The hour badly spent

pretentious literary douchebag, ivory tower, creative underclass, making passes at girls with glasses, too namedroppey, elizabeth dodd, blogsome nymphet, wendy matlock, tim dayton, michael donnelly, may i get freudian for a moment, naomi woodDecember 10, 2008 11:25 am

The English department is made of sexy

Friday afternoon, servicey tipster Sean Trolinder let us know the wheres and whens of the English department’s super-secret final soiree this semester (Beach Museum, 6pm). Believe me, I really wanted to bring someone with me but let’s face it, you’re all pretty lame, so I went alone.

Upon arrival, the head of the department took my coat, which felt like a little bit of awkward because I also have a class with her (Not for long! End of semester! To be honest I’ll kind of miss it. I’ve been feeling weirdly nostalgic lately. Let’s not talk about this any more). Upstairs, the thing was in full swing. Everyone was dressed to the nines and I hardly knew anybody. And the people I did know had already gone off into grad-student cliques. And I needed a drink.

I spent a few minutes doing that thing where you circle the periphery of the party, gaping stupidly at the people who know what they’re doing but not quite knowing how to approach them and start talking. Largely because, as I’ve suspected all long, they all look pretty fucking sexy and that shit is distracting. What, are you gonna go up to Naomi Wood and tell her "hot dress!" That’s okay, because she came up to me.

"This might be the last of these parties for a while. The English department budget’s getting drastically cut," she said. Oh noes! Then we made fun of the Collegian. With which I acquired a new teacher-crush.

Some professors performed a short reading of ‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales,’ a short story by Dylan Thomas. It is fascinating to watch certain people read out loud: Naomi, Michael Donnelly, Wendy Matlock, Liz Dodd, Donald Kimball, Alyssa Dawson; they all had this incredible ability to inflect the sentence just so the humor comes out just so at the end of it. Fun fun fun (yes, I am a huge dork).

I finally gave Wendy Matlock a piece of my mind. Specifically, she is brilliant and enthusiastic, which makes class with her amazing. But! The students, so christianey; sometimes class feels like church, and when it gets like that, my eyes glaze over and my mind shuts down, not to return until someone says "may I get freudian for a moment?" I was afraid you’d never ask.

Phil Nel, by the way, is massively cooler than you. Just ask him anything about music. I dare you.

Tim Dayton is also massively cooler than you. He only listens to punk rock made between 1976 and 1984. We know this from talking to the head of the women’s studies program, Angela Hubler, Dayton’s wife, who wasn’t afraid to zing him. "Does he ever let one else speak in class?" No, he doesn’t, but we don’t mind. We never have anything important to add anyway.

Then we went to the Kathouse, where I flirted with a bunch of grad students. Happy Festivus!

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last night's party, pretentious literary douchebag, ivory tower, creative underclass, facebook, blogsome nymphet, donna potts, wendy matlock, donald hedrick, scopophilic patriarchy, karin westman, tanya gonzález, janice radwayNovember 21, 2008 3:13 pm

All in all, you are just a blogger on the wall

I went to the reception after Janice Radway’s lecture for six reasons.

  1. Yum
  2. Free booze.
  3. Erica Hateley said I should go socialize, and I always do what Erica Hateley says.
  4. If I couldn’t find someone to socialize with, I’d just skulk along the walls, gaping stupidly at the goings-on, and post my gawkings here for the web-savvy to stumble upon when they google themselves the next day.
  5. I always hope each party will be the party where some professor drinks so much port that she starts quoting James Joyce until all her grad students feel uncomfortable and leave early. And I hope that "someone" is Karin Westman.
  6. Uh, five reasons.

I did end up drinking all of James Machor’s white wine. After that I found myself face-to-face with Janice Radway, who followed a long K-State tradition of being an extremely gracious guest.

"Hi. I’m Jan." She extended a hand.

"I’m the only undergrad here," I said, and sat down.

Jan was intensely interested in the small circle of professors around her (Naomi Wood, a well-dressed Donald Hedrick, and two others whose names I forget). As none of us were Kansas natives, she asked what we thought of the place (the consensus is that it sucks JUST a little bit). Then we talked about movies or something.

True to form, Donna Potts and Tanya Gonzalez left for a better party at around 8pm. Wendy Matlock’s cookies were gone. Only one critical issue remained, and Han Yu was the perfect person to raise it. To paraphrase: why do Michael Donnelly’s eyebrows look like they were grafted from a comically overeducated cartoon supervillain?

As it turns out, he does not style or trim them in any way. Which means that until the X-Men step forward, the world is doomed.

