Well, so ends another year of Varsity arts coverage. And this year we finish under a cloud of sorts. We are (nominally, at least) writing about culture here, and it’s so presumptuous really—thinking that we understand anything, or are qualified in any way to present it to others.

The true breadth and depth of this folly has recently been brought home to us. Below is a sampling of voice-mails left for The Varsity’s news editor by a would-be contributor. And we will say no more, because this gentleman has already said it all. Well, he’s said something, anyway.

“Hello, I just gave you the one idea which is sort of the rooted one—names of God—but closely related to it is, I’d guess you’d call it, a method of reading. It comes out of the suggestion from the Don Mills library, that I refer to Chomsky, which is impossible to read. Anyway, what I came up with, I’ll give you a name for. It’s only an attempt to describe a method, which is hard to pin down. A context-based phonetic-constructive decomposition.

Now, I suggest that you try the traditional two- and three-letter groupings, sometimes it takes more, there are sometimes natural groupings that are larger—they can even be four or five letters, but of course we’re not really talking about letters—we’re talking about sounds.

Thank you very much, and what you have to do of course is assign meaning to these particles that you get phonetically by reference to numerous dictionary entries with the same kind of sound decomposition construction. Whew! Okay, thank you very much.”

And:

“Hello! I didn’t notice when I left you my first message, Mr. Ferguson—you just might just be a relative! My grandmother was a Ferguson, and her sister’s daughter, Barbara Dargy, lives on Norfolk Drive in Simcoe. Incidentally, I have Ferguson relatives who visited us. One of them was a lawyer, who I believe was from Kansas.

However, a couple of ideas: I’m trying to get into the publishing field and I’m feeling out the acceptability of a name-distortion-based-approach to exploration of artists, their doings and their non-doings. So, this particular one is not for publication, just rather to see what you think of it.

I call it “SHAW-NIGH-A-CON,” and of course it follows the actual textual indication with a couple of suggested link-ups: “The gas…the bass…the ass.”

Now, I then suggest an ancillary development which I guess you could head the, quote, builders, unquote, and of course, what I mean is, how is her doing founded. A quite different area is—what do we do with inventions of technical things, but of other kinds of things as well? And how do we found the idea that a certain person, or family, is somehow going to be considered a great creator and others who may have done somewhat similar things, aren’t?

Anyway, the word that I have coined to serve as a sort of social entry point for this, is, “KU-YA-RUH-DIFF…PIT-IN!” Uhhh… you’ll probably be able to break that down. Goodbye.”

Exactly so.