RAW FOOTAGE [Part Four]

Greg’s mourners fall into two very distinct categories. There are those with photographs and memories – in other words, everyone else – and then there are those with raw footage – me.
Take Rita Harvey, for instance. She’s nothing short of bonkers. She was never really particularly stable, but Greg’s death brought a lot of the craziness to a head. She, being of the photographs and memories kind of mourner, has a pictorial tribute to Greg. Since he died, it’s become cancerous. What was once just a relatively unsettling feature wall in her bedroom has spread down the left side of the hall, and now threatens the living room.
Guided tours are compulsory. Unsuspecting house guests, from family members to door-to-door Jehovah’s Witnesses, are led through the collection, with the contexts of each photograph narrated by an over-excited Rita.
After what’s felt like the hundredth photograph, I try to weasel my way out of it with a, “I really just came over for that DVD you borrowed, Rita, I –”
“This –” a neighbourhood of dogs twitch their ears “– one’s us down at the beach. He is so funny.” She still opts for the present tense. Special people like Rita Harvey don’t understand that wherever cremation takes you, there’s no coming back. Bless.
“Really, I had better get going. That DVD –”
“You can tell how close we are, look at how he’s huggin’ me.”
Resistance is futile. I suck it up and actually look at the photo she’s talking about. But I don’t see how he’s huggin’ her. He’s noticeably blurred. She looks surprised in the photo.
“He looks like he’s tackling you,” I offer bluntly. “Or push you down, or –”
“No!” A neighbourhood of dogs commit suicide en masse.
Despite the loudness of her protestation, her body doesn’t believe it. Her eyebrows slip. The ends of her smile sag. Her shoulders drop. And I’ve run out of synonyms for ‘fall’. Luckily for me, she blinks it off and pulls herself back up to her full, albeit unimpressive, height. She’s recomposed. Her laugh is an uneasy one. She’s smiling again, stronger than before, almost as if she’s begging me to contest what’s coming next…
“No, silly, that’s just a trick of the light,” she justifies.
And that’s the thing that separates the mourners with photographs and memories, and mourners like me, with raw footage. Rita can account for the blurs in her photograph. Nobody’ll bother questioning her poor excuses. I mean, she was there when it was taken, after all. As she conducts her guided tours, she has control over what we see in the photographs she displays, and anything she doesn’t like is simply a trick of the light…
But my raw footage… my raw footage speaks for itself, literally. What separates a film from photography isn’t the rapid succession of images, but the addition of sound. While a picture might be worth a thousand words, a movie says, and sometimes screams, a million.
Admiring Rita’s collection, fifty-odd grinning Gregs eyeing you, you’d assume he was happy. The evidence is there, there are fifty-odd grinning Gregs, not fifty-odd frowning or mildly-interested Gregs. They’re definitely grinning, and who’d grin if they’re unhappy?
Forget that every time we take a photo, we’re asked to pose, asked to smile. We’re all actors, fakers, and our photo albums are filled with staged snapshots of reality.
And you can say what you want about something that doesn’t talk back. We were best friends, you can say. We were best friends.
“We were best friends,” Rita adds, stroking the photo frame.
She has her photographs, and I have truth.
An illusion of truth, I keep having to remind myself. Illusion. They aren’t even moving, really, it’s all just a trick at twenty-five frames a second. I don’t see Greg, I see twenty-five samples in each second. Within a box. Stripped of context. But it’s hard to remind myself that it’s just a seven-hour sample of several months. There were other times. There were. Good times. But my head has pushed the memories out. This is all I have left. I have no photographs.
As Greg approaches sainthood in Rita’s mind, in mine, his vices are becoming all the more clear.
The footage says our friendship was a failure, and no memory can prove otherwise. I can’t conjure up an image in my mind to combat that of my 2004 self, drained, staring down the lens of the camera, muttering a feeble, defeated, “I guess it’s just you and me now.”

Mum knocks on my bedroom door. I minimise the program windows as she lets herself in.
“You still up?” she whispers, even though she’s looking right at me, sitting at my desk.
“I think so.”
“Look at what I found when I was cleaning out my drawers.” She approaches, an issue of the school’s half-yearly magazine in her hand. She holds it out. She’s opened it up to the coverage of the 2004 Film Festival. The page is filled with photographs. One grabs my gaze.

2004. Perspective finishes. The credits roll. Nobody claps.
“Photo for the school magazine?” someone asks.
I don’t reply. Greg laughs and throws his arm around me. “Heck yes, I want to remember this moment for the rest of my life.”
“Don’t rub it in, come on.”
“Give us a big smile,” the kid with the camera says.
“Yeah, Jason, a hella big one.”
“Ready? Okay… on three… One… two…”
The flash goes off. A sample of the light pattern that bounces off us is taken, and immediately broken down into a series of pixel values. In English, a photo is taken, and we’re immortalised.

There, looking out at the world from his glossy-papered prison, is Greg, with his arm around my shoulder. We’re grinning idiots. Carefree. I feel warm. I feel like I know one thing for certain.
We were best friends. We were best friends.

Mum leaves me with the magazine. She shuts the door, and I give her time to get back to her bedroom before I attack the page with a pair of scissors. I snatch up the closest photo frame and wrench off the back.
If it’s good enough for Rita, it’s good enough for me.

I load the footage into the video editing program. It takes me a sec to find the segment that I want.

Greg’s sitting centre-frame. “Aw. You know I love you, Jason.” He smiles.
“Well, I –”
“Gotcha! I mean, the script, is it the best you’re capable of? Not even a make-out scene? I know this girl, Rita, insanely –”

I pause the footage. I highlight the video timeline I want to work with and copy it into a new project. I’m clicking the mouse frantically, dragging small snippets over to and dropping them into the trashcan icon. I rearrange the pieces, copying some, until –

I click play.

“Aw. You know I love you, Jason. – You’re – the best. – The best.”

I save the alterations.

“Aw. You know I love you, Jason. – You’re – the best. – The best.”

I dump the original Mini-DV tapes in a bin on the way into school.

“Aw. You know I love you, Jason.”

His arm around my shoulder, Greg and I smile within a cheap frame, planted by my computer screen.

“You’re – the best. – The best.”

END

RAW FOOTAGE [Part Three]

I’ve spent more than a year pretending Perspective never happened, but I’m surprised it didn’t pop into my head sooner. As everyone applauds the film after its memorial screening, I’m not filled with happiness that it’s finally getting the reception a fifteen-year-old me thought it deserved. No, I’m kicking myself, that after four torturous sessions being grilled by Mum’s counsellor friend, I remember the footage.
The Mini DV tapes are collecting dust in my bottom desk drawer. Between them, there are hours and hours of raw footage that didn’t make the sixteen-and-a-quarter-minute film. If it’s an understanding of our friendship I’m after, then surely, I’ll find it in that footage.

That night, re-entering my room after brushing my teeth, I do something I’ve never done before going to sleep. I shut my bedroom door. It won’t raise any red flags though. Thanks to her loopy counsellor friend, Mum knows I’m never up to no good.
I slip onto my desk chair and open the bottom drawer. Seven tapes.
Chronologically seems like the best way to go. I slide the tape labelled ‘1’ carefully into the camera. The motorised hatch hums as it closes.
The camera’s hooked up to the computer, the appropriate program’s already open. It’s just a matter of –
I click play.

“It’s on, right?” The camera shakes as a fifteen-year-old me twists the LCD screen around. Now able to see what’s being filmed, I step back and run a hand through the mess of curls sprouting from my head, as if that’s enough to tame them.
“You’re so sexy it makes my downstairs hurt,” Greg offers flatly.
“You’re sick.”
“You love it,” he says, stepping into frame and kneeling right in front of the camera. “I’m hella pretty.”
I clap. “Are we ready to make the best student film ever?”
Greg is sculpting the spikes of his waxed hair. “It can only be as good as your script,” he says.
In 2004, a fifteen-year-old me takes that as a compliment.

