not the motorcycle diaries

I’m ever so slightly terrified of actually becoming an Academic. I just can’t imagine being one in The Current Climate. I’d like to believe I’ve done my fair share of Group Facilitation, Grant Writing and Budget Projections in my time and the thought of filling my days with it again is unreasonably repulsive. Too many conversations I have had lately have begun with, “Soo … in your third year of the PhD hey? What’s next?”.

WHAT’S NEXT?!! What’s next is that I will be pushing thirty and I’ll have no skills except for translating Gramsci into Avantispeak (”Antonio e sempre em in prigione”), writing to journal publishing conventions and googling my own name. I’ve gone to incredible lengths to avoid learning how to add up, operate a coffee machine, balance dishes and learn a telesales script, but methinks it is going to catch up with me some time in late 2008. Fortunately I’m a wizz at the dole diary, so that should tide me over for as long as there’s still a social security system, but what about then?

SO. I proposed moving to New Zealand to some similarly reticent Sydneysiders on the weekend. If we’re all still tragically quoting Nietzsche over our (obtained for free from our first year Arts Studies tutorial students on pain of failing them/telling their Dad they gave us free coffee) espressi in five years time, I’m popping over Da Strait to make my living off the sheep’s back, as it were. Who’s with me?

Is it too late to change my thesis topic to reading all of Gramsci’s works in the original Italian? This should take me at least twelfty more years which naturally I would also be funded for, given the requirement of actually having to learn Italian properly (being able to sing the Avanti song doesn’t seem to count. THEY LIED TO ME IN YEAR TEN).

I mean, apart from not having to write The Chapter of Pain, it would mean getting down with “il senso comune”: the way that ideas of ‘common sense’ come to structure reality (e.g. ‘everybody knows that lip-sewing, baby-chucking and anything else that’s like that is part of Arab Muslim culture’ - Phillip Ruddock 2003). Not to mention “l’insufficienza della vita universitaria e la mediocrita scientifica e pedagogica (talvolta anche morale) degli insegnanti ufficiali” - the insufficiency of university (cultural) life and the scientific and pedagogic (sometimes also moral) mediocrity of teaching officials (Vol 1, page 13)*. Mediocrity, people! I though only Le Tigre talked about that these days.

Here he is. Sigh.

*Of course I am not procrastinating today by sitting at my desk with my high school Italian dictionary turning to random pages of Quaderni del Carcere and making whimsical translations. This would be SICK.