The college of essential knowledge

Normally when the editor rings through to Snort Towers on the Hot Press hotline, it’s with the kind of cool runnings befitting my elevated status in the business they call show: an all expenses paid trip to Jamaica to smoke weed with Sly ‘n’ Robbie, an appeal from HBO to play myself in a cameo in the final series of The Sopranos, a substantial money offer from CBS if I’ll lend my name to a plug for the “new” 1964 Bob Dylan album.
And that was just yesterday before lunch.
So imagine my excitement the other day when the editor phoned up, took a deep breath and asked me if I would like to write a column about students.
“I’m there, Ed,” I shot back. “But first let me break this here Wild Turkey bottle into jagged shards and use ‘em to gouge my eyes out. Then, I’ll bend over and eat my own testicles and, finally, I’ll stick a poker in the fire and when it’s good and white-hot, take it back out and shove it up right up my ever-lovin’ ass.”
“Great,” said the editor, “that’ll be 800 words by Monday then.”
Daft, Pimply People
Of course, there are articles about students and then there’s a Sam Snort column about students, which is why you won’t be at all surprised that I’d like to begin my thoughtful contribution to this special issue for daft, pimply people by referring to recent events in Swaziland.
The tiny country, which is encircled by South Africa, last week played host to its annual reed dance, in which 50,000 bare-breasted girls presented themselves for his majesty’s pleasure. HM is King Mswati 111, who used the grand occasion to choose his 13th wife – as you do. The great man attended the gig in a leopard skin lion cloth – or possibly even a loin cloth. There too, as they say in all the best gossip columns, was his mother – who is known as The Great She Elephant – the King’s first 12 wives, 2,000 spectators and Barry Egan.
Or perhaps not.
Either way, King Mswati sounds like Sam’s kind of guy. But what’s all this got to do with the student life? you ask. Well, according to The Irish Times, the King was educated at Sherbourne School, Dorset, before ascending to the throne of Swaziland at the tender age of 18.
See? Studying – or whatever it is students get up to on the odd occasion when they actually bother to get up – really can pay off in the short run.
Coincidentally – and fortuitously for this column’s efforts to knock a few hundred words out of the dismal and deeply uninteresting subject of students – this was also the week in which we learned that a New Jersey university (isn’t that an oxymoron?) is to devote an academic gabfest to the works of Bruce Springsteen.
Entitled ‘Glory Days: A Bruce Springsteen Symposium’, it will play host to some 150 papers from academics in the US, Canada, Sweden, Italy and Britain, dissecting “everything from the singer’s patriotism to his ruminations on the working man.”
Unfortunately, no more details are immediately available but I’m willing to bet that among the various papers will be such wildly diverse titles as: ‘The motor car in the lyrics of Bruce Springsteen’, ‘Bruce Springsteen: life, love and the internal combustion engine’, ‘Traffic calming and its influence on the acoustic Bruce Springsteen’ and ‘Bruce Springsteen: Would he never write an oul’ song about a bus?’
Five hundred people are expected to enrol for the yoke and, among the highlights will be an outing to the Stone Pony, the famous New Jersey venue where The Boss first kicked out the jams.
Cool Chick Singer
I think it should be clear by now where I’m going with this – nowhere, fast. (Yeah, and expect to see Bruce rip off that line for his next highway epic, without any acknowledgement of who’s really the boss).
The point, of course, is that you could be a student of Bruce or you could be Bruce. That is to say, that you could live in a mansion with that cool chick singer, travel the world first class and stay in the best hotels and then, any time you need to boost the old cash reserves, you can just sit down for five minutes, write a few lines that rhyme ‘bars’ with ‘cars’ and ‘heat’ with ‘street’, and whenever you find yourself a word short in the middle at the end, just stretch the line by sticking in the word ‘mister’.
Or – and it’s a big or – you could be the kind of person who actually “studies” all this shite, in a desperate attempt to bring some small meaning to your life of quiet, crushing desperation.
So, really, my message to students today is: stop being students. Right now. I mean it. You’re simply wasting your life reading up on stuff you’ll never need to know while the King of Swaziland is doing the third-leg boogie with 50,000 virgins having bunked out of school at the age of 18.
And Bruce, a man who never went to Noo Jersey University, is doing very nicely, thank you very much, still crashing the same old car.
Your ever lovin’ Samuel J. Snort Esq