Sure - 2010 isn't over yet. But I have so, so many awesome corkers already that I thought I'd start this term afresh.

So come one! Come all! Marvel at tautologous dialectic debate! Gasp at speculative heuristic modalities! Speculate as to exactly what academics are compensating for! You've seen it on your television screens, you've heard it on the news - now live for one night only, the one, the only:


Junior Division: prizes for individual words.

Academic Puns
Calypso notes that the use of puns are "pretty much the only fun academics have". This year's most popular word:

"DissemiNation" - about diaspora from Nation and Narration

"Nation, Space and Politics" from last year's champion, Terry Nation. See what they did there? The sub headings are even better: "Nation-wide influence"; "The blurring of Nations"; "the birth and death of a Nation"; "a Nation divided: geographical and social space"; "Microcosmic, allegorical Nations"; "Binary Nations"; "dystopian Nations" e.t.c...

On this model, here are some suggested titles for future Doctor Who essays:

"Little Miss Moffat: Fairytale Stylings and the Dream Landscape In Season Five"
"What's On and Holmes: Reimagining the Gaslight Detection Narrative Under Hinchcliffe*"
"Masterplan or CartMelodrama? Developing the character of Ace."

*I know jokes aren't funny once explained, but this is funnier if you know the Hinchcliffe era was script-edited by Robert Holmes, packed with gothic horror and and once featured the Doctor in a deerstalker...

Made Up Words
"The Gothicity of Slime" - I presume gothicity means "gothic-ness"

A repeated word in a poem was described as an example of "geminisation"

"Hauntology" - investigation suggests this (broadly) means "nostalgia"; Calypso simplifies things by explaining "it's the study of queer spectrality"

"Fraudomy" - I suspect the pronounciation ought to be something like "fraud-oh-mee" - but who knows? Or cares? Let's call it "Frodd-om-mee"! Logic suggests it means: "I thought I was a sodomist - but it's OK, just kidding!". But having googled the book in question, the author himself can explain:

I propose to read sodomy in a way that has less to do with revealing a particular "truth" (or "truths") than with thinking about sodomy as a mode of knowledge, a way of reading the articulations between these various forms.

So now you know.

"Phallologists" - people who examine queer philology. Ignoring it's Just-A-Minute ring, I don't even like this as a concept. Why would queer philology have to be all about phalluses anyway? Can't we have Rainbologists or something?

Junior Division 2: Phrases

The "Water is Wet Except When It Isn't" award: Saturday Morning Censorship

"Censorship both prohibits and produces meanings"

The Stephen Fry Goblet For Using Twelve Words When Two Would Do - forgot to cite the source for this, but I think it's "Terry Nation" again.

"Very frequently, linear narratives and parallel montage are combined, creating dramatic structures emphasising repeating patterns of character separation and reunification"

Translation:

"The Doctor and companions are split up. All the time."

The Doctor Seuss prize for Prose: Just Gaming (JF Lyotard); pg 41

"As narrator she is narrated as well. And in a way she is already told, and what she herself is telling will not undo that somewhere else she is told."

Ah, but who is telling you, Baloo? Have you told about them too? Ah! Let's talk as we walk to the zoo!

Runners up:
"Patriotic, atavistic temporality of Traditionalism" -Nation and Narration (pg 300)

Senior Division One: Titles

Lovecraft Memorial Goblet: Syllables Will Eat Your Soul
"The Darwinian law of competitive Devolution versus the Kropotkinian law of symbiotic Evolution & its Metaphysical Manichaeian Division"

In some alternate world, surely this is Saturday Morning TV show - "Oh no! Kropotkinian is destroying the city with his tenticles! When trouble strikes: call up the Manichaeian Division!"

Most Arresting Title:
"The Masturbating Venuses of Raphael, Giorgione, Titian, Ovid, Martial, and Poliziano"

Some academics will do anything for a grant. This chap seems to have hit jackpot by getting all serious about the world's favourite topic. Incidentally, the paintings under discussion are this one and this one

Runner up; and winner of the Words Prize for Using Words

"Pure Resistance: Queer Virginity in Early Modern English Drama"

...so, Queer Virginity, eh? What does that mean, when not being eyecatching?

The "Surely This Is A Parody" Fiji Mermaid Statue

"Stripping the Public Bare: Theorising the Politics of In/Equality from Nudist Encounters"

This has it all, ladies and gents: it scores four shots on the academic title bingo. The focus of the paper is on, broadly speaking, Nudist Equality as compared to race, gender and sexuality struggles. You'd think this was fairly easy to answer, as three of these four activities is a quirk of birth, and the other a one-way track to hypothermia. But nothing can ever be that simple, as the abstract explains:

"Equality here gets read away from its calculative, distributive modality, to focus instead on textured, touch-based equality fantasies."

