At 11:50am on Wednesday morning, I willed myself out of bed, already in a sour mood that early in the day. I wasn’t sour just for the sake of being sour, however; I had a damn good reason for being sour. The only reason I was pulling myself out of bed before noon, on a Wednesday, one of my (many) free days, is that all IES were required to attend a lecture on plagiarism at the University. I’ve been learning about the ills of plagiarism since my freshmen year of high school, maybe earlier. I know how to cite sources, and am well versed in the ins and outs of the MLA format (not true, but at the very least, I’m very well acquainted with Citation Machine). I quickly checked my email just to be sure that this meeting was indeed mandatory. It was, so I quickly brushed my teeth, tossed on some clothes and inhaled a banana all in the name of being punctual to a meeting I was sure would be an utter waste of my time.
As I biked to the meeting, I began to ask myself just how the mandatory nature of the meeting was going to be enforced. What sort of disciplinary actions could possibly be taken were I not to attend? What would they do, revoke my residence permit? Negative. It dawned on me, a fear that I had in the back of head all morning, was that there would have been absolutely no repercussions for failing to appear at the plagiarism meeting, but there I was, pedaling to school, my mood getting fouler by the moment.
When I arrived in the designated room, my fears were confirmed. Only a small selection of IES students had bothered to show up; clearly, most other people were far more perceptive than myself about the way things work than myself. A few more kids filed in as the presentation began, but overall, the kids who decided to show up were in the small minority.
First to speak was the dean of the ISHSS. I don’t really remember what he spoke about, something about academic integrity I think; I spent most of his speech playing Snake Xenia on my cellphone. There Spiteful Tim raised his ugly head: if they were going to waste my time I was damn sure going to waste theirs. Next, some woman of unknown position within the school came up to talk about the specifics of the Harvard English citation system, the format of citation used by the University. She showed us a couple of examples of how to use in-text citations with the Harvard system (it goes something like this: (Perrotta, 2000: 95-101), this happens to be a citation of Joe College by Tom Perrotta, one of the novels I picked up at the library last week, and the reading material I brought with me to Bagels & Beans (by the way, the punctuation within the citation is probably incorrect, but I know the format is (author year page) with some sort of varying combination of commas, colons or semi-colons separating them). She then asked us if any of us were familiar with any other types of citations. Somebody behind me raised their hand and mentioned “the Chicago style.” The woman up front said she wasn’t familiar with that style (to be fair, neither am I, though I have heard of it), and asked if there were any others. In an exaggerated motion, I raised my hand and responded “MLA motherfucker!” Slightly taken aback, she then asked if MLA was similar to Harvard style. At first, I wasn’t sure if she was asking me specifically, or anybody, but when it became obvious she intended me to answer, I replied “Well, it’s almost the same, except we don’t include the year.”
As soon as I said it, I realized I could hardly have said anything more pretentious if I had tried. We don’t include the year? What, I speak for the entire Modern Language Association (in my mind, that’s what MLA stands, though I really have no idea, and I still can’t connect to the internet at Bagels & Beans, so I can’t check Wikipedia to be sure… perhaps it stand for Magniloquent Linguists of America, but I doubt it). She responded with a benign comment of some sort and continued with the presentation. She railed on about the dangers of plagiarism, how it would ruin our academic careers and, indeed, our lives. Apparently a few ISHSS students get caught every year plagiarizing (UvA is very big on Blackboard, meaning that lots of papers get turned in digitally, and are therefore automatically checked for plagiarism against a database of past academic papers), and are kicked out of school, sent to jail, and occasionally shot by firing squad to send a message to all other potential plagiarists. This is what could happen to you! Apparently some people actually buy papers online from time to time, something that seemed unbelievably desperate to me back in high school, let alone now in college.
The meeting actually ended about fifteen minutes ahead of schedule, praise be to God, so I quickly left for Bagels & Beans, my new stomping ground to read and write entries for the past couple of days. I finished Saturday, a novel that I think is quite possibly a masterpiece. It takes place during one day in the life of Henry Perowne, a successful neurosurgeon living in London. I’d call the novel Joyce-esque, though I’ve never read Ulysses, so I couldn’t say if the comparison is truly apt or not. That being said, Perowne’s anxieties about modern living certainly rang true, and his musings on genius and his unease about the insipidness of his own life. I’m reminded of a quote about “a man who is not only dull but the cause of dullness in others” (I’m forgetting who actually said the quote, though the name Samuel Johnson comes to mind (yep! the internet says it was Samuel Johnson), but I became familiar with it when it was quoted incorrectly in Magnolia by a character whose name escapes me (it just came back to me: Thomas Howell, I believe (nope! wrong again. since arriving home and checking IMDb, it turns out the character is in fact Thurston Howell), who is then corrected by Quiz Kid Donnie Smith. Picky picky!). I don’t think the quotation necessarily applies to Perowne, but I think it ties in to his unease in how he sees himself, especially in terms of his masculinity.
A blurb on the back of the novel called it the first great novel written in a post September 11th mindset, which I think is accurate, but also is the weakest part of the novel. The backdrop for much of the novel is a massive anti-war protest in London, which serves to call out many of the character’s opinions on the imminent invasion of Iraq. Perowne doesn’t know where he stands on the invasion; he sees the evil of Saddam Hussein and believes he should be removed from power, but he’s unsure of at what cost this will be achieved. The weakest part of the novel is a short argument between Perowne and his vehemently anti-war daughter. It’s a couple pages of back and forth encompassing the same pro and con arguments that we’ve been hearing about the war for the past five years, and it just seems tired and very much of its time, whereas the rest of the novel seems timeless, despite its specific historical setting. It had previously read Atonement, also by Ian McEwan, so I knew the prose would be stunning, but his way with words continues to fascinate me. I’m going to hunt for more of his novels next time I go to the library.
After leaving Bagels & Beans, I went back to Funen to hang out for the rest of night. I watched a little Arrested Development on the resurrected TV-Links which reminded me just how great that show is.
Her?
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