They say that academics are insanely competitive because the stakes are just that low. I say that the main reason I’ll never make much of an academic is less my insistence on application or my massive personality disorders, and more my fundamental irreverence. Sooner or later, if I tried to make it as a serious academic, I’d call the wrong stuffed shirt on his utter intellectual bankruptcy, I’d make burgers out of the wrong sacred cow, or my hobby of adopting entirely untenable attitudes or methodologies simply to see if they can be used will become public. I do things that are not meant to be taken seriously, but I do them in the best serious manner, and this is not appreciated by those who participate in the cultures I gently mock.
What I’m saying is, eventually someone is going to find a copy of my paper, “Silver from the Furnace: Milton and the Perpetual Revolution,” in which I read the poet and political activist as a proto-Maoist with a religious bent. They are going to ask questions about this paper, and when I (truthfully) reply that I took this bizarre position simply to see if it could be legitimately pursued, to see if it worked as an avenue of scholarship, they are not going to be happy. Incidentally, judging from the grade I received on the damn thing, the approach (while bizarre) was at least internally consistent and intellectually rigorous. Do I actually think that Milton had much of anything to do with Mao? of course not. That wasn’t the point: it was a thought experiment, a challenge, a laugh. And, unfortunately for my future in the humanities, it was a laugh at the expense of academics. And most of my work, to a greater or lesser degree, has been just that. Put simply, academia takes itself seriously, and I don’t.
