Mens sana in colegio sano

To celebrate the first day of the new school year, I offer for your edification and amusement a collection of the very acme of undergraduate scholarship.


If you thought you didn't understand the world before, wait till you read this.

(Allow me this one guilty pleasure. There's no harm if they're anonymous, right? That was my story with the Human Subjects review board...)

Terminolatry 1: Oprahwhelm

In an effort to make this humble 'blog even more of a catalyst for changing people's lives, I am providing a new service. Think of it as a semi-regular vocabulary builder.

Impress your acquaintances. Get ahead in business. Make sense of your world.

Yeah.

oprah·whelm \ò·pra·hwélm\ verb
to completely demoralize or devastate someone in the most public manner possible

oprahwhelmed \ò·pra·whélmd\ adverb
experiencing the sudden, soul-crushing realization that the world's most powerful woman has just destroyed your career/reputation/life in front of millions of her rabid devotees, who will later scoff at, upbraid, and otherwise crap on you given half a chance

Ken Nordine's Audio Mescaline

"The changing information which we experience as World is an unfolding narrative. It tells of the death of a woman. This woman, who died long ago, was one of the primordial twins. She was half of the divine syzygy. The purpose of the narrative is the recollection of her and of her death. The Mind does not wish to forget her. Thus the ratiocination of the Brain consists of a permanent record of her existence and, if read, will be understood this way. All the information processed by the Brain--experienced by us as the arranging and rearranging of physical objects--is an attempt at this preservation of her; stones and rocks and sticks and amoebae are traces of her. The record of her existence and passing is ordered onto the meanest level of reality by the suffering Mind which is now alone." (Tractates: Cryptica Scriptura #32)

Now imagine that read in a gravelly basso profundo - the erudition tempered by noir grittiness and existential angst - riding atop a throbbing, squirming soundtrack of ambient grooves.

That's Ken Nordine's Word Jazz.

The man himself (whom you'd know if you heard his ubiquitous voiceovers) has apparently been doing this since he began to free-style over the house trio at a Hawaiian joint on Wilson to keep his Beatnik clientele's jaded attention. Makes sense it's on the radio in the dead of Sunday nights. But how did it ever get on public radio?

If you intend to listen, don't be on any psychedelics or within 20 feet of a sensory deprivation tank.

Potemkin State

My attention was recently and unexpectedly caught by the barrage of ads for a movie coming out. It seems to be perfect (maybe too close to home?) for youth of a certain age at this point in the late summer.

Plot summary: Kid fails to get into any colleges. Kid and slacker friends create a fictitious school, complete with Lewis Black as dean. Hilarity ensues.

Leaving aside the requisite suspensions of disbelief (for starters, the conceit that a bunch of otherwise unmotivated students could stick with any concerted effort, duplicitous or no, of such magnitude), the kernel idea appeals to me. At that tender age I was dreaming up the ideal interdisciplinary research institute for answering the great questions of human existence--or, more precisely, the cool-ass architecture to house such a beast. It occurred to me later that the ideal location would in fact be the n-dimensional space of the internet, so my dream remains simmering on the far back burner.

Now I've been a student a long time, in varied venues and surrounded by a broad range of people. I've known plenty of students who, faced with conjugating irregular French verbs or following a bill through Congress, acted as though they were wearing leg irons and orange jumpsuits. (That some of them have indeed ended up in such a get-up is a running bad joke between me and my mom.)

Yet some of those same students whose stomachs turned inside-out at the thought of two extra years of pointless post-secondary bullshit just to get a technical certificate manifested insatiable curiosity, self-direction, and limitless enthusiasm about something: mastering an instrument; resurrecting a junker car; reaching peak physical condition, and helping others do the same; designing clothes; reading (even writing) graphic novels. But these were predominantly pursued outside the classroom, beyond the reach of scholastic gatekeeping and shepherding.

This experience is what makes me think "Accepted" will start out promising and quickly become formulaic, divorced from real life--as early reviews seem to hint. Nevertheless there are some sociological verities in this idea that I wouldn't have guessed held true until spending this last school year basically full-time as an instructor in a decent four-year college.

That the rebellion against a cult of collegiate expectations takes the form of the very thing these kids can't attain and perhaps don't want is not fuzzy-headed scriptwriting. I think it's a reflection, on a screen darkly, of just how much we as a society are steering every student toward only certain kinds of post-secondary education.

I will expand this point in a subsequent post, and will try not to come off as overly elitist. If you really want elitism, meditate on just how many people - trivia buffs, college students, even my PhD-possessing peer group - would recognize the czarist allusion in this post title...

A parting thought from the Dean:

"...from behind me, a young woman of 25 uttered the dumbest thing I ever heard in my life. (That was until Dan Quayle was elected the vice president and things took a turn.) She said 'If it weren't for my horse, I wouldn't have spent that year in college.'
I'll repeat that. I'll repeat that because that's the kind of sentence that when your brain hears it, it comes to a screeching halt. And the left-hand side of the brain looks at the right-hand side of the brain and says, 'It's dark in here, and we may die!'
She said, 'If it weren't for my horse,' -- giddyup giddyup, let's go -- 'I wouldn't have spent that year in college' -- which is a degree-granting institution.
Don't, DON'T think about that for more than three minutes or blood will shoot out of your nose."