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pretentious literary douchebag, ivory tower, fucking thursdays, multiple entendre, wendy matlock, british survey, euphemisms, fixating on sex, may i get freudian for a moment, remember that time when i would only read shakespeareNovember 13, 2008 2:35 pm

Change we can believe in

British Survey has been pretty tedious lately. Medieval literature is all "the grace of God this," "forgiveness through Christ that." What a drag. It’s started to feel like going to church, except without all the fun "God Damn America" bits (what’s your church like?). But today we covered Sonnet 135, and Wendy Matlock promised some good stuff.

"It’s always important, in a literature class, to get the sex. We’ve been neglecting that lately." Speak for yourself, Green-stripey-socks-Matlock. Without further ado:

Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy ‘Will,’
And ‘Will’ to boot, and ‘Will’ in overplus;
More than enough am I that vex thee still,
To thy sweet will making addition thus.
Wilt thou, whose will is large and spacious,
Not once vouchsafe to hide my will in thine?
Shall will in others seem right gracious,
And in my will no fair acceptance shine?
The sea all water, yet receives rain still
And in abundance addeth to his store;
So thou, being rich in ‘Will,’ add to thy ‘Will’
One will of mine, to make thy large ‘Will’ more.
Let no unkind, no fair beseechers kill;
Think all but one, and me in that one ‘Will.’
"He’s not sugarcoating this. He’s saying can I put my penis in your vagina," said Wendy. Uh, I mean Dr. Matlock.

I know this was supposed to be sexy, but maybe can we skip the stuff written by other dudes about their own penises? It invokes my castration complex. Kthxbai.

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required reading, multiple entendre, duly noted, this is dumb, wendy matlock, euphemisms, fixating on sex, medieval literatureSeptember 16, 2008 8:48 pm

Professor succeeds in shameless attempt to get mentioned on this blog

Leave it to an English professor to use a high-minded subject like medieval literature as an excuse to flirt with students and fixate on sex, thus guaranteeing a captive audience.

"I’m a big geek," she said, going on to prove it by explaining that she watched the special features on her Lord of the Rings DVDs, which gave her insight into armor worn by medieval knights. Hell yeah that’s hot, and that’s not all.

Today’s topic was the lais (songs performed in 13th and 14th century Europe) written by Marie de France. What are lais usually about? Matlock explained by means of what she called a bad joke: "A lai is basically a brief romance." Actually that was an excellent joke.

One lai was about Lanval, a knight in King Arthur’s court. Depressed, Lanval went off into the forest and fell in love with a magic pixie dream girl. She loved him back and blessed him with wealth. Lanval grew generous at court, and people started to like him.

Once Lanval’s status rose among his peers, Queen Guinivere went after his nuts (and failed). Matlock made kissey noises to illustrate her point.

Later we discussed Tristan and Isolde, a timeless tale illustrating the pleasure of adulterous lovers being together. Matlock was satisfied that the movie "had pretty people." (We like when teachers take backhanded swipes at subject matter).

By the end of the class, there was more material to examine, but not enough time for it. "I skipped the part about celibacy," she said. "You can read that by yourself if you’re interested."

Did she just tell us to go masturbate? We were going to do that anyway.

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ivory tower, fucking thursdays, asteism, this blog is not dead, shut up college, wendy matlock, british survey, lesson planAugust 29, 2008 9:25 pm

The lesson plan looks like my blog

When discussing how we can get a feel for ancient Celtic culture, one student at the front of the Thursday morning’s British Survey I class remarked that "in those days they had a magical world view."

Professor Matlock tactfully compared that believing in some dude up on his cross or whatever, just to show that people really haven’t changed so much since then.

She showed us a slide of a Lindisfarne Gospel. It was covered with red velvet, and gems were attached all along the border. It was magnificent. The process of making it; preparing the paper and the material that covered it, obtaining the red dye from a special beetle in another country, meticulously copying the Word of God onto parchment (by daylight only); "this is a life’s work," she said.

"How does this function as a tool of conversion," she posed. If you’re some Anglo warrior, and you can’t read or write, and you see this book, what do you think of this religion?"

After a brief silence, another front-row student chimed in. "That religion’s awesome."

"That’s a little facile," Matlock swiped, "but yeah, you’d probably think that."

It looks like half of the discussion will be the trading of light barbs at each other, like I imagine WASP-ey college professors do whenever they get together. It sounds fun, but it’s definitely much easier when everyone’s drunk. At 9:30 in the morning, that should be doable as long as I make sure to wake up extra early for, uh, breakfast.

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