Thursday, June 01, 2006

22 years later

plus two minutes:
It was nearly eleven hundred, and in the English Department, they were dragging the Aeron chairs out of grad student cubicles and grouping them in the centre of the hall opposite the big flat screen monitor, in preparation for the Two Minutes Snark.

The next moment a hideous, grinding noise from the university Mac G5, as of some monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the big monitor at the end of the room. It was a noise that set one's teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one's neck. The Snark had started. As usual, the face of Jeff Goldstein, the Enemy of the People, had flashed on to the screen. There were hisses here and there among the audience.

Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago (how long ago nobody quite remembered), had been one of their own, a member of the Modern Language Association with a solid vita and faculty parking priveleges, almost on a level with Stanley Fish himself, and then had engaged in counter-revolutionary blogging activities, had been condemned to sabbatical and had mysteriously escaped and become a stay-at-home dad.

The programmes of the Two Minutes Snark varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure...
read the rest

No comments: