F’s guide for SAIC students

How to Make the Most of Your Class Break

By S. Wizzleteeth

If You Smoke

• Congratulations! You have chosen to risk your long-term health for a more immediately gratifying purpose: meeting like-minded friends. The key to enjoying a whole cigarette — as well as some meaningful conversation, often in the space of a mere ten minutes — is rushing to the elevator as soon as class is dismissed.
• To guarantee that others will rush with you, roll at least three cigarettes during the slide lecture.
• Stake out the nearest-to-classroom vending machines in each building and always have money on your ARTICard so you can swipe your way to a Diet Coke if caffeination seems necessary. Seduce and sleep with the staff at Cosi and you may even be able to procure a latte, or perhaps a Snickerdoodle.
• Remember to bring your ID downstairs, so you don’t have to cajole the security guard into letting you back in, because your recent departure and “oh shit” empty-handedness, save the lighter, does not assure your re-entry.

How to Talk Like an Master’s of Art History Student

(Even If You’re Not One)

• Read everything you can find by your professor. This is the first Lexis-Nexis search you should do in any course. Absorb and then shamelessly ape his or her writing style, hypotheses, and influences. Don’t let on that you think he/she is full of shit until your class is having post-critique beers at Exchequer. If you grow to really dislike the class, find your professor’s master’s thesis and cite it in your term paper.
• If you can’t tell Foucault from Truffaut, get as many volumes as possible from the “... For Beginners” and “Introducing ...” series, published by Writers and Readers and Totem books, respectively. They’re like comic-book/Cliffs Note hybrids for the academically challenged, and feature things like a cartoon Heidegger explaining the meaning of dasein (“the human entity in all its ways of being”) via thought bubbles. Great bathroom reading.
• As you verbally justify an argument, refer to all relevant theorists by their last name only, as if it were their lone identifier, like Prince or Cher. Or Greenberg.
• Whenever possible, use words like pedantic, causality, multiplicity, dialectic, problematic, transgressive, and unpack. (As in: “to unpack Greenberg’s theory of kitsch, one must examine his treatment of the avant-garde.”)
• Never, ever utter the word postmodernism.