Most of the time I'm okay with the way I've structured my existence in the academy. Having never had a full-time job, I recognize that I'm so unbelievably out of touch with the so-called "real world" that the ideas of "work week" or "overtime" or "income tax" are virtually meaningless, having been replaced with "conference" and "article" and "what income?" I don't really understand what an RRSP or a mortgage is, and I don't really need to - I live in a world where $18K a year is a small fortune, because I have friends making and living on less. Home ownership is SO not on the radar for me that the Hubble Telescope couldn't even find it. I'm too busy rationalizing spending 5% of my annual income on photocopies, or spending the day in bed reading, or wearing pajamas outside, or sharpening my hate-on for praxis-less theory to remember to purchase Tupperware or learn how to properly iron a shirt. I am a philosopher king, you see. I'm far too busy clambering up the fortune's hill of academy as fast as humanly possible to bother myself with mundane concerns like vacuuming or furnace output. I'm living a life of the mind, dammit. I am an intellectual. I use words like "praxis." I spend my days deconstructing, reconstructing and sometimes just plain structing.
I am so smart. SMRT. Et cetera.
And this is usually enough to make most of the out-of-touch, below-the-poverty-line lifestyle worth it. I get to feel smug and vastly superior to the majority of the population because I know more about the Stationers' Company Register than they do. Nyah, nyah.
Oh, don't look at me like that. There's not much else to keep you going after you've written ten thousand words on a forty-line poem. You need something to let you sleep at night.
And the superiority complex helps. It doesn't always work - family gatherings where I have to explain my thesis is a prime example of where it falls flat ("So, let me get this straight - you left your husband, moved across the country, set up shop in a remote city with practically no amenities and notoriously terrible weather for zero financial incentive and practically no job prospects, in order to write a 300-page book on the typefaces used in early printed books about plants?"). No superiority complex in the world can save you from nosy post-menopausal women ending sentences with the word "yet" (as in "Pregnant yet? Have you two bought a house yet? Settled down yet? Finished school yet?"), but when alone, superiority helps to shake those pesky feelings of despair and futility that settle in after you've spent three weeks writing something brilliant only to realize somebody else published the same fucking thing last year.
Except sometimes, academics do things that really undermine this whole superiority complex thing I've been trying to cultivate. I'm not talking about Larry Summers type things, neither. I'm talking about what just showed up in my inbox this morning. I've underlined some of the best parts:
CFP: The Cultural Logic of Brad Pitt
For the 2005 Western Literature Association Conference in Los Angeles, we plan to organize a panel on the film icon, Brad Pitt. Why Brad Pitt? As one of this generation's most popular actors, Pitt has explored many of the cultural tensions of our emerging postmodern era. Depicting masculine American whiteness in various states of crisis, his characters generally enact complex postmodern agencies; they are never wholly coherent, they are often self-destructive, and they generally rely on a certain amount of play--between stability and instability, between life and death, between autonomy and alter-dependency, between control and abandon. Simultaneously reifying and challenging hegemonic codes of race, class, gender, and regional or national identity, his characters explore the complex and changing postmodern cultural landscape. Tracing his performances through a variety of films and theoretical texts we hope to explain Brad Pitt's multi-dimensional postmodernity by exploring: 1) the cultural logic of his performances, showing how they dramatize postmodern cultural tensions, and 2) the kind of cultural or political work that his performances accomplish, or the difference that they make and the impact that they have on the audiences who watch them.
I don't care what anybody says. I don't care what the intentions of postmodern theory were originally, nor how truly valuable the idea of multiple truths and relativity are to equitable, anti-discrimination scholarship. That is not a fair exchange for academic conferences on Brad Pitt.
And now I don't feel so smug anymore, either.
"Simultaneously reifying and challenging hegemonic codes of race, class, gender, and regional or national identity, his characters explore the complex and changing postmodern cultural landscape."
If I ever write a bloated, meaningless sentence like that, please shoot me, shoot me dead.
Oh Gawd, I'm such a hypocrite. I confess, I've done it. I've written whole strings of sentences (otherwise known as paragraphs) worse, much worse, than that. But I always felt guilty afterwards. Does that make it Ok?
Oh, and my favourite personal question about graduate school:
"So, ummmm, like, what is it that English students actually DO?"
I had to say, that quite honestly, I wish I knew. I was only half joking; it was one of those disturbing theory-praxis questions.
Posted by: Josh | May 09, 2005 at 12:33
[singing] Jargon makes the world go 'round.
For what it's worth, my laptop exploded last night. It may be because of the propagation of this CFP. Let's stop the madness.
Posted by: Mr. Kong | May 09, 2005 at 13:34
All that for "Fight Club"?
I think some lonely lady professors are giving him a bit too much credit. Remember, this is the man who also starred in "Meet Joe Black."
Posted by: Anne | May 16, 2005 at 17:58
m739k
Posted by: ro470ck | July 05, 2007 at 20:04