“Lost in the Funhouse”

Is this your own title or just another bit of plagiarism?

“Lost in the funhouse” is borrowed, stolen, quoted (take your pick) from a “fiction for print, tape, live voice” by Barth (1968/1972). But then I claim that all writers are borrowers, citers, plunderers, thieves of texts for their own purposes . . .

Really!

Yes, as the poet once said, “Almost everything I do is based on other texts. Without plagiarism, there would be no literature. I’m a rewrite man, like our Willy Shakespeare” (Logue, 2011). Not that I’m another Willy!

Just an academic rewrite man!

Yes, we all look for the flashy stuff. Margaret Atwood said something similar about “the usual writerly methods, which resemble the ways of the jackdaw: we steal the shiny bits, and build them into the structures of our own disorderly nests” (Atwood, 2002, p. xix). I’m another disorderly nestbuilder, a serial quoter using up my quota of quotes for this university-life-story . . .

Life-story? Don’t you mean autobiography?

No. Not really. It’s a story I’m writing rather than an autobiography. All biographies, and especially autobiographies, are to some extent fictions (see Mackay, 2008). Of course any life-story is both a faction, based on verifiable life-facts, and a fiction, based on imagined life-fables of where we’ve been and what we’ve done (see Muir, 1993).

So is this another borrowing?

Well I suppose it is since it looks, as Barth wrote, like another attempt to prove myself at least partly factual despite the fear that my own life might just be seen as a fiction, in which I am the leading or a main accessory character . . .

How unoriginal—“another story about a writer writing a story!” (Barth, 1968, pp. 120-121).

Yet my life story might be interesting (and even appear original) to some other reader. I might be able to show that I’ve had some amusing romps and scrapes whilst being lost in the funhouse. But I admit that my attempt to be both factual and fictional is an odd kind of self-making, a strange way of constructing an identity.

So, the funhouse is just one location in which the lost outsider of your life-story struggles to find himself or create his own character?

Yes, but I also realize that the autobiographical identities I have created continue to change over time, from one funhouse to another, from one text to another (see Ivaniĉ, 1998). Individuals are not stable selves but rather a succession of different characters. Of course, life-story writing, like all identity-talk, “can be mere melodramatic piffle but does not have to be” (see Sparkes, 1991, pp. 40-41).

But you wanted to get an identity and an identifiable voice, didn’t you? Did being lost in the funhouse help?

Well, I suppose I’m already claiming one sort of identity by calling myself a funster. Anyway, you also have your own strange identity as an interlocutor , whatever that is.

It’s a role I play. I’m a questioner, a conversationalist, a dialogist, an interpreter, and an interviewer. So, next question: do you have an audience or a reader in mind for this dialogical university-life-story?

An audience? A reader? Perhaps I just have an audience of one: it could be that the only reader of a life-story is the life-story writer himself. But is his character as reader the same as his character as writer? Or could there be, out there, some dogged, uninsultable, print-oriented bastard addressed from inside this monstrous fiction? Isn’t it likely that I am just my own sole and indefatigable reader, telling my story to myself, my tireless and shameless but sadistic and masochistic self. So, in fact and in fiction, do I just write and read myself (see Barth, 1998, pp. 126-130)?

But in reading shouldn’t you be able to lose yourself—to be transformed from reader into writer into reader—or something like that (see Manguel, 2011)?

You mean that, like Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I might be translated from the rudest of mechanicals into an ass and then transformed back into a simple weaver?

Well, you are, like Bottom, a weaver of a life-story-text, a weaver who presumably hoped to be transformed by your reading whilst being lost in the funhouse. Couldn’t you have seen your funhouse reading as an errance joyeuse, a series of happy wanderings and accidents that could lead anywhere or somewhere?

A happy wanderer? Nice idea—I suppose my first funhouse readings should have helped me create meanings and help me reassemble and reweave them into new texts of my own. But I didn’t think of that at the time.

Do you think that those who are big on theory would deplore all this life-story stuff, just as Derrida’s texts were deplored as mere “free imaginative play” (see Rorty, 1998, p. 338)?

Again, I didn’t think in quite those terms back then, but what could be more fitting for a university funhouse than free imaginative play?

The indefatigable reader might ask “Is there no theory in this funhouse life-story?”