At first, watching outtakes from Perspective is an occasional treat. I hook up the camera whenever I’m feeling a bit down, or bored, and usually, it hits the spot. But over time, I begin to crave it. Infrequent viewings become much more frequent. I grow more and more dependant on the footage, until watching it is my life, and everything else, the meaningless non-existence I have to suffer through between sessions planted opposite my computer monitor, headphones in my ear and my eyes on the past.
I revisit every shot, every scene from every angle, reviewing every blooper, every gaff, and every conversation captured on tape between takes, the unscripted snippets of reality. When I run out of material, I simply start over.
Spending more and more time with the footage, I slip deeper and deeper into 2004.
Instead of merely browsing my censored past with Joyce, I’m reliving it. I’m oddly satisfied.
It feels great.
But ‘great’ footage becomes ‘good’ footage, and ‘good’ footage becomes ‘well, actually, now that I come to think of it, it isn’t all that good’ footage. With every vision and revision, the euphoria of our reunion settles, and I start looking closer. Regarding our flaws with an intensified interest. Analysing my own experiences as they’re replayed for me. Realising I wasn’t all that happy.
And with time, I’ve grown to hate him.

When scenes are too hard to shoot, we just narrate the events directly to the camera. It’s the fourteenth take of Greg’s narration. He’s sitting opposite the camera, in the centre of the shot. Mid-sentence, he pauses to pick at the tomato sauce dripping from his nose. It’s supposed to be blood. He licks his finger and winks at the camera.
“Great, Greg,” I say, off-screen. “Let’s try it once more, only this time, without you being a complete idiot.”
“Oh… you noticed that?” he asks, before glancing at the others to the camera’s left, who immediately start laughing.
“Hard to miss, honestly. Come on. It’s late. Your character’s just been beaten up because of what he believes in. You’re recounting your story to the camera.”
“Okay.” Greg clears his throat. “Here goes.” He takes a deep, I’m-an-actor-preparing-for-a-major-scene breath. He clears his throat.
“Today, please.”
“Okay, okay.” Greg readjusts himself, clears his throat again and says, “You know, I think the film needs more sex.”
“Okay, that’s it, get up.”
“Aw. You know I love you, Jason.” Greg smiles.
“Well, I –”
“Gotcha! I mean, the script, is it the best you’re capable of? Not even a make-out scene? I know this girl, Rita, insanely hot. Like, crazy batshit insane, and hot. She’d –”
“Up.”
“What?”
“Get up. Let me shoot my recount-to-camera scenes and then we’re done for the night,” I say, stepping into frame. My exhaustion is written on every line on my face. It’s like every pore is frowning.
“But I haven’t finished.”
“I’ll find it in one of the other takes,” I say, nudging him off the seat.
Greg hops up. Running around the tripod, he says, “Shotgun camerawork.”
“Don’t move it. It’s already set up.”
“So… I just stand here? I can’t even move the camera.”
“No, for consistency, we have to –”
“So, what you’re saying is, we can go home.”
“No.”
“I think you are.”
My eyes take insult to his suggestion. “I sat through all your stuff, maybe you should sit through mine? We’re a team, remember?”
“Are we… really?” the disembodied voice snaps. “This is just you, your movie, your thing, you’ve proved you can do it alone.”
“Greg, if you wanted –”
“Guys, you know what?” he asks the others. “Let’s just go.”
The others don’t need to be told twice. They’re packing their things.
“Where are you –? Greg!” I manage to sound intimidating the first time I growl his name, but when I repeat it again seconds later, it’s hardly more than a whimper, “Greg…”
“See you, Jason,” the others call out from a distance. A door shuts behind them.
I turn to someone behind the camera.
Cue the pleading. “Greg, come on, very funny… Call them back. You can’t… You don’t want to leave me here alone… You know I –”
The screen goes blue.
When someone’s abruptly stops recording, there’s a gap left on the Mini DV tape between takes. The computer software interprets this nothingness as blue.
Spot on, really.

It’s 2006, and a seventeen-year-old me sitting at his desk is waiting for the next take.

