Thursday, September 07, 2006

Pop Cult Update

The more eagle-eyed among you will have noticed that the serialisation of my dissertation came to an untimely end, much like the original Futurama, before I'd even really established the dramatis personae or got round to the bit where Henry Jenkins cops off with Sherry Turkle during a furtive raid on the empty space behind the metaphorical bike shed of Western patriarchal capitalist domination.

This is not because I got all coy and paranoid about my facile and ill thought-out arguments, oh no. It is because apparently Professor Chapman himself wants to read it, and my tutor wouldn't let him because (according to him) it isn't actually finished yet.

Impressed that anyone with 'Professor' in their name might actually want to read something of mine (though I might have been on safer ground if it had been Professor Yaffle), I immediately ran off to look up this Chapman chap, to discover that he's *only* the world authority on the cultural politics of Dr Who and the semiotics of Diana Rigg.

Now that's what I call academia, ladies and gentlemen.

10 comments:

Konrad said...

So, come up to the lab and see what's on the slab. I see you shiver........with anticipation. But maybe the rain is really to blame, so I remove the cause but not.......the symptom.
Wasn't that thrilling academia? Do you recognize it? Un beso, Konrad

realdoc said...

So when do we get to read the next episode?
It's like Eastenders in this house.

FirstNations said...

Wow! So, he's like the Forest J. Ackerman of academe!
you have ARRIVED.


excuses. bah. next installment, please.

James Henry said...

Other fictional professors: Plum, Calculus, Quatermass, Farnsworth... ooh, there's a whole wikipedia page! Aaaaaand there goes the day.

patroclus said...

Professor Yaffle was fictional?

*discreetly throws away addressed PhD research proposal envelope*

patroclus said...

...unless you meant Chapman, of course. He might well be fictional.

...But then according to The Whales, it's looking likely that we're all merely bots* in a posthuman simulation of human civilisation, so it doesn't really matter which one I ask to supervise my PhD. In which case I think I'll go with Quatermass, for being the most sci-fi and gothicky, and for having the best name.

* All the world's a sim, and all the men and women merely bots

Stop that now, patroclus.

James Henry said...

You had two cups of coffee today, didn't you?

Billy said...

Professor Yaffle would be quite useful to know, if, for example, you had some drilling to do.

Tim F said...

I saw Diana Rigg play Cleopatra once. At one stage she ran onto the stage wearing nowt but a towel, at which point there was a commotion a few seats down from me.

Found out from the ushers afterwards that an old chap had a stroke at that precise moment.

patroclus said...

Tim: Excellent anecdote, but did you mean that last sentence to be quite so loaded with double entendres? Whatever would Prof. Chapman say? Or perhaps it *was* him!

Billy: Which I do!

James: Well surmised.