Indeed, as I’ve since learned, “We all hanker after essence and share a taste for theory as opposed to narrative” (Rorty, 1991, p. 71). But as a life-story writer I might simply reply: “Theory itself is just another text; it does not enjoy a privileged status” (Hartman quoted in Rorty, 1991, p. 79). Or even: “Theories are after all only narratives and between narratives you choose subjectively what seems most useful or gives you most comfort” (Soper, 1997, p. 44).

So, is this piece of yours just one more unprivileged text written as a comforting dialogue? Will that satisfy the theory-mongers? Don’t they want theories and facts?

No doubt they do but I would argue that “facts are hybrid entities” (Rorty, 1991, p. 81) and that facts are also constructions. And that all theories are relations of concepts. And that all theories are mainly dialogues of ideas. That’s what we’re having now—a dialogue of ideas—and I’ll settle for that.

H’m! What is a funhouse and for whom is the funhouse fun?

I suppose these are your research questions. My old school suggested that universities were intellectual amusement parks full of attractions which distorted reality and scared students (and their teachers?). My father had a simpler description. He called it a big school for big people. But when I entered one for the first time I found it “a place of fear and confusion.”

Why?

My grammar school was small and provincial. By comparison, the funhouse appeared gigantic with hundreds cavorting about its campus. Who wouldn’t be afraid and confused by those monstrous buildings and prancing students? Some of the people looked too old to be capering about anyway. I was already lost, directionless. So how could I develop my identity, become authentic, in such a weird place?

Derrida in his own vast funhouse claimed to be s’amusant beaucoup but were the students and teachers in yours just pretending to be amused?

I think many were. And there was plenty of distorted reality scattered throughout buildings variously labeled Biology, Botany, English, Geography, History, Languages, Math, and Physics. But Anthropology, Philosophy, Psychology, Sociology, and Theology looked like more exciting funhouse rides. They might have had something of interest in them. I hated the idea of just being locked into one of them. I needed to keep my senses operating, checking the hideousness of the buildings against the noisy romping of the people. As I learnt later: “This procedure may be compared to the way surveyors and navigators determined their positions by two or more compass bearings, a process known as triangulation” (Barth, 1968/72). “Triangulation” used to be very popular in the funhouse.

Strangulation by triangulation?

Actually triangulation is still popular. Of course, it has been used, abused, and misinterpreted. Triangulation isn’t strangulation or just finding out where we are but could be a way of helping us find new ways of overcoming obstacles to, for example, injustice. Triangulation could help us become bricoleurs whose task is to act as catalysts for social change (see Denzin, 2012). Anyway, I still needed to get my campus bearings.

Did you? Or are you still lost in the funhouse?

I tried to do my best by using all my own simple methods of triangulation—my auditory, gustatory, olfactory, tactile, and visual senses. They taught me especially to hate the funhouse library, that dusty, incomprehensible, soundless labyrinth with its ugly stacks and fussy librarians. I was completely lost inside for most of one day and vowed never to return.

Did you?

Not in that funhouse! And if the library was a labyrinth, roamed by mini-minotaurs, the rides on offer in those monstrous buildings were no less confusing and mazy. But no doubt my fear was fuelled by ignorance.

So for whom is or was the funhouse fun?

It must have been fun for the insiders, the cavorters, and prancers, playing and shouting on the shabby lawns and littered paths outside the hideous piles that housed the funhouse’s departments.

Presumably it was serious fun for those who took full part in the funhouse’s discussions for “only dialogue can adequately express the idea of the argumentative university” (Myerson, 1997, p. 140)? Perhaps it was only they, the serious funsters, who used the funhouse university as an open forum for debate (see Barnett & Griffin, 1997, pp. 176-177)? The serious funsters engaged in a dialogue of ideas.

Later, I read that Derrida also saw the university as a place for cerebral fun, an alluring space for disputation, for the play of ideas and argument (see Myerson, 1997, p. 141). I read that Derrida, inside or outside the funhouse, played around with the texts he deconstructed: “the result of his reading is not to get at essences but to place texts in context—placing books next to other books (as in Glas) and weaving bits of books together with bits of other books” (see Rorty, 1998, pp. 313-315).

More weaving! Isn’t that how Rorty, that other serious funster, also saw himself?

