Jennifer's blog

Oh, Cripes.

I never in my life thought I would actually be saying this.

Ahem. 

I'm going to Oxford.

Oxford

Yes.  That Oxford.  The Big Thing With The Dreaming Spires (Shut Up, Matthew Arnold).  The place with the Prohibited Mounds and the rowing matches and the ancestral thingamabobs and the Tolkein and the ivy-covered eggheads. The one I poked fun at when last in England for its ridiculous sense of entitlement (to which I will hopefully be immune, since I am forcibly part-time and therefore persona non grata to college accommodation offices.  I will consequently have to seek out a nice little hovel in which to hang my hat and burn my food). The place in which Jude the Obscure felt obscure whilst falling in love with his incredibly irritating cousin.  That Oxford.

And I still have blue hair and swear like a sailor when startled.

... This is going to be fun.

Graduation Speeches I Have Known

So, I'm a graduate now.  Jesus loves me more than I will know, whoa whoa whoa, etcetera.

 

Apparently You Flip The Tassel

Yes, I wore the peculiar hat, attempted at one point to throw it in the air but watched it collide with another person's at a height of perhaps three feet and bounce rapidly to earth, compared my white fur tippet (fake) with my friends' white fur tippets (real and sadly shedding), and curtseyed in five-inch heels without falling off.  The University of Sydney wants no more to do with me, and I have the paper to prove it. 

 

A Much Cuter Idea Than Mine

(I did at one point cherish the concept of flying kites in the Quad on my graduation day; but the entire experience, as it turns out, was less Dead Poet's Society than mild bureaucratic shambles interspersed with charming moments.  Which is pretty much university as a whole, really.)

 

Not Present: Woman, Muddy, With Bicycle.

What was much less Dead Poet's Society was the graduation speech, delivered to us as we sat be-tasselled and prepared to be vigorously, finally expelled from the Great Hall into the Great Big World.  A stateswoman in the field of Australia literature- whose theories I know and have a closet full of bugbears about, but whom I am sure is a perfectly nice woman- got up and told us in no discernible order, for about half an hour, that she liked Matthew Arnold, that recessions and hard times need Arts majors (no explanation as to why; they presumably Just Do), that she once taught a prisoner at Long Bay, that anybody who dared tell us Arts majors had no Purpose because they did not lead to a Career were Utterly Wrong, and that she had fallen into the Thames at Oxford once.  This last anecdote occurred three times.

 

As the final contraction before the birth of my post-undergrad days, it was, shall we say, a bit underwhelming.  (Did I mention that when she fell into the Thames it was very cold and she was holding a bicycle?)

 

Aristotle Says I'm Eligible

See, here's the thing (well, one of them).  Arts degree-takers have been wrestling with the preconception that their choice does not lead to a Secure Vocational Future, and is therefore an Indulgent But Abstractly Useful Decision (I paraphrase having heard this argument at least, oh, 15,000 times) since the Industrial Revolution.  Everybody knows that 'a proper education' these days does not lie in being able to discuss Socrates on one's father's chaise lounge, but in knowing what derivatives trading/commercial litigation/actuarial practise is, and having a savings account to prove it.  As far as old hat goes, this is a minstrel's cap with moth-holes in it.

 

Gaddis Sees Point In Art; Eyes It Suspiciously

We all know the defences, too.  There's the line about art being useful and enlightening in itself (which I agree with, though not with abstract, condescending pronouncements that it is essential to societal/individual/world welfare by people who've only ever seen the real world on the nightly news).  There's those, like a helpful uncle of mine, who like to prove that it actually has what he calls 'real-life' impact; he once sent me an overly optimistic article about financial companies looking for Philosophy majors, probably written by the latter.  There are ducks and weaves and defensive arguments over lattes and feelings of uselessness in the dead of night after chance meetings with International Relations majors and yes all right fine now if I give you a lolly will you go away.

