Every "scholarly" piece I've ever written:
"It was a perfect title, in that it crystallized the article's niggling mindlessness, its funereal parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw upon non-problems."
Every conference presentation I've ever given:
"Nobody outside a madhouse, he tried to imply, could take seriously a single phrase of this conjectural, nugatory, deluded, tedious rubbish."
This morning I finished rereading Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim for the first time in over thirty years. I remember reading it for the first time in my first year of graduate school and thinking it was the funniest thing I had ever read, and then reading it again as I was finishing my dissertation and still liking it, but thinking that it was not as funny as I remembered. And here we are three and a half decades later, and I thought it was funnier than on the first reread, but that I think, overall, I liked it better than on my two previous readings (such is our changing perception). It is one of the great "campus novels," so it helps if you're in graduate school or on the uphill side of the lectern.
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