Howling Mime

Rude Vibes at an Academic Conference in Linguistics

We finally got into the department in the mid-2000s, and my advisor was immediately on the track to tenure — writing four club papers, four shrimp proposals, an ordered a quart of RAM and nine fresh boxen.  “Vitamin CPU,” he explained. “We’ll need all we can get.”

I agreed.  By this time the lab was barely able to cut the mouse turds and my howllucidations were down to a tolerable level.  The Dell service guy had a vaguely reptilian cast to his features, his being a native Texan and all, but I was no longer hearing high-pitched CPU fans echoing down the corridors in pools of fresh connections.  The only problem now was a gigantic neon semanticist outside the department, blocking my attempts to enter his vaulted clique — millions of synapses cried out and were suddenly silenced by his overly-complicated discourse semantics, strange symbols & filigree, with discussions of one’s pedigree, giving off a loud hum. . . .

So much for the RAship!

“Look outside,” I said.

“Why?”

“There’s a big data . . . machine in the sky, . . . some kind of eclectic eel . . . coming straight at us.”

“Code it,” said my advisor.

“Not yet,” I said. “I want to study Old Norse.” He went into his office and began pulling my chain and joked about firing me. “Look,” he said, “you’ve got to stop this talk about eels and the inequality of the department funding those who have parents paying their way. It’s making me sick.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll be gone by the end of this adventure.”

“Worry? Jesus, I almost went crazy down there in foobar.  They’ll never let us hack back into that place — not after your scene at the hash table.”

“What scene?”

“You bastard,” he said.  ”I left you alone for three semesters! You scared the shit out of those students! Waving that goddamn Parlin stride around and yelling about reptiles. You’re lucky I came to this campus in time. You were ready to call it quits and leave the program without an advisor. I said you should be my RA and that I was funding you up for your bold power. Hell, the only reason they gave us the lab space was to get you in there!”

)nobody eve n(notices) an e.e. freak (

The woman shrugged as he led me away.  In a conference full of compling crazies, nobody even notices an e.e. freak.

(we) struggled
 thr
     -ough thecrowdedlob.by
and   found   2.2.2   stools   at the foobar.
(my)o(my)
                -=advisor=-
ord(ained)ered  2.2.2  cuban cigars  from a libra
a.round  of                cuba libres
                     and a                    gram of categorical grammar
                               umop apisdn
   then he
       opened the
           job offer.
"who's yo
ur contact?" he asked
                                 he's (wait)
-ing for (us)
             [in a room]
                        [do a dance]
                                    [on the floor]
                                                  [in a round]
                                                               on the n+1th floor.

I couldn’t remember. My contact? The term rang a professional bell, but I couldn’t concentrate, nor think of the future. Terrible things were happening all around us, and in my life at the time. Right next to me a huge name in rhetoric was gnawing at a woman’s neck, arguing some post-structuralist point, turning the carpet a blood-red crimson with his drivel. It became difficult to keep our footing with the lack of foundation, and we slipped over each other in the mess. “Order some snowshoes,” I whispered. “Otherwise, we’ll never get off this pile of bullshit alive. You notice these linguists don’t have any trouble moving around in this muck — that’s because they’re clawing up the ivory tower and will cling to any theories that will get them published.”

“Linguists?” he said. “If you think we’re in trouble now, wait till you see what’s happening in industry.”  He took off the sunglasses his Brazilian ex-wife gave him and I could see he was lying.  ”I just went upstairs to see this man Larson,” he said. “I told him we knew what he was up to. He says he’s a philosopher of language, but when I mentioned M.C. Asher — well, that did it; he freaked. I could see it in his bulging eyes and hathead, smell it in his coffee breath. He knows we’re onto him.”

“Good,” I said, “But where does that leave room for me? If you’re on his committee, you won’t have time for mine. And the Rockport shoes? We’re right in the middle of a fucking academic zoo! And somebody’s giving funding to these goddamn people! It won’t be long before they bore us to tears. Jesus, look at the floor! Have you ever seen so much hubris? How many have they funded already? I pointed across the room to a group that seemed to be staring at us. “Holy shit, look at that bunch over there! They’ve spotted us!”

