[csaa-forum] But wait, there's more

[Christian McCrea]

"Anyway, make sure y'all catch the Saccharin Metric Guide to the Humanities,
which contains a number of very useful insights on this thread:"

I hear the author is so hot right now.

I was going to post it to these lists, but I didn't want to get that
involved. The core of my response lies in this paragraph. (warning:
not an academic):

"You know what, Gregory Melleuish, ye of the unkicked solar plexus?; I
did that horrific Melbourne University first year Contemporary Culture
and Everyday Life subject you reserved your bile for, taught by Brett
Farmer (schwing) at the time, and it rocked me like a hurricane. It
was an introduction to critical thinking about popular culture that I
needed to ween me off the mentality of security and apathy that had
been drummed into me by the last institution I served time at. I read
Barthes, Benjamin, Derrida and Foucault for the first time in that
reader, and by doing research for my at-the-time brilliant essay on
the way advertisers used satire to demean competing products,
inverting the formula laid out by Alexander Pope. It was one of the
subjects that made me want to be smarter for the first time in my
life. Okay, so I'm not there yet, but I felt the fire in my veins to
engage in ceaseless struggle against the mind-numbling servility to
ignorance, old and evil for the first time right there. It is a
first-year subject, one of eight subjects an Arts student does in that
year, and let me tell you, it was a great introduction to an entire
world of ideas, I felt opened up, opportunities for knowledge, power,
love and fire folding out in front of me. I felt there, for the first
time, that I could contribute something to my society, take part in
things that affect people and effect change, and I didn't just want to
put something back, but I had to, it was my big project – to at least
pretend towards a devout ceaseless selflessness and goddamn you,
Gregory Melleuish, that's what its all about in the end."

-- 
Christian McCrea
----------------------------
PhD Candidate
School of Art History, Cinema, Classics and Archeology
Melbourne University
---------------------------
"Keep braiding one's wavelengths back into oneself. That way they gain
all the more external power and surround us with a huge affective and
protective zone. Don't talk about this. Never talk about our secret
methods. If we talk about them, they stop working."
— Jean Cocteau, from "The Cocteau Diaries", Volume One