Snowed Under
Ah, October. The birds are singing, the lecturers are frolicking, and the current pile of assessments is making my desk lean at a frankly improbable angle.
Nobody ever claimed that the English Department was particularly well-versed in logic (actually, I heard somebody did once, but they were laughed out of the university grounds, and found several years later wandering the wilds of outer Darlinghurst wearing eighteen spoons as a vest and singing an Old English version of 'Lady Marmalade', so we can perhaps discount their perspective). This fact is immediately apparent to anybody who's had to navigate their sanctum, the Woolley Building, which appears to have been designed by an architect with an expensive acid habit.
There is, however, something charmingly deranged in the idea that I am, in three weeks, expected to complete English assessments with a word-count greater than that of an Honours Thesis, which we are given a year to do. (I really must stop mentioning this to people in the same situation; for some reason, it doesn't seem to help.)
Possibly this is a subtle attempt to encourage us in our experiments with performance-enhancing drugs, in preparation for the late-night terrors of the Honours year. More probably, it's an attempt to cultivate some kind of literary natural selection, whereby only the strongest and most eloquently critical of Derrida under pressure will survive to do Honours at all. (And they said Literature lecturers were unscientific.) Whatever it is, I now have three weeks of hibernation ahead, from which I will probably emerge feverishly post-it-noting my feet and annotating my telephone conversations. I may start waking up to the discovery that I've footnoted my bed.
This application of pressure is, however, more dangerous than the English Department probably realises. You see, in situations of extreme academic strain I have a history of becoming... well, original. I have handed in a footnoted fairytale in lieu of an essay, inserted a picture of my sneakers as an appendix, quoted George Carlin and Blackadder as philosophical sources, done 2,500 words on the figure of the caterpillar in Shakespeare's Henriad, argued that the school of thought I'm dissecting is fundamentally opposed to academic essays, populated a polemic about euthanasia with a suicidal and very creative couple called Albert and Bernice (Bernice eventually dies because of a malfunctioning toaster), accused Dante's similes of a tendency towards bestiality, and inserted iambic pentameter and acrostic poems for no apparent reason.
It is entirely likely that my responses to the latest barrage (about the warp in Australian poetry and gendered geography in the texts of early modern female writers, respectively) will contain everything from Tintin to Pink Floyd to appendices concerning the breeding pattern of the blue heron. You think I'm joking, but I've already made a deal with a fellow English Honours student to insert the word 'stoat' into both our theses, neither of which have anything remotely to do with wildlife in any capacity. Blue herons are hardly more superficially irrelevant.
And yes, I do recognise that blogging about stoats instead of actually doing the work is probably not the most productive approach. I will, however, probably find a way of inserting a paragraph about procrastination, and so cite my own blog entries in the footnotes. The poor English Department.
