In the almost too droll for its own good Maisonneuve [via Maud], Patience Highbottom [a name that sings, really] illuminates why one growth area for universities is on-site retirement communities. You see, the lifestyles of grad students and pensioners are not so different:
As a doctoral fellow in a middling English department at a middling university in a not-so-middling town, I have achieved absolute leisure. My days make life in a retirement village look busy.I know what you’re thinking. What about those harried, neurasthenic grad students, grown pale and thin after hours deep in the library stacks? What about Paradise Lost? What about Spenser? What about Wordsworth’s “Prelude”? Nope, no longer relevant. Even the professors haven’t read that stuff. The truth about graduate study: you can get by on a wing and a skim of Walter Benjamin.
True 'dat. Plus, the dramatis personae of the graduate seminar are spot on. For a good example of "Eli" behavior ["Will mention having gone to Yale at least twice in all conversations"], one need look no further than the piece by Richard Eoin Nash in the same issue. Could it be, I thought, the same guy who produced and directed a very self-consciously hip staging of Dürrenmatt's "The Visit" [also the source of the Sengalese film Hyenas] at the ART in '92? The "I'm so charming" Irishman with the eye-watering B.O. [to be fair, maybe he was nervous] who sat next to me during the performance? Sure enough, it is. He coyly waits until page 4 to fess up.
I worked with Fitch as an undergraduate at Harvard in 1991. Later the following year, I bumped into him in Harvard Square. At the time I was working on my thesis (I was a concentrator in the Government department) while also preparing for an upcoming series of site-specific performances. Doug and I chatted for a short while, I complaining about having to work on these wildly incompatible projects. I excused myself, explaining that I “had to go do things related to my concentration.”“Why don’t you concentrate on things related to what you’re doing” was his response. Shortly thereafter I abandoned my thesis.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the power of chiasmus. The article itself is good, to be fair.
Masochists are invited to read the magazine's mission statement, which runs along the same earnest "hey, kids, let's put on a show" lines of every aspirant New Yorker-manque publication ever launched or even bandied about by drunk smartypants everywhere [I get to be Jane Grant!]. Only this one's from Montreal, so I may just have to subscribe. You see, much like Homer "I'm a chocoholic, but for booze" Simpson, the cinetrix is an Anglophile, but for Quebec.