A fifteen-year-old me is sitting centre-frame. I take a slow, deep, shaky breath. My eyes are bloodshot. I force a slight smile. “I guess it’s just you and me now,” I mutter.

RAW FOOTAGE [Part Two]

Greg dies in December, 2005, just after school ends for the year.
While every teenager around me recognises it as an opportunity to start hating the world, dyeing their hair and growing their fringes long just so that they have something to flick out of their eyes while they recite disjointed free-verse poems about the darkness that envelops their being, I approach the whole grieving thing with the emotional capacity of a rock.
Instead of self-medicating with alcopops and cask wine, I spend my holidays looking for closure. Years of schooling have trained me to expect assessment at the end of everything. An essay on transforming Hamlet: A- (good but a tad long-winded). A Maths quiz: 29/30 (I didn’t carry the one). Our chapters need conclusions; powerful, resonating lines that tie loose plot threads, and make the incomplete complete. None of that post-modern crap, we need neat endings.
They help us grow.
So, I decide I need to classify my friendship with Greg: great, rocky, depending on his mood. I have to know who we were, so that as with every essay and pop quiz revisited, I can learn from my mistakes.
Not to intentionally quote every boy-band singer since the mid-eighties, but I feel broken. Some important part of me has been snatched away, dissected by the Coroner, and burnt beyond all recognition.
I feel lost.
Mum, noticing this, or perhaps, recognising a situation she can take full advantage of, sends me to see her friend, Dr Joyce Jones, counsellor extraordinaire. I figure it’ll probably help.
I figure wrong.
Now, Joyce doesn’t believe in furniture. Nothing says ‘qualified mental health professional’ quite like a serious-looking middle-aged woman in a pantsuit, trying to balance on a fluoro-pink yoga ball. Meanwhile, I’m relegated to lying on a mat on the floor, looking up at the peeling paint on the ceiling. I talk. She “mmhmm”s.
Mum’s obviously given her a whole list of questions she wants answered.
“Did you ever drink together?”
“Smoke?”
“Did you ever talk about your sex lives? Are you sexually active?”
So, I lie. I lie a lot.
“No.”
“Nope.”
“I’m saving myself for marriage.”
It probably goes against the whole point of counselling, but whatever.
We meander through my stock-pile of experiences, and I’m careful to avoid recounting any story that Mum might have a problem with. I’m looking for truth. Answers, I’ve insisted, will help me move on. But I’m not going to find them when I’m censoring every story, so I give up on sessions with Joyce.
All I want is a true understanding of Greg and I, of who we were, so that I can scrutinise our relationship, and classify it with –

One final resonating line.

RAW FOOTAGE [Part One]

After Loathing Lola was finished, I had a series of pet projects I wanted to work on before sinking my teeth into another novel. One of them was a reworking of my major piece for English Extension 2, Raw Footage. I was itching to go back, tidy it up, get rid of all the “I’m pleasing markers by referencing Proust!” bits that weighed down the story (and weigh it down they did – I cut 3000 words). Much like I did last year with Katie Watson’s Christmas Caper, I’ll stage this story out over a week or so, or maybe longer

I’ll preface it by saying that while Raw Footage is probably my most personal bit of writing, it is insanely fictional. Yes, in Year 10 I was in a Film class, yes, friendships were tested during that year, largely because I was a control freak, and yes, one of my best friends, and one of the stars of the film, passed away not long after. As a griever, I found myself in a unique position, because my friend, Ben, wasn’t really gone - there were 20-odd hours of raw footage I could view at any time, and I could, if I wanted to, get lost in this archival footage of our friendship. It was crude and hilarious and mean and random and candid and… well, it captured our friendship perfectly. The footage I have shows our friendship in a good light. Raw Footage is a story about someone grieving in my position, with raw footage, only, it reflects an overwhelmingly negative relationship.

So, here goes…

RAW FOOTAGE

This is semi-autobiographical. It’s the truth, only the explosions are bigger, the twists are more shocking, and I’m three to four times sexier.
I guess I’m too young to share my story. People will probably say I haven’t experienced life yet. Well, consider this a twenty-year-old’s premature memoir; a collection of everything he hasn’t experienced yet, tastefully embellished for your entertainment.

