Sinister: getting what you want is a positive result

[Kieran Devaney]

Yesterday I was walking from the Arts Tower after a seminar and I asked the 
person I was with if she knew what the dry slope skiing place was, obviously 
I didn’t phrase the question quite like that, that would be silly. But 
remember how long and arduous was my search to find out quite what that 
place was? I wrote about it earlier. Well she turned and looked at the hill 
and said “Oh, you mean the ski village?”. I was, like, so annoyed. It was a 
good seminar though - choice quote from one of the students went like this 
“Getting what you want is a positive result, but a positive result is not 
always getting what you want.” which I, naturally, found hilarious, though 
my giggling was caught short by the fact that no one else got the joke at 
all. Philistines. I want that quote on a tee shirt though, it encapsulates a 
great deal of my world view. Of course I’m sure what he said made perfect or 
near-perfect sense in his mind, I can hardly comment myself - how often have 
I rattled off some sentence which, at my end at least, is articulate, 
insightful and well constructed, only to have it meet with blank looks? 
Quite often.

Trains are great. I can’t imagine spending the whole train journey stuck in 
the toilets with five other people, dreading every little bleep of the PA or 
shuffle outside the door. You just miss too much. It’s a shame. It’s so nice 
to be able to sit there and watch things unfold - distant fields pooled in 
sunlight through gaps in the clouds and the corpses of trees punctuating 
fields. And the architecture - the skewiff spire on Chesterfield Cathedral, 
the pre-packed non-buildings with mirror windows and rows and rows of 
identical cars in the carparks. Mondeos. My dad just bought a mondeo, our 
old car was cream-crackered so he bought that to replace it. He loves it. 
He’s selling our old red fiesta which wont pass its MOT in the bargain pages 
on Friday, only cheap if you’re interested, it’s the welding that’ll cost he 
says, so if you could do that yourself you’ll be in for a bargain - four 
good tyres and a newish battery on it. On the way back into Birmingham you 
go through a place called Castle Vale, or you do on the way back from 
Sheffield anyway, and as we passed through there, through the pillars 
holding up the road I could see the place where I used to have hockey 
training two years or so ago, and since it was a Wednesday afternoon, the 
people training there would have to have been people from my old school. 
Imagine those poor souls, out there on the sandy Astroturf (and hey, 
Astroturf is a proper noun now!), freezing hands, blunted as their sticks. I 
don’t think even I can properly appreciate how glad I was to give up hockey 
when I got the chance. But it was good to see that I suppose. You know I’d 
love to tell you more about being made to play hockey when I was fifteen, 
how I asked the PE teacher if I could quit because I wasn’t any good and I 
hated it and then next year he put me in the school team! My school had a 
history of losing hockey matches. Not deliberately though. I used to avoid 
the ball, there was an art to that, it was noble in a way, I was making a 
comment. A couple of people posted about chess the other day, I much prefer 
chess to hockey - the competitive element never really bothered me, it 
occurs to me that much of life has that to it, your average conversation has 
those undertones. When I was in the cubs I won the district chess 
championship once, and then got hammered in the counties, that’s what things 
were like. I got to keep the trophy for a whole year which was good, we had 
it on the dresser in the living room. Chess is great.

