from my Substack archives: Cindy Phillips, Jul 11, 2025
The Bar Room and the Lecture Hall
“It is always nice to see you,”
Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
Says the man behind the counter
To the woman who has come in
She is shaking her umbrella
And I look the other way
As they are kissing their hellos
And I’m pretending not to see them
And instead I pour the milk…
— Suzanne Vega, “Tom’s Diner”
It’s Suzanne Vega’s birthday today, and although I’m not sitting in my favourite coffee shop listening to campus or trade gossip, I am thinking while I sip my instant ersatz mocha java, about how, somewhere between the whiteboard and the wine list, a hell of a lot gets lost in translation.
It begins innocently, perhaps. A quote from Barthes, for example, meant as provocation: To write is to reach that point where only language acts, ‘performs,’ and not ‘me’. (The Pleasure of the Text, 1973) may easily be twisted into sounding like the author denies responsibility for what they say. Especially in the context of social media posts, or in literary workshops when taken out of context. A knowing chuckle over a Facebook post by someone considered beneath scholarly notice. A throwaway line, spoken with pedagogical charm: I’m using plagiarism like mad to write a book about why plagiarism is never a good idea. Irony. Meta-commentary. A seminar-room wink, followed by a squalid bar room quarrel over who’s buying the next round.
But irony doesn’t travel well.
It catches a taxi, grabs a drink, and usually loses control of its vowels. And before long, the literary turn of phrase, no matter the nuance or context, is rattling around the bar like a coin dropped into the wrong jukebox. Cue outrage. Cue whispering. Cue the most dangerous weapon in the hands of the half-informed: the desire to be in with the in crowd. A flurry of screenshots. A volley of forwarded notifications. A sudden spike in traffic to a LinkedIn profile. Someone forwarding a text to the wrong person in a late-night, drunken error.
Actually, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the ethics of teaching in our new world. About the line, real or imagined, between example and exploitation. Whether something posted, years ago or yesterday, can be pulled into a classroom or a closed meeting as a “case study” without the owner’s knowledge or consent. Whether social media, even when public, is truly fair game when wielded by someone with tenure or authority.
It’s easy to forget how porous the wall between Town and Gown has become since the advent of social media. The phrase, coined in medieval university towns, referred to tensions, often violent, between students and staff (dressed in academic “gown”) and the local townspeople (business and trade in the “town”). Today the distinction is blurrier but no less charged. Ideas that once stayed between like minds now seep into WhatsApp groups, group chats, braais and tawdry kitchens, where literary theory quickly sheds its context and becomes scintillating accusation.
I’ve worked as an invisible mule in both literary publishing and academic worlds long enough to know how ideas mutate once they leave the stable climate of a tutorial. But it’s still startling how fast a reference to parody or pastiche, to sampling or collage, can be weaponised by someone who didn’t hear or read the whole story, or never understood that self-reflexive work, by its very nature, can look suspicious to the untrained ear. Worse still is when these whisperings outlive the campus. They trail like a stale fart into editorial meetings, funding panels, and professional opportunities. Something said with irony becomes a punchline that punches the unsuspecting speaker. A clever comment about cultural borrowing starts being muttered as proof of theft or fraud.
Somewhere, someone who read half a post or heard a sliver of a sentence has decided they know who you are. And because they read neither Stoppard nor Vega, or grasp that meta isn’t a confession but a tool, they assume guilt. Or deviance. Or just an opportunity to look clever.
The barroom, like Vega’s diner, is a place of surveillance. Of half-heard comments and full-bodied assumptions. It’s where intellectual nuance is drowned out by anecdote and half-remembered slander. And the truth is that I have little sympathy for the university staff member who’ll eventually be fired because of loose lips. Ethics have consequences.
It’s fitting that today marks the anniversary of To Kill a Mockingbird, published on 11 July 1960. It’s an important novel about a young girl’s dawning sense of justice, shaped as much by silence as by speech. It’s a story of what adults fail to say, and how children learn to read the gaps. It reminds me, too, of Aaron Burr, and how history turns on moments of misjudgement that can’t be unsaid, undone, or unfired. And of Suzanne Vega, today’s birthday girl, who reminds us that bearing witness from the corner booth isn’t passive. It’s its own kind of reckoning. Sometimes the most dangerous stories are the ones made out of fragments.
I personally don’t mind being studied. but I would object strongly to being misread by morons. And while we’re at it – yes, I understand the rules of plagiarism. I understand the difference between imitation and homage, between sampling and stealing, between literary pastiche and academic fraud.
You can shake your umbrella all you like, but I’m already pouring the milk into my mug; it’s time for a refill. It’s always nice to see you, thank you for reading, and be careful out there.
Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
＼ Get the latest news ／
