they claim

that this is a picture of a baby dodo

After the protest yesterday, I went to an undergraduate translation club meeting. The club is funny: they run a magazine where they collect student writing and translate it all into different languages, often, languages that they are not very fluent in, creating a publication that no one can really read. They are not actually even directly affiliated with the translation department as far as I can understand, but there is something of ours in spirit, and of all of ours in spirit, that seems particularly perverse in the context of being a part of an institution while being something entirely indigestible, illegible, purely experiential, almost quixotic, although that isn’t the really word, since there is no mission here to accomplish, and they do accomplish it: they work together, they translate, they publish a magazine. They meet on Sundays, at school.

Both of the times I’ve attended this club, the meeting began with everyone going around saying their names and answering an icebreaker, although most of them must know each other. Yesterday, one of the students told everyone that one of her goals this semester was starting a new student literary magazine about “smut” she said, because she thinks that it is important—she almost lifted out of her chair, leaning forward, as she was declaring this, so delighted to have an audience to say it loudly to—very important and high time to bring “smut” into the academic space.

If you are not hanging out with teenagers and actually, if you are not hanging out with people of every age, you are not really living. The depersonalized view of the personality is a lot more interesting and it’s funnier. Why did this student believe (in the same way that I’ve thought so many stupid and crazy things) and tell everyone, in the presence of four “faculty members,” that undergraduate students’ sexual fantasies ought to be clearly articulated and out in the open among these ugly buildings and hierarchies and alienating relationships, dead-end transience and crushing debt, powerlessness and complicity, AI and the passive aggressive truce with the forces of the Business School and Greek Life and Sports and all the diseases the students get in their overpriced dorms and the terrible food and ambient mental illness and the windowless, fluorescent-lit, carpeted room I teach one of my classes in and the Board of Regents who want to use our university to punish everyone who don’t share in their ultra-conservative vision and the flashes of light and life among the transient artists who pass through that’s instantly dulled by the grotesque jockeying for pathetic prizes, why would anyone want to expose their inner life here, the part of their inner life that is most embarrassing and most artless, the part of their inner life that is, presumably, about i.e. wanting to have sex/cuddle with cute little animals/anime characters/Percy Jacksons? I don’t know actually know: what do these teenagers dream about that they want to share with each other? What elves do they all want to molest and be molested by in an innocent orgy of in-jokes and three-syllable adjectives? I was too embarrassed, but brilliantly, one of my colleagues, when his turn came around to say what he was the most excited for this semester, said that whatever he’d planned had been overshadowed by wanting to see the smut dream come true.