Yes. Derrida’s deconstructionist reader and Rorty’s bricoleur would be more at home in a funhouse than in a typical university. But how could I, without Derrida’s deconstructive playfulness and lacking Rorty’s talent for bricolage, become an authentic insider, a full participant in the conversations which seemed to characterize the best of the funhouse? I failed to read the official texts. I didn’t think they’d help me create my authentic self. Instead I read the books, listened to the music and watched the films and the plays which subverted the funhouse’s own offerings.

Perhaps Derrida, the “boa-deconstructor”, and Rorty, the naughty pragmatist, would have approved of what you did. Inside the funhouse you could read the unofficial texts and put bits next to one another in order to make your own bricolages.

Yes I suppose that’s what I was doing but as far as the funhouse managers were concerned I was an awkward customer ignoring or mocking everything on offer. The funhouse roller-coaster was tame. The penny arcades were full of cheap junk. The mirror-room was baffling: “In a perfect funhouse you’d be able to go only one way, like divers off the highboard; getting lost would be impossible . . .” (see Barth, 1968/1972, p. 90).

So what are you telling me? That you were an unhappy wanderer, lost, an outsider but a happy bricoleur?

Yes. In my first year of being lost I only enjoyed reading my unofficial texts (I read all of Graham Greene and all of Aldous Huxley when I should have been reading about climatology and geomorphology) and going to plays (I thought Krapp’s Last Tape was great fun) and playing football and developing relationships.

And the romps and scrapes?

Yes—many parties. I helped organize a Roman orgy: Togas and cheap wine. I spent too much time in pubs enjoying my own dialogues and hoping to make something of myself. I often ended up fooling about at the back of lecture rooms. I missed lectures, seminars, and tutorials. I buzzed off to do other things for days at a time.

So inevitably . . .

Inevitably I failed my exams. I was about to be rusticated—charming word—banished from the city funhouse to the country. I was looking forward to it. To have my outsider role officially confirmed. Eventually I was defenestrated—ejected from the honors school and into the dis-honors school with other malingerers and malcontents—some of my best friends.

So what happened then? Did you knuckle down to rescue your academic career?

I’d like to say that I did. But I just scraped on, doing the minimum, having a bit of fun on the way but not really attending to the main task.

You didn’t fail again?

Nearly. I turned up to the first of my final exams about an hour late. I’d missed my train. The invigilator wouldn’t let me in but the dean got me admitted for the last two hours. So I just spent half-an-hour on each of four questions. It served me right.

But you passed?

Scraped a lousy degree. I was a loser in that funhouse. Still an outsider.

And yet you became a teacher. How did that come about?

I never wanted to be a teacher. However, becoming a teacher made me more interested in learning than I had been as a student.

And now an insider?

Oddly, I felt like a student-insider but a teacher-outsider. I was still in a muddle. I earned my living, such as it was, as a teacher but I earned my self-respect as a scholar.

What do you mean?

My initial training as a teacher was accidental. I had no vocation. I was no clerk of Oxenford. I would gladly learn but was reluctant to teach. I simply followed a girlfriend from one university funhouse to another. She wanted to become a teacher. I didn’t know what I wanted. But I enjoyed the teacher training so being lost in that funhouse wasn’t too bad. And I began to learn about learning and to become interested in learning.

And then?

Then she went abroad to teach and I took a job in a brand new college where we—students and teachers—were all outsiders. By then I had become a Deweyan pragmatist.

Which meant?

Which meant that I didn’t see teaching as a form of instruction or telling (I had little to tell anyway) so much as a way of encouraging learning by reflective doing, and through dialogue. I read a lot of Dewey. I was inspired by his dream of transforming not just the United States of America but also the world into a participatory democracy, a global great community. Participatory democracy would enable us all to lead active, happy, peaceful, and virtuous lives (see Benson, Harkavy, & Puckett, 2007).

Heady stuff!

I was idealistic. I was impressed by Dewey’s pragmatic belief that our knowledge grew when we worked together, talked together, to solve our social problems. Further, his view that the school should be the centre of social democracy excited me. It was the school which would provide students with the fullest opportunity for development. This was, for Dewey, a matter of social justice which he was prepared to characterize as “socialism of the intelligence and of the spirit” (see Benson et al., 2007, pp. 39-40).

