The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards: A Novel by Jansma Kristopher

Author:Jansma, Kristopher [Jansma, Kristopher]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2013-03-21T07:00:00+00:00

7

Outis

“The far east. Lovely spot it must be: the garden of the world, big lazy leaves to float about on, cactuses, flowery meads, snaky lianas they call them. Wonder is it like that. Those Cinghalese lobbing around in the sun, in dolce far niente. Not doing a hand’s turn all day. Sleep six months out of twelve. Too hot to quarrel. Influence of the climate. Lethargy. Flowers of idleness.”

—JAMES JOYCE, ULYSSES

With only ten minutes left before my train leaves toward Sigiriya, I jam down on the Necto-soda-sticky keys of the Internet café computer. As quickly as possible, I pound out the final lines of a truly ponderous conclusive paragraph:

The essay’s closing image of a young George Orwell laughing with British soldiers and Burmese natives while the man they’ve just executed hangs “a hundred yards away” is surely a haunting vision of the colonial world order: oppressor and oppressed amicably sharing a Lethean drink, while the unnamed voice of dissent swings ominously in the winds.

I hit Save, double-check my PayMeNow account, and then click Send. In a millionth of an instant, my impenetrable thirty-five-page wall of rhetoric is dissembled into hexadecimal electrons and fired off into the stratosphere—bounced down thirty-five hundred miles clockwise around the globe and into the high-tech library of the Shanghai International Students’ School, where an obese and princely little Chinese boy who goes by “simon/” has been waiting eagerly for his midterm assignment. I’ve never met this particular Simon personally, of course, but after teaching for several years at a school in Dubai, attended primarily by the hashish-addled children of the House of Saud, I’ve come to know his type quite well. During my teaching days I had often wondered how my students managed to turn in shining theses that included words like hegemonic and pedagogical, or even agitprop and autarky. It didn’t take long to figure out that most of them had anonymous Internet ghostwriters cranking out every paper they turned in. So when being a teacher finally lost its charm, I decided that taking up professional plagiarism could grant me decent pay, freedom to travel, and unlimited opportunity to lob my own thought-grenades into the halls of academia. In just a year at it, I’d traveled the Mediterranean, been through Singapore and Hong Kong. I’d visited every single European nation (except for Luxembourg)—all while writing somewhere on the order of two thousand pages of literary criticism, disseminated happily into the thesis collections of universities worldwide.

I feel a fleeting sense of pride over the Orwell paper. I’d managed to take his tidy essay “A Hanging,” which clocks in at about five pages, and spin out seven times that length in tedious, diligent analysis. Thinking it may be a personal best for me, I take a long sip at my cold tea in self-congratulation. With what Simon was paying me, I’d have enough money to roam north into the central region of Sri Lanka for at least a week. I could drop into Buddhist temples, get lost

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.