A bit of a moral tale for you now, just the other day the University English 
Department saw fit to hand out leaflets to all the students about the 
dangers and moral implications of plagiarism, how bad it is and how bad it 
will be for you if you get caught at it. Usually I don’t take much notice of 
these things but the text was worded in such a way that it hinted towards an 
‘and worst of all you’ll be cheating *yourself*’ conclusion, though wasn’t 
quite ungainly enough to use that particular phraseology, which made me 
think about back when I was in year nine at school and we were studying 
Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar for our SATS (to American’s reading this English 
SATS are, from my rudimentary knowledge of the American educational system 
quite different from the ones which you will be familiar with, I wont go 
into detail here though, there are bound to be websites). SATS at the time 
were a relatively new proposition (in fact we might have been the first year 
to do them, don’t quote me on that) and back in 1998 a grammar school like 
mine, precariously placed amongst the newish new Labour government was keen 
to do well, to affirm its status, to show other schools what we were made 
of. And we did, as it goes, this story has a protracted happy ending some 
months after the actual ending when we take the exams and the results are 
published and then later when the grammar schools don’t get shut down by 
Labour, though that might not be the happiest part about it really. So in 
English we were drilled by our mimsy teacher on Julius Caesar, and 
specifically the two scenes which we would be examined on, which if I recall 
rightly were Act III Scene II, where Anthony makes his famous speech, and 
another in Act V, which I can’t remember anything about at all. Up to the 
point where this story takes place I really liked our English teacher then, 
I think she left a year or so afterwards which was a shame, but if we take 
the story as starting here then I, though quiet and quite straightforward in 
my essay writing at this point, did have the seed of an admiration for her 
occasional strayings into the unorthodox - I remember another time that year 
when she was teaching us John Wyndham’s ‘The Crysalids’ and she, almost as 
though the class, which was I shall add, some thirty odd fourteen year old 
boys, launched into a lengthy, impassioned diatribe about the sort of 
stereotypes that she felt women were unfairly expected to live up to. All of 
which seemed wholly strange to my own fourteen year old ears, but strange 
and intriguing. So the story starts then with us being set an essay on 
Julius Caesar to do for homework, which I and everyone else duly did and 
handed in. A week or so later we got the essays back - I can’t remember 
anything about the details of what the essay was about, or how I fared or 
how any of my friends fared, what sticks in my mind is that after the 
customary period where everyone compares marks and comments our teacher 
quieted the class and asked one boy if he’d mind reading out his essay, as 
it was a fine example of the sort of writing we should be doing in our exam 
and an excellent answer to the question. The boy, who was a clever kid, one 
of those whose report card would have decent marks across the board, 
everything from chemistry to art, which wasn’t really so hard in year nine, 
but he got a grudging respect for it from us all, which might have had 
something to do with him being good at football too. Not caring for football 
I also remember not liking him much myself, though that wasn’t solely to do 
with the football thing, he was arrogant I thought, and I think I was right, 
he still was when I last saw him, perhaps still is. At the teacher’s words 
he blushed though, seemed reluctant, “What mark did he get miss?” asked 
someone, “Oh, an A of course” she answered, “perhaps I could read it out 
then, would that be better?”. He still didn’t look too keen, but he could 
hardly refuse and so the book was handed over. You know that reading voice 
that English teachers tend to have? A sort of tender tone, never mocking or 
snide, with gentle, unforced inflections - she began to read his essay in 
that tone with nary a pause or stumbled over word to disrupt the flow. We 
listened. Begrudgingly I gave him credit - his prose was certainly very 
adept, very mature and slick, quite professional sounding, and his points 
were concise and fairly insightful, backed up nicely with choice quotes from 
the text. It was a good sounding essay. Some people were even taking notes. 
I thought that was going a bit too far. Now, there were other kids that I 
disliked in my class at school and one of them, a particularly cruel boy, 
gawky and ungainly in appearance with a real malicious streak to him 
happened to be sitting on the same table as I was in this particular lesson. 
As the reading continued he seemed to be suddenly finding this nice essay 
highly amusing, I glanced up at him to find him looking at a copy of the 
York Notes for ‘Julius Caesar’ - you know those awful guidebook things which 
take you by the hand and drag you through a text? He had one of those, I’ve 
never been too keen on those at all, even in year nine I knew how rubbish 
they were. But still, he was giggling away and looking at his York Notes, 
even nudged the person next to him and pointed at the book, following a line 
with his finger, that person began to laugh as well. I couldn’t fathom it, 
what was so funny? Well typically, as it tends to do the gossip soon spread 
across the table and then the whole classroom, the boy whose essay it was, 
who I then turned to was blushing profusely, unable to keep his eyes on one 
spot. Someone showed me the York Notes, it was open to the page covering the 
bit of the text we had to write the essay on, his finger traced along a 
line, the teacher’s voice coolly intoning the very same words printed on the 
page - he had copied them! And not just those! The whole essay was just 
that, culled directly and unedited from the notes, copied straight out into 
his English book. The classroom fizzed and popped with murmurs and comments, 
only the boy who had written the essay, or not written it kept silent, the 
teacher ignored us though and carried on right to the end, never raising her 
meek voice one jot. As soon as she finished there was general uproar, people 
waving copies of York Notes around at her and pointing to various spots with 
grubby fingers. “Have you seen this miss?” came the cries, but she 
uninterestedly batted them all away, “I don’t care where he got his ideas.” 
she said. Some of us, not least the boy sitting opposite me, the cruel one, 
the one for whom the word schadenfreude might well have been custom built 
were outraged, up in arms, you mean she wasn’t going to change his mark? 
Give him detention? No, the grade would stand, that was the end of it. It 
was incredible! Even I myself felt a pang of injustice, I who prided myself 
on distancing from classroom politics. The bell went and in the corridors 
down to our next lesson, which I believe was French, all eyes and voices 
turned on the boy, some in ironic admiration, patting his back, others 
caustic and testy. I didn’t join in. To his credit he laughed them all off 
with as much good humour as he could muster, though he walked shakily across 
the playground towards French class and his voice did crack a little and he 
did blanche at the barrage of questions. I remember then in the following 
days in various conversations about how unfair it was that he had gotten 
away with this, and I couldn’t help but concur. It wasn’t until much later, 
maybe years later when the event was dragged up again, as it was with some 
frequency that I saw how well he had been punished, and how cruelly too. 
Read a year nine essay. Read a copy of York Notes. Of course our English 
teacher had, but how serious a crime is plagiarism? And does any crime 
warrant such a calculating public humiliation? “I don’t care where he got 
his ideas.” she had said, had grinned at our naïve protestations - how could 
she not know? How could she not care? We had thought. But of course she knew 
and cared far better than all of us. How easy it would have been to just 
tell him off, maybe give him detention for doing that, and maybe even tell 
him off in front of the class, warn us about plagiarism. But that would’ve 
been forgotten in mere minutes. Who could match her tiny voice, gently 
reading the sinful text out to the class? Someone picks up on a phrase that 
they recall reading in preparation from the essay, they pick up their York 
Notes to see if it was from that and find not just that, but the whole 
thing, a duplicate of what’s being read. He spreads the word, and when we 
tell the teacher she doesn’t care! Just dismisses it, he gets to keep his 
unearned top grade, while the rest of us worked significantly harder and 
probably didn’t do as well. Vengeance and justice had to be ours, our scorn 
had to take the place of the teacher’s, because she wasn’t interested. And 
it was a quiet, hurtful grudge that the class bore, which occasionally 
bubbled to the surface and which burned right to the core of that boy, 
minutes etched onto him and borne out through occasional looks, occasional 
comments. I’d like to say he was a different person afterwards, but he 
wasn’t, it doesn’t work quite as well as that, but almost, and perhaps for 
just a few minutes on the way to French class and then again whenever it 
popped up in conversation and he’d awkwardly laugh it off, or grin and say 
nothing, perhaps then there was a change. And that’s easily enough.

