The Once and Future Xmastime

Watching Jackie's insistence on making JFK's legacy one of Camelot on American Experience right now reminds me that the musical was based on The Once and Future King, which I loved as a kid, probably because it was funny ("looking at himself in the mirror, he realized: he looked like an ape.") I vaguely remember that quote at the end of an early chapter.

Meanwhile, in thinking about TOAFK I moseyed over to T.H. White's joint on Wikipedia, which tell us that he (allegedly (obviously)) did a thesis on Le Morte d'Arthur without having actually read the book. WHICH kickstarts White even closer to my heart than he already had been, as back in the day I was the Michael Jordan of not reading the book; looking at the back cover and the inside flaps and somehow getting 5-7 pages squeezed out (usually with a randomly-selected large block quote from the middle of the book, featuring a single word added in by myself to account for a whole extra "line of text.") This is a skill I learned early in high school; by college my talents were at such perfect pitch that I took a theater class in college and got an A without having any idea where the theater actually was on campus - upon being confronted by my professor about the validity of one of my "reviews" my performance was, ironically, award-winning theater.

I've mentioned before that I was such a shitty, lazy student that if a professor tried to give me a chance to better my grade, I would prefer to just take the D or whatever so I wouldn't hafta work on it any more than I already "had."

Similarly, and I believe I mentioned this to someone recently, maybe Kdawggy this summer, I honestly believe I have the exact same chance of passing the bar exam if I went to law school for three years or if it was placed in front of me right now. I would honestly like my chances of somehow bullshitting my way to acing the thing over my actually doing the work and learning something over the course of three years.

Hmm. This post is a little more revealing about myself than I had intended.

I do feel like a shout-out should go to another one of the greats, my fraternity brother Eric Bransford (or, as Mahoney from Deer Park, Long Island (ie the set of Goodfellas to hicks like us 15 years ago) called him, "Bansfit") had a system wherein he would take referenced critical books from the library, copy them wholesale for entire pages, and then make sure he kept every copy checked out from the library for months, so the professor couldn't look up his work. I never did this myself, but cap doffed.

Side note: he once claimed to be a "Gentleman's C Student," which we kinda laughed at until he brought up his transcript, which showcased 3+ years and about 35 classes in which he had LITERALLY gotten a C for each one - never more, never less. Awesome.