the inmate's journal : the academy x

I sent my article to The Post-Semantic Journal of Punctuation and its editors accepted it, made me Chair of their Comma Special Interest Group, and nominated me for Erotic Orthographer of the Year.

 

I sent a copy of my article to the Devil and he responded, Great work Jude.  You’ve successfully combined scholarliness, utopianism, and incomprehensibility to fuse an exemplary and I’m sure influential modern academic work.  Tenure’s coming … let’s keep our fingers crossed.

 

I sent a copy to my mother and she said, I always knew you loved me dear.

 

I sent a copy to The New Yorker and they told me to send it to the Devil.

 

I sent a copy to my father and he said, I’ve failed you as a parent and a human being.

 

I sent a copy to Ouzo and she said, While IdI’s still smiling, nothing will impress me.

 

Meanwhile, the scholarly reviews poured in—

 

Shockingly original and succinct.

The South Wawa Comma Quarterly

Its very sparseness belies its expansive effects and residua.

Paradox and Tomorrow

 

Prose so vivid and energetic it walks the tightrope between meaning and inspiration.

Necro House Review

Subtly defies common scholarly conventions while remaining faithful to the underlying spirit of intellectual inquiry.

Stuttgartian Dasein of Stuttgart, Dasein,

and the Lifeforce of Stuttgart and Dasein

A parenthetical celebration of the new ethical regime of the feminine:  a bold hypothesis set in bolder axioms set in the boldest veracities.

The New Neo-theological Journal of the Dispossessed of Urban Iowa

Defies the pen of the theologian in its brutal eloquence.

International Inquirer of Embryonic, Humanist, and Paradigmatic Ideas

Mr. Peer is surely, for the moment, the center of the intellectual universe and the seed of a new spiritual paradigm.

Who’s Who of Why?

 

OK … so it was rejected, all right!  But life’s nine parts fantasy, one part mundanity, two parts abuse, seven parts sleep, and four parts shopping.  All that divided by death and multiplied by your mother.  So if I indulged in a little daydreaming after receiving the eighteenth rejection notice, I’m sure you’ll excuse me.

 

Fanciful flights—whether to escape your morose poppa-in-law, that predictable sex life, the nose you inherited from your grandmother, or simply peas again for supper—are, after all, the number one revenge strategy we have against life’s accumulative slog.  Take a trip to your mind’s Kama Sutra to deal with standard copulation.  To Vogue to deal with your wardrobe.  To Heaven to deal with history.  Isn’t that what drugs and the Internet and religion and movies and even art all have in common?  Trips—packaged, sold, and gobbled for an accessible price?  Does it matter that the seller’s name is sometimes different—dealer, geek, priest, director, painter?  Aren’t they all really working in the same factory producing different flavors of the same spiritual candy?  And the rest of us vain shoppers with our own peculiar preferences?  Yeah, yeah, a licorice MacBook Air … yeah, yeah, sassafras Brueghel.  Yeah oh yeah, a chocolate chunk peppermint swirl caramel infested Jesus.

 

So here I was, 36,000 feet above reality, stuck with you in a plane called life, trying to find something wondrous and intangible or tangible or incandescent or transcendent or tangerine or something somewhere in some earthy institution.  And here I was in its next practical phase—faking a Ph.D. by pleasing Ouzo by disgracing IdI.

 

Now, those of you well trained in the devious arts—pragmatists at heart, cunning of mind, versed in politics and sober—what strategy would you recommend I use to deal with Ouzo’s instructions?  Which tactics would be most effective to bring the unfortunate IdI down and raise me to glorious security?  Can you draw me up a project plan, with milestones and budget?  Would you guide me, sweet director, in the world’s wooly clever wily ways?  For isn’t knowledge preeminently the ability to survive in whatever environment we find ourselves in, to use whatever resources are at hand to adapt to power’s resolute demands?  And aren’t the most successful those who know what to do and do it without flinching?  Please, generous reader, help this doubter out with your experience in nature’s ways.

 

Well, thanks for the advice.  But I’ll tell you now that I ignored it and did what any sensible intellectual does in difficult circumstances.  I went to a bar and rapidly downed six pints.