Naomi Watts in King Kong
Say what you like (actually, please don’t; it’s just an expression) but I’m absolutely tickled by the picture that Eric Shansby drew as an illustration for the column Gene Weingarten and I did for last Sunday’s Washington Post Magazine.
As you might have read in my previous post, the management at the paper (I imagine them as the group which, in academic life, would comprise the deans, vice presidents, and provosts of our world) were scared that Shansby’s illustration might be offensive to some readers.
Since nobody contacted me directly, I’m imagining I was not one of the people they thought might be offended.
And I wasn’t. So there.
The fact that I am wildly smiling as an ape-like creature carries me off into the sunset and away from Weingarten, who is pictured as bereft and holding sadly wilted — not to say withered — flowers, is just dandy because (and forgive me for thinking that some readers will grasp this concept more directly than others) I look cute in the illustration.
That makes up for almost anything. I’d be telling you lies if I said anything else and why should I bother to lie on a blog? It’s not like I’m auditioning for Wife Swap or trying to find another academic job; it’s not like it would be in my interest to make stuff up or fiddle with the truth. If I didn’t find the cartoon flattering, I might have been more huffy. But I find myself entirely without huff. And that is because of the cuteness factor, and I’m sorry if that offends you.
(Wouldn’t a great new reality show be Prof. Swap, where full professors from Bennington had to trade two weeks of their lives with assistant professors at Bronx Community College, or even — to make it more fair, more like Lodge’s Changing Places except dealing with real life — where associate professors from, say, the Texas State Technical College campus in Waco were given two weeks to live in, and alter the lives of associate professors, their colleagues, and their students at, Wiliams College? Wouldn’t you love to see the “Rules Change Ceremony”? Wouldn’t it be great to see everybody have to meet at the end and be polite when they all want to be sarcastic and terribly, terribly cutting in their remarks?)
Anyway, let’s get back to my being sorry if my lack of offense offends you. I think I’ll take a leaf from the editors’ “correction page” and just start apologizing all over the place for everything I say, everything I write, and everything I do. I won’t apologize for what I think because that would be silly and besides only the Catholics count thinking weird stuff as a sin (and don’t for a moment entertain the idea that I’m not aware of the fact that it’s Ash Wednesday; I apologize for that, too, blank forehead and all).
And I love the fact that people, like a commenter responding to Monkey Business, still believe that I am a figment of Weingarten’s imagination. Every time we do one of these columns together, somebody asks whether I’m his alter ego and then some other poor soul tries to explain that I am real, file my own taxes, have a permanent home address in a different state from his, have my very own spouse (who resembles Weingarten only insofar as they are carbon-based life forms who are guys), and that, unlike Clark Kent and Superman, we have appeared on the same stage at the same time.
But I can apologize for that, too; maybe being a figment, an illustration, a Gina of the Jungle carried off by an ape who looks like Vinnie (how could anybody think Vinnie is anything but, well, Vinnie? We all know Vinnie) would be more fun than being a perfectly ordinary middle-aged English professor.
I’m sorry, but — at least for today — I doubt it.