Socialism!

I have no fear of the term. I’m a European! I voted socialist for the Labour Party. My Labour-Socialist MP became prime minister in 1964. Sadly, disillusion set in soon after. That’s the trouble with idealists and socialists—things just don’t turn out as you want them to.

So?

So, I concentrated on my teaching and learning. I taught mainly to learn. I was a bit like Henry Adams—a professor who refused to profess. I learned with my students. And I took courses, especially in educational philosophy.

More Dewey?

Yes, and, later, Rorty.

Ah Rorty, another utopian dreamer? But did you really think Dewey was fun to read?

Not entirely. But reading Dewey was important: “the origin of thinking is some perplexity, confusion, or doubt.” And I was beginning, finally, to think seriously about education. I was lost in “perplexity, confusion, and doubt.” Dewey promoted reflective thinking or “judgment suspended during further inquiry” (see Dewey, 1910/1991, pp. 12-13). And Dewey claimed that being serious and playful at the same time was not only possible but also the ideal mental condition: “Absence of dogmatism and prejudice, presence of intellectual curiosity and flexibility, are manifest in the free play of the mind upon a topic” (see Dewey, 1910/1991, p. 218).

So which main topic did you seriously play with?

I wrote a thesis on “freedom in education.”

So you then became a serious funster? Was this helping you in your muddle?

A bit—I learned to muddle through.

What approach or methodology did you employ in your thesis?

I read everything I could about freedom and came to my own conclusions about the concept. My methodology was mainly philosophical—a form of conceptual clarification.

And then?

Then I applied my understanding of the concept to a number of contemporary usages of freedom in education.

Such as?

Two interesting examples were those of the theorist G. H. Bantock and the educationalist A. S. Neill.

What did you come up with?

That they both confused “freedom” with a number of other concepts. Bantock failed to distinguish between various definitions of freedom, found the notion of “negative” freedom as inadequate for his purposes and then redefined it under the eulogistic label of “true” freedom. For Bantock “true” freedom turned out to mean “becoming moral” or “becoming rational” or “becoming disciplined” through an educational process of “compulsory freedom.” I thought this was deceptive.

Great fun! And Neill?

Whereas Bantock represented the traditional wing of educationalists Neill was the darling of the progressives with his slogan “freedom works.” Neill claimed that in his school—Summerhill—it was freedom that did all the good work for him. Freedom, as an absence of adult interference in student’s lives, would cure most delinquencies and freedom would counteract harmful propaganda. But I concluded that it was the presences in Summerhill which most benefitted his students: his own human and sympathetic presence most of all, his appointment of suitable teachers, his strong belief in his own values, the communal experience of Summerhill. It wasn’t so much that “freedom works” but that a certain kind of community works. The trouble with Neill is that he lumped all these provisions together and called them freedom.

So, overall, what is your take on freedom?

I believe that a presumption in favor of freedom in education should hold even in the contrived situation of the school. Any restrictions on freedom always need to be justified in terms of other important principles.

And in the university?

The funhouse university should be a place where we can learn and speak and teach freely (see Badley, 2009a). This takes me some way towards Rorty’s apparently mischievous view that we should take care of freedom and let truth look after itself. What Rorty’s philosophy of social hope promoted was as much freely achieved consensus among human beings as possible, a narrative of “history as the growth of freedom, the gradual dawning of the idea that human beings are on their own” (Rorty, 1998, p. 21).

Do you really believe in history as the growth of freedom?

Yes—in Rorty’s way of seeing American history, for example, as the emancipation of the slaves, the enfranchisement of women, the rise of the trade union movement, the development of the welfare state, the woman’s movement, the Civil Rights Movement, and so on in an uncompleted saga. I agree with Rorty that we can view all this as a grand, if lucky, narrative of increasing liberty (see Rorty, 1990).

But you still felt yourself an outsider in the funhouse even with these views?

Of course. The funhouse by now had become more and more corporate, more and more managerial.

What do you mean?

The whole point of managerialism is to run universities as business corporations rather than as collegial communities. All the ideologies of the market including competition and entrepreneurialism (see Barnett, 2003) together with many features of the surveillance state such as teaching quality and research assessment exercises have been imported into the campus.

So universities are not about students becoming educated but about becoming employable?