So now you know.

Runners up:

'Commodities and Culture in the Colonial World 1851-1914' is hosting a roundtable discussion on 'Global Theory; 'Theory' in/of Motion'

Senior Division 2: Special Interest Awards

The Cold Fish Trophy for Academic Missing The Point

"...the refusal to accept norms of behaviour or social constraints is an advantage that allows Blake to pursue his visions of a better world, but it also makes him somewhat ruthless and uncompromising."

The key here is "somewhat". Blake's transformation from Generic Hero Guy to very flawed and surprisingly nasty is a brilliant and uncomfortable turn of events. Dismissing it as "somewhat", to my mind, suggests they just weren't watching properly.

For those operating at the other end of the spectrum, we have the Taking It Too Seriously Memorial Garland: http://www.hermit.org/Blakes7/Essays/neil-A-B.html

"That the Blake/Avon relationship is not only the most developed and most significant relationship in the series, but also one between *two men*, means there is no attractive female role offered to the female viewer. She must therefore insinuate one into the inter-male relationship by ascribing traditionally female role qualities to one of the male characters..."

"I propose, therefore, that Avon is asked to fill, simultaneously, the roles of Man, Woman and Child, and things naturally get confusing. Hence Avon's relationship with Blake, operating in all three spheres, is likewise confused."

Ripperologist of the Year
This new award is dedicated to "experts" in a specific field. This was an especially competitive field, with casual, amateur lunatics fighting to distinguish themselves from professional fruitcakes. Some of my faves:

"Connecting the Dots: Were the Ripper Crime Scenes Chosen to Form a Pattern?"

What do you think?

Most Respectful Ripper Memorial:
http://www.amazon.com/Young-Witches-Vol-Babylon-Graphic/dp/1560972416/ref=cm_cr_pr_sims_t

Oh yes. Well, there would be porn. Words...defy me...

The Award for Academic Thoroughness: Jack the Ripper: A New Theory (William Stewart)

"Could a Jack the Ripper today evade the police as easily as 1888? If Jack the Ripper was the sort of person I imagine there can only be one answer: yes"

This statement's vagueness is rivalled only by it's pointlessness. "If Oliver Cromwell's pancake making skills were as formidable as I suspect, he would undoubtedly singlehandedly bring peace to the Congo."

Senior Division 3: Personalities

Department of the Year
"Centre for the Study of Sexual Dissidence" Sussex

You just know they all lounge around wearing nothing but Venetian masks and expensive slippers, and write all their essays using the backs of recently-debauched maidens in place of desks, while pages dressed as Cupid bring them strange fruit, and wine in curious jade goblets fashioned in crude forms. I'd love to listen in on their dissertation proposal day...

Runner up:

Could the London Intercollegiate Network for Comparative Studies get any more vague?

Study of the Year
It is vital to correctly reference all academic works. Luckily, there's the "Study on Empathy for pain in Couples":

This project investigates empathy for pain (that is, how an ‘observer’ understands the pain of a ‘sufferer') in people who are in a romantic relationship. Please note that this study DOES NOT involve fMRI.

Oh really?

Male participants will experience mild to moderate heat pain during the study (e.g., like that of touching a hot cup or plate) in regular brief intervals, and will be asked to rate their pain experience. Their partners will be either in the same room or in a separate room, and will be asked to rate their level of empathy for their partner. Both participants will also have to complete some questionnaires on personality traits where they are asked to indicate their level of agreement with a series of statements concerning: anxiety (e.g., "I feel calm/tense"); mood (e.g., "I feel content/unhappy"); romantic attachment (e.g., "I feel comfortable/uncomfortable depending on romantic partners"); and pain attitudes and beliefs (e.g. "I find it easy/difficult to ignore the pain"). The device used to create pain (i.e., a small stimulator attached to the arm), is safe and it will not cause damage to the skin. Also, participants will get to sample the experience of pain at the beginning of the study and the amount of pain will not exceed the levels agreed by them at anytime during the study.

Gee, thank goodness! I'd been worrying how I'd substantiate the outlandish claim that "my other half gets upset when I am in pain"...on a more pedantic note, I'm interested by their use of "couples" and then the assumption that one member of this couple will be male...but I suppose that would necessitate a special study to establish that queer couples empathise just like regular sized ones do. Darned academic rigour!

