Old School - 4/29

This week’s theme is: weird crap. It pops up in The Campus every once and a while. The first two sections of the 1954 article shown are a prime example. The author chooses to introduce a somewhat informative, plain article about a professor’s research with a fictional anecdote. He leads into the actual article with the line: “‘Coincidence!’ you say. ‘Not at all,’ I say.” The rest of the thing is normal. This exchange about coincidence is not mentioned again in the entire article, trust me. Also, the author refers to his own eyes as “baby blue”, which is bizarre. Obviously, the intro is supposed to be funny. But is it? We will return to that question in a moment.

A brief reflection on student writing: Accessibility is the gift and curse of the student writers that fill The Campus each week. Usually, we have that precious knowledge about student writers so effectively and vaguely described by the phrase “where they are coming from”. (Know’m sayin’?) You have already heard most of the opinions expressed in these pages, in common rooms and dining halls. It is a gift to the writers — it means your readers are familiar with your subject matter, and you have a good chance of expressing something agreeable to them. People will have fun reading articles on the social scene, on the drinking age, on traditional liberal political issues. These opinions come straight from dorm room conversations. But that accessibility is a curse as well: The writing that we appreciate most deeply comes from a distance, and is handed down to us from above by some god-like apparatus, such as The New York Times, Penguin Classics, or The Onion. It’s tough to admire things that come right out of your own trite little reality.

To the article at hand, and weird crap in The Campus. The interesting thing about this case, and other weird cases like it, is that I have no idea where the hell this guy is coming from. So no accessibility. So I’m going to either dismiss it as idiocy, which was my initial reaction, or embrace it as high culture. Fortunately, upon reading this over a few times, I have decided that it is hilarious, and therefore some of the best writing The Campus will ever see — seriously. Hurrah!