“That’s the lookup table,” he said. “That’s where you have to get hashed for our login credentials. Shit, let’s get it over with, and online. You handle that, and I’ll get the room.”

The face of a Money Eel

Indeed.  Check it in.  But when we finally arrived at the medieval hotel my advisor was unable to parse to a deep structure the registration procedure.  We were forced to stand in line with all the other eggheads — which proved to be extremely difficult under the circumstances of jetlag, absinthe, and pseudo-literature I was peddling in my paper.  I kept telling myself: “Be quiet, be calm, say nothing . . . the best academics do this but with thousands of words . . . speak only when spoken to: name, rank and academic affiliation, nothing else, ignore this terrible jetlag, the absinthe, the eliot, pretend it’s not happening . . . .”

There is no way to explain the terror I felt when I finally lurched up to the desk clerk and started juggling.  It’s what I do when I’m stressed, fall back on muscle memory.  All my well-rehearsed tricks fell apart under that woman’s stony glare, and the knowledge that a Cirque troupe was also staying in the hotel that weekend.  The “Welcome Cirque” placard gave it away and gave me stagefright.  But I was not there to try out for the circus; I had another tightrope to wire.  ”Hi there,” I said. “My name is . . . . ah, Howling Mime . . . yes, on the list, that’s for sure.  The paper had been accepted.  Free tuition, final wisdom, total academic immersion . . . why not?  I have my advisor with me and I realize of course that his name is the one on the list, since he chaired the parse committee.  We must have that suite, and yes this man is actually my advisor.  We brought this laptop all the way from the lab and now it’s time for dessert, right?  Yes.  Just check the list and you’ll see.  Don’t worry.  What’s the language of choice here?  What’s next year’s venue?”

The woman never batted an eye at my banter.”Your paper’s not ready yet,” she said. “But there are plenty of jobs out there for you.”

“No!” I shouted. “Why? I haven’t learned anything yet!” My brain felt rubbery.  I gripped the desk and sagged toward her like a man on absinthe would do, and she held out an offer letter in six figures, but I refused to accept it. The woman’s face was changing: swelling, pulsing like an HR rep from a Fortune 500 company . . . horrible money-green jowels and fangs jutting out, the face of a Money Eel! Deadly poison!  I lunged backwards into my advisor, who gripped my arm as he reached out to take the offer letter.  ”I’ll handle this,” he said to the Money woman. “This student has bad grades, but I have plenty of others.  My name is Doctor Compling.  Prepare our suite at once.  We’ll be in the foo bar.”

Kill the parameters and the head will die

“KILL THE PARAMETERS AND THE HEAD WILL DIE.”

Or for you HTML junkies,

“KILL THE <BODY> AND THE <HEAD> WILL DIE.”

This line appears in my source code, for some reason.  Perhaps I was stumbling for a metaphor, perhaps I was waving a dead chicken over it.  Is he still alive?  Hell no!  Still able to talk?  Perhaps.  I watched a video on YouTube, some horribly twisted video about the Governor of Texas.  A very painful experience in every way, a supposed end to 2004.  Chomsky still keeping linguistics prisoner from a post-war tower at MIT, my advisor jogging home after beers in Edinburgh, my fellow students twenty-something mutants with good intentions, a philosophy professor groping his students in <hall> Hall, no computational or socio profs, strung out on candidates, my department on the verge of death.  My advisor, like Dubya, had finally prevailed for reasons that people like me refused to understand — at least not out loud.

. . . But that was some other era, now I was burned out and long gone from the foul first year of graduate school.  A lot of things had changed in that year.  And now I was in Prague as the writer of this fine slick paper that had sent me out here in the Great White Lark for some reason that nobody claimed to understand.  Two could play this game, I would soon learn.  “Just check it into subversion,” they said, “and we’ll take it from there . . .”