- Kieran

p.s. Sorry if I owe you email or anything like that, the above is to blame. 
I'll get on to writing them tomorrow hopefully.

p.p.s I do wholeheartedly endorse Ken's reading aid. I considered putting 
the above through it before sending, but that would sort of defeat the 
purpose of the website. Consider this the hardcorists version.





_________________________________________________________________
Worried what your kids see online? Protect them better with MSN 8 
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/parental&pgmarket=en-gb&XAPID=186&DI=1059

+-------------------------------------------------------------------------+
        +---+  Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list  +---+
     To send to the list mail sinister at missprint.org. To unsubscribe
     send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to
     majordomo at missprint.org.  WWW: http://www.missprint.org/sinister
 +-+       "sinsietr is a bit freaky" - stuart david, looper           +-+
 +-+  "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "peculiarly deranged fanbase" +-+
 +-+    "pasty-faced vegan geeks... and we LOST!" - NME April 2000     +-+
 +-+  "frighteningly named Sinister List organisation" - NME May 2000  +-+
 +-+  "sick posse of f**ked in the head psycho-fans" - NME June 2001   +-+
 +-+               Nee, nee mun pish, chan pai dee kwa                 +-+
 +-+               Snipp snapp snut, sa var sagan slut!                +-+
+-------------------------------------------------------------------------+