In a move that will no doubt inspire confidence in the next three thousand-odd words, let’s begin with my single greatest failure as a storyteller: Perspective.
It’s October, 2004. A fifteen-year-old me stands, arms folded, in the back of the chapel-turned-theatre. I’m chewing hard on my chapped bottom lip, watching others watch my short film. I know exactly what sort of reaction I want Perspective to inspire, and it’s not inspiring it. Five minutes in and no tears. Nothing.
Perspective is my filmic masterpiece, my attempt at a ‘dramatic downer’, complete with slow-mo segments and a sepia filter. An exercise in shameless emotional manipulation. Its lead – a gay, deaf, eye-patched, illiterate, Islamic single father – fights against every conceivable sort of discrimination in the most guilt-inspiring sixteen-and-a-quarter-minute performance ever committed to film. At least, according to a fifteen-year-old me. The audience thinks otherwise. Someone laughs. Twelve minutes in and no tears.
An elbow prods my side. “I told you we should’ve gone with the zombie midget ninjas idea. Would’ve been hella funny.” This is Greg. “Hella hard to shoot, but hella funny.” He likes the word ‘hella’.
Perspective is our (read: my) entrant in the school’s film festival. As director, I’d gone against my Film teacher’s better judgement and chosen to work with my three best friends, Greg included. My teacher feared that I wouldn’t be able to control them, that they wouldn’t complete tasks I assigned, but that wasn’t a problem. I went into the project knowing that I would be the one to write, direct, edit, and star in the best film without much help.
Some call it ‘ego’; I call it ‘ambition’.
Perspective finishes. The credits roll. Nobody claps.

The next time I see Perspective, it’s the same film projected onto the same chapel wall, only this time, under completely different circumstances. Gone is the eccentric Film teacher MC, replaced by the school’s chaplain. Gone are the snide remarks between audience members. It’s February, 2006, and Gregory Smith is dead.
The chaplain, clearly daunted by the prospect of having to spend the twenty-minute makeshift memorial talking about a boy he’d never met, puts Perspective on. As a tribute to him.
I’m not sure how Greg’d feel about that.
When he first appears, moving, speaking, living, projected onto the chapel wall at five-times his natural size, there’s a collective gasp. He knocks the wind out of everyone.
They look past the direction, the editing, the screenplay, my portrayal of Ahmed Jones, and concern themselves with Greg’s three minutes’ screen time. He makes them cry.
He’s made Perspective the dramatic downer I’d intended it to be.
The credits roll. There’s applause.

Times, they are a’changing

I’m back, sorta. Uni’s over for the year, I’m gunna rest up a little, finish Magnum Opus, redesign the site, redesign the blog, get a new publishing deal, and rest up a little more, in time for uni next year. I’m gunna try squeeze in an internship as well…

I’m also a contributor on newly launched and heavily buzzed-about site, RaraCurio.com.au. It’s not really heavily buzzed-about, but we’re trying to start the buzz. Budding writers, check it out, the more contributors we have, the better. It’s really picking up steam, I’ll be contributing the the ‘Life’ section, I have one up already.

I’m an e-book!

AWESOME!

http://macmillandigital.com.au/BookStore/pagedisplay.do?genre=book&pub=macaus&id=9781741984088

AWESOME! AWESOME! AWESOME!

M.I.A. again

Hey everyone,

Sorry for not being around. Uni’s really sapping my energy at the moment. Big thanks to everyone who caught me at Concord and Parramatta libraries in the past week, I had a blast. Don’t forget, I’ll be at Wollongong and Corrimal libraries on Friday (and I’m dreading that 5am wake-up). But it should be fun

I’m done with uni for the semester on November 6, so, if I’m not back before then, expect the mother of all posts on November 7. And if you’re really desperate to read my thoughts on everything (Hi Mum), click on the Twitter widget on the right to go to my frequently updated, never remotely important or intelligent Twitter ramblings.