 

Neverending Bloody Argument

Not that this debate isn't essential and an integral part of the arts and whatnot. Rather than a trotting out of a horse so flogged it must be nearly glue, though, I would have preferred something more about the world itself, and being newfangled people in it.  Something along the lines of J.K. Rowling's excellent graduation speech to Harvard about The Fringe Benefits Of Failure, or Joseph Brodsky's to a similar sort of place about boredom.  I am young, daft and entitled, and don't know anything about anything at all (this is what a Philosophy major gets you); instead of giving me Apollo's laurel wreath and kicking me off the ivory tower, why couldn't somebody have given us a hint of actual wisdom, even a horrifyingly depressing one? 

 

The Dame did try, bless her.  Apparently the aim of the bicycle story was to tell us to embrace accident, though for the life of me I don't understand why being covered in mud in an English November would incite me to embrace anything, much less accident.  (In any case, it seemed to be her own silly fault for not noticing that the Thames had flooded and England has different seasons to Australia; less Embrace Accidents than Don't Be A Cloistered Nitwit, which is a fair enough lesson in itself.)

 

Congratulations! It's A Recession!

We're in a recession, there's wars, everything on the supermarket shelves is nasty, kids these days listen to terrible music, a horrible amount of people listen to Rush Limbaugh, and out there for our little hopeful be-hatted selves there's failure, ennui, obstacles, injustice, colossal senses of unimportance and impotence, tragedy, desperation, want and loneliness.  The reason I know this, beyond reading the Economist and having eyes and ears and a human existence, is through an Arts education, because the world's pretty much always been like this, and philosophers and artists like to try and muddle their way into knowing about it. 

 

I do wish somebody had stood up and told us what they know about all that, though.  There's inspiration to help us out in our new lives, and then, well, there's Matthew Arnold.

Lancing The Free Market

Now I Can See My Privilege So Clearly!

I began, a short while ago, to write about the ridiculousness of the freelance writing market, into which (for various reasons) I am currently dangling my pretty pink tootsies; but I got exactly halfway through a post before deciding that I sounded so ridiculously entitled I may as well buy some Laura Ashley and a Pekingese named Miss Poky Poo, spray on Gucci's Eau de Smug, and be done with it.  Ah yes, ha ha, the job market is HILARIOUS, I say, from my nicely air-conditioned and desperation-devoid ivory tower. 

 

However, I was nosing about the freelance boards for job opportunities once again this morning, and this notice, appended to a request for a PR writer for a chain of pet stores, broke my silence, once and for all:

Type Faster, Human

"Please note, this business is owned by two Beagles, so if you don't like dogs, or taking direction from them (they're pretty opinionated) this is probably not the best spot for you. (Although we are an equal opportunity employer, if you are a dog, unless you can type, it probably won't work out.)"

 

No, really.  Go and read it again. 

 

Cute, you say, and it is, in a way. But let us not forget that it is also stark raving bonkers.  Taking orders from ventriloquism-aided beagles is what happens when you quit the job market and take up a satisfying career in acid-taking.  The fact, ladies and gentlemen, that this is barely the tip of the iceberg (incidentally, I think we're going to need to find a better figure of speech once the icebergs disappear - the tip of the coastal city which remains above water, perhaps?) as far as - forgive me - barking madness goes should indicate the frank weirdness of my current existence.  (So what else is new.)

 

Blame My Internet Search Engine

I had, for instance, never known before I began my present trawling that there was such a thing as Fantasy Baseball Blogging, an ignorance which strikes me now as remiss.  Anais Nin with baseball gloves?  Slash pairings between burly rival pitchers?  "I've never seen a bat THAT big before"?  Somebody give me some idea over here.  Throw me a bone, beagle-overlords.

 

It is also slightly confronting, particularly at 9am on a rainy morning, to be asked 'Do YOU have a humourous story about abortion?  Your own?  Somebody else's?', followed by a request to put it in 500-1000 words and cede the copyright in preparation for book publication.  I suppose it's better than telling it around the pub.

 

Not My Ideal Saturday Night

The niche writing jobs out there are, in general, fairly astonishing.  I've been forced to admit, to both myself and to the questions posed by job ads, that I am not an expert in power tools, gay men in sport, the history of marching bands, laws surrounding church pension groups, rashes caused by diabetes, or making jewellery which accurately resembles fish; I have not ghostwritten the autobiographies of one or more incarcerated rappers, talked to ghosts, or written a weekly column on oral sex.

