GET (SUR)REAL
One of the great things about academia is that you get to hear a lot of smart people having stupid conversations. Here’s something I overheard this morning while nibbling on a stale doughnut outside a campus cafeteria.
Scene: Boy and girl in trendy glasses sitting at covered café table, smoking; rain falling gently.
Girl: The great thing about surrealism is that it doesn’t have to make sense.
Boy: Yeah, I know. It’s like punk. I’m in this Punk Lit class. It’s so awesome. It’s just whatever.
Girl: Oh, I had that class last year. It WAS whatever. It was awesome.
Boy: Yeah, it’s SO awesome.
Girl: So I’m in this surrealism class, and I wrote a paper about Andre Breton, but I wrote it in a surrealist style. Like it was a surrealist report on surrealism. Like it didn’t necessarily make sense, but cleverly so, you know?
Boy: That sounds awesome.
Girl: I thought so too. But I got a D on it.
Boy: Did your teacher not like your methodology?
Girl: I think my methodology was OK. She just didn’t like me.
posted by kc @ 12:05 PM
12 comments
12 Comments:
Three words: surrealist copy editing. Instead of fixing mistakes in text, you change the parts of the story that are correct.
Think about it. You'd usher in a new age of journalism. And at some papers it would take less time to change what's correct that what isn't.
You should have gone up to the covered café table and whispered, "Ceci n'est pas une conversation!"
What color ink should you use for a paper on surrealism?
I think the ink depends on the methodology.
That reminds me of a bad joke:
Q: How many surrealists does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: Orange.
So I suppose that girl just slept through the bits of the class where the teacher was talking about Marx and, hmmm should we say, Freud? Did it never occur to her that there probably would not be a class about Surrealism if it made no sense at all?
And what the hell is Punk Lit? Do you suppose that competitive employers maintain a database of all the fluff courses that schools offer? I’d love to be able to tell some self-satisfied new graduate that no, we are not going to hire you because you padded your GPA and we are looking for people with an education.
George, you're on to something with just changing the correct bits of text, but there'd still be fact-checking, only in reverse. I think a random approach — a "whatever" approach, if you will — might be best.
I would love to create something that someone loves because it's "so whatever."
DW, I know. The girl gets the rhyme, but not the reason, of surrealism. Yeah, Punk Lit I don't get exactly. Is it just neo-Beat stuff with some Clit Lit thrown in?
George,
We could write some software that throws in random statistics in all the articles. After all, 89.4% of all statistics are made up on the spot anyway.
KC, well do you want to be loved because you are “so whatever”? I’ve been thinking that I need to get into one of these New Age scams and make a bit of dough. My first idea was to sell something like “Ultra-antioxidant Multi-crystallized Energy Purification Skin Toner. But now I think services are better than products. So I’m going to do self-help programs and the like. Sign up now and improve your “so whatever” potential. The future awaits you.
George,
Really that's 67.2% of all statistics that are made up on the spot. I've no idea where that other number came from.
DW, I'm all for software doing the work for me. But the percentages should be based on 110%. Then I can tell my boss I still put extra effort into them.
And if that's not good enough, I fall back on the best whatever response:
"Oh well, whatever, nevermind."
Ben, that joke was a riot!
Orange you going to tell another?
Of course. But only when the time is right.
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