Scholar of the year
A translation of Petrarch's sonnets in Senate House Library bears the following frontispiece quote:

"In the resurrection of science, Italy was the first that cast away her shroud and the eloquent Petrarch, by his lessons and his example, may justly be applauded as the first harbinger of day" - GIBBON

Beneath, a later reader has added in pencil:

"Likewise Ms. Wollaston's translation might justly be derided as the harbinger of new Barbarianism"

As much as the destruction of books chills me, I am always cheered by the appearance of satiric pencil notes. In my perfect world, readers would be encouraged to write margin-commentaries in library books for the next reader to discover. The world of academia would be much improved. In other places, he points out a "non sequitur", adds a Latin quote "parva sed apta mihi", and underlines paragraphs which - at first - I thought were those most relevant to his reading, but am now convinced highlight its worst excesses. He has also counted and made note that Ms W's whinging introduction runs to 68 words:

"It is not without a feeling of anxiety and diffidence, that I submit my poetical translation of "One hundred sonnets of Francesco Petrarca" to the world of critics, when I reflect how vast is the ordeal to which I have voluntarily exposed myself, in having undertaken a task none have thought fit to accomplish before me, whilst my sovereigns in intellect have not hesitated to acknowledge its difficulty"

Because there's nothing like modesty. And having flicked through the book, her introduction is indeed pants. My favourite passage is this piece of incisive and rigorous scholarship:

"The cord of life which had bound Petraca in union with so many friends had so unexpectedly snapped, that he looked fearfully round upon those still in existence, and fancied he heard the fatal shears contracting still more his narrowing circle, whilst one torturing vision clung night and day to his mind - it was a presentiment of his Laura's death. It was not long before his fatal foreboding was verified; intelligence reached him at Verona that she too had sunk a victim to the plague. We will not pause to describe the poet's feelings on this severest of bereavements...

But she does:

"...Who that has enshrined every hope and happiness in the existence of one loved object will not feel how complete must have been the wreck of both to Petraca in this his loss. Death had robbed him of his sweetest and tenderest tie, his only golden link to life - now his heart was widowed, his hope elsewhere. But did religion permit his noble mind to remain a darkening void, busy only with distorted images of despondency and gloom? No! once more he roused himself and found consolation in projecting schemes for his suffering country."

e.t.c. e.t.c., and this is before you even get to the poetry.

A runner up in this category commented on the introduction of Barsby's Ovid. He describes a poet whose women are no more than beautiful, silent stautes as having fantastic insight into the female mind. Our later pencil-bearing reader added:

"Really, Mr Barsby?"

Book of the Year:

Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of CS Lewis

Is to academia what aura reading is to a CAT scan, and is apparently the results of a professor's bet that anything can get published: "what about theorising that each book of the Narnia series was deliberatly based on the Copernican model of the universe?"

I recommend visiting his website - the Independant calls his theory "sensible", the Heythrop Journal "extremely convincing", and the Slime O' The Grot Express "Oh God Just Return The Children, I'll Say Anything." It also slyly quotes endorsement from the author of "The Da Vinci Hoax". Convinced? It's certainly true that, however marvellous, the Narnia books are a slightly mad inconsistent mess. So have a go now, and see which planets you would relate to which. I now quote Wikipedia, quoting Ward:

"In The Lion [the Pevensie children] become monarchs under sovereign Jove; in The Dawn Treader they drink light under searching Sol; in Prince Caspian they harden under strong Mars; in The Silver Chair they learn obedience under subordinate Luna; in The Horse and His Boy they come to love poetry under eloquent Mercury; in The Magician's Nephew they gain life-giving fruit under fertile Venus; and in The Last Battle they suffer and die under chilling Saturn."

How did you do? For my next trick, I shall relate each of the Care Bears to a Tarot trump...

Linguist of the Year: our very own Calypso!

We stumbled across this arcane passage in a book which we were increasingly sure was the lost tome Diacritics, by that elusive alchaemist Judith Butler. For fourty days and fourty nights, we poured over the occult text, trying to make the smallest sense of the strange characters and inhumanly contorted syntax.

“The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony, in which power relations are subject to repetition convergence, and rearticulation, brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.”

It was in no small part my rigourous study of the Ancients contributed to our success, and together we mapped out the structure of a vital fragment by identifying subject, object, verb, and linking antecedants with subclauses e.t.c:

“The move from a structuralist account
(in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways)

to a view of hegemony
(in which power relations are subject to repetition convergence, and rearticulation)

brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure //

and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory
(that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects)

to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony
as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.”

Yet Calypso provided the final, elegant translation: "Structure is being rethought because power isn't as simple as we thought"