 

(The latter was a suggested requirement for editing a self-help book on the subject- and fair enough too, because if they'd just said 'requires experience', the resulting resumes may have been highly questionable.)

 

Why Are You Not This Man

And no, just for the record, I am not going to write Erotic E-Books With Unexpected Twists, purely because I'd take 'unexpected' very, very literally (Taxidermy!  Entropy!  Lyres!  Christopher Walken, whom, like the Spanish Inquisition, nobody ever expects!).  I'm not going to write 1,000 questions and answers for an 'Amusing Board Game About Art History', either, as I'd doubtless get bored and make all of them bad jokes: 

 

"Q: Vincent Van Gogh walks into a bar, and the barman offers him a drink.  How does he reply?  A: 'No thanks, I've gone one 'ere.'"

 

There's also quite a narrow window of legitimate, well-paying (as far as freelance positions go) opportunities.  On the one side of this glowing city is the dark and dense Exploitation Mire, where well-meaning freelancers attempt to avoid the bubbling mud-cysts of Work for Big $$$$$ Only Eight Days A Week!, and the poisonous traps of $0.03 Per Word, Increasing As Your Profile Rises!  Let us not dare speak of Write For Us, Lttle Subscribtion Fee Required!  It's dank and miserable and horribly misspelled. 

 

But Lead Makes The Colours Prettier

On the other, however, are the serene banks of the Soul-Sucking River, where everything is legitimate, well-paid and immaculately grammatically correct, and requires merely a small compromise of one's ethics.  The breeze wafts with the hot air of Product Writers Needed for PR Opportunity @ Toy Company (which, one discovers after a little internet search, needs a new PR image because the toys were found to contain lead).  Published authors wave from the terrace and request a diligent serf to research, ghostwrite and edit their new book, which is an admirable interpretation of 'outsourcing'.

 

Mother, I Need The Ethical-Compromise Card Again.

The best of these are the well-known and hideously well-paid Academic Paper Writing jobs.  Some struggling little darling's mother whips out a credit card and on demand, like clockwork, is provided with what is ostensibly a Model Answer for the essay question provided, at the appropriate length, with bibliography and associated bells and whistles (and at an appropriate level, no less- one can order a C+ paper as easily as an A one.)  Model Answers, in case you raise a moral objection, are only meant to guide our hapless university blockhead to discover his own essay-writing mojo.  The merest suggestion that the Model Answer be handed in as their own work sends the Academic Paper Writing companies into mouth-frothing paroxysms and libel accusations.

 

Bugger This

The people who produce these tailored essays-on-demand, with occasional notice of less than one day, are generally graduates with astonishing last-minute research skills, and they're well-paid.  For a 2,000-word undergraduate essay one earns several hundred dollars, depending on how much time is given; writing somebody else's PhD will probably earn you enough to pay off your student loans.  Unless, of course, you cherish the apparently anachronistic notion that university is there to actually get an education.  Personally I, being afflicted by a nastily strong ethical sense, think the essay-purchasers can go do complicated things to their instestines, which is why I will not be a millionaire any time soon.

 

I will, however, lead an intriguing existence, as I'm currently:

But She Doesn't Have A Knife

a) on the shortlist for a position writing for a Cosmo-esque women's website, whose application articles ('Write about 'Mr Right' and 'What To Wear On A First Date', 500 words each') I made as sarcastic as possible because I was devoid of any hope of actually getting the job.  To say I wasn't expecting the response to my unbearably snarky submissions to be interest is a very slight understatement.  If I get the job my head might explode.

b) employed as an occasional article writer by a woman who rejoices, no kidding, in the last name Rambo II.

 

If that doesn't mean things are going to get interesting, I don't know what does.

Well, That Was... Peculiar.