Yes—as we’ve given up education we’ve established knowledge as our own stock-in-trade—another commodity, another product to be bought and sold. Universities are now funded to provide the research and training the market wants, so that things become more important than people and our social values are weakened. The university is no longer a serious funhouse but a battlefield where liberal education is losing the struggle with market forces (see Shumar, 1997).

So not only were you still lost in the funhouse but the funhouse was also becoming lost itself?

Yes—I was still in a muddle and even more of an outsider as the funhouse itself offered me (and other students and teachers) less and less.

So what did you do?

I resigned as a full-time participant in the diminished funhouse.

A bit drastic?

Not really—I’d had enough and I now had a serious health problem. I struggled to remain a serious funster in a lost funhouse. I had reached an end.

What “end” had you reached?

I’d been diagnosed with End Stage Renal Failure.

Well that does sound drastic.

Yes I thought so too but the renal consultant said he would “manage my decline” until I needed dialysis and then a transplant. I didn’t like the idea of declining but, at least, “managed decline” sounded better than “end stage” as a form of words.

And so?

I declined and then it was obvious I had to dialyze, three times a week.

Were you still working?

Yes, at first I tried to work full-time. I could read and write during the 4 to 5 hours I was hooked into the dialysis machine. I even managed to attend and make presentations to conferences at home and abroad. One of the advantages of “socialized medicine” in Europe is that you can arrange reciprocal dialysis. So I went to conferences in Austria, Finland, Germany, and Spain and had dialysis sessions when needed. I couldn’t do the same in the United States—too expensive.

And then?

After a couple of years I just couldn’t cope. I wasn’t well enough. I then negotiated early retirement and a two days a week contract. But dialysis became less and less effective and I felt more and more exhausted, I expected to give everything up. Then my sister offered me a kidney. After 5 years of often traumatic dialysis I had a transplant in 2003.

And then?

First, the grafted kidney didn’t work. I even had to have dialysis again. But eventually they got the drugs—especially the immunosuppressants—right and I began to feel much better. I began to enjoy what I was doing more and more.

What were you doing?

I gave up all committees and management roles and concentrated on academic writing. I had always been involved in developing staff as academic writers but now I spent more time helping PhD candidates. And still do. I think it’s the best time I’ve ever had in the funhouse, lost or found. I also write more for myself and help others write more for themselves.

And your approach?

Serious fun again! Unless I enjoy reading and writing in an academic context I’ll just give up. I like doing training sessions where I try to demystify academic writing.

So now you’re a demystifier! Tell me how.

I’ll give you an example. I wrote a paper called “Academic scribbling: A frivolous approach?” (see Badley, 2011) originally for the European Conference on Educational Research, held in Helsinki in 2010, one of my favorite places (I’m a Sibelius fan). I’ve used it in various training sessions to present academic writing as frivolous.

Frivolous?

Yes: I’d been reading “The Children’s Book” which contained this marvelous line: To be frivolous is to be human (Byatt, 2009). I used this idea to help demystify academic writing by showing it to be a frivolous, human process which even postgraduate students and academics could enjoy.

How?

I created a frivolous, four-process model of academic writing—scrabbling, scribbling, scribing, and scrubbing.

Entailing?

Scrabbling is the early process of scratching around or groping for material, of resource collecting and critical inquiring, a form of deconstructing other texts. Scribbling is being a frivolous writer—getting the stuff down on paper, teasing out contested meanings, writing freely to generate ideas and also a type of critical noting.

And scribing, I suppose, is getting all this stuff into a more formal shape?

Yes, to the extent that it is an attempt to turn frivolous private notes and scribbles into public texts. Scribing is writing for academic conversation or dialogue or transaction, the creation of readerly texts. And I use the term “scrubbing” to stand for the important final processes of cleaning up the text, simplifying it, editing, and cutting.

So this was or is your shot at demystifying academic writing?

Yes, I think these frivolous-sounding metaphors of scrabbling, scribbling, scribing, and scrubbing help demystify academic writing, help us resist closure, and reject the idea that academic writing should be about certainty or finality or universality. I wanted to get students and colleagues to begin to regard writing as a form of cerebral fun.

And were you successful?

Give me a chance! I only published the paper in 2011. I’ve had some positive feedback. But a lot of academics are rather stuffy about their writing so I don’t expect to start a revolution. I’ll settle for a more modest impact.

