1- What I learned from them both [professor Mulford Q. Sibley and another mentor] was the value of following your interests regardless of intellectual fashions and fashioning your own perspective on things.
2- For young grad students I’d remind them that academia is full of landmines from the administration, other faculty members, and students (who now seem to have a sense of entitlement).
3- For university professors, I would suggest they only dine with their backs to walls, and not let their battles with other professors destroy their younger colleagues and their students.
4- A sense of humor will help at all levels
5- Now that many universities are fighting for students (with the possible exception of the top ones, which are fighting off students), they have become more like businesses
6- Many young students, having been told how wonderful they were all their lives, have a sense of entitlement that causes problems.
7-Many try Harvard
And many fail.
Who then go to Princeton
Or to Yale
While those with a brain
The size of a pea.
Have a hell of a time
At USC.
8- Student evaluations are very destructive in universities; the patients are now running the asylum. I know that many of my colleagues inflated their grading to get good reports. If professors are judged on their ability to entertain students, which I fear is often the case, it is a bad omen.
9- I once asked a colleague from another department, “What do you do with your time?” He answered, “I think!” There’s no written record, alas, to show what he thought about anything, other, perhaps, than how to become chair or dean.
10- Good on committees
For which he was cherished.
He never published
And he never perished.
11- So all of this is enough to keep me busy, but not terribly busy. I’m retired and don’t play golf or tennis, so I have to write or I’d be bored out of my mind. I never could have imagined when I was young how my career would turn out, but I’m not complaining about what’s happened. My wife and I love to travel, so I spend a lot of time planning our trips and then taking them.
12- From writing myself into existence in life, it is the boys with the most toys who win.
13- In 1998 I was fortunate enough to win an award by the Advertising Education Foundation and spent three weeks at Goldberg Moser O’Neill, a large advertising agency in San Francisco, as “visiting professor.” . . . There was, I could see, a mountain of labor behind every print ad or commercial.
14- The idea that teenagers aren’t affected by advertising is similar, as far as truth values are concerned, to saying the earth is flat! Teenagers have hundred of billions of dollars of discretionary income, and the advertising agencies make sure, as best they can, that teenagers and their money are soon parted.
15- It helps if you can write in an unintelligible manner; the French are masters of this. I don't think anyone really understands what Baudrillard or Derrida or Foucault or Deleuze writes. The more opaque and elliptical the better, and the more nonsense you write—with a sense of assurance and confidence to carry it all off—the higher your reputation will be. That is because academics, all of whom think they are brilliant and remarkable, will assume that since they can't figure out what you are talking about, you must be even more brilliant than they are.
16- The ultimate dream of university administrators, it seems, is to have a university with only administrators and students and maybe a handful of professors, at the most. The only problem is that a virtual professoriat teaching courses on the Internet would lead, ineluctably, to a virtual set of university administrators.
17- Professors, of course, would like to rid universities of administrators, who came to administer and take care of minor bureaucratic functions—parking and that sort of thing—and stayed to command.
18- I’ve been in universities for most of my adult life. (I don’t know whether I should be pitied or be given a medal for foolhardy valor.)
19- Many professors mistakenly argue that the three best things about academic life are, sad to say—June, July and August! They are, of course, forgetting about the month between semesters!
20- I don’t know how many people, other than myself, will order copies of the book [Aristotle: Comedy], but like all authors, I feel that if a book is available, someone may order it, and that’s what’s important. There’s always a chance that a book will catch on.
21- I must report a bit of fun I had with my Aristotle book. I saw on the Internet that an electronic journal was looking for articles that mixed genres, so I sent them a dozen pages of the Aristotle “comedy.” My thought was that I had a bit of fiction (the so-called translation of the “lost book” on comedy) and a bit of fact—my annotations. I received an e-mail back saying that while the judges thought that while my translation of Aristotle was fine, nobody could see how I was blending or mixing genres. They didn’t realize that my translations was a hoax, and pretended that they were able to evaluate my “translation” of Aristotle from the Greek. I got a big kick out of that.
22- I got the idea in the early seventies, and have numerous places in my journals where I speculate about how such a book might be written and what I might deal with. In 1982 or thereabouts I bought a computer—a Commodore 64 for $900. I thought my son Gabriel might become interested in computers but he never took to them—until recently, that is, and now he works as a senior engineer for a Silicon Valley company. I also had, for the first time, a very elemental word processing system.
23- The computer really changed my life—and, no doubt, the lives of most other writers. For what word processing did was make it possible for me to write something and then, without having to retype it, save it and revise it as many times as I felt necessary. I was liberated from Wite-Out and the typewriter. In addition, e-mail makes it possible for me to communicate with editors all over the world and send them material that arrives in little more than an instant.
24- I never spend more than a couple of hours writing at a time. Because of my productivity, many of my colleagues think I’m at the computer ten or twelve hours a day, but that isn’t true. When I decide to write a book, I work on it steadily, but seldom more than two or three hours at a time. You can do a lot of writing in two hours, if you don’t waste time daydreaming and playing computer games.
25- I am a study in self-creation. I almost feel that I’ve written myself into existence in my journals. I developed my mind, my style, and my sense of myself—with liberal borrowings from here and there. I may be a fictional character or imaginary being who believes himself real? Who knows?
26- From my list of books you can get a sense of my interests. One reason my books were published is because they are “accessible.” That means I didn’t throw fancy jargon around or write in the style that many graduate students learn, which is highly stylized and often quite pretentious.
27- Publishing books is often quite aggravating, for a variety of reasons. Copy-editors go over your manuscripts and ask millions of questions. When you’ve gone over the page proofs and taken care of the index, you find that there are frequently long delays at the printers. Sometimes your editors make all kinds of suggestions, and they often send your manuscripts to professors who make other suggestions and at times really want you to rewrite the book the way they would have written it. Or who trash the book.
28- I must confess that I’m not always successful in publishing books I’ve written.
29- One problem with writing oneself into existence is that you face a problem when you stop writing. Will you cease to exist?
