lakes of coffee a cup at a time

from Larry McMurtry, Moving On (1970)

. . . it was a relief to go with someone who wasn't eternally bitching about graduate school. Everyone else felt, or at least declared, that graduate school was really no place for them, that the life was unreal, the projects inane, the themes and theses worthless, the professors disagreeable, the social conventions artificial, the competitions silly. Nonetheless, most of them stayed hermetically sealed in the graduate life, wrote the papers, kowtowed to the professors, plodded through the texts, consumed lakes of coffee a cup at a time, griped, whined, exulted over triumphs so minor they would have been unnoticeable in any other context, competed with one another endlessly, and, by the time they had been at it a few months, would scarcely have known what to do in any other world. To go back into what they liked to refer to as 'real life' they would have had to be reconditioned slowly, like divers coming up from the deep.

on academic witing

from Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (2003)

Should writing intended for academics in the humanities be readable for everyone when we don't expect the same from writing in physics? Isn't such an expectation tantamount to a demand that there be no such thing as intellectuals in the humanities, that the whole history of the humanistic disciplines make no difference, and that someone starting from scratch into a discussion--of, say, the theory of sexuality--be at no disadvantage compared with someone who has read widely in previous discussions of the issue? When the charge of bad writing comes from journalists, it is hard to avoid the feeling that some hostility to the very idea of scholarly humanistic disciplines is involved.