So was this your final contribution to fun and frivolity in the funhouse? Your end-note?

I hope not. I might be declining but I haven’t finally ended . . . yet! I’m just about to publish a one-act play on bricolage (Badley, 2012) and I have other projects already planned. Plus I hope to continue to help with academic and postgraduate training, PhD supervision and examining for another few years.

Tell me about one of your other projects.

One is provisionally entitled “From MAW to PAW.”

Catchy title! What’s it about?

Well… I want to look at the way academic writing is changing. I think it’s moving from a rather dull and often turgid formality to a much more flexible range of options. I call this “From Most-Academic-Writing to Post-Academic-Writing.”

So what’s wrong with Most-Academic-Writing?

At its best most-academic-writing is a useful (or frivolous?) set of processes—scrabbling, scribbling, scribing, and scrubbing (Badley, 2011), the essaying of approaches, constructions, ideas, findings, values and suggestions for action (Badley, 2010), usually intended for specific discourse communities.

But, at its worst . . .?

But at its worst it can also be abstract, impersonal, impenetrable, inflexible, turgid and lack panache, passion, humor, and style (after Sword, 2009 and Sword, 2012). It is produced by most-academics who write like desiccated intellectuals and write for most-other-academics rather than for real human beings like us.

That’s a bit harsh! Whereas, post-academic-writing, on the other hand . . .?

Post-academic-writing, by which I really mean post-academicist-writing, is (thickly) descriptive, dialogic, flexible, interpretive, pragmatist, reflective, and speculative. It uses concrete examples, illustrations, anecdotes, and metaphors, clean, elegant, simple sentences with active verbs and concrete nouns, displays examples of creativity, imagination, passion, commitment, personal engagement and, even, a sense of humor (adapted from Sword, 2009 and Sword, 2012). Post-academic-writing may also be regarded as a mode of inquiry contributing to local and global conversations and may include a broad array of texts including assemblage, bricolage, case notes, collage, dialogues, essays, kaleidoscope, montage, patchworks and, even, plays.

And how do we help ourselves and others get from your MAW to your PAW?

First we have to learn to read and interpret the (best) texts of our own (discourse) tribe as models for further re-descriptions of the world (after Bruner, 1986) and then learn more expertly the tricks of the writing trade such as: the use of examples and stories (imagery), the use of cases and case studies (sampling), the use of ideas (concepts) and the manipulation of ideas (logic) (after Becker, 1998).

Is that all?

No, of course not! We also have to see our writing as negotiations with other members of our discourse tribe as we deconstruct their texts and as we construct and reconstruct our own. We have to use these negotiations to un-make and re-make who and what we are as post-academic writers and admit that most post-academic writers are still more likely to be plodding camels than roaring lions (see Badley, 2008).

Is there some theory behind this shift from MAW to PAW?

Yes, we may call this a transactional theory of academic reading and writing which indicates that meaning is deconstructed and constructed by the reader.

Meaning?

Meaning that a transactional perspective emphasizes an active, reciprocal relation between reader and text during each attempt to construct meaning.

I think I understand you. Anything else?

Yes, this transactional theory emphasizes the value of dialogue between expert writers and those who aspire to be expert themselves. It encourages the courtesy of critical conversation in the process of becoming effective post-academic writers (see Bruner, 1974) and supports the view that all such academic writing also contributes to an ongoing human conversation (see Rorty, 2007).

Expert writers . . .?

We try to become expert writers by making connections between the texts we read and the writing we produce in order to answer the problems we are examining (see Dewey, 1916). This means adopting a learning by doing, essaying, and experimenting approach to writing. We should come to see post-academic-writing, in contrast to most-academic-writing, as a personal transaction which depends on humanity and warmth (see Zinsser, 2006).

You are obviously not ending your role as an academic writer but what about ending your time in the university funhouse?

Well it will have to come but I’ll have to find an ending for it. Perhaps I could borrow/quote/steal again: “The only way to get out of the mirror-maze is to close your eyes and hold out your hands. And be carried away by a valiant metaphor. But he looked through a crack and saw an old man—gentle, somewhat sad and tired-appearing—the funhouse operator (the university president?). He should have yelled, but didn’t. He now found himself looking into the tumbling-barrel where the girls were upended and their boyfriends and others could see up their dresses if they cared to. Which was the whole point, he realized. Of the entire funhouse! “The important thing to remember, after all, is that it’s meant to be a funhouse; that is, a place of amusement . . .” (see Barth, 1968/1972, pp. 91-95).