William

Sydney Morning Herald Young Writer of the Year 2009

1. I met Markus Zusak. Win.

2. I didn’t realise I’d been talking to Markus Zusak for 10 minutes until I was signing him a copy of Loathing Lola, and he said he spelt Markus with a ‘K’. Fail.

3. Olivia Coleman of All Saints College Bathurst won. Her story, The Final Game, will be in the Spectrum section of tomorrow’s Sydney Morning Herald. Ending gave my table chills.

4. Markus freakin’ Zusak.

5. I gave a speech:

Stories are everywhere. They’re happening all the time. Some are grand; others, insignificant. Some are tragic, some are comic and some are somewhere in between. These stories aren’t self-contained – they overlap, they interact, and they affect each other. Right now, in this room, there’s what? Around a hundred stories each chugging along – the stories of proud mothers, of waiters, of slightly tipsy English teachers, and they’re all great and interesting in their own rights, but for the purpose of this speech, I’d like to focus on 12 stories, those that belong to storytellers themselves, our finalists.

Now, could they just stick their hands up and give us a wave? Okay, awesome… Hi. 11 of you will not win today. It’s the reality of competition. But what does not winning mean for you? Well, you could shrug off being finalists, you could put down your pens because you don’t win, you could go to university, study and become the doctor your mother always wanted, and file this – this luncheon, your writing – all into your mind as a fond memory you can look back on, a relatively inconsequential chapter in the greater story of your life.

But please, for the love of all that is good in this world, don’t.

Being in the industry, I’ve encountered books. Lots of them. All stories. Some are grand; others insignificant. Some are tragic, some are comic and some are somewhere in between. And then, some are crap. There’s one that’s burnt itself into my memory forever, a book for preteens about a 12-year-old who discovers she has a twin sister who is half-vampire. How you can have a twin sister who’s half-something you’re not is completely beyond me, but that glaring fault of logic aside, there are vampires, and it has a shiny cover, so I predict a bestseller.

Cue me slamming my head against my desk and sobbing uncontrollably.

Poorly written, popular stories about vampires, and I’m not naming names, remind us just how much we need good storytellers, young storytellers. Storytellers who aren’t writing about dreamy vampiric leads, but who are telling quality stories, with Australian voices, with a certain creative flair and… well, correct grammar. You 12 finalists, winners or not, you have each been selected because your work is outstanding. So, forget who wins, think about what comes next, after today. Think about the rest of your story as a writer.

Take your experiences, take your talents, and turn them into something spectacular. Stories are everywhere. They’re happening all the time. And we need people to record them, be that as journalists, poets, short story writers, novelists, playwrights, lyricists, scriptwriters, or bloggers. If you win, and if you don’t, keep your pens in your hands.

Now, I’m not saying the life of the writer is an easy one. Standing here today, I can quite confidently tell you all that in the year since its release, my novel, Loathing Lola, has sold close to 13 copies, including the 7 my grandmother bought for herself. I visit schools and my most frequently asked questions are if I know Stephenie Meyer and if I’m on Team Edward or Jacob. I resort to giving speeches at luncheons for the promise of a free feed, and I spend my weekends visiting bookstores and taking my book off a shelf in the back and putting it smack bang in the middle of a Twilight display up the front.

It is a life of absolute desperation, and I’ve spent a whole year contemplating whether it is really worth it, and whether I should, come the next Young Writer Luncheon, recommend it. But you know what? I’m an author, and there’s nothing else I think I’d rather be. Sure, being a rich, successful author would be nice ahem Markus – but my book is being read… by people I don’t even know. While it might not have a profound impact on the story of their lives, I can influence where their minds go for a couple of hours. Sure, it might be insignificant, but the sheer possibility that something I write can affect even a small portion of someone else’s life – that’s worth writing for.

And that’s something I’d love for all 12 of you finalists to feel in your lifetime. There’s nothing quite like it. The winner will get a taste of it this weekend, but really, when you leave today as either a winner or a finalist, this is still just a beginning. It’s what you do after today that is important. I speak for everyone in this room when I say that I can’t wait to see how you and your stories mark this world.

Congratulations and good luck.

