One
of the most glorious things about being a grad student is being a research
bitch. Those of you in the real world may suppose that being an RB is a
somewhat engaging enterprise, filled with small slips of paper and exciting
discoveries, perhaps while wearing tweed and fluttering one's eyelashes
charmingly behind magnifying glasses, under the watchful eyes of sexy
librarians just itching for the right sort of academic to charm the hairpins
right out from under that tight bun. After a hard day of pretentious
word-logging, RBs might gather for a snifter of port in a room filled with
leather-bound books, a fire blazing cheerily in the hearth, conversation
merrily turning to the latest offerings of one's book dealers or the
misadventures of one's latest article proposal. RB's could say things
like "good show, old man," and "pity, isn't it?" while they
swirl their port around in their snifters, desperately hoping that nobody finds
out that they never got all the way through Areopagitica.
This, of course, would be a gross misrepresentation, and I consider myself
honour-bound to disabuse you of any notions you may have of the pretentious
drinking culture of academia. Being a research bitch is not all port and
winking at librarians, alas, though it does convey a highly-coveted immunity to
the itchiness of tweed. As a matter of
fact, I am wearing tweed right now. No, sometimes being a RB involves
things that are slightly less interesting than watching linoleum curl, one step
above trying to make a duck stand still for a photograph and far, far below
researching the boiling point of a hamster. Sometimes RBs have to do the academic equivalent of running laps in gym
class while the kids a year up get whifflebats and an inflatable sumo-wrestling
ring ("You with the short CV: drop and give me twenty"). At the moment, my RB duties include
copy-editing Ben Jonson's The Divell is an Asse, which consists of
reading the play aloud from the original seventeenth century folios to
another RB, LETTER BY LETTER, PUNCTUATION MARK BY PUNCTUATION MARK. In
other words, I spend several hours a week doing this:
"Speechprefix-P-V-G-capital-I-s-i-t-n-o-t-e-x-c-e-l-l-e-n-t-comma-italic-capital-c-small-h-i-e-f-question
mark-roman-small-h-o-w-n-i-m-b-l-e-h-e-i-s-exclamation mark-all
caps-a-c-t-ampersand-strange
bar-bold-squiggle-k-i-l-l-m-e-j-u-s-t-m-a-k-e-t-h-e-i-t-a-l-i-c-s-s-t-o-p-d-e-a-r-g-o-d-p-l-e-a-s-e-exclamation
mark."
Occasionally, we are interrupted by a mark that looks vaguely like a squished bug or something that may have been stuck at some time or another between a Jacobean printer's teeth, and we have to figure out what that something really is, and why it is on the page. This involves a lot of debate about whether it is just a bug (boo) or a desiccated piece of mutton (boo) or a piece of broken type (yay). If it's the latter, we have to decide what kind of broken type it is – is it an italic capital 'I', or a lowercase 'l', 't', 'f' or long-s? Is it broken type or just not inked? Is this a consistent problem, or is this a unique variant? Shall I kill you first, or do you want to do me and then yourself, since you're the better shot?
And so on. Lately I've found myself entering a kind of meditative trance when it's my turn to recite, going into this Yellow Submarine-like space with a chainlined sky and ligature forest where Ben Jonson's pudgy mug peeks out from behind trees and sternly shakes a chubby finger. "Philip Sidney had a pimply face," he says. "I know." I say. "You said that in 1617." "Well he did," says Ben Jonson, pouting. "And that's not "wife." It's "wise." Long 's', stupid." And then he smacks me with the 1641 folio, which really makes no sense, because Jonson died in 1637.
And I return to consciousness, absent-mindedly scratching my tweed and squinting at what could either be a mouse footprint or an upside down letter "k." Someday, I know, there'll be port. Someday.
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