- My graphic novels course is just based on a couple old issues of Amazing Spider-Man I found in my basement. I don’t know anything about comics.
- One time I told a student that I would give him a letter of reference, but all I sent was a drawing of a stick man with his head on fire. I drew an arrow pointing to the stick man and wrote, “he is bad student.”
- If a student essay has a pun in the title, I’ll give it an A without even reading it.
- Sometimes when I’m lecturing I pretend to go back to my laptop to check my notes, but it’s really just playing old episodes of Stargate SG-1 with the sound off and subtitles turned on.
- If a student I don’t like tries to use literary theory, no matter what they say, and no matter how insightful it is, I will just tell them something like, “No no, that’s not what ______ meant; go back and re-read _____.” The thing is, most of the time I haven’t read whatever text I’m talking about either, and I’m just making it up.
- One time a student asked me for help understanding “The Death of the Author.” I didn’t feel like getting into it, so I just said, “Oh, he was just talking about Dickens. So Charles Dickens, the author, is dead. That’s all you need to know.” He said, “What? How does that help? I thought this was an important essay.” And I replied, “Well, jeez, kid. Just keep it in mind next time you read Hard Times.”
- The thing about proper MLA style and formatting is that undergrads never get it completely right. So I can dock basically as many points as I want for improper style, depending on how much I like a particular student.
- I haven’t edited my lecture notes in 10 years.
- I dock participation points if anyone comes to my office hours when I’m in the middle of watching my soaps. I’ve pirated every episode of Days of Our Lives.
- Speaking of participation marks: I don’t actually keep track. Everybody gets an A, except that I dock points for really random things I decide on before class. It’s like a drinking game, except it’s my students’ futures that are at stake.
- I routinely go to informal book clubs and offer really messed up but convincing interpretations of whatever book is being discussed.
- One time I realized that I basically had three quarters of the varsity football team in my Intro to English Lit class. I failed all of them so that they were ineligible to play in the championship game. I made $20,000 betting on the other team.
- I switched the focus of my research to the nineteenth-century novel because I’m cheap and pretty much all the novels are available for free from Project Gutenberg.
- My favourite book is the novelization of Star Wars: Episode III. It’s like a Shakespearian tragedy and a medieval romance, all in one. Except it’s in space, and the swords are made of lasers. I tried explaining that to Harold Bloom once, but I don’t think he was paying attention.
- I only write positive reviews for other scholarly books because I want people to like me.
- My favourite class of the year is always the discussion seminar where I assign a random John Donne poem and say, “Okay, now let’s find all the sex jokes.”
- For $95,000 I ghost-wrote Clive Cussler’s last three novels.
- Yeah, I’ve read War and Peace. No, I don’t remember the character names or what happened. Denisov something something Russia blah blah.
- The last book I published was only 104 pages and the only edition ever printed costs $87.00. Initially, it only sold eight copies‚ until I worked out a deal with a friend in California in which we both assign each other’s textbooks. He teaches statistics, so it’s probably not the best “pedagogy,” exactly, but it sure does make me a lot of money!
- I convinced the government to give me $38,000 to spend next summer in England researching Sir Walter Scott’s private letters and manuscripts. All the materials I mentioned in my grant proposal are available for free on the Internet, but the government doesn’t know that.
- I once wrote an epic social realist novel about class struggle, except that on the last page the narrator reveals that all the characters are bees, and when they “talk,” they’re really just doing their bee dance. (Get it? It’s because they’re worker bees.)
