(Apologies for cross-posting, but)
For those who might be interested, here is what I said yesterday at the
University of British Columbia English Department's alcohol-free (not,
then, free alcohol) retirement party, held to mark my retirement from this
sad profession.

Peter


SPITCH

     What are you supposed to say in a retirement
speech? I've been looking forward to this one for
thirty-seven years, and I can't resist this final dress
rehearsal, this final tryout of the role every faculty
member lusts for: This is the Must of an old fart. For
you are my last captive audience; this is MY last
captive occasion (at least here), and I'm going to
gloat. I promise not to take more than half an hour.

     What WILL you do with yourself, people have been
asking. What'll you miss? Well, more than anything I'll
miss the secretarial staff; they really are the saints
the Pope should elevate; they keep this place together,
and they keep us -- more or less -- sane, or at least
functional. I shall indeed miss them, and say thankyou
with all my heart.

     What else will I miss? Well, I'm going to SHED (at
least I hope I am) that habit of mind which over the
years creeps up on those who escaped it in graduate
school, a habit of mind which deftly, and with acute
unconscious accuracy, allegorizes the place of the
humanities in our culture by housing them in the
Buchanan Tower, whose brutally assertive phallic
exterior encases a stifling colourless rigidity.

     I'm going to miss a university administration
whose most generous acts it can think of on your
retirement are to give you free parking when you no
longer need it, and a library card for a spanking brand
new library whose collection is justifiably celebrated,
and whose custodians are so besotted with computers
that it now takes thirty minutes to find what you used
to find in thirty seconds in the card catalogue.

     I'm going to miss students, that astonishing
company of the young. But if I should miss them too
much, then I shall think of the diligent gravity of the
undergraduate essay which carefully tells me in an
essay on _Great_Expectations_ that
          Being approached by escaped
          convicts while visiting one's
          parents' grave must have been very
          scary. Magwitch hung Pip upsidown
          and backed him up against a grave
          stone so he was unable to keep
          upright. He told Pip to get him a
          file and widdle.
What demons possess us that we divorce the young from
their language? that we terrorize those who write DON'T
or COULDN'T in an essay, or who use the first person,
or end a sentence with a preposition.

     And there's the earnest intellectualism of the
graduate student who, old before her time, in her first
published article gravely tells us that
          Lise Melhorn-Boe "uses the book form to
          create an accessible site of interface
          between the voices in the text and the
          reader."
Where DOES this come from? What fear in THERE of gusto
and of lustiness, of excitement in the life of words,
of bluntness and simplicity, of LOVE. How is it that
willy-nilly we foster such pretentious codswallop.
     
     What we do to the language, we do to ourselves. We
need a gross of munacy in our surds, spadness in our
weech, bedight and fillyness in the crassloom. Laughter
instead of slaughter. We bleed to declare -- and this
is amather nutter -- we need to beware the sour we all
field, our tower to hulverize and scarrifiate those who
crust angrobiliac and furopentric impristities, for we
absquatify ourselves as well as crudents in the blame
of expidulous bloatocols of so-called lollarship and
spurning.
     
     What an engridulating blatisfaction it has been to
crotch the anxious sob-candidate who stabled moetry as
Puff in his lob-jecture and was farsequently sub-
sighted for his enquasiasm during question prime. There
is great puffty in a fullying pubillanimity which
prebends the bluedent from confussing "I don't know" in
an essay. I have been what I have seen. To tosh a
body's tender, slakes the burst for flood.
     
     How we need an infibulating ambifallity, and how
gradulous if we cannot see the pun in inTER
disciplinarity. Injell-iter-liberty is the fast confuge
of the depressive Absolute. Grammar masks a military
practice. And me? Well, I'm OUT of this bloody army, so
I gloat.

     Whoop de do.


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                             Peter Quartermain
                              846 Keefer Street
                                  Vancouver
                                     B.C.
                                 Canada V6A 1Y7
                             Voice : 604 255 8274
                               Fax: 255 8204

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