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Michael Zhai's avatar

I had similar feelings about academia and my solution was, for a long time, to live at its outer edge - working odd jobs near university towns, so I would have access to libraries and events and a few like-minded people, but would have no obligation to take on its values and sensibilities. A few years ago I crossed over - by accident, it seemed - and am surprised I've lasted so long. As it turns out, academia might need people like us to survive.

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Phil Christman's avatar

“people who Know The Canon”— I agree with this as long as we make a big distinction between knowing the canon and actually reading it. In my experience, a lot of the vapidity comes from people knowing what opinions you’re supposed to have about books but not really paying attention to what the books say. Knowing reputations but not doing the reading! I feel like that’s 2/3 of literary discussion everywhere you go,and sadly that includes self-consciously counter-institutional spaces like sub stack!

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