Polishing A Third…
It was two days before the essay hand in and I found myself switching tabs to Facebook, ready to reward myself with a good old post: “You know you’ve worked on an essay too long when you start to believe what you’re writing.” Dumb chuckles aplenty. Then I realised I’d written that status before, possibly several times. It’s because it happens so often. You might start work on an essay with vague ideas, nothing too concrete, certainly not a whole argument. The guilt of the approaching deadline or a desire to get literally anything written down means you might start writing a few experimental paragraphs down, unconnected, perhaps, not even stuff you actually think is true, just sentences that might make sense and are at least about the thing you’ve got to write on. You write some more, and then you find that, hypothetically, some of these disparate meaningless paragraphs link up. You start to cut and paste sentences so they fit better together on the page like a rhetorical Frankenstein. It gradually takes shape. Before you know it, you’re writing whole pages which have a flow, an argument, and you’re committed to it now, because after the first thousand words you wouldn’t dream of starting a whole and completely different essay from scratch. You’re committed to a steaming heap of crap, a hot, flowing stream of cerebral excrement. There’s no looking back.
You may as well make the best of it, if that’s what you’re going to hand in at the end. You’ve got to make it look convincing, and then maybe they won’t notice. So you edit, re-read it a few times to make sure it at least makes sense. And, to your surprise, it does. Oh it does. You know it backwards because you’ve read it so many times, you know if off by heart, and it makes perfect sense. It’s a perfect essay. It’s the best essay you’ve ever written, you think. Possibly the best written by anyone in your year, or possibly the world. You might win an award for this. Maybe not the Nobel Prize, of course, but perhaps your university has some kind of – yeah, wait – actually, why not the Nobel Prize? The essay is flawless from constant re-reading. You’ve re-read it to make sure it’s perfect so many times that there’s nothing left to change: therefore it must be perfect. It reads exactly as you’d expect it to read, from having read it so many times.
It gets a low 2:1 and the illusion is broken, obviously. But it’s such a natural thing to slip into. It happens all the time. The idiots on The Apprentice aren’t born crazy. They were humans, once. They were like you and me, wandering around, eating, farting and feeling bad about themselves. Then they thought, “Hey, why not apply for The Apprentice? Why the hell not? They let any idiot on, I’ve got to be in with a chance.” They had to submit an application, of course, where they lied and exaggerated and created a massive illusion of ‘business acumen’ (that thing everyone wants but no one knows what it is) and they tart up their CV. Sentences get polished. A sentence that used to be, “14 months working at the till in Topshop” becomes, gradually, “14 months working in retail,” “Several years’ experience working in retail,” “Many years’ experience in retail management” (managing a till is management), “A wide portfolio of working in various strands of commerce at management level,” finally ending up as “I basically run the Arcadia Group.” They tart it up again, and again, until they realized they actually were, in fact, the best businessperson in the universe. No one else’s CV was as convincing to them as theirs because they’d read it and edited it so often that they could no longer see a single flaw in it. They are GOD.
The same applies to so many other people, working in any given number of situations, a universal flaw which we ought to be wary of. Performing arts societies that are so used to themselves that their definition of a good society becomes synonymous with how they perceive their own society. Politicians, most of whom come from an essay-writing university background, who come to believe their own carefully crafted, meticulously vetted spin and lies. And finally, of course, journalists, who think that their articles are flawless because they’ve stared at them so long their brains have given up trying to point out their obvious mistakes.
TIME OF THE SEASON
A word of warning to everyone who knows at least one person who’s a student: it’s the season for festivals and previews for everyone’s am-dram shows coming up. You’re going to be invited to lots of nonsense that you’ll be emotionally blackmailed into attending, or if not actually attending, clicking attending on Facebook. It’s not their fault, it’s a compulsion, and one which I know all too well. I have to try not to spam you with messages about my upcoming musical parody of Tommy Wiseau’s The Room. Oh wait, I just did.
ASSERTIONS
Nibs are wonderful. You can say whatever you like without having the necessity or the room to explain and justify yourself. For that reason, I present a list of assertions which I see as completely true and if you don’t like it then tough. That guy from An Idiot Abroad isn’t actually like that. Paying your TV licence is a moral duty but there should be an opt-out box to withhold money from Clarkson. Nationalising everything wouldn’t be so bad. We should all be happy for Stephen Fry but he really should’ve invited us. That’s just rude.
PYTHON ON THE LOOSE
There’s hysteria in some quarters of the University as rumours spread that there’s a python on the loose. A very special, quick, wily, intelligent python. A python (you get it, right) that you might have heard of. It’s an old python, albeit, a bit long in the (get it) tooth, and people might think of him as slimy and cold but actually he’s rather cuddly. (Yeah? See?) I think you see what I’m getting at. If I’ve understood these rumours right, there’s a huge great snake on the loose. Run for your lives. And someone please tell Terry Jones.
THE CLASSIEST SHOW IN TOWN
I was shocked and repulsed by the sight of the coloured lighting on the fountain in the middle of the lake on Hes West. It changes colour with all the stately tastelessness of a fibre-optic cactus on your nan’s mantelpiece. When I saw it change to green, I was reminded of the urban myth that the fountains had been turned off since the 1980s due to eye infections they caused by basically weaponising duck shit into an airborne toxic event. But I’ve come to accept the lights. My new favourite game is to imagine there’s a swimmer in the lake, and when the water turns red, utter a barely audible “Ow!”