“I had imagined graduate school as a shining city on a hill, but it turned out to be more like an extended visit with a bear in a cave.”
Peter Weller (aka Buckaroo Banzai, aka RoboCop) got Woody Allen, Gore Vidal, and Richard Riordan to write him letters of recommendation for grad school:
Two of my three personal recommendations to Syracuse were written by Woody Allen and Gore Vidal. Woody hand wrote in Venice, on Hotel Gritti Palace stationary, ‘Peter Weller is my friend, a fellow actor, writer, director, musician and a credit to his race.’ Gore Vidal was less oblique: Vidal, typing on a an old Remington wrote, ‘I’ve known Weller a long time. He is an extraordinary student … of exactly what I have no idea.’ My third recommendation was written by the ex-Mayor Richard Riordan of Los Angeles.
That’s right, Peter Weller’s in grad school.
“Almost everything I’ve done in my intellectual life that I now value I did because I was unconcerned about the approval of any officially designated authorities.”
Posted in academe, inspiration, quotes, work
“To take the time that is necessary to investigate a big problem; to think about questions of great importance deeply and clearly and try to answer them thoroughly; to write up your findings in plain, simple and direct prose; above all else, to take teaching seriously and devote time to developing your own methods and style – all this is difficult, if not impossible, for new and untenured professors in the current academic climate. Colleagues and administrators want tangible and practical results – i.e., publications – because, as one former colleague said to me, they want to make sure they haven’t hired a lemon. ‘To say, when you are at work, “Let’s have done with it now,” is a physical need for human beings,’ says Wittgenstein; but it is absolutely necessary ‘to go on thinking in the face of this need that makes it such strenuous work.’ The administrator or colleague with the taxpayer mentality doesn’t understand this. He is used to finitude and expects everything to be done with quickly and to see the results. He is derisive of the thinker who takes his time. It’s bad enough when the general public, ignorant of what we do, sneer at us for not ‘working for a living’ or producing ‘practical’ results, but it’s worse when the same vulgar perception becomes part of the academic mindset.”
—J. M. Anderson, “An Open Letter to New Professors”
Posted in academe
“Serendipity, browsing, screwing around: one of the most fruitful methodologies I know! I’ve always wanted to write a grant proposal with this description in the ‘methodology’ section: ‘I will go the library and play with the books.’”
Hear, hear.
Related post: “Collect Everything.”
The intellectual world, which believes itself so profoundly liberated from conformity and convention, has always seemed to me as inhabited by profound conformities, that acted upon me as repulsive forces.
—Pierre Bourdieu
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