A Literatus to be in Chengdu this Winter

[Bobby]

What an absolute pleasure it is to introduce myself, and please forgive the bombast of the title to this post.

I am writing just to give a shout out to all who might be interested in receiving lessons in English or literature on a private basis.  I am working at a university in another city in Sichuan, but find myself on a sabbatical for the next two months in Chengdu, and so, in mind of shibboleths about idleness and its dangers, I might like to fill the time with casual teaching, or, a fortiori, with any writing or editing concerns.

I could unashamedly wax lyrical about prowess, but I will make it more banal and just say I am a literature graduate (BA) who has written and published myriad literary works before, and is, moreover, imbued with the sincere belief that reading and literature, though challenging at first for foreign students of English, provides a far superior teaching basis than all the newfangled ideas and technology in the world.  What is more, it can be very enjoyable and is wholly conducive to criticism and creativity.

Of course,  I am capable of teaching in more conventional styles, designing dynamic lessons that are thematically fitted to conversation and including new vocabulary.  Attention to pronunciation and grammar is concomitant and automatic, of course.

So, to those eager young minds or interested organisations, you can contact me by email on [email protected], or, alternatively, may private message me on here.

It has not only been a pleasure, but an honour. . .

Robert John Quinn

p.s.  I will live permanently in Chengdu from next June, so this two month stay will be a reconnaissance, of sorts.

[Dan]

Mister Quinn,

I feel compelled, by the sheer ELECTRIC thrum in my temples and sudden surrender of my synapses, to confess:

I could make neither head nor hide of this sincerely written yet obfuscatingly obtuse bulletin.

Why, mayhaps,

I – a native English speaker both born and bred on the shores of those states United

I-once an educator and entertainer – nay, EDUTAINER – of the youth of this dear dominion

Mayhaps I, on a private basis

– for sheepishness forbids the public parading of my poor pronunciation and impotent, pathetic prose-

could sup at your abundant, bountiful, practically overflowing knowledge teets?

If English is your business, I’m buying. Or bartering.

[Bobby]

Dannith,

It was with great joy I received an email detailing a reply to my arrogant supplication for work; whereupon, I opened the email link in the expectation it prefigured a cornucopia of employment offers from prestigious institutions, withal, and the wherewithal to go with it.

You can imagine my surprise, when the epistle that met my eyes was from yourself, a denizen from the states (dis)united, and the genius loci of that magisterial website called Chengdu Living, or, rather, its moderator.  My visceral reflex was to declaim, ‘Avaunt you, my ethnic cousin, back to the dizzying national heights you have issued from!’  but on second thoughts I have taken in good grace your lampooning of my quixotic efforts to salvage the magniloquence of English, and its orators of yesteryear.  In a word, you actuated mirth, Sir, and in this nodded to the alterity of what I wrote.

You can indeed write, Sir, and I do believe it is through people like yourself that America will be kept great (again).

[Bobby]

Sorry to go on here, Dannith, but I have been thinking about the nature of language tonight as a result of our brief conversation, and have come to the conclusion language is not the perfect form of expression to me. There is a much more potent force I have used in the past for those I have a rapport with, such as would undoubtedly manifest towards yourself if we got to know each other.  It was the following, totally true, reminiscence which has allowed me to transpose my beliefs:

God knows where it came from, or what I had eaten. That day I surpassed myself, and quite possibly set a record.  There was almost no rational explanation.

When I was thirteen, maths lessons at an elitist private school my parents sent me to consisted of the teacher sticking a text book in front of us all and then sitting down to let all crack on with it. It was boring, and I pretended to do the sums, but really I was in a hormone-induced reverie, looking at the minute dots, dust, scratches and pen marks of years that had made an extra-terrestrial cartography of the table. It was wondrous, like looking at a map of the universe and every so often I would observe the trail of an insect that navigated those pointless planets.

‘Frroooop!’

I snapped out of it, after the eruption between my buttocks: a fart, loud and clear, ringing through the near silence of the classroom that was compromised before only by the sound of scratching pens. After that, a giggle from an annoyingly posh and bespectacled student added to the usual dull music of secondary school.

‘Froopooopppppppp!’

I farted again, prolonging each beat until those groaning buttocks calmed down, like ravenous beasts who just had their fill.  But if they thought the beasts were placated, they were very wrong. A nervous titter was the response from the class this time, revealing a latent fear of what it all presaged. The teacher did not raise her head as she read her novel, though she clearly must have heard them; I mean, she must have, they were nuclear blasts from my arse, though I am saddened no olfactory quality accompanied them, the air remaining pure with a school’s smell of paper, pencils and cleaning products.

‘Fram. .ram. . ffffff. . .FRRRRRRRRAAAAPPPP!’

The fucking volume of it, a true earthquake. This did not inspire laughter, and even raised the teacher’s eyebrows.  The scratching continued, the near silence.  Then they blasted out reliably, orchestrally, a cannonade I directed against all those pampered and privileged denizens the school had been paid to let me study with.  It was an anal feat which allowed me to distinguish myself socially from the rest of the teenagers there, the aristocracy of my arsehole showing all its disdain for my social betters.

At the deafening tenth or so fart, a member of the class shouted out in shock, and possible envy, ‘This is unbelievable!  Oh my Goddddd!’

Early on, I had decided to count my farts before announcing the preeminence of my intestines yet again. By the end of that hour of mathematics, I managed to fart 32 times. This means that on average I was farting once every two minutes.

See, I did learn something from maths class after all.

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