Space Up The Back, With The Appendices

Suffice it to say that the interview with Oxford was not entirely what I expected, and leave it at that.  If I'm not what they want, I shall not grieve, rend my artfully diaphanous clothing, and throw myself in front of the nearest omnibus (automobile or published- I wonder if anybody's thought to combine the two?  Gigantic wheeled volumes with sets of chairs along the footnotes?)  I shall simply Glide Onward, with my usual grace, tact and infinite poise.

 

... which means I'll get two steps and fall down a flight of stairs.  Onto a visiting dignitary.

 

The Floral Equivalent Of An Elite Courtesan

Now, back to aggressively editing my portfolio [and by 'aggression', I mean 'pieces cannot reasonably expect to make it out alive, recognisable or untainted by my attempts to convert miscellaneous bits into poetry'], reading Anna Akhmatova on the beach purely to confuse myself, and discovering that I am accidentally excellent, because those scraggy dotted flowers I bought once, in a fit of rare sentimentality, for That Person Who Seems To Like Having Me Around For No Apparent Reason are actually The Lily Of the Incas.  Can you think of anything which sounds even remotely more luxurious?  Yes, let's combine horitcultural royalty with associations of ancient civilisations and molten gold.  Jesus.

 

I would like to note, also, that I found these rare, Chilean and Linnaeus-named things in a bucket at a supermarket.  Australia is strange. 

Perhaps Inevitable Doom

The telephone interview with Intensely, Scarily Prestigious British University is in less than 24 hours.  It will be half an hour long. 

 

At this particular moment, despite being fortified with tea, roses and spaghetti bolognese (all supplied by my Utterly Awesome best friend of ten years, who is, what with all the unconditional love and the tea-making, essentially my wife), and in possession of six pages of crib notes, I am worried that I will:

 

++ Become, despite my expansive and neurotic preparation, utterly dumbstruck, and waste precious minutes of their incredibly expensive phone call in dedication to stuttering like a typewriter being hit with a baseball bat;

 

++ Discover a very, very well-buried confessional streak to my soul, and find myself telling reputable academics about my intense writerly insecurities, that incident with the skink when I was five, and my paralytic fear of zombies.  Clearly what they want is a Shining Emerging Artist With A Healthy Attitude, and not some half-baked Antipodean loon who lies awake listening for flesh-eating people outside her window;

 

++ Go, at the last minute, completely and utterly insane, and answer all questions with babble about penguins;

 

++ Reach for the phone, slip, crack my head on a bench, and leave the ambulance men to explain to uncomprehending posh British receptionists as to why I am not available to come to the phone.

 

....I wonder if managing to combine several of these would get me some sort of prize.

I Have No Excuses. Here, Have Some Funny.

Right!

 

Something Indecent Is Happening Here

Considering that the Original Purpose of this blog was documenting my educational rampages across the disapproving wastes of Ye Olde Lions-And-Unicorns Mother Country, perhaps the fact that I am now attempting to batter my way back in to said Mother Country for another postgraduate round indicates that I should start writing the damn thing again.

 

(It also indicates that I am a complete glutton for punishment and have little to no respect for the demands of my accent, which was damaged so severely by the last English jaunt that I may never be viewed as properly Strayan even again.  The masochistic strain is enhanced by the fact that I will once again be exposed to people trying to make me take tea seriously.  I may not cope.)

 

Literary Equivalent Of A Creative Writing Master's

However: after essentially falling out of my university feet-first, my next move is to try and present myself as a Charming Convict Lass oozing with talent/brains/legs/je ne sais quoi to a bunch of universities offering that much-mocked degree on the post-graduate platter, the Creative Writing Masters Degree.  One imagines it, runty, snuffling and slightly diabetic, stabled with all the various Economics MAs and the M.Phils in Fine Arts, trying to hide itself in a corner lest a lot of MBAs unintentionally stampede it. 