I love forums

I was just called a ‘pretentious noob’ by a 17-yr-old boy claiming to be from ‘The Island of Orgasms’.

That is all.

The HSC

I was saving up a rant about university for this week’s long blog post, but then the SMH story broke about bright students being “betrayed” by the HSC (here). For those that aren’t local, the HSC is NSW’s final high school tests that are used to come up with your university entrance mark, that was, when I did the HSC, called your UAI (University Admissions Index). It was a score out of 100 that measured your rank in the state (100 is the 1st percentile, then 99.95 etc etc). This mark is used as the cut-off point of university subjects.

Now, I’m in a weird position in that while I believe that the HSC does reward effort, and if you put in the hard yards, you’ll get the result you want, or close to it, I don’t believe it should be the only thing that’s taken into account for university admissions.

I’ve been relatively open about the fact that I didn’t get the mark I needed to get into my course. I scored 96.4, I needed 98.6 or something ridiculous like that to get into Media at Sydney. I got in because of ’special considerations’. I honestly don’t think anything about my situation in my senior years required special consideration, or really affected my marks a great deal, but the reality is, the HSC is a system, and you have to work within the constraints of that system to get the best possible mark. If you’re eligible for special considerations, whether you think your marks have been negatively affected or not, you take them, because that’s better taking advantage of the system.

And that’s screwed up.

Call me idealistic, but high school students should be tested on skills that can’t be measured in a standardised test, they should be interviewed, they should have their passions assessed, their social skills given a grade, and their life goals taken into account - I want to work in creative industries for the rest of my life. Creative writing accounted for 50% of 2 units’ mark, and about 10% of another’s – ultimately, 9% of my HSC mark was career-relevant. And, not to sound like a self-aggrandising prick (we’ll come to Student B in a short while), I did pretty darn well in that 9%, but once you piled on the French, the Religious Studies, and the other stuff I totally use all the time, my total mark became less and less impressive… and relevant.

Now, on to university. I hate it. It’s taken any love of learning, any love of the challenge of bettering my mind, and beaten it to a pulp. Why? Well… I’m not going to pretend this rant is anything but a disorganised mess, so read the following and take whatever from it that you will:

I’m supposed to be doing a pretty challenging course. I’m in my third year, and the UAI cut-off was in the high-nineties, so logic dictates that if you’re in my course, odds are, even with special considerations, you’re pretty darn smart. Right?

… Right?

Let me introduce you to Student A, who I have had the absolute pleasure of sharing tutorials with for the past couple of years. She never ceases to amaze me. A true testament to the effectiveness of the HSC, and the corresponding UAI, as a measure of student talents. Take the amazing speech she gave on the ethics of reporting the Iraq war, which began with:

“The academic thing about the Iraq War is…”

Yes, the academic thing about the Iraq War. The facts that what followed was neither academic, nor a thing, nor particularly related to the journalistic coverage of the Iraq War aside… well, no, not aside, they’re exactly what pisses me off about what she said, and the speech that followed. This wasn’t off-the-cuff either, she was READING.

Before you think I’m picking on her for one really clumsily worded intro, she then began talking about “unpatriarchal America”… It took me a couple of minutes to realise she meant unpatriotic America, but by then, I’d lost the will to live. I know this because, on my notepad (we were supposed to be taking notes and reflecting on each other’s speeches), I had written:

I CANS HAS DEATH NOW? KTHXBAI.

Halfway through the speech, my friend starts transcribing the speech on my notepad. Here’s her speech’s awe-inspiring conclusion, and note, the elipses indicate her natural pauses:

“So… yes… ummm… tut… and… in… sort of conclusion… I guess, yeah, some ethicists think… that yeah, that’s it. Thanks for listening.”

Head Vs. Desk.

But to be fair to Student A, she knows she’s the Miss Teen South Carolina of the pageant (lol @ context). She is out of place in the course, like her friend, Student A-2, who always gives her speeches on ‘celebrity’ and fans herself with TV Week and quotes Perez Hilton like they’re scholarly sources. Honestly, the UAI got it wrong. So very, very wrong.

