Dear Uncle Mike,
Please say something about academia,
something I can post on my wall to make me
laugh. I am trying to read about Euripidean
drama. Why are academics so dense? And
please tell me a fun place to go to
college,where the teachers are still human and
it is like the sixties, except without all the
stupid conflict (like the White Album done by
Joan Didion), where people talk about things
and are friendly, non-competitive, and
enthusiastic. No, it's too late for me to go
back to kindergarten. Please help.
Shirley in Kingman, Arizona
'f a r
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C S e n e ra l
C o u n s e lin g
In d iv id u a ls
C o u p le s
V i c t o r H . P lu c y ,
Dear Jelly Bean,
O f the many skills and talents Uncle Mike lacks, dream analysis is high
on the list. This said, we wade in. Dragons are good because they need
to be confronted. Dream dragons don't just hang out, whittling a stick
or smelling flowers. They're windmills for the Sancho Panza in all of
us. A chance to be flung down to the earth or up into the stars.
Fairies (or, more correctly, faeries) are even better than dragons.
Sadly, you failed to mention what kind of faerie you were. There's a
different one for each element: fire, air, earth and water. There is,
as you can imagine, a big difference between a gnome and a sylph. Teeth
are for biting, for cutting through. Shells are the mothers of the
pearl of creation (unless you consider the mollusk itself, which looks
like the internal organs of a rock). And it's really an intricately
designed tooth. So there you are, a faerie confronting a dragon who
gives you an intricately carved tool for cutting through the shell of
the Great Secret. Good job, kid. And you managed it without a single
phallus.
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Dear Uncle Mike,
Do you think motorcycle riders should be required to wear helmets?
Aaron L., Seattle
Dear Uncle Mike,
I had a dream with a dragon in it. Then I had a dream where I wa§ a
fairy, and then a dream with a tooth that was sort of like a shell,
except it was a tooth and rather intricately designed. Is it a phallic
symbol? What do these dreams mean?
Jelly Bean (not my real name), San Mateo, CA
P.S. The dragon gave me the tooth.
JL
F a m ilie s
Cannon Beach
Dear Shirley,
You've presented Uncle Mike with a senous challenge. Of the much that
can be said about academia, precious little of it is funny. Centuries
ago, when Uncle Mike was at the university, the pomp and pedantry that
seem naturally to drift, like swamp gas, over factories of higher
learning were at least being seriously poked by the sort of questions
that naturally come up during great social upheavals. Let the
complacent say what they will about the sixties, it was a time when
large ideas were in vogue. We live now in a time of small ideas; ideas
so small they can be correctly confused with petty reactions.
Historians will call this the time of the bean counters. Just as
newspapers are now run by those who worked their way up through the
sales department, the ship of academia is now largely run by those whose
real talents are writing grants and training people to make money.
Behind all the bells and whistles, universities have never been pretty.
Their role in society is to preserve the dominant culture. Actively
pushing the envelope of knowledge is, in Uncle Mike's experience,
something that happens mostly over coffee and pizza. The secret heart
of academia lies in its architecture: what other part of life occurs in
rooms where all the chairs except one are facing the same direction?
Uncle Mike is glad you're reading Euripides, a very wise fellow; much
wiser than the literature wonks who make their living explaining his
tragedies two thousand years after the fact. Why are academics so
dense? Because the audience they write for, future academics, admires
and longs for it. Confronted with such dreck, Euripides would have got
stinking drunk. As for the institutions themselves, Uncle Mike would
love to think there are colleges where learning is still an enlightened
activity, where the search for understanding has an energy and loft
equal to the magic that was afoot in the justifiably notorious sixties.
To be honest, he finds it much easier to believe that Bill Gates has our
best interests at heart. The root meaning of the verb 'educe' is: 'to
draw out'. This implies that the root of learning is inside the
student. For Uncle Mike, education is the product of a good reading
list, interesting people to talk to, and years of curiosity and
unbridled wonder. It's reward is a life lived well, as opposed to one
spent counting beans and watching HBO. Education is what you pay for.
Learning is what you do. And none of us are too old for kindergarten.
Play well.
Dear Aaron,
In a word, no. It is, after all, their head. If they don't place
value on it, that's between them and the universe. They should, however,
be required to be organ donors and not count on priority service in the
emergency room.
&
O 'C ’x y
Sometimes A Great Lotion
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Murial Kukeyser
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