 

He Publishes Or He Gets The Syringe Again

The amount of flak the Creative Writing Degree gets is nicely summarised, I think, by the amount of conversations I've had where well-meaning friends, on the mere mention of the concept, go on a long rant about how 'writing can't be taught except by experience' and their belief that these MAs are a blatantly vampiric measure by those university systems trying to latch on to gullible, Zadie-Smith-reading necks.  However, though there are many reasons, suffice to say that my creative approach is so in need of an environment of discipline and guidance that were a twelve-week course in a dungeon with a Literary Dominatrix offered somewhere, I would be on the application list so fast I'd break the land-speed record.  (If one more person says 'Yes, but...' to me following this explanation, I shall begin sharpening my stainless steel knitting needles.)

 

Llorando

Thus, I am currently in the process of applying to, or waiting for a response from, several UK/US universities.  It's a charming process, involving a delicate mixture of failed organisation, shuffling envelopes, forgetting forms, discovering the printer is only using green ink for a week in a presumed belated celebration of St Patrick's Day, managing forgetful referees, abject panic, the attempted sorting of 14 deranged short pieces (40,000 words) spread out on a double bed into something mildly resembling a sane portfolio of 5,000, the Ancestral Visa Tango, looking at finances, covering eyes and looking at finances again in the hopes of change, waiting by telephones, more panic, more deranged short pieces, horribly lying Personal Statements about how excellent I am, Rebekah Del Rio's version of Llorando, improperly applied stamps, incompetent post offices, fits of depression in New York hotel rooms and more, calmly comforting panic.

 

Bring Me My Tea, Boy

The fruit of one of these applications- an imminent telephone interview with a UK university so scarily prestigious it probably once used Australians as basement slaves who never saw sunlight and had to donate their bodily hair for ink-blotters- has increased the panic to a nice, shrill fear. 

 

I may soon give up, apply for an English Lit PhD on stoats in medieval literature, and huddle inside a university with very thick walls for the next four years.  (The fact that I have also, for reasons I can honestly only attribute to reading too much of The Economist and Amaryta Sen, applied for a Global Politics degree at the London School Of Economics indicates that the next little while is going to be very, very odd.) 

No, I Have Not Died (That I'm Aware Of)

Dear Vox,

 

I'm sorry I temporarily dumped you due to the heady and incredibly all-encompassing love affair I've been maintaining for the past few months with my Honours Thesis.  To make it up to you, and to start a grand new phase of forgiveness, compromise and general marital bliss, enclosed are the beginnings of the Second Semester Quotes List.  Considering that I am now halfway through the first week, this is going to be very, very interesting.

 

Love-

Jen.

 

"COMMUNISTS LACK NUTRIENTS!"

"You should take your jumper off. Unless you have a hideous disfigurement. In which case you should take it off anyway. So we can laugh at you."

"Sorry, sorry, I was just thinking about dolphins."

"The topic of incest in this class may disturb some people..."
(sotto voce) "Think we'll be all right, actually."

"LIFE IS A DEATH TRAP."

"He was much denigrated- well, no, not denigrated, just-" miming sticking a pig in the air- "er, poked at."

"I wasn't ranting.  I was problem-solving."

"It was great to see all those academics I respected so much, you know, make utter idiots of themselves."

"So which one of the Honours cohort would we eat first?"

"Like most people who do my job, I quite like the sound of my own voice."

"STOP USING ME AS A BATTERING RAM IN CROWDS."

"Playwrights, alas, seem particularly prone to getting into fights."

"I think my wrist is a Death Wrist."

"Yes, but copia [the rhetorical device of saying one thing in as many ways as possible] survives in the Dead Parrot sketch, doesn't it?"

"The librarians won't tell me how many people have died in the Stacks over the years!"

"And he does this little... OK, everybody's listening, I'm not going to talk about my fish any more."

"And then Hero does the kind of crying thingie."

"But Bruce is out there! ... Lurking. With, um, Kant."

Of Zizek: "It's not a speech impediment.  It's a cocaine addiction."

"WHY IS IT ALWAYS THE INGOTS?"

(On entering the room, brightly) "In Tahiti they have no word for sad."

"Basically this poem is the best hangover scene ever written."

"Why? Because it's a HAPPY book!"

By Popular Demand

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.

Ridiculousness, The Annotated Version

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. 

Lowered Expectations

Did I Mention I Am Also Planning A Party

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!"