And not a gloom-and-doom-house?

Quite! But “nothing was what it looked like.” That was the simple secret of getting through the funhouse, seeing that nothing was what it looked like and that he was the hero of the story (when the truth might turn out to be that he’s the villain, or the coward (see Barth, 1968/1972, pp. 91-95).

So you want to live with your doubts and uncertainties, your changing and wandering viewpoints (see Iser, 1978) and your multiple selves?

Yes, because I now know that with these numerous identities I also have diverse angles and stances from which to observe what is going on in the university funhouse. Even if I am still lost I can now view the funhouse and its oddities more pragmatically. Being lost is no longer terrifying. I don’t know and no longer worry about where I am going. I’m not even too sure where I have been except in various other constructed funhouses and small worlds. Another great consolation of the university funhouse is that I can continue, deliberately, to lose myself as I change from reader into writer into reader (see Manguel, 2011). In fact, I enjoy being whatever self I am at any one time: the reader trying to understand what each writer is getting at or the writer working out what I am trying to say. I no longer search for some authentic self for I no longer think that I have one: I believe I have many, made from the various postures and stances that have influenced me. Whatever kind of postacademic writer I now am I see myself as manipulating and shaping my words and sentences to make sense, at least to me. All of this involves negotiating with my own, many, selves as well as with many other selves, alive or dead.

There are no endings. If you think so you are deceived as to their nature. They are all beginnings (Hilary Mantel, as cited in Atwood, 2012).

So all these loose ends are also meant to be new beginnings, old threads to be woven into new textures/textiles/texts?

Yes . . . even though, inevitably, I’ll get lost again.

So, do you, finally, understand academic writing and the funhouse as an insider or as an outsider? Have you found yourself, your identity, as a writer or as an academic or are you lost again?

Well, with every new piece I start— especially in my scrabbling and scribbling processes—I am invariably lost again. Then, after a bit more scraping and scrubbing, I almost believe I’ve found my way and myself again. But that belief doesn’t last for long. The next writing project is another blank page, another Arabia Deserta, where my nomadic self loses and then, with a bit of luck, occasionally and temporarily finds his way.

If the university funhouse has become, in this managerial age, more of a gloomhouse and a woehouse are we then doomed to permanent loss?

Perhaps. But, more hopefully, as academics and writers we could adopt Walter Benjamin’s concept of Irrkunst—the art of error, of wandering, of getting lost—for our own purposes? Perhaps we could become academic flaneurs or psychogeographers as we amble, drift, tour, and trudge through the university funhouse?

And, finally, what about your identity? Who are you?

Bricoleur, concept-monger, curmudgeon, fabricator, funster, humanist, inquirer, insider, maker, nomad, outsider, pragmatist, reader, reviewer, rewriter, scrabbler, scribbler, scriptor, scrubber, scholar, teacher, textor, weaver. Like the great rewrite man himself, Willy Shakespeare, I have also dreamt my world and created new forms and selves so that like him I am many and I am no-one (see Borges, 1964/1970). Not one of these identities is who I am. There is no authentic, essential me. Perhaps, like Philip Roth I can’t afford the luxury of a single, essential self. Perhaps we all need these many identities and selves to continue writing and finding out other aspects of who we are?

So being both lost and found is part of the human condition?

Yes. The general conclusion Thoreau reached after his life in the woods and his rambles around Walden Pond was that We know not where we are (Thoreau, 1854/1995, pp. 210-214). Presumably, too, we know not who we are. I am still lost and only occasionally find myself in the academic funhouse or the academic gloomhouse.

So what you’ve done in the funhouse is to shape and re-shape (see Badley, 2009b) various self-bricolages and not just one authentic identity or self?

Yes. That’s where we all are now.

We! All of us?

Yes. During my time in the funhouse I also made you as another of my identities. You are another of my many selves shaped from my own lumps of clay.

Like you?

“Thus play I in one person many people, / And none contented” (Richard II).