Worse than students like Student A, who are just out of their depth, are students like Student B, the smug, self-aggrandising sort of student you only find in English tutorials. Students like Student B not only regurgitate what the tutor says right back to the tutor, and expect pats on the back, they make shit up, and claim that it is the author’s intent.

I’m sorry, but no, you’re a third-year Arts student at Sydney University, you don’t know shit about what Shakespeare intended. Why? Because he didn’t keep a fucking journal, or at least, we haven’t discovered one, and he never stated that Measure for Measure was an exploration of ‘manhood’ in a feminising society. You know what? That was Fight Club, dipshit. But hey, I’m not Shakespeare. Maybe there’s some truth in that reading, but then, what had a slight possibility of being an accurate reading became a huge fucking shitstorm of absolutely glorified, 100% studentfail. Student B said it was a “homoerotic discourse”, and that all the female characters on stage were played by men, THEREFORE, it’s queer theory and about Shakespeare’s own struggle with his homosexual desires. Sure, his sonnets allude to a sexual… “wishywashyness” as Student A would put it, but come on, at the time, men played female roles on the stage. That’s all there is to it. If he had bothered to research the play’s context, he’d see that Measure for Measure is more than likely just a reflection on the new leadership of King James I, but of course, I can’t be 100% certain. Why? Because, believe it or not, I’m not fucking Shakespeare.

So, midway through his rant in the last tutorial, I ask dipshit Student B how he can be so certain.

“Simple,” he replies, “I consider myself a writer, and I feel that, in approaching the text as a writer, I can see where Shakespeare is coming from.”

“A writer?” I ask. “Have you had anything published?”

“No… well, at the moment, it’s more of a hobby.”

“Oh,” I say, tempted to slap him across the face with one of thousands of the remaindered copies of Loathing Lola.

So, there you have it. The hobbyist, ie. the kid who writes emo poetry in his attic after dark, knows what Shakespeare was thinking, because he can relate to Shakespeare, as a writer. I’m sorry, but YOU’RE not even in you’re mid-twenties, you’re not published (that’s not to say you’re not good, but hey, it’s not looking likely…), and you’re a pretentious douchebag. I’m sure, if Shakespeare had met you, he’d have made fun of you, tirelessly, thou loggerheaded bat-fowling miscreant!

Instead of the tutor pointing out that Student B has, indeed, drawn an insanely illogical reading from the text and claimed it as the author’s true intent, the tutor congratulates him on his “radical” perspective. And you know what, Student A, didn’t only pass with her wonderful exploration of “and… um… or… unpatriarchal America… the importance of… in post-September 11″, she passed quite comfortably. While universities can point the finger at the HSC and say “you’re giving us the wrong students”, it’s obvious that the way that they interact with these “wrong” students isn’t working.

I mean, there was nothing more frightening (and exhiliarating) as almost failing my first university English assessment. It was horrible, and me, so used to topping classes, sat there as a first-year, clutching a 55%. I was mortified, and for the first time in my life, I felt like I had really let myself down. But you know what I did? I didn’t say, “I have a contract with Pan Macmillan, ergo, I know the author’s intent, and you’re all just WRONG”, I worked hard, I took the marker’s criticisms on board, and am now on the (bumpy) road toward becoming an English Honours student. And my marks have gotten pretty darn good, too. Slowly, sure. But they’ve gotten good.

University isn’t about telling people who are already good, just how good they are. University is about scaring the crap out of them, challenging them, and making them better.

So, kindly, stop blaming the entry system (homigod, do I sense some sort of structure returning to tie this mess together?). Do the best you can with the students you’ve got, stop rewarding people who try to look smart and begin their sentences with, “And I believe, therefore, it is thus true, however, one can, conversely, consider, if only for a brief moment, the perspective of that which one has not previously considered at an alternate juncture” (I’m looking at you, Student B), and stop telling us how you never fail people because the paperwork is too complicated.

Fail us, or else you’re failing us.

*cue patriarchal (lol) music in the background*

Shakespearean insult courtesy of The Shakespearean Insulter.