The Scholarly Conversation
1. At The Book Nook, a mom-and-pop secondhand bookstore that smells like dust and peaches. Crouched in a squat position, rummaging through the milk crate labeled Textbooks, I found it. The Norton Field Guide to Writing, $2.50.
2. On the back porch, reading about The Academic Paper, how to craft, how to read, and how to research. I sat there repeating, It’s okay, Meredith, we don’t need to master the material, we need to see what’s up. We need to see what’s up.
It’s important to know that Meredith, a recent graduate of California State University, is looking to uncover and dismantle the usual school structure to find her voice as a writer and academic.
At this point, on the back porch, her heart palpitated, and her chest tighten; this is known as anxiety, and in her case, related to shame. The feeling made her see a future, somewhere between twelve years and one hundred years, she’d have to stand up in front of a classroom and teach English Composition, a lesson till this day she struggles to learn.
However, in another and more okay future, she doesn’t care about all that. She gives it her best shot and finds her place authentically, without force, without performance. The pain in her chest loosens, and she reclines into passive observation.
She is seeing what lands now.
a. “Academic texts- both the ones you read and the ones you write- are parts of ongoing scholarly conversations, in which writers respond to the ideas and assertions of others to advance knowledge.”
The Scholarly Conversation
Flash fiction by Meredith St. John
The scholarly conversation? Oh yeah, just up there to your left. Then you’ll bang a right. After, the road disappears completely, and there is a river with a bridge made of cobblestone. A stout man in knickers and a long white beard will come out from under it. He’ll say, “Sorry, you’re free viewing period has expired. Subscribe for $4 a month to read more!” If you pay it, you can cross, and there you’ll sit with Plato and Freud and Kant. In between all of them is a ladder firmly planted. The head of it leads nowhere. Once a month, you’ll throw on a nap snack labeled “the world,” and you’ll carry it as you climb. When you get high enough to see the road again, be sure to wave as you look down on us.
The scholarly conversation in theory is a system of language. Each department has its own language and symbols to communicate between students. The outline of your research, the article, thesis, essay, whatever, operates like a gift. Take the contents of your brain and its findings and the concrete material parings of quotes and experiments and you jumble the objective, subjective, nebulosity of it all into a nice tight package so the next guy, who catches a thought and needs to pin it down, can type in the necessary codes to locate your codes that will lead him to a web of all the other codes you already codified to manifest another beaded string of language and realizations. All for the sake of taking us somewhere known as beyond. A somewhere of even greater nebulosity, that somewhere known as advancement, which pretends to be synonymous with the word future.
After lunch, Meredith took a drive listening to the song Pool House by the Backseat Lovers. It reminded her of San Diego. She thought about rolling around in the car out there and the people she rolled around with. She felt a stiffness in her chest, anxiety, once again related to embarrassment, related to that time, she was always afraid of being noticed, and she couldn’t seem to hide well enough, so she took to becoming completely noticed, which turned out to be the best form of hiding. This memory made her feel shame as she thought about silence and running her fingers, always trying to catch the ephemeral, as if it’s still there, as if there is no shifting quality. Even silence has noise all around it.
A quote drifted in and out.
History is written by the victors,
AND
Another from her English Composition book,
because we are members of a civilized society, there are a number of matters, we do not decide independently for ourselves...The conventions of standard English- the conventions of educated people... Language that calls attention to itself gets in the way of communication instead of making communication easier.
The scholarly conversation takes you forward, but the scholarly conversation takes the next guy backward, then forward again. While he’s moving backward, you’re moving forward while carrying that backward with you into the forward. In that backward, the smell of sterility. Then, rotten fruit. The whole world pungent. The whole world dead. You need to remember, then face it, look at all the dead things, at least use them as codifiers, flags on top of landmines, for the next guy. He needs to know where the alive soil is. As he walks through the garden, he can remember, too, all the death that resurrected you. The red wine and spareribs. The death that can fit in a knapsack.
This history of death from Harvard and Yale to William & Mary, where higher education meant being closer to God. Where they breed ministers out of sons of the elite who became holders of the gate and key and chain, who dispossessed language and connection and divinity from the native uncivilized societies. Who spread education on the back of Lewis and Clark in hopes of bringing into forgiveness those who do not feel they need to be forgiven. From big and small to big and small. From segregated schools without books and food to redlining and standardized testing. From big and small, big and small the language is controlled but pervasive. The language of codes and symbols, and how to hold a pencil, and how to click your tongue. This is the scholarly conversation with death and grief and the fixed nature of how the past lives in our walk, our speech, our regrets, our desires, our expression, like an animal clawing for itself in the mirror. This is the scholarly conversation, a reembrace, shifting and spinning between love and damnation, between love and contamination, between love and hate, between love and idolization.
The scholarly conversation in practice means knowing enough to read the past. It means looking and remembering, and feeling whatever you need. Then, speaking however you can and want and choose, into the atmosphere of the world of the life of the planet, in conversation with up there and down below.
3. I am sitting on the floor of the living room, curled up in child’s pose, clicking and clacking and banging on my computer. Soon, I’ll close this damn thing and head downstairs for a glass of wine before dinner.
Meredith didn’t close her laptop anytime soon. She wanted to edit, publish, and call it a day. In one hundred years to twelve years, she teaches at The Playground of Human Study. She just maxed out at The Playground herself, so she must guide the entry-level courses. She tells her students about the rise and fall of the empire. She shows them how to read the documents written by the Americans, and that they’ll have to know how those Americans wanted speech and why they had expectations for speech, and why they felt these rules were the most important, and why they were certain this was the only way, and how it killed them repeatedly. The prerequisites are Thinking About Thinking Studies, and the prerequisites to TAT 100 are Metacognitive Study and Somatic Understanding.
In another twelve years to one hundred years, Meredith finished her PHD. She teaches English Composition to tell the story of our history. She wears floppy white shirts and sits on the table. She throws the textbook in the trash can and loosens her tie. She’s a cool professor. She shows her pupils how to read the past so to never forget. Her students describe where and how it lands in their body, and so they rage and cry and laugh and stand on tables. She spells things wrong and doesn’t know a damn thing about grammar rules, but it makes her students laugh, and it makes them want to get up and spell things wrong too. Meredith and her students leave the classroom a little lighter and a little louder.
In another twelve to one hundred years, we found Meredith living in a cave. The forest she’s presently located in, we won’t say (for your safety and her privacy). At night, you can see her shadow on the walls as she mimes and lectures her rat pupils. She said she doesn’t mind it so much, living in the cave and whatnot. Except the rats keep chewing on her manuscripts, and it takes months to forge those damn things out of leaves. So, even she will admit, it has its drawbacks, but what doesn’t?