn't you have had an exotic disease for my intern to test his training on?" -My doctor, sulkily, having evidently spent way too much time with my mother, who managed to get cholera last year.
"Perhaps we could put Bex's Aeneas poem to Keith Richard's guitar playing? And stick in some backing vocals that go, 'Dido's a moron'." -My English fiancee, discussing the 'first dance' song for our wedding. A choir of orangutans was also suggested.
"Sam! It is only raining on one side of our house! Why?" "Because our house is actually a pan-dimensional portal, and every time you look through the windows you look through different universes. Or something to do with backlit rain being easier to see than frontlit rain. You know, whatever." -Sam, being unimpressed by the fact that our house is a weather cusp. It was actually only raining on the western side; the other was clear blue sky for about ten minutes. He just doesn't believe me.
"They've bleeped Annie Lennox. I'm distraught." -My mother, commenting on the censorship practises of the United Arab Emirates airwaves. Her solution is to buy an mp3 player and move to Paris.
"A unique job not anybody can do- could it be YOU? ...As an Intelligence Officer, you'll gather intelligence overseas with the potential to help protect and promote Australia's national interests. All positions based in Canberra." -An excerpt from the recruitment email sent by, I kid you not, the Australian Secret Intelligence Agency to members of my honours society. Quite aside from the fact that 'Australia's national interests' might not be what they seem, I'll be damned if I'm moving to Canberra for the civil-servant payscale THEY'RE offering. Bugger that for a game of Jason Bourne.
Wonder what it's like to have a normal life?
The unfortunate thing about the following story is that it actually happens to be true. The reason that this is unfortunate is that it seems patently, absurdly, snopes.com-refutedly false, so nobody's going to believe me. I cannot, however, help the fact that sometimes truth decides to go and make itself utterly ridiculous.
One big falsehood factor is that it actually happened to my (deep breath) mother's brother's wife's father. Add in a dogwalker and a cousin, and you have a tale so tall that the only people who'd swallow it would be the demographic who view 'Real Life Ghost Hunters' as a documentary. This would be where I'd say 'now, you all know I'm not a fanciful person' to reassure you of my truthfulness, but anybody who reads this blog or has in fact met me will recognise that I have my feet on the ground, oh, approximately 40% of the time. The other 60% is generally spent writing, having silent conversations with fictional characters, and admiring pretty cloud formations. Basically, I'm screwed, but here's hoping.
Now, my aunt's father is dying, which is very sad. A few days ago he managed to reach his 80-something-th birthday, and to celebrate, he and his wife took a few of their 80-something friends out for dinner in a Korean restaurant in a posh suburb. These are women and men of the country-club, pearls-and-Chanel society set; they don't speak Korean, but they are completely fluent in golf.
Unfortunately for this group of friends, one of their number, an old fellow who suffered from lymphoma, committed the grievous faux pas of suddenly keeling over dead in his seat before the first course. (One can only imagine the horror of the restaurant's owners, but at least they hadn't served him anything yet.)
Obviously, the restaurant was emptied save for our poor band of slightly-fewer friends, who had to wait for the police to assess everything and ask inquisitive questions about their knowledge of the deceased. One of my favourite parts of this story is the fact that every single one of the old ladies refused to give the policemen her age. Backs may bend, times change, but the secrecy of a woman's age is immortal.
The coroner was, however, slightly delayed, so the police packaged up the body very neatly in a black body-bag beside the table, and waited around for said coroner to turn up. And this is the best bit: my aunt's father and his friends, having had a bad shock and probably spent about two hours enduring the mess and indignity of the aftermath, decided to have their Korean dinner anyway.
I don't know whether this is admirable pragmatism, a sad sort of reflection about attitudes towards death as we get old, or just a symptom of advanced age's low tolerance for inconsistent meal times and change in routine. All I know is that there sat five or so eighty-something people, chowing down on a full Korean meal while their friend lay beside them in his thoroughly non-designer interim resting-place. I do at least hope they toasted him.
