People I Wish I Worked With

And I hereby humbly ask others to put forward their own choices of preferred colleagues. No offence to those who are now my colleagues, but we are a bigger, better, faster trade-in species.

Anthony Burgess



That crusty Brit who created Enderby, the man who wrote poetry on the toilet. In ´The Clockwork Testament´ Enderby does a stint as an English Professor at ´The University of Manhattan´ in New York. He turns up to class completely unprepared, and as not to be caught out by his multi-ethnic class, who are studying somewhat resentfully about the wonders of the Elizabethan civilisation, he starts lecturing about a completely fabricated playwright. By doing this he can´t be chipped at by some smart-alec who may know some stray fact, or ask about some detail that Enderby can´t drag to the surface in his prematurely senile mind.

A brilliant way to get through the hour, he had already negotiated a hostile poetry class that day too.

This from the New York Times 1975:

Though Mr. Burgess’s description of Enderby’s classes is quite funny, there are some professors--not necessarily visitors--who may feel that “The Clockwork Testament, or Enderby’s End” is no laughing matter. When a black student submits a poem about castrating “whitey,” Enderby argues that poetry is not made of emotions, as the class would have it, but of words. Though, like them, he is only half right, Enderby is more amusing as he attacks the notion of the “relaxed” approach to life and art. “There is,” he says, “no essential virtue in comfort. To be relaxed is good if it is part of a process of systole and diastole. Relaxation comes between phases of tenseness. Art is essentially tense. The trouble with your art is that it is not tense.”

Enderby is still better when, in an involuntary revulsion against his literature class, he invents several fictitious minor Elizabethan dramatists. “Gervase Whitelady,” he writes on the blackboard, “1559-1591.” “Whitelady,” he continues, “was the second son of Giles Whitelady, a scrivener. The family had settled in Pease Pottage, not far from the seaside town we now call Brighton, and were supporters of the Moabite persuasion of crypto-reform Christianity as far back as the time of Wyclif.”



Arnold Schwarzenegger

I don´t really like Arnold´s movies or his politics – I just think he´d be a fun guy to be posted overseas with...and I draw this conclusion from the vid below of Arnie in Brazil... Arnold you´re off the hook! You´d be great to go out with and get into the local culture. I´ll teach you a word in English ´bite´...hilarious