Opening a Window to a Good Education

If you’re wondering why I haven’t been blogging lately it’s because I have been hiding away in another world for the past six months – the world of academia.

It’s a strange, ghostly place where people can be seen shuffling down corridors or emerging from dark offices, where they have been working on PowerPoint presentations about Barthes and Derrida.

They tend to wear stockings and sandals (the women) and men’s sandals (the men) and have little interest in fashion or hair styling.

It’s a nice change from the world of celebrities, who only read something they have written themselves. Was it Elle who said that?

They have read 20 books to your three chapters and not only have they done that but also analysed them to the nth degree, using words you have never heard before and can’t even find in the online Macquarie dictionary.

They urge you to dig deeper and connect your paragraphs with linking sentences, to have an argument and to ask questions. So different from journalism, especially today.

But I wonder does anybody read those journals they so religiously publish in?

It’s easy to be cynical and scathing but on closer reflection you find they have some very interesting things to say, a way with words you couldn’t have imagined and some are supremely humble about their work – the truly talented ones of course.

It’s been a "good education"  – and one at times when I was at my most disheartened and frustrated I wanted to drop out of. But it’s opened me up to writers I hadn’t heard of before or read, new ways of contemplating old ideas, and an antidote to Alzheimer's, if ever there was one – better than crosswords any day.

When I finish my Masters of Arts – with any luck in a couple of months – I will post all the books I have read this year. What an incredible and varied list. And then maybe later all the articles, poems, links and sound poems.  And maybe even my finished Masters creative writing piece and exabloodyJesus – sorry I mean exegesis.

Now that was a word that hadn’t entered my subconscious before this year.