"If you plug your ears, close your eyes and run away, you're gonna run into something!"
"I've got your monogamy right here!"
-Percy to Mary Shelley
"Lizzie: Don't tell me you partook of the fruit!
Laura: Well, not really..."
-Goblin Market interpretation
"Top Gun, the horrible Tom Cruise film,..."
-typical relative clausery
"Dr. Who's dealing with the plague and, you know, what are you gonna do?"
"Ever get a fishhook stuck in your skin? There are a number of ways to get it out, and none of them is a good way."
"You can demonstrate this 'pants around your ankles' thing at home."
"I believe in secular forms of redemption."
"Now I'm even more afraid of the dark than I was before!"
"I mean 'literally' in the literal sense of 'literally'."
-on people using 'literally' figuratively
"Don't you be lookin' at me!"
-on the oppressive 'gaze'
"Why would you care? It's intertextuality!"
-on plagiarism
"Whenever I've done anything illegal, that's how I feel."
-on adrenalin rushes
"You've heard of the 1960s British group?"
-on The Beatles
"It's like pushing someone off of a train just to do it....a moving train."
"That's too much fucking perspective!"
Monday, December 14, 2009
More Political Shenanigans
When I was in high school, I was embittered by a great many things. I was 17; sue me. One of those things seems to resurface as a consistent problem, I would assume because I have remained in academia. There were a number of honors students who had a 4.0 gpa, scholarships and got into excellent colleges. They were fucking idiots. Morons. I was stuck on a bus next to one such "I got a 94 on my history test! This sucks!" student who could not have prattled on about more inane bullshit if she tried. They knew how to memorize facts, statistics, dates and names. They knew how to master the standardized test circuit. They knew how to sponge information, regurgitate it on tests, then forget they ever "learned" it in the first place. They knew little else. This may be why my students can't write, can't forge a single argument, can't analyze a text. They can't think. They never learned how to think.
In graduate school, things are a little different. My fellow fellows are not morons. They're actually reasonably intelligent individuals...within a certain realm. Some of them are brilliant and have capacity far beyond said realm. Some pursue the land beyond Faulkner or Chaucer or whoever; some do not. Others don't even concern themselves with the land beyond and persecute those of us who do. I'm not saying I don't love what I do. I love reading and writing and exploring and analyzing, and I love teaching. I get a lot out of it. I get nothing, however, out of bullshit politics. The thing that those high school morons and grad school meganerds have in common is that they are essentially robots. They know how to play the system and little else. That is not to say that playing the system isn't smart. It's a great way of getting what you want, but at what cost?
I believe in balance and sanity. Being able to breathe, to step outside of the bullshit of life, to enjoy the subtle beauty that robots can't or won't see is more important to me than anything else. I don't want to bend over backwards or bleed out my eyes just to function. I don't want to spend a year on a syllabus to compete for a position that needn't be a competition, that doesn't even register as a blip on the screen of high stakes accomplishments--a position that every scholar should have the opportunity to experience. I am not denigrating those who contort themselves, but that's not me. Academia is a job for me. A career, if you will, that I love very much--the best job I've had, but it's not my whole life and I don't think it should be. If it were, I'd end up listening to nothing but opera and refusing to talk to anyone who doesn't know what "verisimilitude" or "hermeneutic" means.
For those who have their heads so far up the Foucauldian or Shakespearean or whoever rectum that they can't see the light of day: If that's for you, if you're happy, more power to you. But don't you dare imply that I don't give a shit, that I'm lazy or don't want to work just because I'd rather not sniff Foucault's shit. What if I suggested that living in a library and then excelling at academia is easy? What if I said that balancing a life, a real live life (and I don't mean 2.5 kids and a picket fence--that's more of a "package") and still excelling at academia is hard? That figuring out what to sacrifice, because handling EVERYTHING is impossible, and still getting A's isn't easy?
I'm not a robot. I don't play the system, and if that makes me a failure, so be it. I just wish that for one second those who create the system (and playing it is creating it, sustaining it) could stop being a rung in the ladder and see that it's just a ladder and there is no "there" there. Get off the goddamn ladder. There's a whole world out here.
In graduate school, things are a little different. My fellow fellows are not morons. They're actually reasonably intelligent individuals...within a certain realm. Some of them are brilliant and have capacity far beyond said realm. Some pursue the land beyond Faulkner or Chaucer or whoever; some do not. Others don't even concern themselves with the land beyond and persecute those of us who do. I'm not saying I don't love what I do. I love reading and writing and exploring and analyzing, and I love teaching. I get a lot out of it. I get nothing, however, out of bullshit politics. The thing that those high school morons and grad school meganerds have in common is that they are essentially robots. They know how to play the system and little else. That is not to say that playing the system isn't smart. It's a great way of getting what you want, but at what cost?
I believe in balance and sanity. Being able to breathe, to step outside of the bullshit of life, to enjoy the subtle beauty that robots can't or won't see is more important to me than anything else. I don't want to bend over backwards or bleed out my eyes just to function. I don't want to spend a year on a syllabus to compete for a position that needn't be a competition, that doesn't even register as a blip on the screen of high stakes accomplishments--a position that every scholar should have the opportunity to experience. I am not denigrating those who contort themselves, but that's not me. Academia is a job for me. A career, if you will, that I love very much--the best job I've had, but it's not my whole life and I don't think it should be. If it were, I'd end up listening to nothing but opera and refusing to talk to anyone who doesn't know what "verisimilitude" or "hermeneutic" means.
For those who have their heads so far up the Foucauldian or Shakespearean or whoever rectum that they can't see the light of day: If that's for you, if you're happy, more power to you. But don't you dare imply that I don't give a shit, that I'm lazy or don't want to work just because I'd rather not sniff Foucault's shit. What if I suggested that living in a library and then excelling at academia is easy? What if I said that balancing a life, a real live life (and I don't mean 2.5 kids and a picket fence--that's more of a "package") and still excelling at academia is hard? That figuring out what to sacrifice, because handling EVERYTHING is impossible, and still getting A's isn't easy?
I'm not a robot. I don't play the system, and if that makes me a failure, so be it. I just wish that for one second those who create the system (and playing it is creating it, sustaining it) could stop being a rung in the ladder and see that it's just a ladder and there is no "there" there. Get off the goddamn ladder. There's a whole world out here.
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